30 Day Challenge: Day 15 - Favorite monster (undead)

Ah, monsters.  The heart and soul of many a fantasy RPG, especially D&D.  The vast catalog of monsters was always one of my primary attractions to the game; even before I was really playing it, I noticed the original AD&D Monster Manual on bookstore shelves and thought it looked interesting as... well, as a catalog of monsters, unrelated to gaming.  That said, there are many aspects of monsters in D&D that are simply quite foolish, in my opinion.  Undead in particular suffer from this.

I like undead a lot.  Given that I routinely characterize my campaign as as much horror as fantasy, this should seem natural.  The word undead itself (in the sense of a dead creature returned to unnatural life, not in the sense of simply being not-dead, which predates Stoker) seems to most likely have been coined by Bram Stoker and was an alternate title to his novel Dracula.  From ancient folklore and mythology to modern horror flicks, undead still reign nearly supreme as the fundamentally unnatural horror opponent.

And not just in horror.  If one accepts Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings as a watershed moment in the development of fantasy the genre as it's understood today, then keep in mind that it was also chock-full of undead.  From the Black Riders (Ringwraiths) and Barrow-wights, even to Sauron himself (who died in the fall of Númenor, but who's spirit "endured"--and who was known in the time of The Hobbit as the Necromancer--sounds like pretty classic undead to me.)  Fantasy and horror are often much more similar than a lot of people realize; the main difference being how the story ends.  However, as The Lord of the Rings itself demonstrates; that can be a spectrum.  LotR isn't really a triumphant and glorious ending to the threat (although there are elements of that) nor is it a grisly and horrible loss, as is often the case in horror novels.  Dracula itself has the titular character on the run and ultimately destroyed at the end of the novel, whereas Tolkien's magnum opus has Frodo and others too damaged by their experience to ever return to normal.  The shades between fantasy and horror are already awfully thin to begin with.  When openly embracing dark fantasy, as I do, they are practically non-existant.

However, in D&D undead are often confronted by the cleric, a made up archetype that has little literary or folkloric precedent, and my least favorite class (conceptually) of any ever published for D&D.  The cleric's Turn Undead abilities often function as a de facto "get out of undead free" card in a very real sense, meaning that undead are either quite horrible (or worse, simply frustrating) to deal with for parties that don't have clerics, and merely a boring speed bump for parties that do.

The other problem (and this isn't unique to undead, although it seems perhaps a bit more acute in that area) is that the same monster conceptually has proliferated into a huge variety of similar monsters in the game, often using a thesaurus to create new monsters out of synonyms for an existing monster.  In some cases this is merely to add variety, but in some it's to have the same conceptual monster be available at varying levels of play.  This is an unfortunate artifact of the design decision of D&D back in the day to be an exponentially increasing PC power curve, a problem that has become runaway in many versions of the game, rather than being fixed.  This variety means that undead in D&D is increasingly bizarre, esoteric, and strange.  I'd like to see the power level convincingly fixed and flattened, so that existing monsters can be properly challenging for a much larger stretch of a normal PCs career.  I'd also like to see monsters collapsed into fewer monsters, with a la carte options as monster powers.  For example, incorporeal undead can have as a menu the CON drain of the wraith, the negative levels of the spectre, the Madness attack of the allip and many of the abilities associated with the ghost template (from a 3.5 perspective, the version of the rules with which I am most familiar.)  GMs could then pick which ones to use based on any given campaign's needs, while not putting forth the bizarre idea that there are literally dozens of minor variations on the same concept of "ghost."

But, my reservations about the state of the game (and the place of undead within it) notwithstanding, I need to actually pick a favorite.  For that, I'll go with the eldritch from Privateer Press's Monsternomicon.  Conceptually, the eldritch is basically a vampire.  But, rather than being a specifically Count Dracula like being, with the exact same traits, abilities and weaknesses as evidenced in his novel, the eldritch is a bit different.  More flexible.  More scary, really, in most respects.  I use the template, ignore the restriction that it only be applied to elves (since my setting has none anyway) and call the result  a vampire.  Done.

You can pick up a pdf of the 3.5 update (the original was in 3e; I have that in hardcover, and the update in pdf myself) right here from the good folks at Paizo.

Grozavest, capital city of Tarush Noptii

Vészok Grozavest is the capital city of Tarush Noptii Timischburg, and is notorious for several distinctive features.

As one approaches Vészok Grozavest, one sees a massive fogbank, about thirty miles away from the city center in every direction. This fogbank stretches up like a cloud wall to a height of many hundreds or even thousands of feet into the air. Passing through the fogbank is a relatively quick and painless procedure. The bank is extremely thick and visibility is sharply reduced for about a mile. It is so dark that it appears to be night inside, even at mid-day.

Once past the fogbank is where the really bizarre features start to take shape. The fogbank ends, and one walks out under the open sky again. It is frequently overcast inside the circular fogbank, but not always. It is, however, always night. Even at mid-day without a cloud in the sky, the vault of the heavens is pitch black and stars can be seen wheeling overhead. Strange stars, often, that do not match the constellations elsewhere except at Vészok Grozavest. The moon often rises and sets on a different schedule than elsewhere, and the mares on the moon have a completely different pattern here, sometimes showing the "old" pattern of the moon before it resembled a skull.  Sometimes it looks like a totally different moon altogether.  There are even reports that at odd or unusual times there is more than one moon in the sky.

No plant life can survive in this 60 mile diameter circle centered around Vészok Grozavest, of course, although black skeletons of old trees and dried brown remnants of grass still cling to places off the roads that are not trampled or broken by the passage of time. Strange, and occasionally phosphorescent fungi grows in strange patches as well.

As one nears the city itself, the ground starts to slope upward. Vészok Grozavest is built around the rim of a large crater, nearly a mile across, and in fact, the buildings go all the way over the edge, and are carved into and hang from the sides. At the center of the crater is a vertical shaft, descending into pitch blackness. Nobody known today has ever descended into the shaft and returned. Legend has it that the crater is the mark of the fall of Tarush, a daemon-god of death, from the dark tapestry of the night sky to the material world. The first vampires were those champions who went to ensure Tarush remained sealed and defeated in one place, the Primogenitors. This, however, is legend. No confirmation of these rumors exist, and if Tarush exists, no one has ever seen or heard from him. Certainly, however, some supernatural power hovers over the site, causing the bizarre stars and constant nightfall that make it the perfect environment for a capital of vampires.

Vészok Grozavest is a large city, of well over 100,000 regular inhabitants, and tens of thousands of temporary inhabitants at any one time.  While the fact that it is ruled over by and preyed on by vampire overlords is officially denied but mostly well known, in reality, that doesn't necessarily mean much to every day, regular life.  There are only a few hundred (at absolute most) vampires in the city, so one takes ones chances on being hunted, but with some suitable precautions, the risk is relatively low, and the Tarushans and Timischers find that they like the enforced peace and prosperity that strong rulers bring, and can take the risk of vampire attack as the cost of such long-lasting peace and prosperity.  Outsiders, of course, say that all livestock feels this way, and it is a deal with the devil that is never worth the cost.  The Grozavestans, they claim, are only trying to validate the life that they have and can't do anything about; but living in constant fear is never worth the cost.

Vészok Grozavest is quiet.  There is little crime (since convicted criminals are where the vampires hunt first—a concession towards efficient management of their chattel amongst the humans).  Valuable travelers from outside—merchants, caravans, and their entourages, are given small brass tokens that mark them as Untouchables—vampires who feed on them forfeit their life and estates to the Ruling Council.  While all of the Vampire Houses have their own estates and holdings in the city, the Ruling Council also has it's own, unaligned brigade of Untouchable soldiers, who patrol the streets and keep the peace. The official narrative is that the Untouchables are so named because of their skill in combat... but most people doubt that, and understand the arrangement they have with their macabre rulers.

30 Day Challenge: Day 14 - Favorite NPC

After this one, the 30 Day Challenge schedule calls for me to pick favorite monsters (by type)--a task that keeps me busy for nine days.  Given the importance of monsters to D&D, though, it seems an important category worthy of mulitple questions.  On the other hand, I'm struggling just a bit to develop my answer to the question: who is my favorite NPC?

Sometimes with these types of questions, I'm not sure whether I want to answer in a personal way (i.e., from my own campaigns and games) or in a "populist" way; i.e., NPCs that are famous from modules, campaign settings, or novels or whatever, and are therefore known by many gamers all 'round the world.

In the end, on this one, I decided to split the difference somewhat.  My friend Corey Reid ran a lengthy campaign using a fairly heavily house-ruled (mostly redacted to limit options, at least until such time as the players discovered more options) 3e game.  He ended up posting a write-up of the game on the good ole ENWorld Story Hour forums.  He later actually compiled this into a PDF, which can be bought from Lulu.  Here's a link.

http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?201115-Barsoom-Tales-II-Romance-Revolution-and-BLOODY-REVENGE!!!-COMPLETE

In many ways, he's very up front about this being the story of an NPC, the Demon-Goddess, Madam Yuek Man Chong.  It wasn't meant to be; he had a great ensemble cast of great players with interesting characters.  Something one of them did made the entire campaign take a hard right turn.  A character who was meant to be a throwaway appearance--a super-powerful Ten Who Were Taken style sorceress who shows up and scares the PCs a bit or something.  He had, at the time, a funny little set of house-rules.  Swash-cards, he called them.  They were cards that the players were dealt, that they could play for interesting, modest benefits in game.  One of them was that an NPC would fall head over heels in love with the PC.  When a player pulled this one unexpectedly on one of the most powerful NPCs in the entire campaign setting--who at the time, didn't even have a proper name assigned to her--he's very upfront about how the campaign was turned on its ear and became something that he never envisioned.  Reading his account of this is interesting; it's a great example of how to roll with unexpected punches as a GM, how to play a fascinating and horribly unbalanced NPC and yet make it not overshadow the players own characters, or ruin the game, and it's a great example of just the sheer potential of our game to deliver honest to goodness great drama and entertainment.

Yuek Man Chong is, again to make a reference to Glen Cook, very similar in many ways to The Lady, or Soulcatcher.  She's not only insanely powerful, she's also actually insane.  This is par for the course for any sorcerer who manages to survive long enough to practice their craft in Corey's Barsoom.  But her integration into the game is what really works.  She never overtakes it, even though I've heard Corey occasionally lament that he's afraid she might have.  I think she's a ton of fun to read about, but only because the player characters are themselves interesting enough to go toe to toe with her (in a narrative sense, not in a let's roll initiative and take her down sense). 

When we come back for day 15, it's my favorite undead.  Which is difficult, I think, because I like the concept of undead (have I mentioned before that my game is as much horror as it is fantasy?  Well, probably not recently enough.)  However, I think D&D is guilty of ridiculous over-splitting and specialization of undead.  Finding the one that's "just right" and does what I need is easier said than done.

30 Day Challenge: Day 13 - Favorite trap or puzzle

While traps and puzzles are an old-timey D&D staple, I've never liked them.  Either as a player or as a GM either one.  I don't think that they're fun.  They're usually frustrating, and certainly extremely gamist.  They also don't really reflect much of anything in the fantasy literature from which the game sprung, or which some of it's players (i.e. me, at least) like the game to more closely resemble.

That said, there is one "trap" concept that works quite well for me.  Haunts, from Pathfinder, first released as a 3.5 mechanic, but later ported into Pathfinder.   It would work well in any d20 game, and is also easily enough adapted to any other game, for that matter.

Haunts really represent some elements of the more classic ghost story.  They don't represent an actual ghost per se, but most ghost stories have all kinds of creepy events that work, if you really dig into its nuts and bolts, more like a supernatural trap than anything else, and haunts are this exactly.

Here's the link to the relevant section of the PRD, so you can read how they work.

http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/mastery/haunts.html#_haunts

30 Day Challenge: Day 12 - Favorite Dungeon Type/Location

It's the 16th and I'm on challenge number 12.  I knew I'd fall behind on the weekend!  Sadly, had to watch my Aggies (two time alumnus) lose to the Crimson Tide, but honestly, I can't argue with what was a really great football game.  To add insult to injury, the first topic in my quest to get caught up today is favorite dungeon type.  Luckily, it's slashed with Location, because I have no favorite dungeon type, I hate dungeons (the next challenge is even worse.  I hate traps and puzzles.)

So, by hanging on as if to a lifeline to the Location option, I'll grab on to fantasy cities.  From Sanctuary (of Thieves' World) to Haven (of Hawk & Fisher); to the Maul (of Conan) and Lankhmar (of Fafhrd and Gray Mouser fame) fantasy urban cities tend to err on the side of being "wretched hives of scum and villainy" and that's exactly how I like them.

I actually have a number of fantasy city sourcebooks, or fantasy city descriptions in other form (as in for an Adventure Path in Dungeon magazine) and some of them are among my favorite setting sourcebooks around.  These include Five Fingers, Freeport, Cauldron, Sharn, Riddleport, Magnimar, Katapesh, and more.  I like having these, because they havemaps I can raid.  I also like having lots of locations I can potentially raid.

That said, as with all officially published setting documents, I can't ever really use them as is.  I have to simply borrow from them instead and use them in my own way.  Part of this is because it's too much work to memorize all the details, and I'd rather just have a big pool I could pick through for details when needed.  Part of it is because I just always like to put my own spin on things, and have the ability to cherry-pick ideas from others, as well as my own ideas, or even invention as the son of need on the spot.

I do have to admit, however, that my cities tend to feel the same.  It is often difficult for me to make really meaningful distinctions between cities in my settings, that come up often enough to really feel significant.  Then again--this is often true for actual real cities that I've been to as well.

Gaming Vlogging?!

While searching for some other blogs on Day 12 of the 30-day challenge (because I wans't sure exactly what they meant, and I wanted to see how a few other people interpreted the question before charging in myself) I came across this response--a very simple vlog.

I could do this!  Not as often as I blog regularly, probably--but still.  This might be fun.  I do have a youtube channel (that is completely fallow; I loaded up a couple of stupid videos years ago and never used it again), so I'm all set!  Anyway, check it out--it's only a few minutes long.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0REpGyJ0L1Y

Although, if you're like me, you really wanted to find the comments screen after a while and yell RUINED!  Don't leave out the [i], or you're just talking about a city that's covered in runes!

30 Day Challenge: Day 11 - Favorite Adventure You've Run

Well, this one is tough for me to answer.  I don't really run adventures.  Ever.  Sometimes I read them.  But not to run them, only to raid them for ideas.  So I literally have no idea what to answer for this one that really is completely "on topic."

So instead, I'll "cheat" just a bit.  While I've never run any D&D adventures that I can think of, I have run the infamous DARK•MATTER adventure, "Exit 23" (which was included in the original campaign setting book) several times.  Although never in its original Alternity form; I've run it adapted (by me) to d20 Modern.  This little gem of an adventure is about perfect for a 4 or so hour convention game, which is about how I've always done it, although I added a little more to make sure it filled the time completely.  It was meant, I think, to be done with six players (and that's mostly how I've done it) but I've done it before with an impromptu seven too.

It also helps that as a convention game, you can really play up the horror angle a bit more.  If a character goes down, well, that's OK.  It's just a couple hours of one-shot anyway.  The horror angle is handled very well; there's really only one monstrous encounter (an ice demon of some kind) but this is a great example of how to "milk" a monstrous encounter so it doesn't feel routine (as is so often the case in D&D.)

And that's really where the module shines.  It's moody, and it perfectly hits that horror-tone.  Sure, it ends up being all Larry Correia, where the solution to horror is to blow it up (it does take place at a gas station where the power's out, after all--and everyone knows how explosive gas is.)  There also seems to be a surprisingly amount of running into and over things with semi trucks.

I honestly can't even remember ever running another another pre-written adventure--of any system--other than "Exit 23".  So, while it's not a D&D adventure, I think it probably has to qualify.

That said, I'm a little tempted to adapt some Paizo adventure paths into something I run for my group.  They'd be heavily adapted, but they'd still be more or less recognizable.  I think either Carrion Crown or Serpent's Skull are the ones that most catch my eye.

Race names

In my effort to distance myself from D&D (and sometimes other fantasy settings) in my DARK•HERITAGE setting, even when I'm cribbing ideas directly from D&D, I've often led myself into a state of semi-confusion with regards to nomenclature.  Nowhere is this more apparent than in the names of my non-human races.  To rectify this, I've decided I need to quit messing around with names and decide on one name for each race, and stick with it.  I also need to avoid names that are used for other concepts in D&D--for example, I've used changeling (which is, of course, a name rich with folkloric meaning) to refer to my take on tieflings and shifters both--a situation which only tends to confuse me more than anything else.

This post will rectify that--establish once and for all the PROPER name for each race in the form that I'll actually be using it.  It may lend itself to verisimilitude to have multiple names for each race, but it doesn't lend itself to ease and clarity on my end.  Of course, I say that and... they'll be one or two exceptions.  I love the name Kvuustu, for instance, but it's not very reasonable to expect that someone in a Mediterranean style setting would be able to say that. Cavusto as an alternate is perfectly fine.

Without further ado, here are the list of races and their "proper" ID tag, excluding the various human ethnicities, plus the "concept" from which I originally got the idea.

• JANN.  Original concept from D&D: fire genasi.  Brick red skin, usually blondish, wispy hair, yellow eyes, Arabian Nights style culture.  The jann claim to be blessed with the blood of the ifrit from the legendary City of Brass in their distant ancestry.  Luckily, for this one, I've had a pretty consistent take on the name.  I've always called them either jann or the very similar djinn.  Mostly jann.
• WILDLING.  Original concept from D&D: shifters from Eberron, although the tharn from Iron Kingdoms made an important contribution.  Also, based largely on the wild man body of Medieval folklore, not to mention toned down werewolves.  This is one I've had lots of problems with.  Wildling may not be a great name, or terribly original, but it's awfully descriptive and does the job.  I've toyed with calling these guys wildmen, woses, vucari, and changelings, as well as occasionally slipping and calling them shifters.  I'm going to stick with wildling and be done with it.
• KEMLING.  Original concept from D&D: tieflings, but they're really as much based on Nightcrawler and Darth Maul as anything else.  Not to mention Graz'zt, old witchcraft trial accounts of Satan visiting witches as a Black Man, and even Nyarlathotep for that matter.  Another bad draw for me; these poor guys have been called darklings, tieflings, hellspawn, hellkin, and changelings.  Because they have a culture that's supposed to be reminiscent in some ways of the Bronze Age ancient Near East (as well as names from that region) the name I've come up with is original, and yet oddly similar in basic concept to the D&D term tiefling.  The suffix -(l)ing is a really old (as in Common Germanic old where it was *ingaz, and it carries forward into lots of Old English words, and a handful of modern English words still too--sibling, darling, duckling, etc.)  It's a masculine suffix that connotes a sense of belonging to, or son of--later corrupted to mostly being a diminuitive.  It's also the suffix used in Wolfgang Baur's coining of the term tiefling in the first place.  Apocryphally, Baur coined tiefling based on the German word for devil, which is Teufel, but that's a bit debatable since that should have rendered as Teufling.  Tief in German means deep, so tieflings are directly translatable into English as deeplings.  Either way, it's supposed to suggest their nature--the descendants, via twisted and obscure lineage of humans and some kind of fiend.  Kemling, then, has a similar meaning, using the Germanic suffix -(l)ing and the ancient Egyptian word kem, which means black (suggesting the skin color of kemlings in DARK•HERITAGE, it is both descriptive and evocative of their culture, their heritage (which is dark.. Hahahaha.  Umm. Yeah.) and their actual physical appearance all at once.  Also: hamazin in this scheme becomes merely a place-name or nationality type, i.e., someone from the Baal Hamazi region, whether human or kemling, either one.
• CAVUSTO/KVUUSTU.  Original concept: these are late surviving neanderthals.  That name obviously won't really work, as it's specific to the Neanderthal, or Neander Valley in Germany, where the first neanderthal fossils were found.  As I mentioned, I'll keep the two names, since one is clearly derivative of the other.  This actually is one that works well at lending some verisimilitude without being confusing, unlike the other examples I was courting.
• NEPHILIM.  Original concept: the Nephilim, from Apocryphal Judeo-Christian tradition.  Also, aasimar from D&D, except that the angels who are the distant ancestors of nephilim in my setting are, of necessity, fallen angels.  I never really had another word for this one, although I'd have liked to.  Nephilim is so Hebrew that it doesn't really seem to fit as a word that would be used in the Mezzovian Sea region.  Oh, well.  It fits the concept perfectly, and it's already well-known.  I'll just live with it.

30 Day Challenge: Day 10 - Craziest thing that's happened that you saw...

I've seen lots of interpretation of this.  I've heard of all kinds of crazy things happening in sessions from a meta standpoint, i.e. crazy things players do (as opposed to characters.)  One post on this topic I saw referred to a guy at a con game mooning the GM and doing a little dance of some kind for a roleplaying benefit, since his character was doing the same to somebody else.  Another guy I know went to a game of folks he didn't know, and one of the guys there decided that he was LARPing in the middle of the session.  And that he was playing a vampire.  And that he was going to try and bite another player on the neck with his fake vampire teeth.

I consider it a privilege not to have any stories of that kind to tell.  I do have some stories of crazy things happening, but it's always to characters not with players.

Which one to tell?  I actually have quite a few, and narrowing it to the most crazy is probably not something I can do.  Here's a pretty entertaining one, though. 

Shautha was a character in a game I was GMing.  She was a half-orc barbarian with a charisma score of... I don't remember, about 5 or so.  Not an attractive character.  She had the sex appeal of an angry shoggoth or Lena Dunham (but I repeat myself.)  But for some reason, the player decided that she was going to play up this character's obsession with girly things.  She really wanted to be a pretty little princess.  Or something.

There was a great moment where they were in the house of a suspicious minor lord who they knew was up to no good, but they didn't know exactly what his deal was.  So Shautha decided to flirt with him.  I can't remember anymore exactly how it happened, but somehow, although initially horrified, this minor lord somehow decided that really beefy half-orc gals were his thing, and they retired (with another character, who was actually attractive) to his bedroom suite as a distraction while the other PCs searched the manor.  Trying to lead him on without going too far (while Shautha on the other hand, horrifyingly wanted to see what a sexual encounter could be like) while the other characters raced to discover what ended up being the body of the patron that they were supposed to meet in town got really wacky really fast.  When the characters finally busted into the room to confront him on the death of their patron, the one character--a normal human rogue--who had at first led the flirting distraction, was desperately trying to escape the room, while the NPC was motor-boating the half-orc and singing "Oh, you touch my tra-la-la" to her and bouncing on the bed.

Naturally, it didn't end well.  The house ended up burning down, although the minor lord escaped thanks to his army of trained and armed gorillas (yes, this was the same game as mentioned in the post below) and the party was left with nothing better to do than attempt to rescue their characters, who as I recall, were carried off by demon lords.

Later, they encountered this guy again.  He had been nursing a burning crush for Shautha even after everything, and tried to convince her to leave her group and run off with him.  I think she almost did it too.  Especially after they discovered a cache of bad poetry written about her.

So, anyway.... Most crazy I've ever seen?  Probably not really.  But it's certainly a crazy story, and it's the one that came to mind today.

30 Day Challenge: Day 9 - Favorite character you haven't played

I GM a fair amount.  Therefore, it's probably actually quite a bit easier to pick a favorite character that I witnessed from another player than to pick one of mine.  I've had some real great ones.  I'm reminded of Eladkot, for instance--an unscrupulous, cowardly wizard who pursued knowledge best left undiscovered in my Pirates of the Mezzovian Main game--the D&D game which revamped my direction on the DARK•HERITAGE setting forever.  The characters had found an oracle, who said that her best work was done via anthropomancy.  Although this particular group of PCs weren't exactly anywhere close to heroic archetypes, even they balked at that.  But not Eladkot.  While he accepted the group's decision at the time, I got a private message from Eladkot's player between sessions, and we roleplayed out the notion of his character sneaking out that night, going to the slave market and buying the reediest, sickliest, and most importantly, cheapest halfling slave he could find, taking it to the oracle and having the slave slaughtered so the future could be read in his entrails.  (Needless to say, we didn't really roleplay out the details.)  I rolled up a number of predictions, and gave them to him via email.

When we got together for the next session, and he proudly proclaimed that he had new knowledge to help in the PCs quest, the interaction between the players was priceless.  They naturally very quickly cottoned on to what had happened.

Ricardo Murcièlago

That whole episode is actually one of a few short-list candidates for the next topic on the 30 day challenge; what's the craziest thing you've ever seen happen.  But I won't use it, since I just described it here.

Actually, that player has a history of having created a number of highly amusing characters.  I can't remember the character's name, but the tall, scrawny fella, who he described as looking like Disney's version of Ichabod Crane with a patchy, thin beard, who so related to dwarven culture that he believed he was a reincarnated dwarf who had lost his memory, was pretty darn amusing.

But no.  My favorite has got to be Ricardo and Lash.  Wait, that's two characters! you may be saying.  Well, sure.  But sometimes characters are nothing without their relation to another character.  Who is Abbott without Costello?  Who's Oscar without Felix?  Who's Moe without Larry and Curly?  Who's Tony Curtis without Jack Lemmon, or Rock Hudson without Tony Randall, or Bing Crosby without Bob Hope? (OK, those last three examples maybe don't work quite as well.)

Ricardo was a fantasy Don Juan--selfish, self-centered to a caricatured level, always more interested in whatever female company was in front of him than in anything else.  He was a male human swashbuckler (from Complete Warrior in build.)  His best friend was Lash, a fighter/rogue hobgoblin who's major frustrated goal in life was the acquisition, by hook or by crook of a ship, so he could have the piratical career he always dreamed of.  I did a little exercise prior to the start of the campaign in which all of the characters had to write very small little vignettes that put them in each other's past a bit.  Ricardo and Lash somehow quickly evolved into a long-running partnership of sorts.  They frequently hated each other and bickered like an old married couple, but in reality, they couldn't imagine life without each other.  Ricardo's distraction whenever a skirt was anywhere in sight frequently threw Lash's schemes into disaster, and Lash's preoccupation with his schemes frequently threw Ricardo's conquests into similar disaster.  The notion of these two bumbling con-men and hucksters who went through life inadvertently frustrating each other's goals, yet somehow unable to conceive of parting ways, resonated very quickly with me as the GM, both of the players of the characters, and for that matter, with the other characters in the group, who quickly allowed the two of them to ascend to a hilariously ineffective leadership role for the party overall.

You know how Jack Vance is often cited as being central to the formation of D&D?  Mostly, that's because of some superficial and obviously derivative similarities between the magic of the Dying Earth series and D&D.  In my game, however (which had no regular magic use at all, as a matter of fact) it was rather influential in the sense that Lash and Ricardo were like Cugel the Clever, a self-centered patsy who wandered from one misadventure to another, leaving disaster in his wake but not self-aware enough to realize it.  That was Lash and Ricardo to a T. 

Lash after being reincarnated as a gorilla

The wackiness of that particular game grew rapidly.  When a female demon-lord appeared in front of the characters in a harrowing, disturbing form that was emasculating to the characters--both figuratively and literally--Ricardo was unconscious.  She realized that her memory of the female human form was hazy and flawed and fixed it just in time for Ricardo to wake up, be instantly enamored of her, and swear his service to her in behalf of the entire group.  They couldn't stop him in time!  What a riot!  Ricardo nearly fainted again when the group quite angrily explained to him what he had done ("she had shark's teeth between her legs, Ricardo!")  Later, when the group had taken a number of casualties after visiting the Lost City of Naked Hotties Who Ride Dinosaurs Into Battle (otherwise known as Opar, although I don't think anyone ever asked) the demon-lord patroness reappeared to the group.  Sad to see Ricardo dead, whom she had become somewhat fond of, she reincarnated him into the body of one of the slain Naked Hotties (described as looking like a Fast Times era Phoebe Cates).  The infamous Don Juan reincarnated as a cute as a button little hottie was good for a laugh, and we got several sessions worth of amusement out of that.  Lash, on the other hand, had stormed off in anger while she was doing the magic that would reincarnate Ricardo.  Caught in the crossfire, his own consciousness was also torn from his body and reincarnated into that of a dead gorilla (long story; the Naked Hotties of the City of Naked Hotties were at war with sentient gorillas.)

Lash's player actually enjoyed being a gorilla more than being a hobgoblin, I'm sure.  After a while, both of them got their original bodies back, but I think the players were kinda reluctant about ending that chapter of their character arc.  They agreed that the joke was starting to get a little played out, but at the same time, they definitely enjoyed it while it lasted.

In an almost Seinfeld like conclusion to the campaign, the group inadvertently kicked off the apocalypse that would destroy the world they knew.  They wandered off blissfully unconcerned, whistling casually so nobody would think that it was their fault (metaphorically, not literally) and too self-centered to believe that the apocalapse would actually affect them personally.  After all, they were above such things.

We later tried to revive the characters for another campaign (in another setting, actually.)  Although it went reasonably well for a time, and we had some great moments, lightning couldn't strike the same place twice, and it wasn't quite the same.  Personal matters started to interfere and the participation of the players became a bit inconsistent... eventually, the campaign withered away with a whimper.  But the memory of the first great Ricardo and Lash campaign (no disrespect intended to the other PCs in the group, several of whom had some great moments of their own which may make the cut for the next post yet) is something that I'll have with me forever.

30 Day Challenge: Day 8 - Favorite Character You Have Played

This is actually a tough topic for me.  I don't really do old war-stories from my RPG sessions very well.  I don't remember a lot of details about old characters.  Usually my favorite character is my current character (and since my current game isn't D&D, well...  Also, I GM a fair bit.)  And my favorite characters aren't often D&D characters.  I had a character that I envisioned as Bertie Wooster once, in a Call of Cthulhu campaign.  He went insane when meeting with Nyarlathotep, who was incognito.  I had a character who was a changeling rogue in an Age of Worms campaign.  I envisioned him as a fantasy Don Juan, who had gone a bit too far--when discovered in flagrente delicto with a crime boss's wife (or mistress, I can't remember anymore) he found himself on the run.  Because he was a changeling, he disguised hiimself as a young female barkeep in a small town outside of Greyhawk city; the little town of Diamond Lake where the adventure path was started was where he was in hiding.

I kinda liked the notion of a classic, Some Like It Hot vibe to the character.  Sadly, although my DM promised me that that would come up, it didn't.  He forgot, and my origin was so much wasted effort.  In addition, I wasn't really a trapfinding D&D style rogue; I was more of a con-man and huckster.  I found myself constantly pushed to develop in ways that were stereotypical for the class, but not really what I had in mind for the character.

I really liked that character.  At about 10th level, I retired him, though, because the campaign just wasn't working in a way that allowed him to be who I wanted him to be.

My current character is, kinda sorta, in house-ruled D&D, but the Star Wars setting, set sometime shortly after Return of the Jedi but ignoring pretty much everything from the EU (if you accept a few things, like Clone Wars to be somewhere "above" EU in canon, more like the movies themselves, for instance.)  He's a former Sith Acolyte who was disillusioned (and, in fact, majorly pissed off) at the Sith Order, and therefore came to the Jedi Enclave on... uh... whatever planet it was on when we started the game. (Dantooine.  It's on Dantooine.  Maybe.)  He's not exactly "good"--in fact, he's not even close to being good.  But he's interesting.  But maybe the Jedi class isn't exactly D&D as most people know and love it.  But my last two or three D&D experiences as a player ended up being a little bit disappointing in terms of my own character.  And I don't really have any stories from "ye olde days."  So, I guess that's the best answer I can provide...

30 Day Challenge: Day 7 - Favorite Edition

3.5.  No question.  I don't love it, exactly, but I'd rather play it than any other edition.  I know it quite well, it's very flexible, and it works fairly well.  I have some serious problems with it, but no moreso than I have with any other edition.  And I still remember the axiom of "tools, not rules"--which was how I'd always played the game anyway.  With that in mind, many of the commonly decried problems with the edition fade away.

That said, I'd rather not play D&D exactly at all.  I'd rather play something like m20, or d20 Modern.  Really, what I don't like most about the game is all of the D&Disms (which curiously are much less prominent in some older versions of the game--although those are marred by lack of robustness and inflexibility in other ways.)

The also ran, that I could play and be OK with doing so if 3.5 (and 3e; I'm considering them interchangeable for purposes of this post) would be the Moldvay-Cook era B/X game.

The edition I'd be least likely to want to play is probably 4e--although AD&D (of either 1st or 2nd edition; either one) would be a close second.  And if I could live with Moldvay-Cook, I could probably also live with Mentzer or RC; the differences weren't really that significant, were they?

30 Day Challenge: Day 6 - Favorite Deity

Woo-hoo!  I'll get caught up yet!  Today's the 10th, and I'm making a post for Day 6.  But since these questions are so easy to talk about, I'm moving like crazy through them.

Day 6's question is who is your favorite D&D deity.  And as the old Deities & Demigods book shows, D&D deities also include a bunch of regular old mythological deities, since it included chapters on Norse mythology, Greek mythology, Celtic mythology, Babylonian mythology, Sumerian mythology, Finnish mythology, etc.  It also included some fantasty pantheons that were not developed for gaming, i.e. Newhon mythos, Elric mythos, etc.  Curiously, it did not feature the Greyhawk mythos, which later (in Third edition) was the default pantheon for the game.  And in 4e, the gods were a mixed bag of all kinds of past deities, reassembled into a new pantheon (I should have mentioned the "points of light" default setting for 4e the other day when talking about favorite gameworlds.  It was a nice one.)

However, I'm on record (see my favorite class post) as really disliking playing the cleric class.  And if you're not playing a cleric, picking a god to worship isn't exactly an important task.  So, I tend to like gods that can serve as interesting antagonists rather than gods that I pick for my characters to worship.

I thought about punting, and since Deities & Demigods and later the d20 Call of Cthulhu book gives rules for this, picking Hastur or Yog-Sothoth as my favorite D&D deity, but that's not really true.  I also thought about punting and picking a real mythological figure, since D&D has included them, like Set or Thor or Ares or something.  But that's not really true either.  In reality, creating a pantheon of original gods as part of setting design has always been one of the things that I liked most about homebrewing.

Armies of the Abyss, by Green Ronin (originally a 3e product, but later bundled and re-released as a 3.5 era product called The Book of Fiends introduced the thaumaturge class, a kind of demon-lord worshipping alt.cleric.  It also made the case for a pantheon of just demon-lords, and pointed out that other than good and law, your all covered.  While D&D hasn't exactly been entirely forthcoming about creating a pantheon of the heads of demonic, diabolical, celestial and angelic orders as deities per se, I actually quite like that idea better than most.  With a robust "court" of Outsider lords, it does, actually, make the notion of additional deities seem somewhat superfluous. 

I also prefer a more open pantheon.  In Greek mythology, for example, there were the 12 Olympians, but they were by far not the only gods (heck, Hades wasn't even counted amongst them, since he lived in the underworld, not on Olympus.)  I also prefer room for lots of gods and goddesses and other deities, and without a formal structure that would tend to limit how many I can have, what they do, and all that.  And keep in mind that in greek mythology, many of the monsters were effectively deity-level creatures too.  It's easy to see Typhon or Echidna as demon-lords or deities, either one.

I guess if I truly have to pick a deity, I'm going to go with Orcus.  I know, I know, he's not a deity, he's a demon-lord.  But he can grant spells to clerics (at least as an option, in most editions of the game) and he's got it goin' on as an antagonist.  Plus, the fat, bloated goat-headed look is a classic monster of deity-level monster.  Here's a classic type of Orcus depiction, and a more comic-bookish WAR version.

30 Day Challenge: Day 5 - Favorite set of dice/individual die

Well, this is an odd one.  The question for today is to discuss your Favorite set of dice or individual die.

See, I have a lot of dice sets.  I have way more than I need, and I'm a little compulsive about wanting more sometimes.  And I mostly use them all.  I do have a specific d20 that I use as my d20 of choice, though.  I don't have a picture of it handy, but it was a stand-alone d20 that I picked up on a whim at a gaming store a few years ago.  It's not "correct"--i.e., the distribution of numbers on the faces isn't random, but of course the rolling of the dice is random enough, so who cares?  The die seems to be kinda swingy; I get really high numbers or really low numbers frequently, and not so much the middle ranges.  At least it feels that way, and some other guys in my group have commented on that as well.

Anyway, I do have a picture of my dice bag, at least, open and showing the dice.  I like my bag; it's pirate themed and home-made by my lovely wife.  I'm actually trying to talk her into doing me another one as well--for my gold coin tokens.

Other than that, I do aspire to a few more sets of dice.  I kinda like the ones that Q Workshop does, with the themes.  Paizo contracted them to do a number of sets of dice that were themed specifically to their first half dozen adventure paths.  I'd like to get the Legacy of Fire and the Serpent's Skull dice.

Q Workshop also has Call of Cthulhu dice, and man, those are the ones I want.  They're a little on the pricey side, so every time I think I might buy some, I get turned off, but one of these days, I'll either get over my psychological hurdle, or find them on sale, or something. 

Moldvay-Cook era

For about $5 each, I could pick up pdfs of the Moldvay Basic (my first real foray into RPGs), the companion Cook Expert set (the pdfs are the printing with the Erol Otus artwork framed by a colored border rather than the ones filling the entire cover.  I think the differences of the printings are insignificant, however.)  At $4.99 each, I could also add the modules that originally came with them, Keep in the Borderlands and Isle of Dread.  Total cost outlay: about $20. If I were to actually play any old-style D&D ever again, that's what I'd want to play.

Not that I actually do want to play old school D&D.  Rather, I think if I got those, it'd be to read them for nostalgia's sake and look back at the artwork, much of which I remember fondly.  And at that price, I'm fairly well tempted to do so.

If I actually wanted to play the games, I could always just get Labyrinth Lord for free, of course.  Or some of the less clone-like retroclones (I did mention earlier that I've been big into m20, right?) But let's face it; reading the original text and seeing the original art again; that's what this would really be about.  The rules aren't the thing, the experience is.  And reading the old modules again; wow, that would be almost surreal.

Part of me is nervous to do so, though.  I haven't exactly forgotten, after all, that I was quickly disillusioned with D&D and went looking for other alternatives.  In part, this was because AD&D seemed to completely overtake D&D itself and adopted a paradigm that was less to my liking than D&D's--but also, it's because the entire D&D experience wasn't really exactly what I was looking for.  I think I need to accept that I'm just fundamentally not really a D&D player; I'm a gamer with tastes that only sorta intersect with D&D.

But, D&D was my first, and the Moldvay-Cook era D&D was where it all started for me.  And in many ways, I still think it's the D&D I'd enjoy playing the most if we ever quit playing 3.5 in our group.

30 Day Challenge: Day 4 - Favorite Gameworld

One more, before I call it a day (I'm still five days behind, so I'll have to hoof it the rest of the week.  And I might even want to get ahead, since I'm sure it'll slide later.)  For Post #4, the 30-day D&D Challenge for bloggers asks you what is your favorite gameworld.

First off, I'm a dedicated homebrewer.  I really can't play in a canned setting without finding some obscure corner where I can do my own thing.  I'd rather just homebrew entirely.

That said, I do like owning campaign settings, and I like reading them.  And I'm interpreting the question as referring to actual published settings, not my own homebrew (my favorites of which aren't even D&D settings anyway, and are at best "OGL" settings that imply a highly variable version of the rules rather than one that's close to D&D as most people recognize.  I only have one setting that I think even qualifies as a D&D setting, in my opinion, that I'd be willing to nominate as among my "favorites.")  Rather than simply picking one, I'll talk about a few, with some caveats.  And then at the end, I'll tentatively put one forward as the "answer" to today's question.

Iron Kingdoms is probably my favorite setting.  The old Witchfire Trilogy of modules is a pretty nifty.  This was also one of the first "mainstream" setting that went away from the old high fantasy with a small dash of sword & sorcery, being instead a dark fantasy with a dash of steampunk (both directions that I greatly prefer these days.)  The release schedule was crappy--by the time 3e rolled over to 3.5, there really hadn't been many more than half a dozen releases (including four from the Witchfire trilogy + Fool's Errand little inter-module mini-module.)  And then after the rollover, Privateer Press delayed their big campaign setting book even more to update it.  It ended up being split into two 400-page books.  After it came out, there were still only two (I believe) more products released for the game before it faded away and Privateer Press focused more on making their miniatures games, which actually made some significant changes to the setting, in terms of both details and tone.

Plus, as a "third party" setting, maybe it doesn't really count anyway.  Although if it doesn't, then neither does Golarion, which while of course is best known as the setting for the Pathfinder game, lets not forget that the original campaign setting book came out before the Pathfinder game and is fully compatible (and expected to be used with) D&D 3.5 rules.  Curiously, this is about as D&D-like a setting as any, yet I quite like it.  Somehow it manages to take D&D tropes and assumptions and make them work.

If you have to use an "official" setting, then Eberron is my favorite.  I really like the pulp/noir feel to the tone, and the focus on lower level characters and its de-emphasis on alignment.  I also quite liked the new races (shifters, kalashtar, etc.--I could take or leave the warforged)  I liked the emphasis on lower yet more prevalent magic, and I thought the dragonmarked feats were a nice alternative to a lot of spellcasting.  The only problem I had with Eberron really was that it was straining, it seemed, to not be D&D at all.  Rather than really embracing all the D&Disms, it felt held back by them.  If the setting had been designed as a Savage Worlds rather than D&D setting, with a few D&Disms intentionally left off all along, it would have been even better.

And finally, if settings designed for the 3.5 edition, by Wizards of the Coast, doesn't really do it for you and you believe that only settings designed for a more "traditional" ruleset, by TSR count, then I guess I'll go with Planescape.  I like that well enough, although I'd rather borrow a bunch of Planescape stuff and re-arrange it (and mix it with some other stuff, like Paizo's Distant Worlds and Malhavoc Press's Beyond Countless Doorways to have created my "Wagon Train to the Planes" game or something.  But Planescape is one of the few pseudo-Old School settings that I can actually read and feel excited about playing.  That certainly is not true for something like Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms or the Known World.

A quick shout-out to Freeport which I also quite like, but which is third party, which is technically systemless in its current iteration (although it certainly feels like D&D more than anything else).  I disqualify it for consideration based on the fact that it's not really a complete setting; it's meant to be a modular setting element that can be dropped into another setting instead.  The latest version of the book did have a little epilogue chapter that kind of added a setting, but it was really brief, and I doubt it was really meant to be used for much other than a tiny bit of background--there simply wasn't enough meat behind it for it to be anything else anyway.

In the end, using those caveats, and not counting "unofficial" settings, I guess my vote goes to Eberron.  If you can count third party settings, then I pick Iron Kingdoms, but if that's too weird and not D&D-like enough, then I pick Golarion.  But in reality, as I said, nothing beats a good homebrew.

30 Day Challenge: Day 3 - Favorite Playable class

Well, why not?  I'm behind, and I'm waiting for a conference call to start.  Rather than waste that time, I'll add another post to my 30 Day Challenge - D&D Style.  The third post in the challenge is to describe Your Favorite Class to play, and why.

I should get right out there and point out that I don't really like the spellcasting classes.  Any of 'em.  I don't like the way magic works in D&D.  I especially don't like the cleric, which is an archetype that I think fails to be archetypal.

If you get really picky, most of the classes have spellclassing.  Junior grade spellcasting classes include the paladin (a fighter/cleric hybrid), the ranger (a druid/fighter hybrid) etc.  That leaves me, using most class lists anyway (and certainly the basic ones from 3e) with the fighter, the rogue, the barbarian and the monk.  Fighters tend to be really bland, monks are loaded up with supernatural wuxia abilities, and barbarians are really quite specific.  So... the rogue?  I guess.  I like them well enough, but they kinda don't quite make it either.

Luckily, since when I play D&D I play d20 D&D (3.5) I've got a lot of options available to me.  Third party OGL publishing has made a lot of new options available.  My favorite classes tend to be alt.rangers that don't cast spells.  Since hiking is another one of my major hobbies, that probably shouldn't be surprising.  Oddly, of the myriad options to accomplish this, I'm not sure that I necessarily have a favorite.  Maybe the wildlander from Midnight?  Maybe just take the ranger as is, and apply the skirmisher archetype from Pathfinder?  Speaking of which, hybridizing Pathfinder and 3.5 classes together, or simply using Pathfinder classes (which is mostly fine in 3.5 D&D, although the results might be slightly over-powered) opens up lots of options, by making the rogue, the fighter, and many other classes much more interesting.  In fact, the Pathfinder Rogue, plus archetypes, might take the edge off of my love for alt.rangers.  But it's a close one.

30 Day Challenge: Day 2 -- Favorite playable race

Since I think the plan was to complete the 30-day challenge within September (and I didn't start until today, Sept. 9th) I thought I'd go ahead and do a few more, to get closer to "up to speed."  After all, these are all pretty easy.

The question for Day 2 is to describe your Favorite Playable Race.  And the "generic" array of D&D races includes humans, elves, dwarves, halflings, gnomes, half-elves and half-orcs (mostly.  A few different editions have a few different options.  That seems to be mosty the "classic" line-up from AD&D and 3e, and covers most of the list with the exception of 4e).  To be honest with you, I don't really like any of the classic D&D races, with the exception of human (which isn't really a D&D race, mind you.)  I'm tired of the "classic" D&D fantasy races.  There's not a single one of them that I care to play anymore, and frankly, not even a single one that I care to see put into another sourcebook.

Who do I like, though?  Clearly, I like humans, and the dominance of humanocentric fantasy in the literature makes that a compelling paradigm, but I do like some variety.  My favorites are humans--but touched with a little something-something, and my own homebrew setting works that way.  For example, the plane-touched races--aasimar, tieflings and genasi, are all quite nice, and I like what they bring to the table.  Tieflings were even introduced as a core race in 4e, although I don't really like what they did to them--I prefer tieflings as envisioned in earlier versions of the game--primarily 2e and 3e.  Shifters--from Eberron--are also nice; humans touched with just a bit of werewolf.  Like the planetouched races, they feel exotic, yet also human.  Mostly.

My DARK•HERITAGE campaign, then, has what are nominally races like this (at least in concept, if modified in name and mechanics.)  I've got fire genasi, tieflings, aasimar and shifters (and Neanderthals just for good measure.)

Of that bunch, my favorite is probably the tiefling.  It may be a bit overplayed as a planetouched race, and it may be prone to too much brooding anti-hero abuse by poor plyaers, but it's also got a lot of potential.  I tend to envision tieflings not as looking like their 4e versions, but sort of like Nightcrawler (from the X-men) with Darth Maul horns.  That also means that they'll look quite a bit like Graz'zt, as it turns out.  Cool. 

30 Day Challenge: Day 1 - How You Got Started

Another fad taking over the gamer blogosphere.  I'm gonna try it out, just because it looks easy.  There's a Dungeons & Dragons specific 30 day challenge, where you take on 30 different topics and make a blog post for them.   Because I don't really play D&D exactly per se, this is slightly off topic for me, and I've got a specific tag I've created to keep it separate from my other series.  I also make no promise that my thirty days will be consecutive--although I'll try to keep them mostly so.

The topic for Day 1, as you can see on the image, is How you got started.

I had a friend back in about 1980 or so?  Maybe even a little earlier.  I used to go over to his to "play" with him.  He was a bit spoiled (in my opinion) and had this huge collection of Star Wars toys.  Y'know, the Kenner action figures and playsets.  Since this is was prior to the release of Empire Strikes Back, it was a constrained collection, and I think his collection was pretty darn complete.  We weren't exactly collectors, though--the point of this stuff was to play with it.  Since in 1980 I would have been 8 years old, I hadn't yet outgrown that paradigm either.

I do recall one day, however, that he wasn't very interested in playing, and was trying to get me involved in this talky game he was trying to figure out how to run.  It was a disaster.  He didn't know what he was doing, and I wasn't particularly interested.  This was my first experience with D&D--with OD&D, actually.  I can't remember if it was the White Box or the Brown Box, but it was one of those.

A few years later, when the D&D fad really finally became a thing, was when I finally "got it" though.  At that time, we were into the Moldvay boxes with the Erol Otus artwork.  I still kinda like that version, although I'm not really interested in going back to old rulesets.  If I was, though, either a Moldvay or a retroclone that approximated Moldvay would be my first choice.

Back at this point (which started in fifth grade for me and carried forward through middle-school) I played off and on with a variety of different friends, and eventually we used more AD&D material as well.  I never really played a real campaign, though--it was more fiddling and short-term one-off type stuff.  But this is when I "got" the concept of the RPG and decided that it looked like fun.  I also got involved, right about this same time, with the Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks--solo RPGs, kinda, if you will.  But I was really still more on the periphery of the hobby for many years.  I didn't really buy anything, and I didn't really play consistently.  That didn't start happening until I was in college, many years later.  And it wasn't until 3rd edition came out in 2000 that I really had my first experiences with real campaigns and whatnot--you know, the way the game is "supposed" to be played.

Iconic Dark•Heritage Characters: Tereza Alecsandrescu

Tereza grew up a ward of the Church in Sarabasca (a community not exactly known for its piousness, so the Church was often poor, underfunded, and not highly respected.)  Found on the church doorstep as a baby, the nuns there hoped that one day she would join them, but Tereza's affinities were not towards religious vows.  Rather, secular scholarship is where she excels, and what she most desires to pursue as a vocation, but this has unfortunately opened her up to knowledge that she should not know, and the restricted section of the convent's library is too often the site of her sorties into knowledge that she would be better off leaving alone.  In this sense, her curiousity is her fatal flaw, not unlike Keisa Alawasmu (another iconic character, detailed previously--check out the ICONICS tag for more info.)

However, unlike Keisa, Tereza is not an occultist, and learning to handle the powers that Mankind was Not Meant To Know is not really her goal; rather, ancient history is her passion.  There are few people in the Mezzovian Sea area who can rattle off details about ancient kingdoms and peoples than Tereza.  She also tempers her book-learning on the subject with as many in the field excursions as she can, making her something of an "adventuring archeologist" if you like (an archetype you may be familiar with from my favorite movie of all time--although Tereza is not nearly as rough and tumble and tough as Indiana Jones; she's a little more like Evelyn "Evy" Carnahan from The Mummy.)

Unbeknownst to her, however, she is the object of considerable interest to many sinister interests across the area.  She obviously looks different than the natives of Sarabasca, but she doesn't really understand the cause for that.  In reality, she is a native of Cannibal Island, and has the distinctive chalky, pale look of inhabitants from there.  Since she was raised from infancy in Sarabasca, she does not sport the tattoos, or other cultural artifacts of her heritage.  And curiously, she seems to be immune to the curse that forces her kin into cannibalism.  The cause of this is mysterious (especially to her; she doesn't even know much about Cannibal Island except for rumors anyway, and certainly doesn't suspect that her heritage is somehow associated with that benighted place.)  However, a few other cannibal cultists and other occultists of various types have started to hear rumors of her existance, which is not a situation that is likely to bode well for her.

In the various systems that I "endorse" for the game, I'd call Tereza the following:

• In D&D (3.5) I'd call her a 5th level rogue, probably.  Her sneak attack is probably not really in line with how I envision the character although maybe it's OK to leave as is, nor is her trapfinding ability.  I'd borrow a page from Pathfinder, and swap those out, a la the archetypes which offer alternative class abilities.  The Investigator archetype is a good one for her.  None of the archetypes offer replacements for Sneak Attack (which I suppose they feel is too "core" to the concept of the Rogue) so you'll either have to house-rule your own, or just keep Sneak Attack in.  This is also true for Pathfinder, if using that system.  Her dabbling in the occult can come through the feats that give access to minor magic; maybe even going as far as a familiar!
• In d20 Modern, I'd call her a 5th level Smart hero with the Academic Occupation.  Speaking of which, the Research talent tree would make a good substitute for Sneak Attack if applied above.  On the fly house-ruling, here we go!  Her magical dabbling is best described by using the feats, as above (which apply to both iterations of the rules.)
• In DARK•HERITAGE HACK I see Tereza as a Thief.  Her magical dabbling comes by taking a few cross-class skills from the Sorcerer class.
• In m20, Tereza is, again, a Rogue.  With a few ritual spells up her sleeve.