Character: Karen Chien Chang
May. 16th, 2004 11:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zdashamberToday Accordion Guy got his ancient and modern posts together in one place (alas, it's the one that for me at least takes for-freeging-ever to load), and pointed out his best (which are really good, an excellent way to spend time if you haven't encountered him yet). Among these was one from two years back that I hadn't seen, where he was discussing banking in Chinatown, and how the ladies depositing their store's money would sometimes try to set him up with their daughters...
It reminded me of a bit I really loved in the Feng Shui game my ftf group played a couple sessions of. My character, Karen Chang, was a "Karate Cop"; I was deciding between that and "Old Master", among whose suggested skills was "noodle making". I was told that the Old Master usually kicked the bucket at the end of the story arc in an Obi Wan kind of way, and also it was the first time I ever played Feng Shui and the Old Master had all sorts of Fu skills that looked complex mechanically, so I ended up going for the simplicity of the Karate Cop... Plus, one of my favorite characters ever was a practical deadpan cop and I was happy to recycle that, and I was looking forward to playing the straightman to the Magic Cop in the game.
But I figured, why let the Old Master thing go to waste? So I figured Karen's mom was an Old Master, who once was a pretty young asskicker in China, and met Karen's dad on some secret mission. Now, she a runs noodle restaurant in SF Chinatown.
So, the cop pair ran into some odd Feng Shui stuff down at the docks, and learned they had to stop something from going down on the Golden Gate Bridge at midnight. While her partner tells colorful stories to the brass, Karen meets to plan with the Ninja who happened to help them out at the docks. Since they're starving, they meet at Karen's mom's noodle place.
The Ninja arrives first. Karen's mom immediately sizes him up, and decides he'd be a great match for her daughter, who's already 30-something and still not married... She asks him his name and finds out that he's Japanese. Oh. So much for that. But--it's Feng Shui, and everyone speaks perfect Cantonese! So he's passable after all! So she piles on him the best noodles in the house and goes to drag out the baby pictures of Karen... And Karen, reticent savvy cop or not, gets to turn bright red and go, "MOmmm..."
It was great. Watching Bernie, son of Chinese parents, doing the Asian-mom-trumping-Old-Master thing... Hah! And Damian, the sweet guy who plays the Ninja doing the shared-embarassment thing with me... Hah!
Little things, I tell ya.
Feng Shui characters start with melodramatic hooks, and I picked "twin brother that turned to evil." And the day that we made characters and played the first session (with the embarassing mother bit), I was completely tired, so Karen ended up with a kind of rough whispering voice; the kind you get when you can't be arsed to make your vocal cords vibrate. I really loved the voice; it helped me keep the character reticent and less apt to poke her nose into everything, which is something my characters tend to. It occurred to me that her voice was like that because in a fight with her twin after she'd found out he'd gone bad, one of his kicks crushed her larynx. (Her family situation really all fell together very quickly and nicely; I was totally pleased with that.) And I think there is actually the chance of a romance between her and the ninja, which would be a lot of fun...
I was also happy to have come up with a good name... I like the way Karen Chang sounds. She's definitely one of those people who have an Asian name with a (usually similar-sounding) English name used for convenience... I think I took the name of someone in my dorm in college sophmore year, Chien Chang (which I also like), which would make it sure to be an accurate Chinese name if I remembered it right—she went by Vivian.
I'm game for more Feng Shui, but I don't know if we'll be back there any time soon, since we get a lot of Bernie's GMing (he does the main campaign, a homebrew FUDGE thing; on off weeks we do one shots and other stuff), and so we tend to lean towards one of the other guys GMing. And they do cool stuff, too, which I'll no doubt mention sooner or later.
It reminded me of a bit I really loved in the Feng Shui game my ftf group played a couple sessions of. My character, Karen Chang, was a "Karate Cop"; I was deciding between that and "Old Master", among whose suggested skills was "noodle making". I was told that the Old Master usually kicked the bucket at the end of the story arc in an Obi Wan kind of way, and also it was the first time I ever played Feng Shui and the Old Master had all sorts of Fu skills that looked complex mechanically, so I ended up going for the simplicity of the Karate Cop... Plus, one of my favorite characters ever was a practical deadpan cop and I was happy to recycle that, and I was looking forward to playing the straightman to the Magic Cop in the game.
But I figured, why let the Old Master thing go to waste? So I figured Karen's mom was an Old Master, who once was a pretty young asskicker in China, and met Karen's dad on some secret mission. Now, she a runs noodle restaurant in SF Chinatown.
So, the cop pair ran into some odd Feng Shui stuff down at the docks, and learned they had to stop something from going down on the Golden Gate Bridge at midnight. While her partner tells colorful stories to the brass, Karen meets to plan with the Ninja who happened to help them out at the docks. Since they're starving, they meet at Karen's mom's noodle place.
The Ninja arrives first. Karen's mom immediately sizes him up, and decides he'd be a great match for her daughter, who's already 30-something and still not married... She asks him his name and finds out that he's Japanese. Oh. So much for that. But--it's Feng Shui, and everyone speaks perfect Cantonese! So he's passable after all! So she piles on him the best noodles in the house and goes to drag out the baby pictures of Karen... And Karen, reticent savvy cop or not, gets to turn bright red and go, "MOmmm..."
It was great. Watching Bernie, son of Chinese parents, doing the Asian-mom-trumping-Old-Master thing... Hah! And Damian, the sweet guy who plays the Ninja doing the shared-embarassment thing with me... Hah!
Little things, I tell ya.
Feng Shui characters start with melodramatic hooks, and I picked "twin brother that turned to evil." And the day that we made characters and played the first session (with the embarassing mother bit), I was completely tired, so Karen ended up with a kind of rough whispering voice; the kind you get when you can't be arsed to make your vocal cords vibrate. I really loved the voice; it helped me keep the character reticent and less apt to poke her nose into everything, which is something my characters tend to. It occurred to me that her voice was like that because in a fight with her twin after she'd found out he'd gone bad, one of his kicks crushed her larynx. (Her family situation really all fell together very quickly and nicely; I was totally pleased with that.) And I think there is actually the chance of a romance between her and the ninja, which would be a lot of fun...
I was also happy to have come up with a good name... I like the way Karen Chang sounds. She's definitely one of those people who have an Asian name with a (usually similar-sounding) English name used for convenience... I think I took the name of someone in my dorm in college sophmore year, Chien Chang (which I also like), which would make it sure to be an accurate Chinese name if I remembered it right—she went by Vivian.
I'm game for more Feng Shui, but I don't know if we'll be back there any time soon, since we get a lot of Bernie's GMing (he does the main campaign, a homebrew FUDGE thing; on off weeks we do one shots and other stuff), and so we tend to lean towards one of the other guys GMing. And they do cool stuff, too, which I'll no doubt mention sooner or later.