Dane's Notebook

Dane's Notebook

Everything about Statless and Tactless you wanted to know, but couldn't be arsed to go read up on.

Players------------------------------------------------

Dane: Your's truly. 34 year old comic and game shop owner.

Joe: My least favorite human being that I couldn't live without. Works with me at the shop. 29 years old and in grad school for a doctorate in who-knows-what. Married to a woman who finds his utterly horrific personality charming. I guess there's someone for everyone. He brought Soo into the group in exchange for me not house-ruling out his latest idiotic character. Actually not nearly as bad a guy as he comes across when he talks. He works at a soup kitchen and stuff. I think he just uses my gaming group as a place to vent all of his base instincts.

Kyle: 27 years old. Got a degree in English and managed to land a teaching job. Pretty even-handed and actually the closest thing the group has to a normal, sane player. Sometimes I think he exists purely to spar with Joe. It's kind of a Batman/Joker thing except the Joker is fat and charismatic. Maybe Batman/Penguin...

Ian: Ian's 25 and he's been in RPG groups with me since he was a freshman in high school. He's lucky. When I was growing up nerds like him would have been bullied into a puddle but Ian seems pretty well-adjusted. He's kind of the group's butt-monkey but he sort of takes the role and lives with it in a healthy way. He went through an 'emo' phase way back in the day that I'm happy to forget but Joe's not so quick to forgive. All in all an nice guy, perhaps aggressively so.

Soo: Joe brought Soraya (who goes by Soo) to the game because we lost our last fourth player. She's new blood in an old group and it's kind of jarring for me as a GM to watch. I guess I never really processed how set in our ways the group has become until there's an outsider there to question those ways. Joe is convinced Ian and her have a thing going on and won't let me have peace about it at the shop. I don't really see it though. Ian's usually pretty clumsy around women and he's very comfy with Soo, so I think it's more friendly than Joe's perverse mind can process.

Characters---------------------------------------------

Bailey Hunt: Kyle's current character. Probably the closest thing to what I was expecting to have to deal with this campaign. Kyle tried to spread Bailey's points out to make him a versatile adventurer with a sort of cowboy gunslinger vibe (I'm really getting more of a violent Indiana Jones though). Unfortunately this seems to have given him just a point or two few skills to actually succeed at things. If I told him how often he missed rolls by 1 or 2 he'd probably cry. In character Bailey is a long-time adventuring partner of Ian's character Mari and is kind of the group's muscle now that Joe is out of that game. Talks with a southern drawl that seems to phase in and out of existence. He's got an odd habit of getting hit all the time. I think dice just don't like him.

Kalinara 'Kali' d'Vostog: Soo's first character in my games. It's not really common for a novice to go for the "lots of points sunk into assets" thing but Soo was kind of misled by Joe into doing it. It actually proved pretty effective so far: Kali is rich and high-class enough to cut out a lot of the awkward legwork of finding adventures and she has enough clout that it will probably get the group out of trouble. She's usually packing a small revolver. During the big fight scene at Colton Kali shoved Mari out of the way of a bug and got her arm hacked off. I think it was the left one but I'm kind of having a hard time remembering. She recently took up magic and specialized teleportation.

Mari Shasho: Ian's character for this group. Ian's been playing female characters long enough that the group really doesn't dwell on it. To be fair, he does a good job RPing them so I'm not really willing to make issues. Mari is a pyromancer and this has been kind of an issue for the group because Ian really wants to contribute to situations where fireballs aren't really a good contribution. Joe had the idea that Mari should technically become Kali's servant girl during the trip to Colton as a way of keeping someone close to Kali in situations where her nobility would let her get places the group can't follow normally. Ian and Soo have been setting Mari and Kali up for a little romance subplot. I'm fine with that sort of thing as long as it doesn't overrun my game. I've noticed that Mari seems to be injured less often than Bailey but in far more amusing ways.

GR-210: Joe's character for this game. Sometimes a problem gets out of control and the GM has to step in. Other times the game just fixes itself like the timestream in a sci-fi movie. For a while GR-210 was a hulking steam-powered murderbot that was personally punching his way through my plot. Early on in the trip north GR did something utterly stupid and got himself blown up. Reduced to a talking robot head, Mari had robotic spider legs from an automated toolbox grafted onto him so he can skitter around with the group. He probably could have gotten a body back by now but I think he's having too much fun with this shape. Joe was hoping Kali would buy GR-210 lots of parts to make him a super weapon and invested all his initial points in language skills to force her to but so far it hasn't worked and actually his bucket of language skills has been pretty useful. Currently, GR-210 has a follower character named Danielle whom I hate with a passion. GR was killed in action for reasons I'm loathe to discuss.

Willy "Lord Beefstorm" d'Vostog: Joe's second character in the game following GR's demise. Lord Beefstorm is based off of a passing reference to Kali's family and is Kali's brother. He's apparently been bumming around the world doing heroic things since his teenage years and at some point acquired the horribly dumb deed-name that he goes by today. Joe built Beefstorm around optimizing the mechanics for lying to characters and is pretty much a Jedi in terms of application. He recruited Techie, a Watch agent that the group had met, as a follower.

Dillon Johnson: Dillon was originally suspected of being kidnapped by criminals but eventually proved to be involved in a conspiracy related to the Old Velthri religion. A prominent businessman, he disappeared before the story begins. He was eventually found dead in the temple near Colton, apparently having been betrayed by his own cult. His kidnapping was faked in order to allow him to slip away on the expedition to the northern temple. His journal is the first clue to the larger plot of the campaign.

Dr. Ghilliam Graham: An old friend of GR-210's from back in his college days (don't ask). He's an expert on Old Velthri religion and various other things the plot demands. The group later learned that he's a member of the secretive Shadow's Watch: the Imperia's secret police force.

Felicity Johnson: The wife of Dillon Johnson and apparently also a member of the Order of the Opening Eye. A wizard of some skill she almost posed a threat to the party before Danielle blew her brains out with a sniper rifle and Mari set fire to an entire city block. I would like to clarify that apparently the players are the good guys.

Jenise Langley: A farmer responsible for minding the path to the Order of the Opening Eye's mountain training camp. She introduces the group to Grandmaster Trant.

Grandmaster Trant: The mysterious and campy leader of the Order of the Opening Eye. Much more dangerous than he seems, I swear.

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