Pressed for time today, I was going to just put together the web page for the International Checkers project, and so put that to bed. Unfortunately, TheGameCrafter.com was down for a good part of the day, so instead I’m going back to my thief character notes and banging another of those sketches into shape. The updated file now includes Pistil, a goblin thief with a sinister secret.

This is another monster sketch, though unlike Kargen, which focused on the Wight’s skill bonuses, it’s based more on magical abilities. When you can fly, turn invisible, and resist most conventional traps, the typical thieving skills aren’t so important. The idea of an Imp that takes on a humanoid disguise was suggested by the D&D 3rd edition Monster Manual, which simply said that (although animal forms were given as examples) an Imp had access to “one or two forms no larger than Medium-size.” Who could turn down an engraved invitation like that?

These days, you have to break the rules in the Pathfinder RPG Bestiary to get the same effect. But the Gamemaster can invoke Rule Zero to break any other rule he wants, which means that Rule -1 must be that the writer can tell the GM what rules to break.

(Character portrait, as before, from 108 Terrible Character Portraits, ©2010 Jeff Preston. Used under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.)

This next chartacter sketch isn’t part of that batch of notes from 2000. The whole thing progressed from the notion of using only Halfling racial levels in a single-class build. While the idea of treating character race and class equivalently is a very old one in D&D (in fact, it’s the only mechanism for character race in the 1977 Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set, where I first learned the game), it was long out of fashion until reintroduced in Monte Cook’s Arcana Unearthed in 2003.

I drifted around a bit on a personality hook for the concept, though, until I decided to take my cues from the game mechanical concept itself. The notion of race in D&D is open to tremendous interpretation, from a Tolkienesque view where (to use the canonical example) orcs really are just irredeemable brutes by nature, to much creepier stuff based on human prejudices. I figured I could go whole hog with this concept by going the latter direction. The boxed character quote is broadly based on a couple of real-world statements by a white supremacist who shall remain nameless.

When heading in this direction, I had was originally going in a much more overt direction, but I was influenced to back off by my choice of character portrait. The guy just looks so smooth and friendly, doesn’t he? It makes it so much more interesting to me if he’s not up front about being a racist scumbag.