Character morgue

I have a battered file folder marked “Character Morgue”, which contains character sheets for fifty-four characters that I have played since the Eighties. The collection is very incomplete. Only one of my RuneQuest characters is included (Andvari Hammerhand), and none of my Champions, James Bond 007, or Call of Cthulhu characters survive. I wish I still had a character sheet for Hermod the Silent (who was very nearly a Sword of Humakt). I don’t remember ever playing Myron — perhaps I generated him for someone else to play in one of my adventures.

  1. Albion (HindSight character for my Gehennum setting)
  2. Andrew Jackson Armstrong (ForeSight character for Tony Purcell’s New York PIs campaign)
  3. Andvari Hammerhand (RuneQuest character)
  4. Anneke Yonge (Star Wars D20)
  5. Ariel Jones (ForeSight character for a campaign inspired by “Nine Princes in Amber”)
  6. Asoka Asaiak (ForeSight character for one of Tonio Loewald’s ForeScene campaigns)
  7. Bluefin (HindSight character for a Gehennum campaign)
  8. Carman Tilgath (HindSight character for one of Tonio Loewald’s Fvaldanon campaigns)
  9. Catherine Han (ForeSight character for a modern/Lovecraftish campaigns)
  10. Chan Ka-kui (HindSight character for a fantasy Tang China campaign)
  11. Chen Fu (CyberPunk 2020 character for a CthulhuPunk campaign)
  12. David “Biff” Davis (ForeSight character for a '20s pulp campaign)
  13. David Tran (ForeSight character for a Delta Green campaign)
  14. Edmund “Bluelights” Edwinson (D&D character for a campaign set in a fantasy version of Durham in 1090)
  15. Edmund Fitzalan (Ghosts of Albion playtest character)
  16. Gideon Yang (ForeSight character for a Flat Black campaign I don’t remember playing)
  17. Great Bronze Gong (HindSight character for a fantasy campaign)
  18. Harry Armitage (ForeSight character from a Nazi-punching campaign)
  19. Ikorn M. Friedman (ForeSight character for one of Tonio Loewald’s ForeScene campaigns)
  20. Ivan Petrovich Romanov (ForeSight character for a campaign of police procedurals in Moscow under glasnost)
  21. Ivrian Immanides “Evander” (HindSight character for a Gehennum adventure)
  22. Ivrian of House Green and Scarlet (HindSight character for a Gehennum campaign)
  23. James Hunter Welrod (ForeSight character from one of Tonio Loewald’s ForeScene campaigns)
  24. Sieur Johannes di Palma (HindSight character for a fantasy campaign inspired by Orlando Furioso)
  25. Karghenin (HERO System character for a fantasy campaign)
  26. Malcolm Lockridge (ForeSight character for one of Tonio Loewald’s Falls the Shadow campaigns)
  27. Maximilian von Gavel (ForeSight character for a Swiss Military Intelligence campaign)
  28. Methlin (HindSight character for a Gehennum campaign)
  29. Dr Miles Grandrith (ForeSight character for a Mars 1889 campaign)
  30. Lt-major Miles Scrivener (ForeSight character for a Flat Black adventure)
  31. Myron (HindSight character for a Gehennum campaign)
  32. Special Agent Nicholas Ashburn (ForeSight character for a pulp Mars campaign)
  33. Nicolas Serafino Garcia de Segrave (Passion Play character for a Fading Suns LARP)
  34. Nikki Graf (ForeSight character for a Flat Black campaign)
  35. Oberon (HindSight character for a Thieves’ World campaign)
  36. Otanes (D&D 3.5 character)
  37. Parmenion (D&D 3.5 character)
  38. Patrick Michael O’Connell (ForeSight character for one of Tonio Loewald’s Falls the Shadow campaign)
  39. Pausanias Lacedaemon (HindSight character for one of Tonio Loewald’s Fvaldanon campaigns)
  40. Quinlivan Ruix (ForeSight character for a fantasy campaign)
  41. Rafe Vitell (ForeSight character for one of Tonio Loewald’s ForeScene campaigns)
  42. Rider Around the Great Heaven-Domed Lodge (HindSight character for a fantasy campaign)
  43. Shinjo Mumon (C&S character for a Rokugan campaign)
  44. Shouts at the Sky (HindSight character for a pirate fantasy campaign)
  45. Simon de Montfort (Vampire character for a Sabbat elders campaign)
  46. Stephen Booker (ForeSight character for an SF campaign set in AD 2100)
  47. Stephen Booker (ForeSight character for a wainscot fantasy campaign)
  48. Lord Tacitus Arbeiter (ForeSight character for a Flat Black campaign)
  49. Telman Orse (ForeSight character for one of Tonio Loewald’s ForeScene campaigns)
  50. Tess Cant (ForeSight character for one of Tonio Loewald’s ForeScene campaigns)
  51. Toshiro Aoki (Bushido sheet)
  52. Toshiro Aoki (HindSightSight sheet)
  53. Tozawa Ichiro (Bushido character)
  54. Yoshida Kenji (HindSight character for a Bushido setting).

Wow, that’s a lot. I haven’t been a player in nearly so many campaigns; I overwhelmingly often run campaigns rather than playing in them.

Bertran (GURPS, set in Dragaera)
David Ralston (GURPS, set in the Infinity Patrol)
Jakes the Cat (set in a friend’s homegrown space pirate game)
Judith van Rijn (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, though not in the Buffyverse)
La Gata Encantada (GURPS Supers)
Linnaeus Jorgensen (Call of Cthulhu)
Maria Weiss (set in the same friend’s cosmic horror campaign)
Tomcat (Villains and Vigilantes)
Xenon Warrior Princess (Big Eyes Small Mouth, designed for one-shot play in a session in honor of a dead player of mine)

I don’t seem to have Tursiops (Marvel Super Heroes) or Fornication Jones (GURPS Swashbucklers: “Me da named me ‘Fly-Fornication,’ him being a Puritan, but the ‘fly’ fell off while I was in the Army”). I regret mislaying Fornication Jones; he was my first big exercise in tying together a long list of GURPS traits suggested by a high concept—in his case, “master gunner.” (Possibly his best bit was when we were getting ready to seize a French prize, and he did the timing chant: “The French—they are—a fun-—ny race. Port! Guns! Fire!”) Or Nick Landry, a young woman in training to become a superpowered spy. . . . That’s only a sixth of your list.

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Yeah, it is. And yet there must be a couple of dozen characters missing. None of those characters is from before I started at ANU in 1986, so there must be three or four AD&D characters, a Traveller character, two Rolemaster characters, a Pendragon character, at least two Tunnels & Trolls characters, a Call of Cthulhu character, and a Danger International character missing from schooldays and my time at UNSW.

My Champions characters from ANU days were

  • Colonel Carnage (an armoured energy protector)
  • Leviathan (a brick)
  • Black Lotus (a brick with strength based on EGO)

My characters in ForeScene and HindSight playtests were

  • Seraphim Booth (a starship mechanic)
  • Gimlet son of Grommet (a dwarvish mercenary)

I’m missing

  • at least three James Bond 007 characters who are sadly un-memorable.
  • A DragonQuest character (he was a fencer)
  • My first Bushido character (a Bushi who died heroically to provide a modicum of Karma to Tozawa Ichiro)
  • An alien student of the Force (Star Wars RPG (D6) character).
  • My Castle Falkenstein character, a British doctor.
  • My In Nomine character, an Eloh of Michael seconded to the War on Crime.
  • Another Pendragon character, a young pagan knight.
  • A “character” (if you can call them that) for Immortal: Invisible War.
  • A Space 1889 version of Dr. Grandrith, red captain
  • and a ForeSight character called “Gordon Rossiter” that replaced the ForeSight version of him. He was a blacksmith and inventor.
  • My first RuneQuest character (who died young),
  • Hermod the Silent (aspirant Sword of Humakt),
  • and the one RQ character whom I ever got up to Rune level (a RunePriest Lord of Elmal).
  • At least three investigators from Call of Cthulhu: an alienist, a priest, and a semi-criminal pilot.

All in all I must have played about ninety characters over the decades, not counting at cons. Some were for one-shot adventures, or generated for campaigns that failed to take fire.

I don’t have any of my early PCs any more. In a folder I haven’t opened for a while, I find (leaving out ones that I have absolutely no memory of playing):

Kylara Vaile, first-level AD&D assassin;
Eären Veriel, 3/3 AD&D F/MU
Kehinde, a 4th-level Gamba Fighter from the Nyambe setting.
Tulisios the Barbarian, from one of Phil Masters’s convention scenarios (AFAIR it was basically Buffy in the classical world)
Hazan-Kiv, a half-demon from Bugtown (“you’re half-human? Ew.”)
Mzczslavcz Szyszko-Czaczvcz, a Mitteleuropan anarchist for Call of Cthulhu. (Still alive, because the party was unimpressed with his effete ways, and left him on guard outside the old spooky house. When there was brief screaming followed by crunching noises, he decided that he’d had enough of this investigation lark and went back to seducing impressionable young rich socialist women.)
Nicola Blake, a Solo with techie tendencies for Cyberpunk 2020.
Lisa Sakharova, a CP2020 OTV pilot who got hired in to haul the party around.
Helen Camberley, a tech/medtech for CP2020. Quite a thick file, with life story, apartment plans, contacts, cyberware in excruciating detail, etc.
Ryan Forrest (“yeah, I know, I had weird parents OK”), a Temp Cop from a friend’s Daley City campaign (CP2020 heavily modified).
Barry Foster, a Solo from that campaign.
Marianne Gryphon, a medtech from that campaign. (There were several iterations of Daley City looking at different parts of the world - it wasn’t a particularly high death rate.)
“Mad” Joseph Long, apparently a “former Black Hat” from Deadlands. I don’t remember much about him., though he seems to be a rifle, shotgun and fist specialist.
Sir Roland Kendry, a rich gentleman with delusions of knighthood from a GURPS 3e campaign – in the time and place of the condottiere, but not especially connected to them. (What would have been a perk if they’d existed in those days - he can say “My ransom is 30,000 pieces of silver” in every commonly-spoken language.)
Virginia Camberley, a Timepiece agent from GURPS Time Travel.
Morgan Thalasi, a Lace and Steel duellist.
Ilvenia Mordag, a mercenary necromancer in the Dark Space setting.
Benny Herzog, a Mossad operative from Torg (“and me without any plastic explosive”).
Yael Herzog, his sister who’d got converted to the Nile Empire reality and was now an extremely Weird Scientist.
Catherine Herzog, another sister, who’d got caught by the Cyberpapacy and was now a reformed inquisitor.
Lucas Hopkins, a judicial champion in the Warhammer fantasy world. He regarded himself as a lawyer, genuinely believed that the gods determined the winner of judicial bouts, and favoured the flail (“I hate divorce cases”)…

I remember, but don’t have a character sheet for:
Dances with Junk Bonds, a WoD Werewolf shaman (homid, theurge, glasswalker) who felt that the technology of humans was the most practical means of restraining them (“we don’t want to kill them all - we’ll need to keep some alive in reservations”).

In other places, mostly more recent than that:

Michael Mortimer Mitchell, GURPS Werewolf Corax (were-crow). Specialised in knowing people who could get stuff done, and baiting the rest of the party.
Alexander Hamish MacDonald, steampunk engineer

In my GURPS 4th edition files I find:

Bruce Murder Howell (for a CSI-type game that never happened)
Dr Gregory Bennett (a Laundry Files investigator)
Sir James Taverner (an Elizabethan Mage and gentleman of the Art)
Vajra (the Transhuman Space Buddhist AI I sometimes mention)
Hugin. Munin and Samadhi (its servitors)
Sir Vorick of Mansel (decadent small-polity noble in Traveller)
Kunigonde Stoutenburgh (Cabalist mage and arguable megalomaniac)
Edith Molyneaux (her maid and chaperone)

With Whartson Hall I’ve played:

John Hanrahan, anarchist and investigator of Things What Should Not Be
Archibald Moncrieffe, engineer and businessman (Forgotten Futures)
“Guts” Zielinski, college ice hockey enforcer (The Cthulhu Hack)
Dr Patrick Zarkov (of the Tipperary Zarkovs) in Fallout (Genesys)
Captain Benjamin Drake, a Forgotten Futures occult investigator
Blaise, a Strontium Dog (“not really very mutated at all”)

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Reading RogerBW’s list I am reminded of a CyberPunk 2020 character I played before Chen Fu and in a campaign without supernumerary tentacles, and of two Garou from Werewolf campaigns, a Metis theurge and a Lupus theurge.

Plus which I had forgotten the Earl of Rule, an English Royalist exile in Seventeenth-Century France (ForeSight).

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I see that I left out my Changeling character, Edward Two Dogs Fucking, an unseelie pooka grump whose animal form was a coyote. He was a deliberate exercise in playing contrary to type: I based him on a person most of us knew who was a habitual bullshitter, and made him a social manipulator, con artist, and petty thief. He claimed to have been the inspiration for the cartoon character of Wile E. Coyote by telling Indian trickster tales to the staff are Warner Brothers; one of his attributes was an Acme Backpack of Holding from which he could pull out objects at need—but not always predictably. (One of his less successful rolls got a full-sized ostrich, kind of like Bullwinkle’s “Don’t know my own strength.”)

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Shouldn’t he be listed under Whartson Hall characters? The name seems familiar, like someone who would have journeyed through space with the likes of the intrepid Grigori, Dr. Kirin, and Tunnock T. Cake.

Did he have a slightly younger twin brother called One Man Bucket? :wink:

The archive of GURPS characters for games I’ve run is separated by campaign, but all the characters played by me are in one directory.

(It’s all under version control, of course. And that’s proved surprisingly useful, to resolve questions like “when did I get that ability”.)

That could definitely have been a Whartson Hall character! When you do a wiki search for people with that name, you find a reference to Voltaire’s novel Candide, which featured a character called Cunégonde:

While Cunégonde may be derived from Cunigunde of Luxemburg, the name is also a pun on French and Latin terms for female genitalia and buttocks.

Such a given name conveys rather different associations to the surname “Stoutenburgh”, as well…

She’s from a Dutch merchant family (“tulip bulbs have been good to us”) who came over during the Glorious Revolution, and she talked her way into the Royal Society of the early 1700s. She’s working on changing her home society via [censored], which the rest of the players don’t know about (the bits they do know about they think are probably harmless). She probably doesn’t have the right sense of humour to be played in a Whartson Hall campaign.

Oh, and there was my character in @thelibrarian’s Spirit of the Century campaign, “Rockets, Spies, and Private Eyes”: Kawai Ichiro, the Shinobi Shiro! His character sheets (one of then designed to be read upside-down from the other side of the table) are still in the “Rockets, Spies, and Private Eyes” folder rather than the “Character Morgue” folder.

One of my regular players told me about a character she played in someone else’s campaign, named “Cunegonde Sticherin Fuchs”. . . .