Character Philosophies

[Vonlok The Bold]

I had one character who had a noble ancestor many years back. He took it upon himself to find out what happened to that ancestor, and restore nobility to his family name. It started that way, and adapted slightly as events in the campaign happened. His goals were of course to become landed, find a suitable wife, bring honor and glory to his family name.


I have a character now, who has a love hate wannabe status with nobility. He thought he wanted to become a noble, and strived for acceptance. He was mistreated frequently by nobility and humiliated so much as a youth, that he now kind of hates them, and wants to prove that he is on an equal footing with them. Underneath of course, the poor guy just wants to be accepted.

 

[Macbeth]

My old PC: A samurai who lost hope in an endless fight against the yuan-ti and ran away to the 'west' only to have a series of in-game events restore his faith in the ancient ways. He was training and gathering forces to go and destroy the Yuan-ti one day. That is until some goblins (actually tiefling goblin rogues) took him out.

My Current PC: his great grandfather commited such evil acts that the souls of his decendents haver been promised to the dark gods. My PC hopes to become a famous enough force for good that the good gods grant him a place in a better afterlife. To make matters worse, a rather powerful demon that has control over the souls of the PC's family is taking a 'vacation' on the prime material until the PC dies, and presumably doing some pretty evil things, which the PC sees as his fault since the demon is waiting for his death.

My 'Secondary' PC (we play a second group of characters for a break from the norm): A pygmie (savage halfling) kept onboard a pirate ship as a good luck charm. He wants to take over the ship and use it to raid, pillage and plunder the ships that trade slaves. His culture is a mish-mash of pygmie, Zulu, Carribean Voodoo and New Zealand Mauri. He draw magical power from the spirits (represented by levels as a sorcerer). He's a freedom fighter of sorts without any morals against plundering those that are in the slave trade.

 

[FreeTheSlaves]

His culture is a mish-mash of pygmie, Zulu, Carribean Voodoo and New Zealand Mauri.

(It's Maori)

 

[Nifft]

(It's Maori)

It's transliterated.

-- N

 

[Yair]

My next PC: A gnostic wizard that seeks to learn the magical arts of destruction on the nature of the human form and the essence of earth, so he could unchain his immortal soul from its earthly prison.

My next-to-last-PC: A cleric of the Unconquered Sun adamently trying to bring the light of good into the darkest realm (Ravenloft).

One half of my characters have a philosophic/theologic bent, the other half are combat brutes.

 

[John Morrow]

After watching the movie King Arthur I was intrigued by the concept of a personal philosophy or ideal as a motivation for adventuring. Even though it was forced, the ideal of free will was a unique twist for the character. What philosophies have you used for your characters?

I actually ran a Pelagian supernatural horror fighting monk in a Champions game (of all things) years ago (long before Pelagius was mentioned in the movie King Arthur). It was a bit of complicated backstory that I don't think the GM (not a Christian) appeciated or even fully understood. I tried to use the same character in a second planet-hopping game but that came to a screeching halt when I realized that the character would have to use the opportunity to preach to the natives and it just wasn't that sort of a game (that was a can of worms that none of us really wanted to open). So I created a different character and we did a swith with some logical in-game explanations for it.

 

[palleomortis]

I don't know if this is what your lookinf for, but I make it so that the PC chooses his own stuff, and I just assume that if he dosn't have a motive, then he just got board and needed a job.

 

[Evilhalfling]

I had a gnome tinker/professor who believed that the world was a mental construct that bodieless entities created cooperativly to allow them to interract with each other. This is a real philsophy the name of which escapes me. He had some illusions spells of course. Eventually he obtained an artifact which allowed him to selectivley ignore reality (treating real objects as illusions) it didnt work with creatures or items that were there possession.
This rarely worked out well for him.