Based on last reblog, I wanted to talk a little about the complete coincidence of the time we prior to discovering our condition made a plural character with 5 character sheets.

In fact this is the character who Wynn took her name from. She opted not to elaborate on the details while when she explained that in the past.

Bluebeard's Bride is a horror themed tabletop game using Powered by the Apocalypse rules. To copy the description from the Wiki page:

Bluebeard's Bride uses the popular folktale as its base: A young bride marries an older man despite some question of where his previous wives have gone. He leaves her alone in his sumptuous castle but warns her not to open one door. Eventually through boredom or curiosity, the young wife opens the forbidden door and discovers the corpses of the previous wives, whom she soon joins when Bluebeard returns. The gamemaster is called the Groundskeeper. Players do not play an individual character, but a specific piece of the Bride's personality: Animus (hostility), Fatale (seduction), Mother (selflessness), Virgin (vulnerability), and Witch (deception). As the Bride wanders through the castle, she meets both wonders and Horrors that tell her about Bluebeard, and to some extent, about herself. As RPG historian Stu Horvath noted, "Each room is a psychological ordeal for the Bride to confront, and the players must struggle to find different ways to cope." As the Bride works her way through the castle, her personality will edge towards becoming either fully Faithful or fully Disloyal. If either happens, the Bride arrives at the fateful door. If the Bride is defeated by the Horrors of the castle, she herself becomes a Horror haunting the castle.

I'll skip the off-table drama that complicates this story and say that our best friend at the time was going to be a test DM at GenCon and wanted to run a few test games and invited us over to play as he trusted us above all other people at the table to treat this seriously. He wanted us to make a Bride with sheets for all five personality fragments to represent a full table of 5 people sharing the role of playing The Bride.

We created Owynn Pierce (technically we adapted her from an existing character). A maritime history/fantasy character that was a female version of our main Slasher tabletop character at the time Owen Pierce, a serial killer who was being forced to learn empathy. We broke down Owen's character into the 5 archetypes:

and from there the setting for the tabletop game began and we refined and polished this idea of "Owen if he were 5 personalities inside of a bride" into Winnie.

I'll avoid talking too much about the plot because as far as I know our friend is still using characters and concepts born from this time in his Lead Into Gold stories and I'd hate to betray his trust and post spoilers by mistake. Suffice to say we had a prideful young woman who apprenticed wood working under a father who died (while Winnie watched, callously and uncaring) before being adopted by an uncle who hated her and wanted to put her to work but take all the credit for her superior woodwork.

She's discovered by the Bluebeard analog who sees this precious and cunning young thing and wants to keep her.

Owynn's "Court" is made up of the Animus, Fatale, Mother, Virgin and Witch.

Animus is passion and pride in work, a love of woodworking and a complete and utter security that she is accomplished and capable. Fatale is the one who sits and watches people and gets to know how they tick, knows how to push buttons to get what she wants. Mother is the storyteller, the one who goes to a bar and befriends people. Extroverted, outspoken. Virgin is the intense heart that beats under that chest. A desire to be loved, a torrent of passion that can overwhelm and break down barriers of coldness and mistrust. Witch is the one who can shut off emotion. The one who sees the worst in people. Who watched her father die. Who whispers dark intention of all around her.

We have several recordings of "The Court of Sisters" discussing the plot together.

Now, it'd be funny if I said "Animus is Dawn, Witch is Wynn, Virgin is Cammie, Mother is Craig, Fatale is Camden" but that's not true.

[3/7/2026 edit: have listened to the voice files again and Fatale is quite obviously Craig, speaking with a more loose and casual cockney twang. Which would make Camden the Mother if we were subscribing to this theory. We have emotions about listening to the voice files again... stuff we can't really air out in public.]

There are elements of us in those 5. But it's not us. We didn't even know we were plural back then. Plus a lot of the pride and arrogance that Winnie displays is born from me, Dawn, the one at the table during that.

BUT.

I do believe that on some level I did take the most disparate parts of our heart, the contradicting elements of our soul and turn them into that character. But all from my perspective. Which is why Fatale is a manipulator. Why Virgin is less "soft" and more "paralyzed by emotion" because from my perspective, pre-discovery, Cammie was not her own person, she was the thing that overpowered me when I was riding high, the moment feelings overwhelmed me and I lost all my me.

It's absolutely fascinating to see this character, hear the voices that we gave her (pre-transition, too) and read the months and months worth of stories we wrote with her from the lens that we were doing our best attempt at playing a plural character with 5 distinct parts while not realizing that we ourselves were plural and had 5 distinct parts.

Honestly I get worried when I think about Owynn.

On one hand she's proof that this is something that existed before everything. But she's also in a way able to be used as proof we are "faking" because the way that we 'pretended' to be plural in a tabletop ends up being so similar to how we present as actually plural now that we're diagnosed and out.

We miss so many of our characters from those times. They're lost to us now. Even if we could use them again, an Owen/Owynn without their partner in crime is just half a character.

So our TTRPG days were primarily focused on World of Darkness and over 10 years we played a bunch of games that were all part of one continuity. Some were not finished (and their incomplete state was a plot element in other campaigns, spare for the Demon: The Descent campaign which never really came up again)

As our GM may be using those overarching ideas and themes still we will try to stick to stuff that involves our characters, who are likely not to be featured in any of his ongoing projects (though he's free to use them - what we gave is his to keep)

The two characters who had definitive endings are Tyler, our Mage (and later Fae) from the first campaign we played (which itself was adapted into a webcomic in the early 2010s) and Owen, our Slasher (and later Genius) from our Slasher campaign.

Tyler was a vessel for us to work out our emotions on suicidality and began the story as a career student burnout who, in the middle of a mental health crisis, decided to drive halfway across the US to seek care from a relative he trusted. During the journey he ran into the 'season 1 boss character' a caretaker for a spirit hallow home to a WoD spirit that feeds on blood. The caretaker finds those unworthy to live and 'feeds them' to the spirit. Which is where each character began their story, in that hallow.

The caretaker judges that Tyler's sin is that he doesn't care if he lives or dies but finds that she cannot kill him so ends up recruiting him to take over for her when she inevitably cannot do this anymore.

Tyler has memory issues that require him to use a journal (which he did not have access to in captivity) and his memories of his time in the hallow come back to him slowly. Eventually he comes to understand that he killed people to save his own life while in there (there is an image of this in the webcomic that we really enjoy) and a lot of his story is him making peace with he fact that he lives on time stolen from others and he is not allowed to throw that away.

The irony being that at the end of the story the PCs (and 2 surviving NPCs) ascend to replace the 'imago spirits' and Tyler becomes the spirit of 'Supine', a balancing force for the other humor spirits.

A character whose only motivation was to die becomes an immortal spirit.

We wrote a few stories about Supine after his ascension but our focus has more been on Honoria who we have been typing about a lot of late. The two of them share the same human soul. Though it's been watered down a little between them.

Supine runs a hallow trying to collect those who have given up on life and want to disengage from it all. A lotus eater colony, essentially. He thinks he is doing a kindness as he is an essential function to the world and only stalks those who he considers would consent to his feeding on them... but in the end, isn't that exactly the mentality of the caretaker at the start of the story?

For Owen he was an unrepentant serial killer who was obsessed with fashioning his media image and curating his story for consumption. To the point that he became obsessed with reporters following him and ended up killing one (who was related to a player character from the first campaign, earning him a stalker character in the way of an endgame powered PC - our former partner did an animatic of that sequence which was kind of cool).

Owen is and was a piece of shit.

But the story was about healing, addiction and mental illness and used the WoD system to display the traits. In Slasher the 'itch' forces a character to kill on a timeline similar to how long vampires can go without feeding and the more they kill the more their soul degrades until they become a mindless killing machine without any humanity.

Good old World of Darkness, it kind of is a system built on stigmatization if you read between the lines.

But our GM didn't want to play it like that so the story was about these killers trying to recover from their addiction. Owen and the GM character were in heavy denial. Owen took *pride* in his work and felt it defined him as a person and the GM character (whose weapon was "other killers") was convinced that she didn't do the dirty work herself and even if she did her victims deserved it and if they didn't then they wouldn't have allowed themselves to be killed.

Eventually they are given a change in character status and Owen becomes a Genius but with the knowledge that any deaths caused by him will cause a relapse that is a slippery slope to devolving.

During the redemption portion of the campaign the PCs have to display empathy (a trait they were incapable of feeling while killing) and rehabilitation that tries to take accountability for their actions. In Owen's case he needed to placate the old PC who wanted him to pay for murdering her guardian. All while working on the overarching mystery at the core of the story.

The plot of this campaign revolved around discovering the nature of the world and the reason it is why it is (long story, short version is that the Pain Spirit saw an abandoned universe from the TTRPG we ran and decided to give godhood a try) and prevent a character from the world the original games took place in destroying it all because she doesn't consider it to be 'real' when her world is out there.

A lot of themes at play but the end result is the characters choosing to live on in the world of pain and bring a measure of joy to it by living as their authentic selves. There is no such thing as good or evil, just choices and consequences and for characters who did not have empathy at the start of the campaign, they have developed it.

Owen fell in love during the events of the game and settled down in a small town in Wisconsin, no longer chasing the highs of accolades and adoration. He measures his worth not by what attention he can gain from the world (attention is and was always his driving motivator) but simply how much attention he could give to his partner in life and crime and how much attention she could give him in return.

They made one another happy.

I hope they still do. I really really do wish that.

Owen is the fucking worst piece of shit I ever wrote. He is a detestable little fuck and deserves the fires of hell a thousand times over.

Thank you for sharing information about your characters!

So-- I think it depends on the character? Like when we build a character we kind of stretch out what their emotional range is and there's always this little sweet spot

The best example is our Slasher/Genius character Owen who loved to Peacock-- we used to record logs in his voice (and killing room tapes) to really ham up and express his peacock nature-- when we performed him at the table he'd often get flustered because he has all this GRAN-DEE-YOSE EN-AR-GEE to spew out but like it all trips over itself-- pressing his buttons was FUN

But with someone like Belladonna it's those introspective scenes where she's turning things over in her head that we like writing the most, really trying to lay out what is going on inside the heart and mind of a character

But we don't always write like that-- when we wrote our Fae character Honoria for the post-campaign chapters we wanted to present her like Phoenix Wright in Ace Attorney 4 so we could see she's become wise and powerful since the game and has this confident air to her, then when we get to see her internal prose again we discover that she's still the same helpless fuck-up "cursed to be a Dawn" that she always was-- I LOVED when we did that! It was probably our fave bit of character writing <3

So-- let's just do short and sweet ones and say what I enjoy most in writing them:

Madison Smith - Dialogue <3 I love how she and Bella bounce off of one another, how she's careful and inquisitive-- writing chemistry is always easy with her <3

Belladonna Cooper - As mentioned above, how she thinks and feels-- 90% of the story is her perspective and we like to find interesting ways of exploring her emotional flashbacks and switches-- it's SUPER important to get her internal and external world right!

Tyler Dawn - As a tabletop character he was mostly acted (until the webcomic anyway) and he was always processing and trying to keep up but he is a fuck-up and treated as such by the team-- we liked the moments that showed that he DOES care and pay attention, he just struggles more than the others-- his vulnerability always made me wanna hug him

Honoria Everett - The chasm between the person she needs to be and the person she is-- in the campaign Nori and Tyler shared a soul and an enchanted journal (we have a physical copy of one as a memento when the game ended, our GM wrote the message as Honoria) that they shared messages back and forth in and it was always good to see the difference between the one tasked with uniting the courts of Arcadia and the shard of soul thrust into a fantasy story.

Owen Pierce - PEACOCKING! We loved loved LOVED peacocking as Owen! We have so many voice files of him just babbling on and on (we are tempted to share one where he describes his fetish but-- naaaaa) anyway-- Owen loves the sound of his voice and we loved giving it to him!

Adrienne Moore - For our trash therapist mage, we loved writing her getting INDIGNANT! She used to get SO incensed and we loved just letting her become angry beyond belief!

Maya Kato - Master manipulator and we loved writing how she worked people

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I wanted to take my time with this one so... have some song suggestions:

Madison Smith (Original Fiction Series) - For Guinevere by Heather Dale

The song is so tender and caring with the concept of love synonymous with trust. "So trust me now" being the repeated line through the song but even from the start "I know your heart" gently whispered. This is a song about understanding and connection where it is not offered surrounding the lovers of the song and simply states "And every day we seem to fall in love again"

(Bonus: I Could Have Danced All Night sung by Julie Andrews - The song Madison was humming in the story that keyed her in to the fact she was "hopelessly smitten" was never stated outright but it was this one.)

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Lady Dawn/Honoria Everett/Baker of the Rising Dawn (Changeling: The Lost/Final Fantasy XIV Online) - Akatsuki no Kuruma (Wheel of Dawn) by FictionJunction

During the campaign this was the song that we associated with her, the idea of her being the only surviving member of the original party singing a song about survivors guilt and mourning those who died in war. The epilogue of the campaign involved her and the DM Character's house staff putting affairs in order. We liked to think of this song being the montage of Honoria returning to Arcadia after the campaign and starting her journey to free the Changelings and unite the courts. Sometimes we imagine it like an anime intro montage for her intro to Final Fantasy XIV. Because I (Dawn) am eternally a 19 year old with early 2000s aesthetic concepts of what is cool.

(Bonus: Get Good by Vanessa Carlton - Rabbits on the Run in general is a Tyler/Honoria album but this song in particular is about someone who has been knocked down and needs to get back up with the visuals of dandelion seas (Arcadia was constantly described as having fields of dandelions and most fetches were constructed from dandelions and dreams). It's not a strong connection but we always think of her when we hear it.)

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Tyler Dawn (Mage the Awakening) - More Than Fine by Switchfoot

So there was an album made for the campaign Tyler was in and this was his government assigned theme song. Which included a glib reference to the fact that the original child born to the Dawn family was spirited away to the Fae realm and the character we were playing was a fetch created by Queen Titania. Never really liked it as The Tyler Theme but it's generally good form to allow your characters to be shaped by the DM when playing a collaborative fiction game because it lets them know where the character's plot is going before the player can experience it for better surprises.

The album also included some character relationship songs. No Contest from Chess, I'm With You by Avril Lavigne and Hurricane by Panic. Why, yes. The campaign did take place in the late 2000s/early 2010s.

(Bonus: Presto by Rush - So Honoria and Tyler share a soul so this one is an Honoria song now but was a Tyler song back in the day. It's about being able to see things more clearly in hindsight and not being able to effectively act on the things you have learn. Radiating more heat than light and improvising the illusion of careless flight each representing the fact that the brilliance that the singer manages is not intentional. Both Tyler and later Honoria approach their responsibility within Arcadia without understanding how they are to enact the grand change they know that they must. They wish they could wave their magic wand and make everything alright... but they're just one person who doesn't have the full picture. Presto (album) in general has a lot of songs about this concept of trying to have a fuller understanding and make the correct decisions but Presto (song) is the one that effectively states that you have to act without knowing and keep adjusting your course. Inaction is the killer)

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Owen Pierce (World of Darkness: Slasher) - Sticking It To Myself by Jonathan Coulton

This is THE Owen song. To the point of which I cannot listen to it without thinking of him. The song is about a person so certain that they're right that they make self-fulfilling prophecies and congratulate themselves on filling them out. Owen took pride in his intellect and his killing and was, frankly, a complete fool. The song captures his complete blind self-adoration and wanton self-destruction.

Thank you for the ask!

Niche detail is a broad category so I'll interpret it as a detail that really doesn't add anything to the character and hasn't been shared with anyone outside of our head.

So we'll do for the three options available:

Honoria: One of Honoria's titles, Mr. Fahrenheit enables her to play the saxophone. What we like about this odd fact is that the event that created that legend and granted her the title involved one of the other party members playing a trumpet but the story diluted through retelling and changed the shape of the legend.

Belladonna Cooper: We are *ridiculously* particular about name usage in the story and always know which alter(s) are fronting when we write any scene (and also what their triggers are and when each began manifesting). We have slipped a couple of early Ben and Sis appearances in the chapters before it's clear that there are five members of their system. The most obvious one had Madison comment an the oddity without the context to understand what she was noticing. For a more niche fact, the smell of burned engine oil summons Sis out.