Sharktober 2024 - 17: Electric Shark

The Granite Knight

Academics Skill: Wise Sports Skill: Tough and Strong as Anybody Favorite Foods: Tea, Rice, Noodle Soup Blood Type: O+ Animal: Ox Age: 18 An Interesting Fact About You: You have a secret love of romance novels. No one can ever know. Character Description ❀ You are a cursed knight who lives alone in a hut. You’re kind of young to be living by yourself, but you have such a look to you of extreme competence that no one dares to say anything. You’ve got the mien of someone much older than you are. That’s sort of your thing. You are competent and dependable and stoic. When Old Mrs. McGurt, with her weak eyes and bad hip, needs help getting to the doctor’s office, you’re there. When Farmer Tanaka needs an extra hand tilling the fields, you’re there. You don’t complain. Maybe you should? Maybe it would be good for you not to keep everything locked inside your stony exterior? ❀ That wasn’t a metaphor. Your skin is literally made of stone. Somewhere in your dramatic and sad backstory as the squire of an itinerant knight, you were struck by a terrible Outside curse. Your skin is thick and grey and hard, your face is marked like the side of a mountain. You’re self-conscious about it and that makes you mad. It’s hard being a teenager, and nobody understands. ❀ You’re going to tag along on your friends’ adventure because someone needs to protect them - from the dangers of the Outside and from themselves. They don’t know what it’s like out there. It’s your job to make sure they don’t find out. Sidebar: Shake it Up! For an atypical Granite Knight experience, pick 0-3 of the following: ❀ Instead of the young woman Oboliu Waite, you can be Dace Lillimut, a young man ❀ Instead of the squire to an itinerant knight, you used to be a superhero’s kid sidekick. ❀ Maybe you’re not 18, you’re actually thousands of years old. Wow. ❀ Your Curse isn’t stone-skin, it’s.... ✶ … a burning flame in your head that never goes out. ✶ … a transformative disease parasite that lets you grow tentacles. ✶ … lycanthropy. ✶ … a genius IQ that separates you from mortals.

Sidebar: Playing Dace Lillimut You’re a bit less stoic than Oboliu. Smiling comes easier to you and you’ve even been known, every once in a while, to laugh. Also, you are, most likely, a werewolf.

Journey to the Outside - Characters

Prepare to go on a great quest to the ends of Creation and well, well beyond. Before you know what to pack for such a quest, though, you need to figure out just who you are! So, are you...

❀ The Light Seeker, Tripp Tanaka, if you want

✶ to be the sort of person who tends to fall headfirst into trouble

✶ to make friends out of enemies

✶ to be sort of naive and embarrassing

✶ to have a mission to find a great treasure

(or are you the Rider girl variant, Susan Numidia, instead?)

❀ The Peerless Spirit, Sonya Hou, if you want

✶ to be an impossibly skilled nature god

✶ to be a reluctant hero and a bit of a jerk

✶ to climb a ladder to heaven and face what doth dwell therein

(or are you the cyborg variant, SWk-2456, instead?)

❀ The Vice Magus, Roderick Titov, if you want

✶ to be something of a comic relief

✶ to use weird and scary magic to get what you want

✶ to decide the fate of whole worlds despite being wildly unqualified

(or are you the girl variant, Zoey Titova, instead? Or maybe you're Colbrand, the False Light?)

❀ The Granite Knight, Oboliu Waite, if you want

✶ to be steadfast even in the face of terrible things

✶ to labor under a terrible enchantment

✶ to get things done when your companions are always faffing about

✶ to be asked to sacrifice your life to remove a great darkness from the world

(or are you the boy variant, Dace Lillimut, instead?)

❀ The Servant Prince, Julian Lungren, if you want

✶ to change into a bunch of shapes but especially an enormous dragon!

✶ to quest to regain your honor and impress your family

✶ to put someone else's needs before your own

✶ I did mention becoming a dragon, right?

(or are you the girl variant, Yurian Lopez, instead?)

Or come and be . . .

❀ The HG, or "Hollyhock God," if you want

✶ to focus on describing the world rather than being attached to any particular character

✶ to play the game, and nobody else is being the HG, so you had better!

✶ to be able to just say that things happen and they do, and

✶ to help pull together a story from the things characters do,

My fairly terrible Mignola-copying cover for a fictional Natalie Coutourier-starring Chuubo's comic called "Winter: Flowers in the Ice". I'm not done, but I don't know that I ever will be done so...

Chuubo!

Angel of Fortitude again

Hello! I like your character concepts for Chuubo. I check the #cmwge tag often, but only discovered your work through third parties. Have you not been tagging them, or is Tumblr's tag system being wonky again?

I put #cmwge on all of these, I'm pretty sure(too tired to check), and definitely on this first several, so I don't know what to say.

The Servant Prince

Academics Skill: Average Sports Skill: Average Favorite Foods: Gems, Diamonds, Wizard Blood Type: O+ Animal: Dragon Age: 14 An Interesting Fact About You: You are the disgraced heir of a line of Draconic Nobility. Character Description ❀ You used to be important. As the son of the Fifth Lord of the Polar Palace, you were destined to live a charmed life of duty and glory. You were to oversee a fief in your father’s domain and watch over the world from on high. But then, you made a mistake. You brought shame on yourself and your family. In his inimitable wisdom, your father stripped you of your titles and lands and banished you from his domain. You’re still a member of the spirit courts, but you are marked and disgraced and few will still take your calls. Now you live in a modest cottage in the Walking Fields, with only your most loyal servants to keep you company. It all seems sort of rough for a kid, but… that’s just how it is, you guess. ❀ You aren’t really a human. Most of the time you look like one, but, in fact, you are a coatl, a shapeshifting sky dragon. You can change your shape into any animal and even transform into an enormous feathered serpent with scales like rainbows. It’s a pretty cool thing to be! ❀ You’re going on this trip because you’ve been ordered to. Your brother, the Tlatoani of the Eastern Palace, has tasked you with aiding in this quest. If you find the Treasure, he says that it will go a long way to proving that you are ready to return to the Courts Innumerable. You’re much more concerned with what completing the quest will mean for you than the actual fulfillment of the quest, at least at first. Sidebar: Shake it Up! For an atypical Servant Prince experience, pick 0-3 of the following: ❀ Instead of Julian, you're Yurian, the Servant Princess. ❀ Instead of a quest to regain your honor, you’re on a quest to repay a debt. ❀ Instead of a shapeshifting dragon prince, you are… ✶ … an illusion-casting fairy prince. ✶ … a metafictional storybook prince. ✶ … an angelic warden. ✶ … a musical sea lord.

Journey to the Outside

And the angel of the sun did fall. She fell, down, down, from the sky, and into the emptiness beyond the world, beyond the things that were good and real, out where only false and nonexistent things might live.

And then they knew what it was to know darkness, to know meaninglessness, to lose all hope. The world, the whole and breadth of it, knew what it was like to be without a sun.

But at the same time...

...and, perhaps, this was most surprising of all...

At the same time and for the first time, the emptiness beyond knew what it was to have a sun.

And the whole of it changed.

--- Journey to the Outside, a fan campaign for Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine

So, I've been working, off-and-on, for a while on an idea I've had to do a Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine Epic Adventure campaign in the style of Journey to the West. I'm almost ready to get started running it, so I thought I'd share the stuff I've got so far. Instead of actually creating the mechanics for the characters, I'm giving descriptions and allowing the players to choose their Arcs on their own. I'll probably write up, at least, the starting Quests for each character, eventually, but I haven't gotten there yet. So far it's mostly just a list of characters and a bit of description for each one, and their variants.

Introduction

Jade Irinka is dead. The sun has fallen into the Outside and the world is reeling under a strange and alien sky. Each day a ball of blazing gas rises and sets, casting shadows and helping the plants to grow. But it is not the sun - and in their bones, the people of Town know it.

It is a mournful thing to live in a fallen world.

But there is hope. Or, rather, there is a chance for hope. Hope exists, but someone has to venture out into the Outside and get it. Someone has to go on a journey to save the world. And not just anybody: gods and monsters and villains… and also just some guy.

It sounds like it will be an Epic Adventure, doesn’t it?

Sidebar: Conventions

This campaign is an Epic Fantasy game featuring THREE Conventions, manifesting as level 2 Afflictions:

The stage may be small but audience is great

You are well known wherever you go

And

There’s always a place to stay when the weather gets bad

A quick doodle of... okay, it's Meenah from Homestuck, but it's, in this case, the image I'll be using for my character in an RPG who is also a fish-chick with a trident.  It's... complicated...  whatever.