From Deadlands Classic:

A snake handling Pentecostal Blessed with the “grim servant of death” flaw. As he genuinely tries to save souls, people often get bit by the rattlesnakes he carries with him. Technically he doesn’t break the law but most sheriffs don’t want him sticking around. Sadly the campaign never got started.

These are amazing.

I’m going to shamelessly steal some of these for NPCs in my campaigns.

Not mine, but a collaborativr effort: Young dryad loses physical body and is imprisoned in a robotic shell. She escapes and now all of her former magical druid powers are a combination of mechanical contraptions and just a dash of magic. She runs on magic energy, but her acid spray cantrip is truly a small vaporizer embedded in her palm. Really cool, but the Player stop playing that char vecause we restricted her wild shape to much :/ in hindsight, i really dont like my dming decisions regarding that char

An insane Bavarian retired geology professor, turned conspiracy theorist, who was trying to bring his dead wife back, and win back the approval of his estranged daughter. Died one session in after being bitten by an insane cultist.

Yes, I did a Bavarian dialect the whole time. No, I’m not good at it. Yes, there where real Bavarians at the table (well, one of them was Franconian, but same difference (don’t tell her I said that)).

Shadowrun 4e. A hacker who was way into drag racing. I got really into statting his race car, and even made driving equal to hacking. He was in deep in the underworld, trying to buy his childhood friend out of her indentured servitude at a brothel.

Mad Max style wasteland campaign: A Shepard boy, skilled at archery, wandering the wasteland with a talking dog (who was named Blood, but wasn’t evil). I saw this kid as being on the more idealistic and good side, and I picked a concept connected to society in contrast to what the other PCs picked (A reformed Mohawker, a powerful mutated woman wielding a stop sign, and a “priest of KISS” following the concert routes his roadie parents took before the bombs dropped, mistaking them for religious pilgrimage)… sorry that one had a lot of gas.

Superheroes: A jewish journalist who learns he is the inheritor of the Golem of Prague, and with it, a tradition of Talmudic magic. The other party members were a Bisexual paramedic/ vigilante by night (me and her player agreed that we were roommates lol) and the last one was a black teenager who killed a cop after he had paralyzed his brother. The campaign started and we were “the cop killers” and were protecting a small minority community but I keep thinking that had so much gas in the tank and room to grow and I might spin that off into its own campaign.

I’m just so sick of heroic high fantasy

A gnoll taken as a cub and raised by good clerics as a test of nature vs nurture. He was all about freeing slaves and offering redemption to evildoers, but was also bloodthirsty in battle with the truly evil.

For a short adventure / one-shot, I played an intelligence-based tome warlock (using some of the play test materials). His patron was… himself, in the past. He was a terrible evil wizard who realized the error of his ways, wiped his own memory, and restarted. His tome was just his old spell book, most of which was pretty gnarly stuff. Slowly finding that out would have been a fun journey if he was a long-term character.

A tiefling divine soul sorcerer with the Criminal background. He was born to two pious tiefling clerics of Lathander who saw their fiendish blood as a curse, and prayed to cleanse their unborn child of devilish influence. When he was born a Divine Soul, his parents tried to raise him as their perfect priestess. He had to be a model tiefling, a representative of his entire race as well as Lathander himself. He chafed under the obligation and ran away from home, living on the streets and stealing to get by, all while trying to hide his divine soul powers out of a combination of rejecting them and just trying not to draw attention.

Slinking around in the shadows eventually led to him wandering into the Mists of Ravenloft, and he found himself in Barovia. He found his way into a party and essentially just acted like the party rogue for a bit until combat came and he got backed into a corner and he suddenly started throwing around guiding bolts.

I was really looking forward to doing a whole arc with him reclaiming his powers and figuring out what it meant to be himself, but OOC stuff led to me leaving that group before he had a chance to leave his edgy rogue phase :c

I wanted to play a necromancer of no particular class, whose skeletal grandmother followed him around under his thrall. His village practiced a kind of ancestor worship where on holidays they animate the skeletons of their family and dress them up in clothes and jewelry and try to (symbolically) show them a good time as a gesture of appreciation. The tribe’s forest was burned down or village destroyed and PC had to run for it, taking only his most prized possession - the bones of his matriarch. Over the course of the campaign I’d like to add nicer clothes and jewelry to the skeleton, maybe give it magic items.

Ultimately it’s just not feasible to play a non-evil necromancer, and my table doesn’t play evil anyway either.

Throwaway idea: A Loxodon (elephant) bard named Harry Elefánte.

A human beastmaster whose spellcasting focus was a tiny awakened shrub (which was slightly on fire) and had a flying snake pet.

He was a Pokemon trainer. “Cindertwig, use your Thorn Whip! Now, Create Bonfire!” “Flython, do a Poison Fang attack!”

We only had one very short combat for the 1 shot.

Low wis warlock who is convinced he’s actually a Paladin, and is confused why his oath keeps seeming to change arbitrarily. Thought that signing the contract was making his oath.

A warforged that escaped the war, met another defector, and together tried to start a new life. Unfortunately, the kingdom sent assassins after them in order to silence them and make sure that they would not switch sides. The human died, but the warforged lived on, carrying with it the remorse of not being able to save them. To honor its friend, it kept the nickname that the human gave it - Hector, which was a pun based on its model name (Tactical Heavy Operations Robot, model H -> H, T.H.O.R. -> Hector).

Survivor’s guilt was the main idea behind the build: It was a Fighter Rune Knight built to tank damage and protect its allies as better as it could (Heavy armor master, Interception fighting style, Cloud rune).

Tanking damage is not optimal in DnD (killing the damage dealer is always the best choice) but it was meant to be a low-level one shot, so it was fine. Unfortunately work, family and other real life issues got in the way and the party wasn’t able to convene on a date where everyone could gather and play for four hours straight.

I got to play this character for several sessions, but he deserved more.

A lesser Devil modified bard chef. D&D Pirate Game with a drow captain of a haunted ship.

My bard powers were all based on cooking. In order to buff the crew I had to feed them. I had a constant supply of hors d’oeuvres, tiny deserts, etc. After combat, I would heal the party by cooking 5 star gourmet meals. I fought with a meat cleaver.

My back story: I was basically on the run. I was Gold Star Master of Sauces and Boilings, 3rd Degree Initiate of the Sulfur Ovens and Bonded Sous-chef of the School of Flesh and Broth in the City of Dis, 87 years into a 500 year Sous-chef contract that I was AWOL from. I got summoned to the Prime Material Plane in order to cater a wedding party for the daughter of a shady wizard and I managed to exploit a loop hole in the contract I signed with him to leave to get ingredients and never come back. He was pissed at me for ruining his daughter’s wedding reception and my masters at the School of Flesh and Broth told him “Capture and return our Sous-chef, or else!” So he was my primary antagonist.

But I had a plan! I wrote up a contract for people to sign to try to get them to be my apprentices. By Prime Material Plane standards, I was a genuine gold star level chef. All those poor sods you see competing on Hell’s Kitchen would kill to study under someone of my skill level. Basically, the contract was structured such that if they managed to complete an apprenticeship with me, they should be able to obtain employment with kings, popes and sultans. However, if they failed to complete their apprenticeship, I would own their soul. My goal was to be a complete dick to my apprentices to the point that they would give up and run away and fail to complete their training. Then, when I had a small collection of souls, I could return to the 9 Hells and buy out my contract and get them to stop chasing me.

Sadly, the campaign only lasted three sessions.

A few of my favourite clauses from the contract:

Apprentice certifies that, to the best of their knowledge, their Mortal Soul is in sound and original condition, not bound into their body through any enchantments, curses or blessings of undeath or deathlessness (or other mystical bindings), not owed to any other being of the Lower Planes or other Outer Planar Origin, not claimed by any deity or near-deity for any purpose and in no other ways is it’s transfer into Chef’s lawful possession in the event of a breach (5.0). impeded. Furthermore, that they will NOT promise, commit, sell, license or gift their soul to any third party during the terms of this contract.

Neither party shall be liable for any failure to perform their obligations under this agreement if prevented from doing so by a cause or causes reasonably beyond their control. Without limiting the generality of the foregoing, such causes include Acts of deities or near-deities, disruptions to the structure of the planes of existence, infernal war operations (the Blood War), temporal disruptions, Wishes made by third parties or other similar cause or causes which could not with reasonable diligence be controlled or prevented by the party. This clause IN NO WAY waives the obligations of the Apprentice with respect to clause clause 1.1 i.

If Apprentice abandons the apprenticeship due to unanticipated death (2.5), a grace period of 3 days will be granted, during which time Apprentice may be resurrected or otherwise returned to life (including as an undead being), upon which event Apprentice agrees to immediately and without delay return to their Apprenticeship. Failure to do so shall be considered a breach of this contract.

In the first campaign I ever played in, I ran a necromancy wizard that was neutral good.

Basically, he grew up a hermit and has zero awareness of the taboos surrounding his school of magic. However, because of his alignment, he has a very different approach to how he uses his magic.

Whenever he has to raise undead to fight for him, he does it by asking for their aid rather than outright raising them. He approaches the practice more as a way to preserve the lives of the living rather than a way of amassing servants or power. When he no longer needs their help, he thanks them and tries to make sure they either return to their resting place or are given a proper burial.

His overarching goal is to ensure everyone lives a long, full life and wishes to find a way to resurrect others in the way other classes can to help achieve that goal.

Didn’t get to play him for long since the group kinda fell apart