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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rabulias" data-source="post: 9402352" data-attributes="member: 16651">Like many others, my username is from a favorite D&D PC. Rab was a halfling multiclass fighter-thief, created back in 1986 for an AD&D game at college. I envisioned him as a swashbuckling type (very different from his halfling kin), with some Indiana Jones influence, exploring the unknown, uncovering ancient mysteries, and sometimes having to fight his way out of trouble. I wanted a name that could also have a shorter nickname (like "Indiana" and "Indy") and I came up with "Rabulias" and "Rab". It's pronounced with a long "u" and the same emphasis as Indiana, so rab-yew-LIE-us. He usually adds his (self-assigned) epithet when introducing himself as "Rabulias the incomparably shrewd and clever" but as he likes to say, "That's a lot to say in a tricky spot -- just call me Rab."As for my avatar, I am no artist, but I wanted to have a good character illustration for Rab. This was pre-World Wide Web, and the Internet was only accessible to a few (I was not one of them), so I had limited options. Most of the illustrations of halflings I found were either pretty silly or were very, er, rotund (a definite Hobbit influence). I pictured Rab as more lean and athletic, and a little more serious. I never really found a good one until sometime in the 1990s I got a used copy of TSR's The Five Shires Gazetteer, illustrated by Artie Ruiz. An illustration of Jaervosz Dustyboots, the Sheriff of Seashire, stood out to me. I made several photocopies and (after many attempts) blacked out the background with a Sharpie, and it's been how I have pictured Rab ever since. I got a much better result once I could scan the page and edit the image in a graphics program (with undo <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f923.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":ROFLMAO:" title="ROFL    :ROFLMAO:"  data-smilie="18"data-shortname=":ROFLMAO:" /> ), and that is what I used here.</blockquote>

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