Well it is a scroll... add ideas to it. Go to Comment

Perfect idea and one I thought of but overlooked when putting up ideas. Go to Comment

He often does. Go to Comment

A truly intriguing topic!

I use constellations (and other planetary thingies) quite often in my worlds. Go to Comment

Love this article. Well done Mourn. And congrats on the roleplayingtips.com cross-over!

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Excellent.  I believe astrology and all related aspects are a critical part of a world's magical tradition.

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Some nice techniques to add depth to the game without needing a whole bunch of additional rules and complexities. Tying haracters births to an astrological event or sign I particularly like, it lets players add some more depth and customization to their character without a lot of issues for the GM.

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Good article. In addition to rituals and effects on spells, constellations are good to use during character creation, especially if a GM has a calendar worked out (especially with holi-days.) Go to Comment

Excellent. Maybe with this well-laid out article I will find the gumption to create my own constellation history. Or maybe this Mathom fella will strike again...

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An excellent article in combination with Constellation Myth. Makes me wonder if my own world would benefit from this idea.

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Grothar: Dwarf

Probably because I played him the longest. A miserly, gold loving mercenary dwarf that worshipped the god of chance. He was so infatuated with money that of course he kept track of party treasure...which was never as much as the others thought it was when they gave it to him in the first place.

Once, they had a good run with an earth elemental that just dumped a load of gold on them for helping it with a crisis. Danger was still in the area and everybody was in a hurry to leave but Grothar would not leave till he saw how much they pulled in. A day later Grothar had the tally and his companions had fought off dozens of the enemies they had hoped to evade.

This miserly bit was constantly contradicted by his interpretation of his god of chance. In drunken stupers it was typical for him to wander drunk out of the bar, continue to wander out into the surrounding woods and bury the parties treasure in a random area and then leave in homage to his god. In the morning he would wake up, vaguely remember what he did and ina flurry of yelling and crying storm out to try and find it again. It would be a day of struggle for everybody trying to track and find where the treasure was buried.Chance was NEVER on their side when they tried to find it and I forgot how I convinced them to continue to allow Grothar to carry most of the money. Just had a lot of fun with him. Go to Comment

I don't think there will be any complaints about submissions for each type. If you can pick your top couple, I am sure that is doable. Go to Comment

Talia Bladedancer: Human Ranger


Talia was a human, vaguely antisocial ranger lurking in the forest surrounding the city the campaign started in. She had quite a mercenary bent to her, and often took jobs as a courier, bodyguard, and once or twice hired muscle. She hated slavers beyond all reason, stemming from the fact that she had been captured by slavers as a small child, and had only escaped in her teens. This got interesting really fast, because one of the city's main industries was slavery. She had a habit of raiding slaver caravans, killing the slavers, and releasing the captives (she got the party involved in two of those raids.) She eventually became best friends with a cleric of Bahamut and co-leader of the party.

She was very, very plain spoken, which once or twice caused a problem as Talia would say exactly what she thought of anyone, even if they were more powerful than she was. The only time this didn't come back to bite her in the butt was when she ranted at the chief of a fire giant tribe for ten minutes about how he was being an idiot. The fire giant in question was leading a war against a human kingdom, and the party had been hired to stop the war. The party found out that the fire giants were trying to take the human territory because a frost dragon with an army of frost giants had pushed them out of their territory. What made Talia mad was that he was trying to take the human territory by force, instead of joining them to drive out the frost dragon. Fortunately, fire giant society valued truth more than diplomacy, and listened to her. Talia was not allowed to talk when the time came for getting another dragon to help fight the frost dragon.

She survived being caught in a conflict between three different slavers, temporal displacement, helping the cleric raise a baby dragon, pissing off a group of (epic-level) bounty hunters, being suspected of assassinating an emperor, a tribe of medusae who had kidnapped said emperor, and a war of massive proportions between the frost dragon, his demon sword, and his army versus the rest of the people of the civilized lands, and only retired from the party when it was discovered she was the long-lost princess of a tribe of gypsies, having been kidnapped as an infant. This knowledge did not make her happy, but she accepted the responsiblity. Go to Comment

Well, I just can't pick a favorite.. There've been so many ones I really liked. Go to Comment

You know, I am having a problem with that. I have one for every game I have run. Fields for Cyberpunk, Earthfire and Bannu for Champions (if you have played it for as long as I have, since 1981 you would have two too), Kendall in Amber, Sir Marx in Traveller (Alien noble, 3 foot foxoid), Sir Arriones in Fantasy Hero, The Hanged Man in Boothill, and so many, many more. Go to Comment

Father Maxwell Tesla:

The first time I got to play Shadowrun, rather than GMing it, I had Father Max. Father Max was a Catholic priest of a Parish in the Redmond Barrens, one of the worst run-down dumps in Seattle, and a hermetic mage to boot, with most of his spells centered around illusion and emotional control. In order to set up shop at all, he had to fend off the local gang - They got the idea real quick when he started chanting in Latin... and they started getting hit by lightning out of the blue sky. Eventually, he even managed to get their allegiance. The episode, however, cost him his arm, which he had replaced with a cybernetic piece... one that included a shotgun. And that was before even getting out of Chargen. He started doing Shadowruns on a Robin Hood basis: Steal from the rich, pay for the parish.

That shotgun came into play later - There were a number of times where I would start chanting in Latin, and pull the trigger instead of casting anything. Sadly, I never got to use his spells to whip a mob into a frenzy, but I did get to stand up in a speed boat tearing across Puget Sound at >100 MPH and call the lightning down from a stormy sky, while two trolls did their best to hold on to me. Go to Comment

We dance all the way back to 1999, Millenium fever was in the air and I was playing my first Mage: the Ascencion character, an Order of Hermes/Cult of Ecstacy dual tradion mage. He originally went by the name Ender, but he was the only mage in an all vampire troupe, and ended up simply being called Merlin for simplicity's sake. He was pasty and gothy, and kept the vampires nervous with a Prime 2/Forces 2/Spirit 2 spell he called Sun in my Pocket which would in theory harm a vampire like sunlight. The spell was never tested.

Merlin played until January of 2004, having destroyed and remade the world, changed the entire set up of the Vampiric clans, lost his sanity on multiple occassions, married a vampire, tried to restore her to life, failed and built an entire realm for her in a pocket dimension.

BTW, large fragments of that Realm survive, some of them have even migrated here. Merlin was about as close to a munchkin as I could get, as he became an Arch Mage of the Prime sphere and a veritable god in his pockjet realm which quickly grew in size and population, acting as a wildlife sanctuary for mythical creatures.

Both Appaloose and ScorpionJinx know a good deal about Merlin, my favorite and longest lasting charater of all time. BTW, he likes the attention as he is still basically kicking around in the back of my head. I blame my twisted ideas on him. Go to Comment

Amanda Morgan
Clan Brujah, sired by an egotistical bad-ass who left her for dead. Mandy found a new life after being killed as prior to her prenatural death, she discovered that her last few years of massive drug use had given her the little joy of AIDS and she was in the process of freaking out when she was eaten. She has since found a new place in Los Angeles under the wing of Lucas, a Ventrue financier in the emply of my wife's Chatacter Kit McGregor, a legendary street racer who has won Race Wars three times! (Fast and the Furious based Vampire Game, heavily influenced by Need For Speed Underground 2)

In a realm of import tuners, Mandy commits the cardinal sin of driving American cars, the prime offender being a twin-turbcharged Corvette Z.06 which put out more than 1000 horse power. Mandy is hated because of her preference for American cars, and her absolute lack of inhibitions. She also has a feeding preference for drug dealers, a group of people she blames for having ruined her mortal life. Go to Comment

Nadina Dara ker Siyassi

Every girl wants to be a princess, perhaps except for Nadine: she was one, and was not too delighted by the fact. A naive 'save all, make the world a better place' type, she was a decent mage. Having never actually encountered real life, she ran off slumming, which would have led to adventure for sure, though her world was struck by a mysterious plague, and Nadine died soon thereafter... only to awaken drifting from world to world, from adventure to adventure.

Most girls wish to be slender - Nadine, at a glorious 600 pounds, was indeed: a twenty yards long Lamia, a constictor of shifting colors, she was a sight rather unusual.
Not that she thoguht there was anything wrong with it.
I remember how some other PC tied a clothes hanger to her... neck, using it to hold clothes, so that Nadine could speak to some human around the corner, most of hr body hidden (as always, I played the one and only character with social skills).

Given her noble birth and lack of experience outside a palace, she spoke with a patronizing kindness, educated her lessers, and was very surprised when the world did not work out how she expected.
But still, the world was fun.

One cannot forget the look on the faces of the other players, when, faced with a truly unpleasant NPC, Nadine simply announced "I eat him" - as it would have been done 'at home'. When the third NPC suffered such a fate, the GM even yelled at me "stop gobbling up my NPCs!"
Ah, those were the times.

Nadina still lives, teaching children in a steel city floating above the clouds, finally not cursed to drop from world to world. Go to Comment

A great idea. Go to Comment