Here on Day 14 of the RPGaDAY 2024 Challenge we will be talking about Compelling Characters. At first I thought that I’d talk about some of the many characters that I had created in the past Character Creation Challenges. But then I remembered a series of articles that I had been posting with scans of old character sheets that I had saved from past games.
So a little bit of a background. In 2021 I was going through some old boxes and found a three-ringed binder full of old character sheets. So one of the things I thought I’d do is scan them and post them here in this blog. In my previous character sheet entries I posted characters from Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 1st edition, and a second AD&D 1st edition character, the FASA Doctor Who RPG, Shadowrun, Cyberpunk, Vampire: The Masquerade, WEG Star Wars the Star Trek RPG by FASA, GURPS, Marvel Superheroes, Warhammer Fantasy, Star Ace and Fantasy Hero.
I’ve talked about one of my favorite Dungeon Masters and good friend, Jeff Sullivan and the recent multi-year Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 campaign that we completed in 2019. Years before that he had run another campaign using the same system. I think it was sometime between 2003, 04 or 05. While going through the three-ringed binder full of character sheets I found that first character. I remember playing with Andrew, Gibby and a few other friends. This campaign didn’t last as long as the one I blogged about above.
I don’t recall too much of the background, but I remember being really excited to play Tirik. He was a Ranger, but the DM had a special sub-class that he allowed called The Archer. I think I may still have the Archer write up somewhere in my many boxes of stuff that I need to go through. Besides having the weapons specialization with the bow, he had some ranger spells as well. Looking at some of the notes that I had jotted down on the sheet, someone was casting bless spells on us. Somehow we had a magical weapon glow (I don’t recall if this allowed us to see magical weapons, or if they glowed that way because of their magical nature). For some reason I had “8th Season of the Virgin” written on the side. I’ll have to ask Jeff about that one. Besides having a kickass bow and trick arrows, Tirik also had a +1 magical sword that does other stuff (that I’m sure I would have found out while using it in game) and a dagger called Lumina. This dagger has an adamanite (spelling?) blade with a deer horn handle. I remember Gibby getting his Belt of Giant Strength with Jeff describing how it was made (using the tendon of a giant we had just slain). This was also the first game where I was introduced to carob roots. These were roots we could chew on to regain a small number of hit points (a d4s worth IIRC).
I just realized that in both games the character’s name started with the letter “T”. I’m going to have to send Jeff a link to this blog post to see if he remembers this campaign. Here are scans of the character sheet that we had downloaded from the Mad Irishman website.
More reader feedback: Phil Hatfield on MeWe responded to my Well Supported Campaign post. He let me know that one of his favorites was the Star Wars Lords of the Expanse from West End Games. And while he didn’t love the system, he really enjoyed the material for Twilight Imperium: Embers of Imperium. I’m going to have to check those out.
Do you have a compelling character from past games? Tell me about it. This article is open for discussion on the TardisCaptain dot Com Discord server. You can also email me at Carl (at) TardisCaptain.com with any comments.