Enter the Slayer
As you may or may not know, we release a weekly Roll20 token over on Patreon. When a certain fancy half-orc lady came up in the queue, our patrons were all like, “Who’s that girl?” So we put it to the usual vote in our monthly poll. Since Handbook-World has long since met its bard quota, we threw a number of interesting options at the wall to see what might stick. And wouldn’t you know it, like Miss Gestalt before her, the new girl found herself dealing with a dead tie. “Vampire Hunter” and “Noble Scion” both garnered exactly 36 votes. With the age old question of elegant lady or killer queen too close to call, we’ve decided to split the difference. I therefore hope you will all join us in welcoming Van Helscion to Handbook-World. (Many thanks to a certain clever gamer and friend of the comic for suggesting the puntastic name.)
With introductions out of the way, what do you say we talk about Van Helscion’s aesthetic? Similar to adorabolical monsters and tiny tough guys, elegant and refined PCs are all about the secret badass trope. Sure you’ve got lace and brocade and opera glasses, but you’ve also got a dragon-scale corset hiding underneath the ball gown. Your airs and manners conceal a mean streak, while your elegant coiffure conceals a derringer or two.
This is the kind of character that excels at sesquipedalian loquaciousness. That uses the most obnoxiously posh English accent. She quirks an eyebrow at vulgarity, gasps at impropriety, and then stabs you through the heart with her secret garter belt stake. It’s all about looking too fancy to ever consider violence, and then bringing that violence home with aplomb.
I talked about my own brush with this kind of character back in “Courtly Dress,” but what about the rest of you guys? Have you ever rolled up a courtly dandy rather than a grizzled soldier? An effete fop rather than a burly barbarian? And did you manage to use that guise of respectability to your advantage? Tell us all about your noblest adventurers and most fashionable monster hunters down in the comments!
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Van Helscion looks utterly awesome, and would probably make excellent use of the element of surprise. Like Pug, most people (and monsters) won’t expect to have their hind quarters handed to them by someone in bespoke tailoring.
I think the closest I came to such a character was when I played a member of a noble Vodaccian house in 7th Sea. Everyone else was packing magic, he relied on his sword and his faith. He tried to uphold decency and proper etiquette. It worked, too; he got an assassin to give some info by pointing out children were out of bounds according to the writings of 7th Sea’s take on Machiavelli.
And at the end, when we faced some vile spirit offering teleportation magic for the low, low price of our souls (as well as sometime earlier, when we faced a creature of living flame), my swordsman saved the day with sincere prayer and bottles of holy water.
I imagine your pirate as “pistol / bomb guy” from this cartoon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3RRc44IVrE
He sure looks like a classy scoundrel! ^_^
Funnily enough, despite it being a 7th Sea game, I can’t recall we ever travelled anywhere in any other way than overland…
I can’t believe I never thought about playing a Half-Orc bastard child of a noble house. It’s perfect for me
I love playing a Noble character in Feudal settings generally, it lets you interact with politics on a level a murderhobo probably shouldn’t be able to, but it’s always gotta have a catch, and a bastard raised amongst the nobles but always seen as an outsider is my favourite. It gives you connections that can be leveraged but it doesn’t make it too easy
Aristocracy and warring houses are hard to pull off. You’ve got to characterize each of them, provide lots of reasons for infighting, and then invent unique personalities within those organizations. It’s a lot hard to remember that “House Lodovicco are the merchant ones” than “The Merchant Guild are the merchant ones.” I think that extra step of abstraction makes nobles slightly less popular.
Eh, “why not both” is always a good option. And there are plenty of precedents.
I welcome you, mylady.
I fear that every character we introduce will now be a mashup, as voters seem to enjoy making us squirm.
By the way, who broke the window?
I kind of see Van Helscion bursting in to save Pug from the vampire, for some reason. 😉
That feels like the implication, or possibly the vampire bursting in to underestimate Helscion. But the hole looks a bit small for either of them, which gives me the amusing mental image of Pug breaking into the middle of a fight between the vampire and Helscion and getting her tail handed to her.
Either way, the battle left Pug clutching Van Helscion’s skirts! ^_^
… This conjures a mental image of hatchling Pugilist clutching at her mum’s – or at least her caretaker’s – tail for comfort.
No doubt Pug was lured upstairs with promises of an “attic fight club.” So much more novel than the usual basement fighting pit business!
Not in a D&D-style campaign… social characters, yes, but not aristocrats or nobles.
But I may have previously mentioned a Victoriana campaign in which I played an upper-class adventuress with a propensity for concealing large-caliber handguns in her clothing. At least, when not creating a scandal by wearing trousers and going openly armed (you’d think it would be the pistol that upset folks, but no… it’s the legs).
She’d probably have gotten along well with Van Helscion… I don’t believe we ever encountered vampires in that game, but she’s definitely killed a few monsters, human or supernatural alike.
*faints*
Eh, if you’re playing a Victorian adventuress and you’re not the center of society gossip, you’re probably doing something wrong.
This topic is interesting to me due to how different the underlying assumptions seem to me.
I have played more than a few high-class elegant and refined characters, most of them quite badass but I don’t think it has been hidden or unexpected for any of them.
People aren’t generally surprised when they are good at using that rapier/katana/ivory-handled-dueling-pistol/well-carved-wand/whatever other culturally appropriate high status weapon they are carrying as part of their complete outfit.
I mean advertising that you are a proper member of the warrior-aristocracy with the full skillset that implies is a large part of the point of those weapons being part of the complete outfit. Why it wouldn’t do to embarrass your family and your teachers should you get an officers commission in service of crown and country now would it?
Maybe if we played in more settings where the days of warrior-aristocrats/ladies and gentlemen are long gone and where the upper class have long ago lost the connection to the military.
Or maybe it’s just that we have had so many exceptions that it’s no longer the exceptions and more just the rule.
Historically speaking, just because your position in society nominally requires you to be an expert warrior doesn’t mean you needed to be an expert warrior, especially if your actual position had more to do with helping the local king/lord control his country/fief. It was good for a knight or prince to be skilled with lance and sword (or bow and lance, or bow and katana, or whatever the local warrior-aristocrat’s weapons of choice were), but if you weren’t, there were other ways to act noble.
This is true,(to various degrees through various times and places).
I’m just saying that it wouldn’t be surprising if someone where. (and that not at least performing warrior aristocracy could make your peers look down on you if there weren’t some kind of mitigating circumstances same way as not performing other class makers might).
It’s less about the aristocratic schtick than it is “the fop.” If you look like fashionista rather than a career soldier, you can take advantage of enemies’ underestimation.
I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t some gender bias underlying the trope as well. Think about the surprisingly dangerous Elena from Mask of Zorro:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJ0tpT_xtcg
I have tried three times now to play a rogue that is a “skill monkey” extraordinaire. Sure, we always think of rogues as skill monkeys, but if you min max the crap out if it with feats and proper planning (and add a touch of bard in there for good measure), you can have nearly every skill at 20+ when you make a check (and more than a few at 25 to 30+ from all the expertise). The plan makes the rogue less combat effective, but it means they are the go to for every skill check in the game (not counting tools).
I say I have tried (and failed) three times, not because the character concept is not valid (tho it ALSO might not be valid 🙂 but because two times the games just fizzled out (as games commonly do, unfortunately) and one time the DM just did not ‘get’ the concept I was going for (non-combat rogue… it’s a thing!) and kept throwing my character into situations where I needed to fight my way out, so I had to leave 🙁
I will get my non-combat skill monkey rogue to work one day! (“working” meaning at least level 11, because that is when reliable talent kicks in and the concept comes together)
For me, I think it’s about doing ANYTHING in combat. It doesn’t have to be good, but it does have to be more useful than “I hide in the corner and try not to get injured.” In that sense, rogues with a bit of magic aptitude can go a long way. Activating random items is legit!
Oh my gosh, Van Helscion, that’s perfect. I need to find an excuse to steal that pun.
I’ve played some highborn adventurers in my time, but I don’t recall either going all in on the “noble fop” angle or using my character’s respectability to do more than balance out…I can’t think of a nicer way to say this, but all of the other characters.
I think we all like to see the stuffy m’lord get a thorough pantsing. It’s just good tropesmanship for the guy who shouts, “Think of the impropriety!” to get a little egg on his face. But because we like watching little snots like Draco Malfoy get their comeuppance, I think we too often go the other way and play a bunch of ruffians just for the sake of being ruffians. That ignore a lot of the other ways that playing “the noble” can go.
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/thrown-for-a-loss
Ain’t nothing wrong with balancing that out.
The only times I played something equivalent to a ‘refined’ character like such was in two instances, both the same AP.
One was a violinist Tiefling bard, who was something between a serious, classical orchestra performer and a goof who was perfectly aware of his stigma and rejected an evil family relation that tried to make him a lawyer.
The other was a Gunslinger lady who was a no-nonsense madame of grit. The kind of person Samuel Vimes might marry.
Lady Sibyl is a great template for a PC:
https://discworld.fandom.com/wiki/Lady_Sybil_Vimes
I’m kind of tempted to give that a whirl now.
In creating characters for a new campaign, I’d hit a conundrum:
The half-elf wizard had a fleshed out backstory, a solid persona, and motivations (more knowledge, creature comforts).
The halfling illusionist had a fleshed out backstory, a solid persona (drama major, alchemist savant, entertainer), and motivations (adventure!).
The halfling swashbuckler had a confusing backstory and a letter of recommendation to join the party. What even inspires her to go do this stuff? I wondered what sort of goodies to seed dungeons with to reward her efforts.
Then I looked back at the entry for courtier’s outfit. “If you wear this outfit without jewelry (costing an additional 50 gp), you look like an out-of-place commoner.” (Roughly the same for noble attire.) Despite having graduated from an elite fencing school, if the swashbuckler wants to be taken seriously by Mssrs. Essart or Treville and become a real musketeer, then she’s going to need to find some bling (and none of that store-bought stuff, either).
I’ll let you know how the campaign turns out. 🙂
Love it when the mechanics give you inspiration. Whenever I come up against a creative dry spell, I find that reading the rules text shakes loose new ideas. A throw-away line like “out of place commoner” is all it takes to make a character concept really sing.
Good luck getting taken seriously as a fancy fencer! I hope you’re a splash at court and get to walk down the steps in slow motion.
Oh, boy! So my character in a long-running Hell’s Rebels campaign is pretty much exactly this. She’s a Rogue/Noble Scion who has grown up in the lap of luxury and spends plenty of money on clothes and comfort. She is also, however, a Cheliaxian politician, which means that she’s grown up on the assumption that she will be joining a dangerous game when she joins politics proper.
Starting out, she was an utterly ruthless woman. Espionage is her game, but she’s not been opposed to keeping many secrets to herself, or doing wetwork behind her allies’ backs. It’s only been over the course of several months (in-game) that she’s slowly come to realize that being the bad guy of the rebellion doesn’t necessarily help them. She never quite lost her original Neutral Good alignment, but she’s now acting much more like it.
How does the “proper noblewoman” thing play with the rest of the party? Do you catch much guff for being prim and proper, or are you just basically one of the gang but with better clothes?
Oh, as it happened, the early party was one big family, plus one outsider. My character was therefore mostly working with her twin brother and her half-brothers, among whom she was the most political and thus yearned to rule the family when their aunt would pass away. (Sadly, now her entire family save for said aunt is dead due to the campaign.)
I appreciate that your comic doesn’t do Warcraft-colored Orcs. (Though I wish you would do D&D Goblins rather than Warcraft Goblins)
As for nobles, something in my American upbringing, and progressive economic values (Eat the nobles!) has given me a disdain for the concept of nobility. I only really use them as a punchline. I’ve played two nobles in 5E, and both of them were jokes. For example my Noble Sorcerer had the amount of inbreeding that a Sorcerer has, (If you breed with something non-magical your children will have half the magical potency you have) plus the amount of inbreeding that a Noble has.
It does limit the palate a bit when every noble is a Habsburg.
I haven’t gotten to play him yet, however I do have a character whom is a “better than thou” Nobleman, that takes great pride in his appearance. However his temper makes him a great fit for barbarian.
This works well enough, as seing as his suit isn’t armor, and DnD barbarians get bonuses for not wereing armor.
But when the time comes for his chance in the spotlight, I must take care in balancing Shot temperd nobleman, and bezerk raging warior.
I’ve always wanted to try out the “wild child” noble. It sounds like a great opportunity to pop your own pompous balloon.
A Deadlands character I made had, as a minor element, that everyone thought her gunslinger persona was a man. So she’d be able to ‘disguise’ herself by switching out of that getup (face mask, duster, maybe some armor, and of course twin revolvers) into a fancy dress and makeup.
That campaign never came to pass, but now I’m running a Deadlands campaign, and I think I’ll introduce her as an NPC. We’ll see how the Posse react if she has to drop the disguise and the slim, quiet debutante (I can’t believe I spelled that right first try) starts shooting guns out of bandit’s hands and plugging monsters.
Fun concept for an NPC. The secret identity thing is always tough to pull off as a PC, what with the absurdity of, “For my first action in combat, I will hide in this handy alleyway. Oh wait, there’s already this cool vigilante in here! He says he wants to go on my initiative! What’s that vigilante? Why of course I’d be happy to RP as you! That’s so convenient, since my actual character plans to cower out of sight of the encounter. Don’t bother to check on her though! She’s doing fine thanks.”
So, do Pug’s remarks here indicate that she will be giving a poofy dress a try in future?
Pug in a poofy dress would resemble an angry feather duster.
Not a tabletop character (yet) but I do have an OC by the name of Violently Eccentric Maximilian, who tosses in the “period gentleman” aesthetic into your typical mad max type character. Kind of a mix between batman and Walter C. Dornez from Hellsing Ultimate, his “surprise” weapons include various throwing knives hidden about his person, a sword-cane, and a single-shot mini cannon hidden in his top hat. Add on the less hidden ones like his four-barrel flintlock and he is one formidable opponent, all the while pulling of a refined british accent and courtly demeanor to rival the snobbiest of lords
There really ought to be a retroactive ability called “surprise weapon.” You get to think of a new one each session.
My character in a 2e conversion of War For The Crown I’m helping balance is a distant relative to the crown prince- not that I’m anywhere near the line of inheritance, being a half-elf bastard. Class-wise, I’m playing an investigator with low str, low dex, and decent con- but high int, wis, and cha. My main weapon is a crossbow, which she was taught to shoot by her father, who was a soldier. (Technically, because of my class, I’m proficient in all martial weapons, but the crossbow is a unique magic item and also it makes more sense flavor-wise) Whereas her courtly knowledge was taught by her mother, who is one of the many cousins of the royal line.
It’s super fun to play her, even if she does lack pretty heavily in the combat capabilities department. During fights I mostly either use battle medicine, make knowledge checks to identify enemy weaknesses, and so on. (Or, I use studied strike to delete one enemy from the combat per round, because boy does investigator crit like a motherfucker)
Oddly enough “investigator” was the runner up for Van Helscion with 32 votes.
The “artificer” class was a distant fourth place with only 11 votes.
I haven’t had a chance to play them because they were built to be played together, but I have a pair of characters that are a Phantom Thief Unchained Rogue and a Dashing Thief Swashbuckler. They’re nobles that had their family’s lands, titles, and fortunes stolen when they were children. Now that they’re adults, they’re stilling it back. Basically the sister (Rogue) blends into the crowd of rich partiers. Then the brother (Swash) bursts inside declaring that he’s there to rob them all dramatic-like. Then while everyone is distracted, Sis goes upstairs and steals all the jewels.
That sounds to me like a pair of NPCs waiting to happen. They’d be great as an unexpected encounter at a fancy party.
I might have to adjust their build either way though. I think I made them need to be flanking a bit too much for the theme to work properly. I want to be able to use them.
It’s fun to play a more foppish character, especially when they’re in strict contrast with their party members. In a Monster of the Week campaign, my mage wore extremely old fashioned white suits and used old timey machines because in his mind magic didn’t work well with modern technology (that’s not true in game, but since he believed it, he had issues whenever he tried using technology). In a 5e espionage focused Eberron campaign I’m in, my Arcane Trickster is basically a more foppish Indiana Jones. And my main 5e campaign, my Blade Singer wizard is fairly unassuming in appearance, but has almost singlehandedly commandeered a Githyanki astral ship with my favorite anime spell: Steel Wind Strike.
You know who did the fop thing well recently?
https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/McGregor_Houghton
If that character was slightly more competent he would have been perfect for the trope.
Now that I think about it actually, the opening sequence of “Jungle Cruise” makes a pretty good exemplar too. Lily pretending to be a secretary and then Indiana Jonesing her way out of danger was likely my favorite part of that film.
I’m actually playing a half-orc noble lady pseudo-disney princess bard right now. It may not be the most badass thing ever, but she did just successfully threaten information out of a cat. (To be fair, it’s at least the most “badass” thing any character has done so far in the campaign.)
I hope that she used song. Nothing quite so intimidating as finding yourself caught up in a duet. Who knows what beans you might spill in the lyrics?
This lady seems to ooze class and leadership (though I could of course be wrong on that, as she’s yet to even speak…). I guess that could be the commanding presence of the nobility? So we’ve got her, and pug is an instant ‘in’ as her scrappy sidekick… who else will be joining her party? Will cavalier turn up to her audition? Will Gunslinger finally find himself a niche?
Technically, as a noble scion she’s supposed to ooze leadership:
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/prestige-classes/other-paizo/n-r/Noble-Scion/#TOC-Greater-Leadership-Ex-
That’s actually the biggest struggle with the character at the moment. Not sure who her “cohort” ought to be, or if we should just ignore that bit and hope no one notices.
Ooze leadership?
She should have a gelationous cube cohort!
That’s just dumb enough to be a punchline in this comic. 😛
I never got to play the character, but in 3.5e I brewed up a fairly mean Monk/Rogue who used some obscure tricks available to the former to disappear with the aid of her parasol providing a bit of shade and deliver a ridiculous number of attacks each round with Sneak Attack damage.
She was technically not nobility- rather, she was a body double of a noblewoman who was killed alongside much of the family in their hiding place, and (as this noblewoman was her only friend/this effectively left her without the job she was raised for her whole life) she took her place and used her identity in public to find her killer/bait them out. It feels like a concept I should recycle for Pathfinder someday if I can.
Funny enough, Neo from RWBY has sort of the aesthetic I pictured for her actual travel/dungeoneering outfit, but I had a high end dress for her as a fluff item (I forget the name, but it’s a rare type of material and the closest you can get to a designer dress from 1st party material, giving a large diplomacy bonus in socialite situations, iirc).
I did a body double noblewoman in Exalted once upon a time. It was a homebrew city of Laurel’s where all the nobility had masks and body doubles. The more powerful the noble, the more identical dudes in their entourage. It was a silly city of assassins, and I had great fun avenging my “nine sisters” after our princess’s death.
So my Summoner Emille is a laid back somewhat portly Shepherd more content to enjoy baked goods and knit rather than worry about battling foes. When it comes to fighting he crushes his foes but he’s more sleepy than fighty.
And your sleepy shepherd is… fashionable? Trying to see the connection here.
Supposed I missed the point. I personally avoid nobility as I feel it asks a lot of the dm and its either power you don’t need or power you can’t access. I can at least describe my shepherd’s dress. Nice flowing green robes with gold filigree of blossoming flowers and an ornate circlet with golden branches with various flowers encased in amber along the branches.