Cleone's player here, maker of Onion spoofs and maintainer of wikis! Well, one wiki. World's finally given the go-ahead for us to look in here, and to start off thanks to Ryan Nock and the rest of the Zeitgeist writers to providing the base for this amazing experience! Our weekly sessions were the highlight of my week for nearly three full years, and provided a steady bright spot amid some pretty rough times.
Having read through this thread, I'm going to once again plug the wiki I made to track our campaign - particularly the
session recaps, which are a bit more fine-grained than World's per-adventure summaries and include some peak dialogue where our record-keeping allows. World generalized/slightly misrepresented some stuff and skipped over some personal character arcs to keep his writeups condensed, so if you're interested in learning more about the characters I fully recommend checking out the recap and character pages! (Also, I shamelessly want a little bit of validation because I've definitely poured a triple-digit amount of hours into this over the past few years.)
The wiki, admittedly, has not yet been updated for the campaign's end beyond the recaps because I was waiting on the epilogue for that and (I say lovingly) World has yet to finish it. That'll come eventually, though.
Anyway, just to talk about the character I played here: I knew when World shared information about the game that I wanted to play a deva, because I love reincarnation tropes and exploring ideas with them. Cleone's initial concept was a deva who drew on experience from past lives but was aware their most recent past life was a jerk (influences including Iria Animi from the game Tales of Innocence and a bit of Dax from Star Trek: Deep Space 9), and I left most of the details to World figuring he had the context to come up with something better than I could in my plot ignorance. It paid off big time: I blindly walked right into the reveal of Cleone's relationship to Nicodemus during Adventure 5, and it gave me physical chills! Her difficult-to-name but close relationship with Kasavarina was also a highlight, and their interactions in Adventure 8 remain some of my favorite moments in the campaign.
World didn't post this one, so I will.
Her coming from Danor was also a bit of a happy accident, as 1) I nearly considered a spirit medium (and played one later, as Zo) and 2) it was related to a backstory idea that didn't work out. I decided to keep the idea that she was a Danoran technologist on exchange, and made her an older and more experienced character career-wise to match the position. And since then, for most of the game's lifespan I've been saying I don't know how other campaigns work
without a Danoran PC. Cleone's ongoing investment in Danor even as she learned her country was inseparable from the Obscurati felt integral to letting certain parts of the story have proper weight, and I'm extremely glad I did it. (Gatria's player has also said similar things about having a Beran PC, and they're also right!)
It also led to a few, uh, weird juxtapositions with real life. In particular I remember having a moment when we started Adventure 5 in 2021 during pandemic lockdown and World mentioned anti-Danoran protests in Flint the same night I listened to reports on pandemic violence against Asian Americans on the news (me being Asian American myself). Then we got to 10-11 a year later and, in a very different and more unsettling vein, at one point I realized Cleone was calling for revolution after Gatria spread rumors about Danor's falsified elections. Bad. I realize that Zeitgeist started in 2011 (judging by forum timestamps) but WHEW. Resonance, or lack thereof.
Anyway, Cleone is a big blender of concepts I enjoy playing with! And our lovely GM threw even more things I enjoy playing with at me. I had a great time, and I feel a bit spoiled for tabletop experiences now haha.
I don't have much skill by way of drawn art so I can't contribute much there, but to cap off this post here's Cleone and her past life Alastor as made in Animal Crossing:
