Numenera characters! Two of my PCs and an important NPC.

Mote (a Mystical Delve who Talks to Machines), a genetically- and cybernetically- enhanced space ape from space on a quest to find her computer god.

Tom Sideways (a Charming Jack who Speaks with a Silver Tongue), the layabout younger sibling of a crime lord on a quest to find a gun which shoots time-travelling bullets.

now that the Discovery/Destiny stuff is out my group’s doing a semi-reboot of our campaign, so obviously i have to draw All The Characters. i’ll clothe them eventually but for now i’m busy having fun with body types.

BOLDLY GOING WHERE - wait, no.

Oh man what even is a creative process. I’m not joking, I had to google “what is a creative process”. It’s how you make ideas happen?

Mostly I Ask Questions. So often I’ll look at a popular narrative trope or character type I dislike, and try to work out what it is I dislike about it and how I could make it interesting to me. Or I’ll say “hey, wouldn’t it be cool if -” and then try to work out all the consequences of that thing.

(Mote, for instance, was me saying “hey, wouldn’t it be cool if I took ‘God is dead’ super super literally” and “hey, wouldn’t it be cool if I played an uplifted animal”. And then everything past that was me figuring out how to fit those two ideas into the Numenera world.)

So, f’r instance (let me talk for a moment about a story I think about a Lot, please) I’ll say “I really hate masquerade stories, can I tell one which is interesting to me?” and try to figure that out.

The other thing I do is think about things in terms of themes and messages I want to present, and then think okay, worldbuilding and character creation are my tools, the plot is a series of problems, how do I use these tools to solve the problem in a way which gets my message across?

So the masquerade story is about relationships and connections between people, so I say “the protagonist is one of the most powerful magic-users in the world” and then I say “magic power stacks exponentially when people work together” and those add up to “no matter how individually powerful you are, you can never achieve solo what other people can achieve through teamwork”.

And a lot of the time it ends up being one set of ideas leading into the next. You’ve got to keep asking why does this happen, what are the narrative consequences of it happening like this? (Sometimes I’ll see people saying “I want Plot Thing to happen but I can’t make Character do it”, but I’ve never felt like that, I never lose the sense that everything I’m dealing with is a construct. What are the narrative consequences of having a character who won’t do what I want them to do? The consequences are I can’t tell the story I want to, so let’s kill this character and construct a new one from their corpse.)

“I hate masquerades, how do I make one I don’t hate?” -> “magic waxes and wanes over centuries or millennia, this is a story set in the period between magic being useful and magic being known to the general population” -> “the masquerade is being enforced by groups of people who kept knowledge of magic alive during the low/no-magic time periods, because they want time to maximise the power they’ll have when the masquerade inevitably breaks” -> “this is going to be a story about the magical oligarchy getting punched in the face”.

I don’t know how much sense this makes but it’s how I think about things. Everything has to work towards a functional whole, and if something doesn’t fit then I don’t keep it. I find generating ideas to be easy, so I’m trying to get into the habit of being cavalier when it comes to discarding them. I find when I get stuck on something it’s usually because I’m trying to force an idea which doesn’t fit.

I doodled Solioquy Sonata Sauerkraut. Satanic Spongebath Slamdunk. Soprano Stentorious Slapstick. Sycophant Simian Systematic. Solipsism Solstice Sayonara.

runerigus is a cousin evolution of one of the oldest known objectum species awakenings recorded, with artistic depictions and physical evidence found dating back to the paleolithic era. from what archaeologists can hypothesize, they could have been given life in a similar way to the possessed swords of western regions - through conflict and bloodshed, absorbing the spirits of the dead and gaining awareness. there is some evidence pointing to ancient humans making artwork imbued with curses to ‘summon’ a runerigus spirit and possess it, possibly as an aid in their conflicts with sapient species at the dawn of time.

runerigus, like the unovan cofagrigus, is an immortal spirit that will persist until the physical object it possesses is destroyed. contained specimens in authorized museums and archeological collections date back thousands of years. however, the offshoot yamask that you can find in galar are usually only a few hundred years old, owing to local pagan practices that have continued to summon these spirits as guardian pokemon until the league halted the practice during galar’s reformation.

2, 11, 19:Answered here!

21. Have you everregretted something your character has done?

I lowkey regret and would like to blank from my mind thefirst couple of sessions I’ve done with every single character I’ve had, but that’skind of inevitable when I’m trying to work out how to play a character. I regularlyregret my choices but making bad decisions which I regret 0.5 seconds later ispart of what I find entertaining, I can’t think of anything specifically I’vedone where I look at it and think oh shit that was a horrible mistake and notin the fun way.

35. How much roleplaydo you like to do?