Not mine, but a collaborativr effort: Young dryad loses physical body and is imprisoned in a robotic shell. She escapes and now all of her former magical druid powers are a combination of mechanical contraptions and just a dash of magic. She runs on magic energy, but her acid spray cantrip is truly a small vaporizer embedded in her palm. Really cool, but the Player stop playing that char vecause we restricted her wild shape to much :/ in hindsight, i really dont like my dming decisions regarding that char

Shadowrun 4e. A hacker who was way into drag racing. I got really into statting his race car, and even made driving equal to hacking. He was in deep in the underworld, trying to buy his childhood friend out of her indentured servitude at a brothel.

Mad Max style wasteland campaign: A Shepard boy, skilled at archery, wandering the wasteland with a talking dog (who was named Blood, but wasn’t evil). I saw this kid as being on the more idealistic and good side, and I picked a concept connected to society in contrast to what the other PCs picked (A reformed Mohawker, a powerful mutated woman wielding a stop sign, and a “priest of KISS” following the concert routes his roadie parents took before the bombs dropped, mistaking them for religious pilgrimage)… sorry that one had a lot of gas.

Superheroes: A jewish journalist who learns he is the inheritor of the Golem of Prague, and with it, a tradition of Talmudic magic. The other party members were a Bisexual paramedic/ vigilante by night (me and her player agreed that we were roommates lol) and the last one was a black teenager who killed a cop after he had paralyzed his brother. The campaign started and we were “the cop killers” and were protecting a small minority community but I keep thinking that had so much gas in the tank and room to grow and I might spin that off into its own campaign.

I’m just so sick of heroic high fantasy

These are amazing.

I’m going to shamelessly steal some of these for NPCs in my campaigns.

From Deadlands Classic:

A snake handling Pentecostal Blessed with the “grim servant of death” flaw. As he genuinely tries to save souls, people often get bit by the rattlesnakes he carries with him. Technically he doesn’t break the law but most sheriffs don’t want him sticking around. Sadly the campaign never got started.

An insane Bavarian retired geology professor, turned conspiracy theorist, who was trying to bring his dead wife back, and win back the approval of his estranged daughter. Died one session in after being bitten by an insane cultist.

Yes, I did a Bavarian dialect the whole time. No, I’m not good at it. Yes, there where real Bavarians at the table (well, one of them was Franconian, but same difference (don’t tell her I said that)).

A gnoll taken as a cub and raised by good clerics as a test of nature vs nurture. He was all about freeing slaves and offering redemption to evildoers, but was also bloodthirsty in battle with the truly evil.

Silver Dragonborn Ancients Barbarian - I wanted to try a tanky build again, after not liking my attempt with paladin. He was Con primary, Str secondary, using a Warhammer and shield, and I was excited to see how the path of the ancients intersected with things like shield Master or sentinel. He was from a tribe of remnant Dragonborn after Abeir split back off. His tribe used to rely on shamans that communicated with their ancestors, but the last one had passed in his grandfather before he was identified as a new shaman. His sister died in a horrible accident, and his communication with her spirit was how he was identified. No one in the tribe knew how to help with his gift, so he went out into the world, accompanied by the spirit of his sister, to see what he could learn. His rage manifested as an icy white cloud rolling over him and falling to the ground, slowly revealing the spirits that accompanied him. I planned for him to notice and get to know more and more of his ancestors’ spirits as he got more powerful - including his grandfather, a taciturn half-dragon, and a happy-go-lucky silver dragon. Unfortunately, I had to bow out of the campaign just as we hit level 3, so I never got to experience any of it. ☹️

We were playing a Ravnica campaign so I made an Orzhov Order Cleric who was a criminal attorney.

I’ll preface this by noting that the sin of sloth has traditionally been understood to be a sin of omission, not just commission, i.e., you are insufficiently devoted to the things you ought to be.

Which means you could, in theory, have a (reflavored tiefling) devil paladin so devoted to sloth he works against evil causes. He’s not interested in good per se, it’s just that advancing the interests of good and traveling with a good adventuring party has the best ROI for failing to carry out his evil responsibilities.

Naturally, this has caused a fair amount of controversy among sloth devils, and there is a multi-century trial going on in the Hells about whether this ought to be allowed. This is not expected to be resolved in the foreseeable future because the advocates for both parties keep filing their responses well after petition deadlines expire.

A Gnome Artificer who was mute. It was interesting to use only visual langauge to communicate with people. I had a “system” where I could use the magic items / features you get from Gnome and Artificer to talk if I decided I really needed to, but I tried to limit that both for in universe reasons, and meta reasons. Kinda defeats the purpose if you can just magic your way out of it. The idea was that she was cursed by a fey creature, and could cheat a little bit with magic, but eventually the curse would hurt too much to talk more than a little. Eventually I started to feel like the trope of Nynaeve from The Wheel of Time, only replace hair pulling with glares and knowing smiles etc.

A tiefling divine soul sorcerer with the Criminal background. He was born to two pious tiefling clerics of Lathander who saw their fiendish blood as a curse, and prayed to cleanse their unborn child of devilish influence. When he was born a Divine Soul, his parents tried to raise him as their perfect priestess. He had to be a model tiefling, a representative of his entire race as well as Lathander himself. He chafed under the obligation and ran away from home, living on the streets and stealing to get by, all while trying to hide his divine soul powers out of a combination of rejecting them and just trying not to draw attention.

Slinking around in the shadows eventually led to him wandering into the Mists of Ravenloft, and he found himself in Barovia. He found his way into a party and essentially just acted like the party rogue for a bit until combat came and he got backed into a corner and he suddenly started throwing around guiding bolts.

I was really looking forward to doing a whole arc with him reclaiming his powers and figuring out what it meant to be himself, but OOC stuff led to me leaving that group before he had a chance to leave his edgy rogue phase :c

A human beastmaster whose spellcasting focus was a tiny awakened shrub (which was slightly on fire) and had a flying snake pet.

He was a Pokemon trainer. “Cindertwig, use your Thorn Whip! Now, Create Bonfire!” “Flython, do a Poison Fang attack!”

We only had one very short combat for the 1 shot.

In the first campaign I ever played in, I ran a necromancy wizard that was neutral good.

Basically, he grew up a hermit and has zero awareness of the taboos surrounding his school of magic. However, because of his alignment, he has a very different approach to how he uses his magic.

Whenever he has to raise undead to fight for him, he does it by asking for their aid rather than outright raising them. He approaches the practice more as a way to preserve the lives of the living rather than a way of amassing servants or power. When he no longer needs their help, he thanks them and tries to make sure they either return to their resting place or are given a proper burial.

His overarching goal is to ensure everyone lives a long, full life and wishes to find a way to resurrect others in the way other classes can to help achieve that goal.

Didn’t get to play him for long since the group kinda fell apart

I had a really neat idea about playing a changeling bladesinger who most likely pretended to be elven to learn the art, although I did have a not-quite-RAW idea about the old switched-at-birth changeling myth, where his elven “parents” would have taught him before he slipped up and they realized what he was.

He was actually three characters in one: a mostly nondescript human “bard”, spinning extremely tall tales about a mysterious elven bladesinger who doled out vigilante justice at night (also the changeling), and the changeling himself, who hated the way people looked at his true form, would only have revealed it to the party if he had no other choice, and really just wanted to be a hero in a group of adventurers, doing the kind of stuff he made up and sang about in taverns.

I came up with this concept a few years ago, but even before COVID I was kind of my group’s forever DM, so even if I ended up at a gaming table again soon I probably wouldn’t get to play it, so if you like it, feel free to use it. You cannot steal what is gifted!