Check out the sound effect post at the bottom

[zdashamber]

Coughed up from sickness's maw, covered in foul saliva, and yet: I live! And I gotta say, the Serenity trailer? Is awesome. I love Mal.

Right! simonepdx has requested we share the characters we're currently playing. Or at least, that's how I'm taking it, because the characters who I'm not presently playing but who are still hanging around in my brainspace are mostly kinda psychos, and the "fucking psychos" character post is for some future time.

The major two at the moment are the two in the main campaigns I'm playing, Keket and Carlos Salado y Ortiz.

I'm involved in two gaming groups presently, one I found just last October or so, and one I've been with since late '98. The older group has been through several campaigns by various GMs amongst us. Currently we're playing Amber set in Ancient Egypt, run by the brilliant and handsome Jeff, who'd get described thusly even if he didn't read my LJ, Hi Jeff! ;P It's called Heavy Feathers.

My character for Heavy Feathers is Keket, daughter of Horus, Goddess of Dreams, Prophecy, and Drugs. But she's a lot more invested in Warfare than any of that god stuff. I echo Morpheus a bit with the Dream thing, and when I start getting too compassionate, a constant failing, I try to "Remember, thou art a drug dealer." Keket's got the head and neck of about an arms-length of horned viper. She's got a really neat set of relationships with various others of the gods. I've been meaning to write up a full Keket post.

The newer gaming group, GMed by jhkim and whumpdotcom, is playing Buffy, and has a spiffy webpage for the campaign, "Silicon Valley Slayage." My character, Carlos Salado y Ortiz, and nearly all of the others, have LiveJournals, which amuses me greatly. I've nearly created an entire fake life for him; could add some refinements, but.

Anyway, Carlos is from Miami and then Berkeley and then with all of his Cuban-parents world-changing Berkeley-honed ideals he went to Africa with Doctors Without Borders and joined the Watchers and made a raid on the First Evil that ended with him shipped back to the States missing a chunk of memories. He fled medicine for computers. He's trying to be a moral voice in the Vampster crew, but he's not really sure how moral he is, and he's in the process of becoming an alcoholic. The end of the season is approaching...

The older group tries to meet two weeks a month for Heavy Feathers, and the other two weeks, when various people are out, for something else. These something elses are often oneshots, but there are some continuing sorts of things...

One of these is Palace, the Buffy game run by Mike. It's set in a strange art noveau town in Arizona, and our only Hero-level character is a werewolf played by Bernie. I'm playing Venus, the ghost of a girl caught in a lava lamp when she died in a screwed-up magic ritual in the late 60s. She's sort of practical these days, though on the other hand, she's going to be pursuing the werewolf even though she's immaterial, since hey, he's hot, and if you hadn't noticed, he ends up naked every time he changes back to human.

Since Venus doesn't sleep, she taught herself Spanish from all-night infomercials. It's a glamorous life. ;)

Another of the games with a continuing thread is Bernie's Feng Shui game, where I play Karen Chang, a Karate Cop with the SF police, whose career was going fine until she got partnered up with motleypolitico's Magic Cop, and now she's getting all the "weird" cases. On the other hand, her twin brother who went evil is also involved in the weird stuff, so.

She hates her brother in an intense case of sibling rivalry. For one thing, since he took evil, she's stuck with good, where her mother can harass her constantly about why she hasn't found a husband and settled down, is she still seeing that nice Ninja? Mom, I'm not seeing the ninja, we're just friends...

I wrote up an actual character thing about Karen here.

And then there's the continuing Deadlands thing, which I miss, but Jeff runs it and HF takes up most of his attention, and HF is great, so. I play Henry Edward Mission, who took his airship and cashed out of the Civil War. Easier that way, since his wife is from the Union. I bought her as a sidekick, but she's the brains of the operation; she keeps the ship running, too. Though she seems to be drifting towards mad science. Thinking about it, Jeff tends to introduce complications into my happy little long-term relationships. Hm...

Anyway, Mission's great, because he's very acute, but not clever. Quite a decent fellow, good with a yarn. I wrote up a thing about him here, with onamotopoeic sound effects!

Now, I feel like I'm missing someone, or several someones, but it's late, so I'll content myself with this for the nonce.

Comments

[nakedvillainy.livejournal.com]

How do you manage to play so many male characters? I remember your Doc Holiday in "Luke and Merle," and your Benedict in "Fall of the House of Amber" -- both good. I try to play guys and they come out gay. It's a struggle to keep my NPCs in manly land when I run -- Caine just slides right into "Pirates of the Carribean" Johnny Depp.

[zdashamber.livejournal.com]

Maybe it's that I-the-player honestly don't believe there's any difference between men and women. Or maybe all of my characters are roughly the same, and I get away with it because I'm a tomboy/butch/whathaveyou. Maybe it's that I tend to eschew flamboyance in all characters, so even the gay ones are pretty low key about it. I dunno.

If you can do the Jack Sparrow thing, I'm envious. :) (And Brand in "Fall of the House of Amber" didn't strike me as gay--just completely psycho...)

[nakedvillainy.livejournal.com]

Well, I think "completely psycho" outstrips whatever sexuality there might be....and honestly, that character was just as much Thaddeus' responsibility as mine. His description was "you're always somewhere between hysterical laughter and hysterical tears," and "you overdosed on hashish the night you heard that your father died, and now you keep seeing his ghost." I just ran with it. (Okay, I was entirely responsible for the peeing on the floor thing.)

[simonepdx.livejournal.com]

Wow, Heavy Feathers looks very cool indeed :-)

About the male characters thing, I think you're on to something when you say it may be that you just don't believe there's any difference. It works for me that way, too, and gives you room to inhabit the character rather than inhabiting a stereotype of his or her gender or sexuality. Dunno... sounds about right though; that's how it feels when I get it right, at least.

[zdashamber.livejournal.com]

Heavy Feathers is very cool! Did you check out the shapeshifting system? I was just thinking as I walked to lunch how well it worked to echo the Egyptian gods and their various forms, to be able to shift points around from form to form.

One of the PCs draws a bunch of points out of Temple every time he shifts into a combat form, so we joke about how his temple starts sinking back into the swamp and winos wander by to pee in its corners... We've agreed that the smell of urine in a temple steadily decreases until you reach Temple 3, where it's entirely gone. :) One of my favorite quotes was joshing someone about her Temple: 1; "Hey, I raised that, it's 2 now!" "Great! Now rabbits don't attack you!"

For the male characters thing, I like the way you put it, with the "room to inhabit the character rather than inhabiting a stereotype of his or her gender or sexuality". That's how I hope it is, too.