InsaneJournal

Current mood:	nostalgic
Current music:	Richard Hell And The Voidoids: Lowest Common Dominator
Entry tags:	roleplaying

The characters in my head
So after reminiscing a lot I went to poke around to figure out who I'd use as a PB for Julien Banks, one of my original MUD characters. I would, I imagine, be playing him as in his mid to late thirties. He's a very gentlemanly person - by the time I stopped playing him, he was a Duke, the highest rank attainable, as well as the mortal leader of the temple he was dedicated to - Elbar, the god of chaos and storms. Most of his temple fellows were of the excessively violent type of chaotic, but Julien, oh. He was the smiler with the knife under his cloak, to borrow a phrase from Chaucer. He had a tricolour hunting dog or a hunting falcon as his pet, and a manor house in the north of the world that you only got to go into if you were about to be converted. (Or killed, in the case of one hapless newcomer to the temple. Julien wanted to see how he'd react. He apologised afterwards, of course.) It had a wine cellar and a forge, as Julien was also in the jewelers guild, and managed to reach the third (and highest) tier of skills. Class-wise, he was an anti-paladin, the warrior-cleric of the evil-aligned temples, though he always maintained that Elbar ought to have been classed as true neutral. It meant he was a fucking badarse in killing things - all his weapons skills were maxed out, as well as things like critical strike - and he also had some war magic, some healing magic, some basic transportation magic, some protective magic, some detection magic.... plus, the two wonderful extra skills of the paladin classes, layhands and devote. Layhands could only be used twice a day and would heal half the difference between your current hp and maximum hp. Julien had 7k maximum hp. This was very nice for him. Devote could be used every ten levels (hero level is 100) and was applied to a weapon to make it more effective, but only when used by the caster of the devote.

So basically, he sat at level 61, with far more hp than most characters, the highest rank possible, not the highest temple rank possible but the highest temple rank out of any Elbar characters, he had a manor house, he was an extremely adept jeweler, his fighting skills and spells were all mastered, he was on chatting terms with the avatar of his temple (an immortal stand-in for the actual god), the leader of the clan associated with the temple after the first ever overthrow attempt on the MUD, and... basically, he was epic.


This is the picture I had of him, which is a random getty model.

I'm thinking, selected icons of either Eric Bana or John Stamos. Not that I have anywhere to play him, so it's all theoretical, but yes. He had this amazing sense of humour that was just... completely straight-faced, he could say the most utterly appalling things without twitching a muscle, though he also grinned and laughed and all that sort of thing as well.

I found an old journal entry somewhere that said, "so far today", he had invited a sworn enemy to the pub for a drink (without success, sadly), handed out diamonds to whatever PCs happened to be in town, gone out for tart with a templemate and sat around giving useful and completely amiable advice to a low-level from another enemy temple. Because that was just the sort of thing he did. And when he was bored, bad things happened, like the aforementioned overthrow ("Things need shaking up a little."), then when he got tired of the clan he withdrew half the funds, promoted another member and left - for the rest of the time I played him he was a loner in Player-Kill, with no clanhall to hide in. There were very few loners in Player-Kill. Then again, there were very few players who attacked Julien.

From the journal entry:

"addendum: of course, shortly after I wrote this, he and Dmayrion went to Tucker's Hotel where the ranked citizens can hang out without being disturbed by the rabble. Then they thought it'd be a good idea to see just how tough those guards ARE. As they fled, Julien down to about 2k of 7k hp, he commented that he didn't think they were particularly welcome there anymore..."

I miss you, Julien.