Rich Morris' Comics - YAFGC and The ComixBlog

The campaign is over but still everyone has me down in their agenda as Morgana. Which i obviously love .
We do have a psion in our new campaign who insists on playing a narcoleptic...argh.

Oh joy. Well as long as they do it in a mostly funny but harmless way it shouldn't be too bad. Though I'm pretty sure Silaque (another character of mine) took the cake for most messed up psion.

Care to share the story?

Its a little off topic but sure, why not.
Silaque was... special. She was an incredibly gifted psion, and at one point in her life had a well stocked lab to experiment with. Unfortunately there were accidents, and she ended up effectively getting turned into an abberation. So after a few accidents, she had a small white cat tail, moth antenae, bright blue hair, and a faulty memory at best. Faulty enough that she had to write down anything she wanted to remember more than about five minutes. She had a psicrystal named Melanie, who hounded her to get enough money to build a new lab to finish her project. She often got fed up with Silaque and could be outright verbally abusive with her.
As it turned out (yes I did make this all up during the game, needed to explain the 6 wisdom and 41 intelligence.) Melanie was manipulating Silaque into finishing the job, and was also preventing her from remembering what happened during the last accident. The resulting explosion had killed both of her parents and her newlywed husband. Melanie knew that if Silaque remembered this she'd refuse to finish the project, and turn into a 'useless bundle of self pity'. Melanie also manipulated Silaque into staying away from a guy she thought was cute, because he reminded her of her husband.

We never finished the game so there was never an ending, but the other players were figuring out that something was up. So I was planning on having Melanie using Silaque as a puppet to fight them when they started trying to interfere. Whee. >_>

The joys of sentient magic items and alien artifacts.

Many, many unfond memories.

Psicrystals are technically sort of like a familiar for a psion. Except they contain a fragment of the psion's personality. Melanie was originally a representative of her resolve, and dedication to her research. The accidents, failures, and set backs warped her into the GLADoS like entity she is today.

But still a pain.

Come to think of it, one of my favorite NPC characters to play as a DM is our psion's crystal. It is described as exuberant and overenergetic and i like going wee or doing something irrelevant in the middle of a scene that got too heavy!

Hee hee yeah. Melanie was such a bastard though! She'd let tiny bits of Silaque's more painful memories seep through to punish her on occasion.

To be honest I like RPing animal companions more. Like Shadow, the overprotective dire wolf animal companion to Shamil, a little gnome druid. He was awesome. I also like my angry half dragon wizard's 'friend' Agoreth, a winter wolf.

>.> No one's posted here for a while, since june, but I thought I'd toss one of my favorites in.

Name: Valin Veneficus, Archmage of Solinari

Campaign/Setting: Dragonlance, years after the War of Souls.

Class and Level: LvL 5 Wizard (Diviner), LvL 10 Wizard of High Sorcery (White Robe), LvL 3 Loremaster, LvL 2
Archmage (This was after a very long, long career staring when he was lvl 1)

Str: 6
Dex: 10
Con: 12
Int: 31
Wis: 20
Cha: 18

Speed: 15 (from flaw), Init: -6 (from flaw)

Age: 84 (when I retired the character)
Height: 6' 4"
Weight: 150 lbs.
Hair Color: Black when young and then silvery white when old
Eye Color: Deep green (nearsighted)
Official Title: Archmage of Solinari, Master of the Tower of Palanthas

History:
Valin Veneficus was born two years after the second return of the gods. He was around to watch the rebuilding of the Conclave of High Sorcery and, growing up in Solace, lived on the tales of Raistlin Majere, the greatest mage who had ever lived, who had grown up in the same village.

It was inevitable that young Valin seek to become a wizard and spent years studying. Finally, on his 22nd birthday, he received a visitor; a young woman robed in white had come to his door asking that he come with her. It was a surprisingly quiet journey given what he had heard about the perils that could await a young aspirant to the Art on the way to the Tower of Waywerth. Indeed, even his Test, the horrifying ordeal that all mages must suffer through in order to truly obtain power, was quiet, up until a accident that permanently crippled his left leg. It was a lesson to him, to never take anything for granted and to not always depend so heavily on his mind alone: looking before you leaped is admirable, but not if you never leap for all the looking.

He joined the Order of Solinari, the white robed wizards of good, and his life was relatively quiet for the first few years after his Test. Then, as he was traveling to Palanthas from his home in Solace, he was accosted by a group of Draconians in the mountains. His life changed that day when he was saved by yet another Draconian, a strange, blue scaled one that went by the name of Khur. From that day on, they were inseparable, Khur becoming Valin's friend and bodyguard, eventually donning the mantle of a priest of Kiri-Joleth (god of justice) and the two of them had a great many adventures.

The second saddest day in his life was when Khur passed on, fighting against a group of ogres that had banded together to make raids on the smaller cities and towns. Valin's life was saved yet again that day by Khur's son and so the cycle went on.

Eventually, when he was about 40 or so, Valin became the Master of the Tower of Palanthas, which had be rededicated to good after Dalamar the Dark moved it from Palanthas to its new location, hundreds of miles away. Kharras Khurson lived there with him as his new bodyguard and Valin married an old apprentice of his ten years his junior, one Vhal Verras, a sorceress dedicated to the Goddess of Neutral Magic, Lunitari.

Life grew quiet for Valin and he retired when he reached 80 years of life. He currently lives in a small tower outside of Solace with his wife and two grandchildren (their parents having been killed in another of those senseless battles that seem to occur every so often to remind you that the balance between good and evil remains).

Personality:
Valin, when he was very young, was a terribly serious young man, polite and well spoken and perhaps just a little too stiff. As he grew older, though, he began to learn how to have fun with life, his injury during his Test pushing him to enjoy life while he had it and to savor things he had taken for granted before. He loved stories and the telling of stories, often between adventures or even during them, he'd stop in whatever tavern that was near by and tell stories, using illusions and spells to illustrate what was happening (such as making images appear in his pipe smoke, using ghost sound for sound effects, etc.).

He tended to be very wise at times, while at others doing incredibly foolish things: he would counsel lords and kings, yet he often would often miss the more commonplace aspects of life (he never noticed the feelings of Vhal his apprentice, especially since she was so much younger than him. Finally, five years after HER test, she returned to his side, grabbed him by the beard and told him in no uncertain terms that she was a woman, of DECENT age, and that Valin WOULD notice her if she had to pull out each one of his whiskers one by one and turn him into a newt, whilst doing something very uncomfortable to him with his own staff. Suffice it to say, he took notice after that). Kind and gentle, he preferred trying to subdue an enemy before he was forced to do serious damage to them with his magic. He would often give of his own money to those who needed it most, not caring for the most part about material wealth; the only thing that he was greedy for was knowledge, and even then after HE'D finished reading it, he'd allow his apprentices and companions to read through the information and to learn. Valin was a teacher, first and foremost.

Player's Notes: I love playing Valin. He was everything I envisioned a wizard being, wise and regal yet with oh so very human weaknesses. He was very much the mind while Khur, played by a friend of mine, was very much the body and they made a devastating team. He is much missed and still in my thoughts, though I haven't gotten to do anything with him for years, I made him originally on a mud called Age of Legends: Tales of the Lance (www.ageoflegends.com, port 6010) and he's still talked about and remembered here some years later. I imagine him standing in the topmost room of a small stone tower, robes gleaming in the white moonlight as he leans on his weathered staff. Blue-gray pipe smoke swirls about his body as he gazes knowingly into the distance; the years have taught him to look deep and far and he sees something coming. He stands, watching, waiting, and knowing.

Was Vhal an NPC or a player character?

Player Character.

Even better, i love it when two characters develop relationships no matter what kind they are.
Did it work out for them? Ten years is not an awful gap.

Yes, they had some children and remained married through the years, untied by both magic and love, so it was pretty easy for them to remain together. If nothing else, their research kept them together.

Another was a particular favorite that I still use on occasion;

Name: Mathias
Class and Level: Barb 1, Wiz 7, Lore 10, Total Level =18
Campaign: Homebrewed
Alignment: Neutral Good

Str: 16
Dex: 12
Con: 16
Int: 27
Wis: 16
Cha: 14

Speed: 20 (overweight human)

Age: 38
Height: 6'
Weight: 300 lbs.
Hair Color: Black hair and beard
Eye Color: Steel Blue
Official Title: Headmaster of the Hightower Academy

History:
Mathias was born to a barbarian clan, a son of the chief. His small tribe, however, was killed by a red dragon from the nearby mountains. Mathias was saved when his father threw him down a privy hole that had been dug, mainly because he was fiercely attached to his younger son and wanted the twelve year old boy to survive. Covered in muck, the young barbarian fought his way out of the dug refuse hole but too late. The small nomadic tent village had been burned, anything of value taken, his father's body bitten in two. From then on, Mathias had a particular hatred for chromatic dragons and they were the only thing that could send him into a rage.

He wandered for about a month, living as his people had taught him, though barely surviving on his own, when he was found by an old man who walked with a limp. This old man was robed in furs and told the boy to come with him. Tired, desperate, and close to death from exposure, Mathias agreed. The old man lead him to a Tower, a huge structure shaped like an oak tree of granite with green slate leaves; he stared in wonder as the huge stone building swayed in the wind!

The old man pulled back his hood to reveal a strong if weathered face, white bearded and blue eyed. Turned out that the old man's name was Thaddeus, a wizard who'd lived for over a hundred years. The tribes had told tales of the old wonder worker, some good and some evil, but all agreed that he'd been around almost forever. His father had refused to discuss the old magician though and even grew angry when pressed. Mathias was a little afraid, contemplating running back outside and taking his chances with a natural death when the old man picked up a staff and, without turning around, said, "Dinnae be foolish lad. Iffin' ye wish t' die, ye shoulda done it afore followin' me home. C'mon, there's dinner read." And with that, walked up the spiraling stairs.

Mathias stayed with the wizard some years and grew close, learning magic (which amazed the young barbarian that he could even do, learning to read had been the hardest part interestingly enough) and serving the wizard in cleaning and chopping wood. Eventually he found out the truth, reading an old journal that had been in the library; it had belonged to his father. Mathias was amazed, he hadn't even known that his father COULD read. More surprising yet, Thaddeus was the old chief's father, Mathias' own grandfather.

Mathias lived with his grandfather until he was 23, when something terrible happened. The old man was bidding Mathias a good night when the tower was rocked by explosive force and something horrible burst through the wall, a demon. Thaddeus' first action was to cast a protective warding around his grandson, again protecting Mathias against his will as the chief had done, and gave the demon all the opening he needed to finish the ancient man. Smiling horribly, the demon picked up the fallen wizard's staff and, with a rude gesture to the protected Mathias, departed, returning to whoever had sent it.

Mathias buried his grandfather's corpse and, taking what he thought he would need, sought out after the only goal he had left in life, revenge. Revenge against whoever had killed his grandfather for that stupid staff, revenge against the red dragon that had take his family from him all those years ago, revenge for anyone too weak to obtain it like he had been.

Over the years, Mathias made several true friends, Arcanis the Psuedodragon that would become Mathias' familiar, the human Cleric/Monk Zuriel Ravensky, the half elven rogue Dannan Ives, and the Tiefling swordswoman/suel arcanamach Kassandriel. Together they went through many challenges and met each and every one of them head on, coming out victorious until they finally tracked down the man who'd had Thaddeus killed, a sorcerer named Archon. The evil spellcaster had needed Thaddeus' Staff of the Magi for something big, a ritual that would re-write the very fabric of reality, and so he needed to be stopped forever. Dannan died during that battle, with Mathias almost following him, though through the grace of Zuriel's god the wizard was saved and Dannan was eventually revived using the horded treasure of Archon.

Mathias eventually started his own school (taking the leadership feat) and began teaching, calling it the Hightower Academy. A statue of Thaddeus stands in the courtyard and many great young wizards have started coming to the school to learn. Zuriel and Kassandriel stayed on as guardians while Dannan visits often, going between the school and the nearby city where he has started his own spy's guild. Mathias still carries the Staff of the Magi that had belonged to his grandfather.

Player's Notes: Mathias is a fun character, first because (I'll be honest) I rolled gold with his stats. I mean, that's a well balanced wizard. Plus, he's a wizard with rage and power attack. I've actually been able to use that against an enemy caster (Enemy caster: FEAR MY POWER! Mathias: Heh, what power? *Casts antimagic field. Rages. Smashes with a warhammer* ) and he was a wizard with power attack. I mean, just fun. Also, his backstory gave the dm alot of material to work with which was great and the other players had great characters too, each one fun to work with. Dannan was a little bit of a klepto, but refused to steal from the poor or from "good" people. Zuriel was very much the body as well as being a healer, he'd wade into battle alone and then shout, "MATT! BRING THE RAIN!" which was usually a signal to douse everyone surrounding him with fire. Worked quite well. Kassandriel was the intimidating unkillable fighter that absorbed the damage meant for the rogue and wizard. Yet, beyond this they each had amazing characteristics of their own. Dannan was a jokester, loving to mess with his friends especially the super serious Mathias, Zuriel was the gentlest person around who actually fought with a quarterstaff because it didn't hurt as badly as his fists did, and Kassadriel was a loving mother who had a tendency to "tough love" Mathias when the weaker wizard was being stubborn. heh. In all, they were an amazing unit and a great gaming family.

Valin: did you ever play Shadowbane? I ask because my late guild's second in command, named all his toons with the surname Veneficus. Maybe just a coincidence...