Unnaturally Comfortable
One of my buddies in a recently-resurrected Firefly game runs a doctor. He’s called simply The Doctor, and is nothing like That Doctor. This is the sort of character that, with a deadpan expression and nothing behind the eyes, will launch into a dissertation on “sustainable skin farming.” Then, when he notices the room full of horrified expressions, he’ll stare back like, “Oh goodness, have I said something untoward? How thoughtless of me!” He is an unsettling dude, and a fan-favorite among the group.
Same deal with the garbage pail alchemist that pals around with my megadungeon party. Being an absurd semi-mummy with moth wings and a predilection for drinking his own spue has endeared him to the party like you wouldn’t believe. There’s something oddly compelling about the creepy-but-lovable archetype, and our girl Necromancer is draped elegantly all over that trope. If you think about it though, that makes a certain amount of sense. When you’re an inherently creepy kind of PC, you want to find a way to make others like you.
Take my own necromancer PC. I knew I would spend the campaign with at least one undead minion stinking up the vicinity, so my first act was to name my starter zombie. When I picked up animate dead and added a horrible skeleton demon to the party roster, I immediately asked the others to help christen the monstrosity (we settled on Becky). My thought is that, whether it’s puppies or zombies, it’s a lot harder to turn a critter away when it’s got a name.
There’s a tactical advantage in all this as well. As Neil Gaiman says in Neverwhere, “You must never imagine, that just because something is funny, it is not also dangerous.” They don’t call it a “disarming personality” for nothing! Playing the creepy goofball is a great way to get close to your enemies. If you happen to be a creature of pure malevolence and evil intent, getting your prey to drop its guard is just good policy.
So what do you think? Have any of you guys ever used a goofy exterior to mask your true maleficence? How’d it work out for you? Let’s hear it in the comments!
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I do that every day of my life!
I can’t tell how it’s working since I have no power truly worth mentioning though. =P
I’m sure your mutant powers will kick in any day now. You’ve just got to wait on that letter from Hogwarts telling you how to activate them.
Nah, the only time i ever tried to conceal a characters powers was when i was pretending my druid in dark suns was a water cleric so he wouldnt be killed. It worked pretty well until i found some defilers, wizards whose powers drain life from the environment, permanently destroying it without some decently strong magic to fix it. At that point, despite my parties urgings, i follwed them to their inn, waited outside there window in hawk form, then summoned a leapard on one of them, killing him instantly, another the turn after, with the other 3 running away from the hidden druid. Unfortunately that got us found out by some psions as i rolled 1 vs a will save to not be tracked or something, and we got blackmailed to find them some ancient psionic artifact to my party’s dismay. In the end we managed to destroy it though which was cool and good since them usjng it would have killed alot of people. It was pretty anticlimatic as we managed to just avoid the dms encounter with some good ref rolls, fly, and resist energy. That was a pretty fun campaign.
Complimentary room leopards will not get your inn a good Yelp review.
Basically my plan for pretty much every fight against non-flying enemies by the time I reached level 5 was summon cat. It worked well.
Anti-Paladin must sure feel lucky, getting to hang out with 3 spooky hotties like that 😛
Schtupping Succubus will cause you to wither and die.
Necromancer schtupps corpses.
Witch is too stupid-evil to have a functioning relationship.
Also while I’m not familiar with PF AntiPaladins, older ones radiated an aura of disease to contrast Paladins being immune to disease. Nobody should schtupp that.
He’s looking forward to his first Handbook of Erotic Fantasy comic.
We all know if Necromancer starts banging Anti-paladin, she’ll really be thinking about Paladin.
As a life-rule, you shouldn’t let any part of someone who is on fire be inside you, that’s just begging for internal burns.
I’m currently making a Fate Core campaign based of My Hero Academia, and the school medic is a coked-out mad scientist who’s great at healing, but has a biiiiit of a god complex. He’ll heal you, and he’ll do it well, buuuuuut you run the risk of waking up with a few more or less pieces than what you started with (i.e. shiny robot limbs in place of you weak fleshy one, shoulder mounted laser cannons, extra eyes, a tail, etc.). If you die, your body is never found. Yep. Frankenstein Ex Machina. Once the campaign starts, I’ll have a few cruel laughs at my players’ expense….
Yup. That’s the kind of goofy creepy I’m talking about! Now if you eventually show the school under attack, then have this doctor of yours unleash the badass flesh golem crafted from borrowed bits of his patients’ bodies to defend it, you’ve got the second half of the equation.
“Holy shit! This guy can make something like that? I thought he was just an amusing weirdo!”
Why is today’s comic in silhouette? Is the “Armchair” too gruesome for colored details?
Gotta keep that PG-13 rating.
Yeah, about that, remember when I said he was constantly coked out? The reason being his power, Traumaturgy, allows him to generate electrical pulses/waves/bolts that stimulate nerves. Due to him overusing in his younger years, he has a constant need to feel AWESOME. This includes: Pain, Shocks, Coca-Cola, the other Coke, burns, etc. If anything, he’d be fighting in the front lines risking death, all while activating implants he just remembered he put in that one guy who totally agreed to them, that one guy being EVERYONE. As for the flesh golems, what flesh golems? He also may or may not be either German or Russian, as he’s too damn high to have a definitive accent (don’t ask, his name is Dok Hyde).
Oops didn’t hit reply.
I play a cleric of Cthulhu (in an evil campaign), who is outwardly friendly and helpful to everyone. In the first town he decided to “help” someone who got knocked out in a bar fight “back to their house”… in reality, he dragged them into an alleyway and sacrificed them to Cthulhu. He has also gone around towns granting “blessings” in the form of Bestow Curse, blessing the person with dreams of Cthulhu (he pretends to be a cleric of Gozreh). And even more recently, he went in to an insane asylum under the guise of granting whatever assistance he could to the poor souls within, in reality he was recruiting for a cult. In a town the party had recently taken over, he worked to convert the temple of Phrasma into a temple of Cthulhu and unhallowed it so that followers of Cthulhu would be perfectly comfortable in the temple (endure elements). In more overtly evil things he’s done, while attempting to convert some followers of a different great old one, he used his channel to disintegrate people at random and said that the survivors were the chosen of Cthulhu.
I think maybe you missed the “lovable” part of creepy-but-lovable. :/
Aww. Skeleton’s name should be Betty, not Becky! Either no Ranma ½ fans, or they could only barely remember the name of Dr. Tofu’s skeleton ‘assistant’. Well, it has been a while since the show came out.
She got the name because we already had a cohort named Bucky in the party. We’ve since added Bastion and Bruce to our minion roster. I’ve been keeping my eye out for a likely Bartolomey, but no suitable monsters have presented themselves yet.
This is a tactic i usually try to use in games in general, do random things to keep the players distracted meanwhile you can just do any thing you want until is too late and they can not stop your evil plans. Nobody thinks the jester is the dangerous one, until it is too late at least, think of it kinda like be a Malkavian and just make things right so a war erupts between all the clans, and the Camarilla and the Sabbath, and some werewolf even i dont know how ended there. Fun times. Smoke, mirrors and nonsense are powerful tools, if you know how to use them you can make your plan, take any measure you need to take, bidding your time, and then strike without anyone capable of doing anything. Like my little riddle of some time ago, you use the expectations of other against them. They think you are a fool, a jester, then why correct them? Just keep going while you take your time to make your move.
Also great page, funny reference, but i have a question. Where are they going?
They’re en route to their first evil mission as a party. You’ll find out on Friday what that is.
Kidnap paladin and sacrifice him to the forces of evil?
Kill paladin and rob the rest of his party?
Are they going to register paladin in various webpages so he get his e-mail account full of spam?
*takes notes*
The Doctor’s name reminds me of a character Gary Gygax used to write about that was simply called “Erac’s Cousin” (https://i.imgur.com/Yv7mTc8.png).
As for the goofy exterior, I haven’t really done it with any characters before. I do it with my character builds though. I have a penchant for building tough bruiser martial characters with a curious and impatient personality (partially based off of myself, but always far bolder than myself). I often go through dungeons opening chests or sticking my hand in holes or opening doors without them being checked for traps. I do this because I secretly want to PvP, but in a way that works in-character. Merely attacking my allies would be so out of character it would be disgusting, but if I can trigger a magic jar or a domination or other similar effect, then I enjoy the chance to kill my team or be killed by them. During the rest of the game I tend to be that goofy character though.
So you’re just hoping to get dominated so you can whoop the rest of the team? Sounds like an interesting challenge. Did you ever succeed in that task?
Twice I have succeeded in getting dominated and but only once did I manage to kill another character. In a one-shot we I got Magic-Jar’d and killed one guy, and forced the other to retreat (due to a Contingency of his).
The other time I knocked three people to negative hit points, but they all stabilized before the cleric was able to end the effect on me and I had to do the whole “I did this to my friends?” shock-and-horror-bit that would be in character.
But yeah, noone ever does just arena-one-shots in my groups, so I build a character and hope that one day I’ll get to see how my build does against the others. It rarely works, but when it pays off it feels great.
This doesn’t happen every build, but if I’m restless, I build bruisers with low will saves (or rather, I build bruisers that happen to have low will saves).
Just happened last night in my Cthulhu game. Ancient runes drove the group’s big guy into a homicidal rampage. As it turns out, the Basic Role-Playing game doesn’t care how big you are. If you’ve only got 25% in “hit dude with club,” you still aren’t much of a threat. Poor mind-controlled schlub wound up smacking the group’s crippled brainiac PC one time before his madness was up. I think he was a bit disappointed.
Tzimisce have the reputation of creeping everyone out, so the last Vampire (Sabbat) game I played in had a very friendly and kindly personality… which is a fun way to go with the pack priest
Gabrielle was mutually bound to another PC (True Love is a fun way to undermine your character’s Path of Cathari), and they both acted parental towards the childe of that other PC. She took care of the children that the Ventrue packleader PC was so intent on keeping around for easy food. She was always interested in making new clothes for others (Yes, that corset has ribs.) and enjoyed making useful furniture (think: water bed).
Playing a character that doesn’t think anything of doing those sorts of things is really fun. “Shopping for new material” was a reoccurring theme.
For your group, it sounds like this was a… hot topic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YMPAH67f4o
In a long running Burning Wheel campaign I have been playing a Blood-Magic-using Corrupted Summoner. For those of you unfamiliar with the system, Blood Magic is the process of adding dice to future magic-related rolls with either torture or ritual sacrifice, Summoning has a Faustian feel where the things you call up are not obligated to do anything, but you can offer them things like souls or your eye in exchange for a service. Corruption is an attribute by which you character becomes more and more twisted as they perform certian “evil” actions until they are eventually dragged down to Hell. Anywho, this character is “named” E-. Just “E” because whenever asked they give a different name starting with “E”. We were meant to be the heroes, but E has slowly dragged the partie’s moral compass down to the point where necrophagia is accepted as normal by the “good” party. This is in no small part related to E’s personality, which has been something of a “kick down, grovel up” approach. Until very recently, following E buffing itself to an almost comical degree, it has been an oddly likable character. E’s primary motivations are self preservation and a deep-seated hatred of humans, and really anything that is NOT a spirit or undead, resulting in E’s determination to become a vampyr. Despite all of the mass child torture E engages in, alongside the sacrificing of, so far, 20 untainted mortal souls to greater demons, the party has relied on it for a great deal of their present buffs as they creep ever closer to joining it in its corruption.
Can you give me some examples of the “kick down, grovel up” approach? That sounds like exactly the sort of goofy exterior I’m talking about.
Sure, a lot of it has to do with who can do what to this character at any given time, and it has cropped up a few times this past session. For context, concerned with a greater demon-killing hit squad that will be deployed to E’s house in a week, it took steps to summon a lesser deity and strike a defensive bargain with it in exchange for allowing it to freely roam the city. The only catch was that said entity has moral standards, resulting in an elaborate act in which E has been attempting to convince it that it really is not so bad, involving much winking and nodding at other PCs. E is in a similar situation with one of the main GM characters, who also does not approve of E’s manner of doing business. Despite E’s complete disdain for this character’s entire ideology and mode of operation, E goes to great lengths bowing and scraping before them, particularly when said NPC has something it wants. Conversely, there was an incident recently in which the Art Magic user went into a 6 hour trance, during which time E positioned them in front of a young child it had just finished torturing, placed the bloody implement in the mage’s hand, then spattered them in blood instructing the demonic guard and the child to relay a story about how they had been tearing into people with the torture implements while in the trance. All of that is set on the backdrop of E’s total disregard for anyone it thinks it can get away with screwing over. The party is spared from the worst of it, both because it is the polite thing to do with other people at the table, and because E views them as being directly tied to its long term interests. That has not stopped E from planning the creation of a fanatic vampyric blood cult which may or may not eventually oppose the party following E leaving play. Quick note on vampyrs in BW, they are functionally immortal in that they have “Shadow and Dust” meaning that the “character” being played is the “shadow” or a projection from the “dust” which is often the original, mortal remains of the vampyr. When E finally shed its body, it was among the happiest moments of its life, in no small part because the of the significant increase in the scope of people E could torment.
As far as humor goes, E does have a fair degree of gallows humor. I believe the first time the party granted me artha for humor was when E ritually sacrificed a child by saying “got your nose” while pulling said child’s face off. Gathering sacrifices is referred to as “partying” on the town, and bad puns abound. There was even the time when E was killed as a vampyr, re-spawned without the party’s knowledge, then, dressed as a ghost, gave the party a spook when they returned to its house. One of the most fun parts about playing the character is continuing to surprise the GM, even after a year of these shenanigans, like when E bargained with a greater demon for its own skin, in suit form.
Yup. That is a fully evil dude. But if you act like a cringing lickspittle, it’s a lot easier to excuse the behavior than when you’re doing grimdark.
Necromancer seems to treat her creations like her children, which means if she’s “schtupping” them (as you so delicately put it) it adds a whole new level of creepy to the situation.
dammit, this did not reply to the comment I was trying to reply to!
I’ve had an NPC that’s one of the avatars of Nyarlathotep – in the form of a very peppy young woman. The basic ideas of the character were “cute but worrying” and “always messing with someone, but that someone isn’t always the player” (it was for a solo game). As one of the faces of an eldritch deity, they’ve casually crushed the hearts of demons, bantered with minions of the goddess of death, and at one point, followed the player into a Neutral Evil plane to cheer them on during a fetch quest. Overall, it worked out rather well, I think. XD
One point that’s often overlooked, I think, is how different people are unnerved by different things. For example, a lot of players aren’t going to be too bothered by another monster with tentacles and too many eyeballs – but how exactly do they react to a not-quite-safe cheer squad that knows waaaaaaay more than they should about what’s going on?
Inspiration? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyaruko:_Crawling_with_Love
A little bit. XD That’s actually how I described the character to one of my friends, though my version was less hyperactive and more just outright trolling. Even if they’re friendly to the player, they’re still an avatar of Nyarlathotep – they are never safe.
something something Bill Cosby something something
I need to find another word than “creepy.” I think it’s got the wrong connotations. 🙁
No, I was thinking of that Neil Gaiman quote you posted, “You must never imagine, that just because something is funny, it is not also dangerous.”
Have I posted my adorable cartoon ekolid demon Formicid before?
https://s20.postimg.cc/tof5bjl8d/Placronym_-_Sized_and_Cropped.png
https://s20.postimg.cc/b4dw16ipp/Books_on_Table.png
https://s20.postimg.cc/cmal7i0cd/Heart_Eat_sharp_Red_small.jpg(
Ha! I think you’ve got an implicit understanding of today’s comic. 🙂
BTW, do you know why the site reverted to not lettig me post links?
You’re talking about your cartoon ekolid demon Formicid links from the other day, right? I saw all three versions of that comment behind the scenes. I think that I’ve got to manually approve links before they go through, so I elected one of them to approve and just trashed the others. Sound fair?
More than fair. My issue is that I could have sworn that in the past the site let me post links in comments without them requiring approval. I think the first one or two I posted needed to be cleared but IIRC all the ones after that went straight through until now, so I was wondering if something had changed link-policy-wise. Or perhaps if something changed with how the site is coded, because it also used to remember my screenname and have it already filled in whenever I went to post a comment so that all I had to do was type the post itself, but a week or two ago it stopped doing that on all my machines, so I don’t know if maybe the code for the comment system was tweaked or what
Naw, I’m just usually faster on the approval. It’s a function of the SPAM filter, that’s all.
Always like the idea of a Elton John style wizard that no one could take seriously but who was, at the end of the day, a high level wizard who would and could wreck your junk in a massive variety of ways.
I would build it something like Gnome Illusionist/Conjurer who prepares stuff like Dancing Lights, Glitterdust, Color Burst, Pyrotechnics, and Ghost Sound (For his theme music obvs) but eventually leads to Prismatic Burst, Wall and Sphere stopping along the way at Hallucinatory Terrain and Wall of Fire (Would you function well in a fight in the middle of a Disco Inferno?)
I always wanted to go sorcerer and Ziggy Stardust:
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/core-classes/sorcerer/bloodlines/bloodlines-from-paizo/starsoul-bloodline/
Pretty much the same spell list. We should team up!
Sounds like some sort of off-the-wall buddy cop or breakout film. Something along the lines of :
“One was a man about town, and focused the glitz and glamour that magic brings him. The other was starstruck and obsessed with the shine.
but when their flashy lifestyles are threatened by their capture and imprisonment by The Squares these two unlikely heroes must join forces to combat the forces of sameness and mediocrity or loose their va-va-voom forever. Does this two-oh duo have what it takes or will the shine be rubbed of this rainbow?
ELTON JOHN and DAVID BOWIE in…
FOLSOM PRISON BLUES”
Will they either drive each other up the wall or become Two great mages with great taste who have great taste together?
Your jib. I like the cut of it.
One of the characters in my All Monster campaign is Zeigfreid “Ziggy” Glitterdust, a skald of exceptional skill. The player isn’t 100% in character, though, and has been spending his downtime writing a play based very loosely on the party’s exploits. The characters in the play are Chief Dangerpants, Porque Cutlass, Rocky Position (pronounced with an outrageous french accent), Sparky the Wonderdog, and Smooth Memphis.
His character portrait was a face-blending of Bowie and Andre the Giant. It turned out exceptionally horrifying.
Ima need an Imgur link to that portrait. Sounds hilarious.
I don’t have any characters who hide their cruelty behind cuteness, but my necromancer hides his cruelty quite well behind a mask of compassion.
He’s a healer at heart, taking every opportunity he can to aid people who have been injured (at least, if they weren’t injured trying to harm innocent people and/or his friends), but he has a TERRIFYING cruel streak when it comes to people who hurts kids, like how he crushed the person he had hired to run his orphanage with Bigsby’s hand when he found out they had been abusing the children.
The party still hasn’t gotten over just how brutal Justin was to the poor bastard, and i think they just realized just how unhinged Justin can be if something pushes him past his limit, which admittedly is pretty GD far considering he’s a necromancer.
What I’m trying to say is, while my necromancer is a compassionate sort (or at least, seems that way) he has a cruelty in his heart that escapes damn near everyone he interacts with….until they push him just a little too far.
It’s good to sandbag that sort of thing. It’s so much more impressive to see a the quiet wizard get angry than the barbarian.