NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="gideonpepys" data-source="post: 7339238" data-attributes="member: 79141">'The Mechanical Devil of Kurat-Ul-Ain'Quratulain is a new PC, designed to replace one of the other characters, who is leaving the group (and relocating from London to San Francisco).  We had plenty of notice of this change, so her player joined the group a few months ago and has been running Kasvarina, while getting used to the setting and the campaign.There are three major factors to take into account when adding a new PC to any campaign, but particularly one of this depth and duration:1) Why would they want to accompany the PCs long-term?2) Why would the PCs want them to join the group?3) What makes them stand out?We had an additional factor, in that the new character needed to fill the role vacated by our departing team member (bearing in mind that Korrigan built the unit to complement one another, with each member fulfilling a specific, if overlapping, role).  This was the easiest to deal with.  The player simply had to agree to design a combat-focused character, with an emphasis on total competence in that role. ('Pretty good' wouldn't do.)To some extent this handled 2 and 3 in one fell swoop.  To further accentuate the newcomer, though, they would need to be 'outre'.  (We went the opposite way with Gupta and made her 'hyper-normal', but she was able to fill the role of the wide-eyed neophyte for a while before proving her worth with a roster of unique supporting powers.  (And now, of course, she's 'a freaking weretiger'.))I decided that whoever the new PC was going to be, they should be discovered in the Vault of Heretics.  I suggested a few rough archetypes, and the player chose 'automaton'.  Then we created a backstory together - which will unfold over the next few weeks or months - before I added the final touch: that she had been betrayed by Nicodemus and abandoned in the vault, after helping him reach Ashima-Shimtu.  So her primary motivation, after escape, will be revenge upon the main campaign villain.  How very convenient!The intention was to play her out as part of the memory event and have her slowly come to her senses over the next couple of sessions, but Korrigan 'cut to the chase' - as is his wont - when he asked her directly if 'he' (in the role of Nicodemus) had kept his promise to free her. This question was so direct and 'out of sync' that she was immediately awakened to the strangeness of her circumstances: namely, that she is consciously taking part in a memory event from 500 years ago, while her actual body is trapped in ice, where it was transported by Ashima-Shimtu at Nicodemus' request.</blockquote>

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