T is for Thrae Ssissth Vorel, Pretentious Ruler of the Skies

Posted on 23 April, 2016 by Law

Name: Thrae Ssissth Vorel
Campaign: Unnamed Monster Campaign

If you’re tired of reading this month and you’d rather hear this entry in audio format with three times as much snark, you can listen to us discuss this character at I Podcast Magic Missile. The section on Thrae begins at 18:40 and I suggest skipping to it if you don’t want spoilers for Tuesday.

The epithets I’ve been using in the post names are ones I’ve made up for this month, except Egan and this one. “Pretentious Ruler of the Skies” was Thrae’s in-campaign epithet. It was the initial high concept and the character grew from there. According to D&D rulebooks, even his name is Draconic for “pretty air thief”. If you want to stop reading now because you fully understand this character and his player, I understand.

At the point at which Thrae joined the campaign the party needed three things: arcane blasting power, levity, and transportation. His character design steps were something like “come up with an idea that fits all three, then make it hilarious, then make it make sense.” He was a drunk cat-person airship pirate sorcerer. If you want to stop reading now, I also understand.

I remember him most for his equipment: an airship, which was eventually destroyed when a castle flew into it and no I didn’t get that mixed up; a belt of inebriation, a custom magic item that was largely a Batman utility belt filled with forty different kinds of liquor; and boots of perching, another item that gave him a bonus to Charisma checks whenever he stood in a Captain Morgan pose (“Do you believe me?” [lifts leg] “How about now?”). His race came up not at all, and his class only mattered in combat and when it was funny. His favorite strategy was to quietly cast fly on himself, shout “Ahh! Abandon ship!”, leap off the side of the boat, fly under it and back up the other side while the rest of the party panicked, and calmly land and continue steering like nothing had happened.

Thrae could have been incredibly disruptive if run by a player who wanted to hog the spotlight or troll the rest of the table, but he wasn’t. Instead he provided an off-the-wall comedy that accentuated the more down-to-earth comedy of our pathologically-lying murder golem and our half-naked dragon orc (“down-to-earth” here is, of course, relative). He was only in the group for the last sixth of the campaign and he knew it, so he never expected to get a significant growth arc. He was a great casual character, demonstrating that not everybody needs a dark backstory and personal demons to overcome.

I think after participating in the final battle and saving the world but condemning the party to infamy, Thrae went off in search of a new airship. He was nothing if not consistent.

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S is for Sammael, Celestial Necromancer

Posted on 22 April, 2016 by Law

Name: Sammael
Campaign: The Eight Arms and the Shadow Invasion

I feel like every third PC can be described as “exceptionally handsome, but impulsive and foolhardy”. I might as well describe somebody who has that exact phrase on his wiki page.

Sammael was that celestial necromancer I reference now and again in my posts. He was an aasimar oracle of bones, so not only was he part-angel he was also the party’s healer. His philosophy on necromancy could be summarized as “What? It’s magic like any other magic. It’s not like anybody was using those corpses.” He dutifully failed to notice the judgmental stares of people around him, the souls of those he had wronged literally haunting him, and being constantly told he had the faint smell of death on him. It’s not that he disagreed with everybody’s assessment of him (though he did), it’s that his low Wisdom never let him associate “everybody dislikes me” with “I might have forcibly exhumed their parents”. That’s how stats inform fun characters.

Sammael had an menagerie, another one of those things about D&D everybody hates because they saw somebody do it once or heard about it from a friend of a friend. It included:

  • FedEx, the zombie dragon who was too dumb for much besides ferrying packages from one end of the city to another. He never saw combat mostly because he could barely fit through the door of the room where he stayed.
  • The Versatile Animated Skeletal Haulers, six orc barbarian skeletons. Sammael actually went out of his way to find, kill, and animate orc barbarians for their alarming Strength scores. They also never saw combat and were mostly used to carry gear, though they did wear red leather dusters and carry guns just in case.
  • Boni Bologna the Skeletoni Oni, a skeleton with natural flight and fast healing who flew far above battle and harassed enemies with a longbow. He did participate in the campaign’s few outdoor battles on the Material Plane.
  • A grey render zombie whose name is lost to time. Sammael could summon this one at will but rarely did after the conversation described here


Take a drink.

The running theme here is “the menagerie didn’t participate in combat much”, and that’s what made them great. They were story tools to show how deep into necromancy Sammael was, but they didn’t detract from the rest of the party’s importance or screen time. This is how a good, workable menagerie is. Its members show up, perform some task, and leave. They don’t hang around and suck up table time or destroy the action economy, which are the reasons summoners get as much hate as they do. A summoner is an entirely valid concept (I’ve run for four, one of whom is later in the month, and played another) and none of them have monopolized our time. It’s like anything else: as long as you have a reasonable person with some grasp of the rules running them, they’re no problem.

When last we saw Sammael he was going on a solo adventure with two strange men he’d just met to find a magical artifact that may or may not have existed. He won’t be back for the next campaign with his fellow party members, but I’m sure he’s not dead. Pretty sure.

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R is for Rousseau, Paladin of Tyranny

Posted on 21 April, 2016 by Law

Name: Rousseau
Campaign: The Great Tower of Oldechi

Just take the drink now.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau the philosopher was of the opinion that people were at their best separate from civilization, that a human is inherently good and wise when removed from a corrupting society. Thus the society that is least a society, one where all individuals are loosely associated and free, is the ideal society for the human condition. Reliance on the opinions of others for esteem and survival limits the ability and well-being of the individual and develops the damaged civilization we have today. Of course, in D&D, the best person to represent this philosophy is a paladin of tyranny.

I don’t actually know that Rousseau the character is named after Rousseau the philosopher (it could be a random name, or it could be based on something significantly less intellectual), but the differences between the two are too pronounced to not be funny. Rousseau was a dragonborn cleric/fighter dedicated to Bane, the 4E/Forgotten Realms god of hate, oppression, and fear. He did an alarming amount of damage and had equally alarming defenses for a healer, letting him saunter into combat and stab things until they weren’t things any more. In between murders he buffed and healed the party and controlled the battlefield pretty well. As a total package he was an amazing fifth character, his dedication to crushing his lessers notwithstanding.

What I liked about Rousseau was how powerful he was in-story. By the end of the campaign his Strength was 30, the absolute forever maximum of a 4E character, and he took an epic destiny that made him taller and heavier than the average dragonborn, an already tall and heavy race. I let him get away with acts of strength and size that shouldn’t have been legal in 4E because it felt right to me that he should be more powerful than just about any other creature. Starting in the One Piece campaign we referred to this trait as “narratively X”, where the character is more X than the system allows but we ignore those limitations for story purposes. Rousseau was narratively strong, able to bend obdurium prison bars but not strong enough to dealt several hundred dice of damage on an attack, and he was one of the first characters I saw who did it.

With his character focus on oppressing the weak, his statistical focus on being a threat to everybody and having no weaknesses, and his story focus on being strong enough to make any player sit down and shut up, Rousseau seemed ill-suited for heroism or even alliances. But in a party of outlandish characters and personalities (recall he was in the same group as Cid, Lao!ze, Meisha, and Plague; no I am not putting four links there) he was more of a quiet background character who could move to the forefront whenever he wanted. Rousseau’s player ran him as the kind of guy who would sit back and let everybody else worry their heads off, step in and get the job done whether that job required tossing a dump truck or making a witty quip, and leave the spotlight like nothing had happened. Everything about him met the needs of the table.

Rousseau ascended to godhood as Scourge, god of conquest and skill, and so far he’s the only new deity who’s factored into a later campaign. I promise that’s the last time I’ll link “ascended to godhood” this month, which if you’ve been paying attention is kind of a spoiler for Saturday.

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Q is for the Queeks, Cannon-Toting Rat Swarm

Posted on 20 April, 2016 by Law

Name: Rikkek, Lurquol, Thrott, Skreech, Tretch, Skweel, Skrolk, Thanquol, Glitch, Snitch, and Sneek Queek, et al.
Campaign: The Eight Arms and the Memento Mori

I wasn’t actually the first choice as this character’s DM. Initially the player went to our local Pathfinder Society DM and asked to play a goblin who spent all their money on a cannon, which they would transport and load using minions from the Leadership feat. The DM’s response was something like “Not a single word of that is legal in Pathfinder Society.” And when something is ridiculous but not technically legal, obviously I am the next best choice. I think my only reservation was “alright, but in this setting goblins have German accents”, which was a more effective way of changing the character’s race than any banlist.

The Queeks were several ratfolk, all siblings and members of the Eight Arms Friend to All Creatures party. Among the siblings Rikkek was their leader and the one who fired the cannon, Lurkwall was the cohort and defender, and the others all lugged and loaded the cannon so Rikkek could focus on aiming and shooting. Each one had a distinct personality and set of skills so they each had a chance to be ineffective over the course of the campaign, but Rikkek was the PC proper.

By the numbers Rikkek was ridiculous. He was an 8th-level character who did 12d6 damage per attack, hit on a 2 against almost every creature (and giant creatures, the team’s bread-and-butter, traditionally had terrible touch ACs) from across a city block, and dealt 30d6 damage on a critical hit before he started getting fancy. He could only attack every other round, but when every hit was a kill that was usually enough. While he spent his rounds manning the cannon, his cohort managed the battlefield at the level of a competent, though not good, fighter. Essentially he was a slightly underpowered front-line defender who also had a nearly-unavoidable, long-range, free-action, instant-death spell that took a round to recharge.

What made the Queeks interesting was their drawbacks. A cannon, of course, is large and heavy, and that limited its ability to move across the battlefield, through the middle of town, anywhere with an unstable floor, and into any waterbound dungeon or encounter that required not being at the bottom of the ocean (please recall that this was a sailing campaign). It was also expensive, as was equipping eleven characters, two of whom needed to be near PC-level. All those characters required a lot of maintenance, and most of them were low-level NPCs; the player came into the campaign knowing full well a single fireball, or even a burning hands, would kill the entire character concept pretty much irrevocably. Rikkek was terrifyingly powerful, but he had so many intentional restrictions on what he could do I never felt like he was steamrolling the campaign.

I think the best part about him is that he felt like he should have been a reskin but wasn’t. He just took a few little-used sections of the rules and ran them as expected to get a fun result that didn’t derail the campaign. He pretty much reached my limit for character wackiness, a line my players seem dedicated to approaching asymptotically, but it worked out.

The Queeks ended the campaign where they began it: on dry land with everybody alive and little reputation, no wiser or richer but still ready for the next ridiculous adventure. I think their player wouldn’t have it any other way.

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P is for Plague, Living Cancer

Posted on 19 April, 2016 by Law

Name: Plague
Campaign: The Great Tower of Oldechi

I’m a big fan of taking a race that D&D hard-codes as evil and using it to play a good character as a quiet, ineffective “screw you” to race-based alignment as a concept. I really should have expected that somebody would flip it.

Plague’s player heard me say that “Cid Viscous” was the most unnecessarily on-the-nose PC name I’d ever had in my campaigns and took it as a challenge*. By the rules Plague was an archlich, a good version of the traditionally evil lich (because the prefix arch- means “especially good”, as in archangel or archaeologist). Plague’s player, however, considered the epic destiny’s alignment as a recommendation more than a requirement. His entire focus was engineering and spreading disease, and he slung as much darkness, necrosis, and overt evil as he could.

For the most part he managed to spare the party his predations, but that was more by omission than design. Remember that arcane striker I mentioned who wanted to take War Wizardry? Here he is. I still remember when he found the feat in the book. His eyes lit up, he read the name, and before he could get another word out the rest of the table exchanged meaningful looks and strongly recommended against it.

The best story regarding Plague is one I’ve written before, so I’ll reproduce it here:

…the party became trapped in a library the size of a small city, where all the books were rapidly being devoured by a group of insect-like creatures. Using the remaining books [Plague] engineered a devastatingly powerful, fast-acting disease transmitted by contact. His goal was to get to the enemy hive, die, let the disease wipe out the insects while the party hid, and claim victory when he came back the next day.

The final battle of that arc became a skill challenge, with the character racing toward the enemy hive while the rest of the party covered him, blocking attackers with control effects and clever tactics and throwing themselves into the fray to distract the enemies. He took hefty damage but made it to the hive on his last legs. With his most powerful remaining attack he took out the hive’s support structures, dropping it on him.

The damage from the falling hive took him to negative four or five digits. His exploding corpse infected pretty much everything in and around the hive. By the next day some 90% of the insects were dead, and there were very careful high-fives all around. That’s still the record for the hardest I’ve ever killed a player.

I have since been informed that Plague was cackling madly the whole time.

The moral of Plague’s story is “let the players be clever”. I had a fancy fight planned against a full hive of epic-level insects, but Plague’s death run while the rest of the party provided covering fire was a much better story and a much more entertaining session.

Plague, hilariously, died. His player left the party and he switched allegiances, accompanying Laotzu instead (take a drink). Eventually Laotzu’s lust for power consumed him and led to him siphoning off so much of Plague’s power the latter could only manifest a head and an arm for the rest of his existence, and even that happened only because the original party kept ahold of his phylactery. He didn’t even join the new pantheon as a herald.

* — For reference, Plague’s title is currently contested by Slogg Sexipants, half-ton ladies’ man.

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O is for Orabelle Peña, Companion of Orson

Posted on 18 April, 2016 by Law

Name: Orabelle Peña
Campaign: The Eight Arms and the Memento Mori

There’s a joke among early 3E players about especially stupid paladins. Intelligence was a common paladin dump stat in a class that really wanted three good ability scores, and paladins also got an intelligent mount that began at Int 6. It wasn’t uncommon to have a mount smarter than its PC. But it is somewhat strange to have a mount more interesting than its PC.

Orabelle was a halfling sailor and sling expert who accompanied (but did not join) the Eight Arms monster-friending team, which started as the Eight Arms monster-hunting team until the campaign started and the party decided to hug everything they met. She was the only person in the party competent on the water, a somewhat meaningful trait in an ocean-based campaign, and the only person who could make a ranged attack without a bucket of gunpowder. She was, however, fairly weak physically, to the point where she couldn’t even carry her full compliment of sling bullets.

Enter Orson, Orabelle’s animal companion whose name also conveniently begins with O. Orson was, as far as the rules were concerned, a mundane turtle. His damage was terrible, his speed was terrible, his cognitive functions were terrible, and his primary uses were carrying gear and providing cover with his AC nineteen points higher than the party’s cleric’s. But Orson’s true worth was in assigning him a funny voice and saying whatever seemed most subversive at the time, which rapidly became making dark predictions whenever the party succeeded. In no time we determined he was either a creature from beyond the stars or merely their servant, a harbinger of the coming apocalypse.

Exactly what apocalypse that is, I don’t know. This isn’t an example of foreshadowing, this is an example of making jokes and pretending they were foreshadowing if I commit to them later. The point is that Orson was a hilarious way for me as the DM to insert comedy into the campaign, not that he was actually a setting villain (…take half a drink).

Orabelle as a whole ended up not doing much. I expected her to be a “real person” balance to the “monster hunters” in the rest of the party, but since the party ended up allying with almost everything they met that didn’t work. Orson is the part of the character we remember. I don’t want to say the lesson here is “be useless, nobody notices anyway”. It’s more like the lesson is “be fun”.

After the Eight Arms fought Mega Ultra Chicken, the campaign’s backup final boss, Orabelle left the group and returned to her normal life. This is the same character who played Felicia, and I’m not sure if “I’ll hang out with you, but not too long” is something I should take away from running for this player.

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N is for Nicodemus Kriedy, a Gentleman and a Mauler

Posted on 16 April, 2016 by Law

Name: Nicodemus Kriedy
Campaign: The Eight Arms and the Shadow Invasion

I spoke with several of my players as I wrote the articles for this month, mostly to warn them about which days they should skip if they didn’t want to see themselves get buried (the glee with which several of them anticipated their assumed roasting fills me with confusion and dread). When I brought up this character, his player recommended I describe him as “the best person that his particular life experiences could have produced”. Which, actually, is a pretty apt description of the Eight Arms setting.

Kriedy was a former soldier and thief with the soul of an egalitarian and the demeanor of a men’s right activist. He gave his allies and enemies exactly as much respect and deference as they deserved, no more, and he did what was right as long as he considered himself the best person to do it. He served as a middle ground between the wackier members of the party and the level-headed ones, maintaining a professional demeanor while doing unprofessional things for professional reasons. He even had his full plate glamered to look like a suit.

Most importantly, he was the head of the adventuring guild around which the campaign setting is based. One of the early bits of advice new DMs get is “don’t give members of the party power over other members of the party. If one PC can boss around other PCs, it will devolve into bickering and the campaign will fail.” Perhaps that’s good advice with certain kinds of players, the sorts who look for reasons to oppress each other. But having a PC be another PC’s boss isn’t in and of itself a bad thing. Nicodemus is the first in a series of characters in our campaigns who show that, with a mature table, it’s a character relationship like any other. He didn’t lord his power over the of the party, and in return the party deferred to him whenever it was time to make a decision. Everybody had a reason to stick together, there was no NPC pushing the party around, and we got exchanges like this:

Kriedy: Did your summoned zombie just kill one of the hostages we were supposed to save?
Necromancer: Yeah.
Kriedy: …
Necromancer: His Int score is a horizontal line! He doesn’t know better!
Kriedy: I’m docking you.

After Kriedy I’m not so gun-shy about letting one PC be the boss, manager, or patron of the rest of the party. He showed that, as with splitting the party, it’s not a matter of the action itself as how you handle it.

The Eight Arms succeeded in their first adventure, though Kriedy did die once along the way. He also played the damsel in distress for The Eight Arms and the Unforgiving Blade. After a second brush with the campaign setting’s hard limit on resurrection I think he’s wielding a chaingun in my next campaign, because that’s apparently the best way to use all those two-weapon fighting feats.

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M is for Miesha, Actual Succubus

Posted on 15 April, 2016 by Law

Name: Miesha
Campaign: The Great Tower of Oldechi

Speaking of the Tower Campaign.

Miesha, Lao!ze, and Cid were contemporaries, joining the campaign at the same time and making it to the end. Miesha was sort of an opposite to Cid; while Cid was a fairly reasonable build reskinned dramatically to a ridiculous character everybody hated by design, Miesha was a fairly ridiculous build reskinned to a very specific end everybody “liked” by design. Instead of the dragonborn sorcerer/warlord her character sheet said she was, Miesha was a succubus. Her arcane striking all had a demonic bent, focused on increasing chaos, and she treated her martial leading as more enchantment than inspiration.

As a party member Miesha worked really, really well. A hybrid leader was exactly what the party needed to survive the end of the campaign, especially in the frequent cases where the party split up (or were split up, forcibly, by me). She came as a package deal with the party’s lich, and his eventual egress from the campaign and subsequent fate tied into her story. Her damage came half from Strength, which fit with the party’s unofficial theme of “hilarious, unexpected physical might” and half from Charisma, where she filled a hole we had after the party lost their bard.

The way in which she didn’t work with the party, and for the same reason the best part of her character, was her theme. Most of my campaigns up to that point were rated PG. In specific circumstances I might have gone PG-13 to drive home how terrible particular a villain was or for an especially amazing joke, but I stayed firmly in a family-friendly comfort zone. The characters in the Tower Campaign mostly fit with this, with a bit of cartoon villainy thrown in because my players seem to default to evil given the option. Miesha was very obviously not family-friendly. It wasn’t just that she was a succubus, it was how she played that to the hilt. There were no lurid descriptions at our public game-store sessions, of course, but there were enough knowing winks and innuendos to qualify us for our own TV Tropes page.

The thing is, the world didn’t end. Our group of adult tabletop gamers was more than capable of handing the occasional explicitness without collapsing under the weight of our iniquity. She didn’t make the campaign about seduction any more than Cid made it about fitting into tiny spaces, and she didn’t send any player into fits of embarrassed blubbering. Yes, it meant things weren’t as appropriate for the young folk who occasionally wandered by, but they weren’t really my target audience. My players were, and they were fine with it. Miesha is where I started figuring this out.

As with everybody at the end of the campaign, Miesha ascended to godhood. She didn’t go through many changes, partially because “sexy lady” is easier to sell to worshippers than “slime” and partially because her name wasn’t a pun.

A note: this character is a literal demon, but I didn’t reference our drinking game anywhere. That’s because this epic-level demon is not as good a campaign villain as several of my PCs. I say this not to diminish Miesha’s character, but because when I say “this ostensibly heroic character is a villain more than a hero”, I want you to understand my full meaning.

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L is for Lao, Laotzu, and Lao!ze, Adventurers with Pointy Bits

Posted on 14 April, 2016 by Law

Name: Lao, Laotzu, Lao!ze
Campaign: The Great Tower of Oldechi

I’m going to cheat a little more here, and for the same reason. Lao, Laotzu, and Lao!ze were different characters, united in that they were run by the same player in the same campaign and shared a naming scheme that gives my spellcheck fits. They also all had racial powers that let them attack multiple enemies. I’m not saying their character design was “find a race with a minor action attack power, then pick a class that deals damage, then make a personality that works”, but I’m also not not saying that.

Lao was a bladeling wizard who was only around for the first five sessions of a 108-session campaign and so didn’t affect the story or grow that much. Laotzu was a dragonborn sorcerer obsessed primarily with gaining power through magic and secondarily with setting the party barbarian on fire. Lao!ze was a thri-kreen ranger who loved disruption and chaos, but also precision and accuracy somehow. All of them dealt damage (Lao was not terribly good at it), but in different ways for different reasons, and all of them taught me something about what I do and don’t like in characters.

Lao was easy. I knew I didn’t like flavorless bundles of numbers, and 4E exacerbated that. He might have had the potential to be interesting, but “potential” means he hadn’t done it by the time he left.

Laotzu was the most team-killing character I’ve ever seen, and I’ve played a character who killed a member of his team. He had a feat that gave him an accuracy bonus as long as one of his allies was in the blast radius and he used it mercilessly, usually on the barbarian, usually targeting the barbarian’s worst defense. He also picked up War Wizardry, which halved the damage he dealt to allies. This wasn’t an improvement; instead of mitigating his behavior it only justified it. War Wizardry and similar options became effectively banned from the campaign, which mattered when our next arcane striker tried to get it. It was, however, hilarious. Nobody actually died from it, and I got a good idea of exactly how much damage players will take for a joke.

Remember my less-than-glowing opinion on rangers from yesterday? Lao!ze is the character who formed them (though my time running Delve Night didn’t hurt). He did a staggering amount of damage on his turn, what with his tendency to hit on a 3 and turn critical hits into more attacks, and an upsetting amount of damage on my turn as well even when he wasn’t cartwheeling his way into making my monsters ineffectual. But I loved how he bonded with the party, slowly enough to be believable but solidly enough to be a campaign asset. He’s also the only character I’ve ever seen use d7s, and we made him a custom weapon so he could roll them more often. The joy he got from rolling damage taught me a powerful lesson: find out what makes your players happy, and they probably won’t murder you in an alley.

Since the campaign didn’t visit Lao after L3, we assume he’s either dead or still going through the tower. Laotzu left the party, formed his own group, became a campaign rival, went mad, ate his team, became a campaign villain (take a drink), and died. Lao!ze was part of the final party and thus ascended to godhood. I suppose in the end they came out about even.

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K is for Kojen, Link but Different

Posted on 13 April, 2016 by Law

Name: Kojen
Campaign: The Legend of Zelda: Shaman Gates

When you play enough of the same game you start to get opinions about things that don’t have anything to do with the things themselves. For example, I’ve only seen a few paladins, and none of them have been sword-and-shield holy knights, shining from horseback and defending the faith. Instead the last four paladins I’ve seen have been an overly-excited archer, a drunk earthbender, an expert with the battle ladder, and Felicia. My opinion about paladins includes “they never, ever, use a mundane weapon” whether or not that’s true. Similarly, my opinion on rangers includes “upsettingly high damage, upsettingly low personality”…usually.

Kojen is Link from an unreleased Zelda game. He’s a hero. He dresses in green and rarely shows off his hair. He had a mundane job (here, shopkeeper) until he received his call. He uses one weapon almost exclusively (a crossbow, per Link’s Crossbow Training) but occasionally uses others to solve puzzles. And like Link played by most people, he acknowledges that avoiding damage is better than toughing through it but still takes a lot of hits anyway.

Kojen plays like a typical 4E ranger: bow attacks, lots of movement, avoids typical ways of being punished for either of those actions, and a bunch of ways to subvert my expectations around how many tricks he has left in a given round. This is the point in a description where I say “but this character was strange and unique in the following ways”. Kojen really isn’t. He acts exactly like you would expect a ranger Link to play. There’s nothing exciting or clever about him. He’s a totally normal character.

But see, this is a Zelda campaign, so a mundane character is perfect. He has a few quirks that define how he approaches challenges, but for the most part he lets the world and monsters be the most interesting characters in the room, just like if he was playing the video game itself. In many ways he’s a foil for Azeld in that they both represent different play styles for the same game. He hangs back and measures his resources and actions carefully, she rushes in and bonks things. He thinks his way around puzzles and quests, she rushes in and bonks things. He (or his player) knows a lot of Zelda canon and leverages that in both his strategies and investigations; she rushes in and bonks things.

Normally I have a real problem with boring characters. “Fill the sky with arrows” is a build, not a character concept. But I’ve never felt Kojen was boring, and I think it’s because he fits the campaign so well. Nobody joined the campaign looking for a deep, immersive backstory where they face their troubled childhood; everybody joined to use a hookshot. His play style helps me keep things light-hearted, and I don’t miss tough moral decisions and competing allegiances barely as much as I thought I would.

Again, this campaign isn’t over. Kojen could still die (again!), forgotten, in a barren corner of the world, denied even the dignity of a burial. He’ll probably kill the final boss and retire in glory, though.

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