Goblin priestess of Tymora who's on a mission to free her people from their tyrant god Maglubiyet, and change hearts and minds for goblins in large cities through setting a personal good example.
Treant druid who's on the run from the authorities because she keeps planting knotweed in the foundations of various large buildings and temples. (I used the tortle lineage for stats)
Middle sibling from a noble family who is competing against all the other siblings to "earn the most money" by a set date, because the one who brings the most cash home gets the family inheritance. Decided "adventuring" had the best return for time spent.
Imprisoned Artificer who designed and built a robot (5e "nimblewright") that she could telepathically pilot - then sent it out to go recruit an adventuring party to rescue herself.
From the character concepts my favorite is the noble competing for gold and treasure. It's a fun twist on the I'm here for the money motivation.
The construct trying to save the master is cool as it can potentially lead to swapping characters after a while. But it's a bit main charactery for some campaigns.
Title: "DND characters I've been banned from playing."
A drawing of a smiling woman with pointed ears and a blond updo looks at us. She wears a green dress like a folded leaf, with yellow and blacked striped tights underneath. Bees buzz around her.
Caption: "Swarm druid with beehive hairstyle, but it's a real beehive."
A drawing of a red-skinned person with horns and yellow eyes without pupils reads from a book. Cards float above their hand. Their robe bears a red B symbol, in the style of the D&D Beyond logo.
Caption: "Warlock who is directly pacted to Wizards Of The Coast."
A drawing of a zombie-like person in tattered clothes holding a staff made of bones looks at us. The staff glows green.
Caption: "Necromancer who raised themselves from the dead, and now has to maintain the spell."
A drawing of a person-sized mechanical snake with a drill bit for a tail and a piece of wire as a tongue.
Caption: "Warforged druid who wildshapes by physically reconfiguring their body."
A drawing of a large cloud of red and yellow energy, with a tiny silhouette of a person with arms outstretched at the center.
I highly recommend that everyone describe their images here! There are visually impaired people who would love to participate, and this makes memes accessible to them. :)
And if you take 3 levels of armorer you can have your armor change to fit your new form to have a good AC and shoot lightning as you slither around as a robosnake
Once upon a time it was the only concept that could get me back into a 5e game, but now pathfinder 2e has the automaton so I can play the same character concept there!
I tend to have a habit of looking at all the tools I have, and using them to the greatest possible effect I can...
I played "Princes of the Apocalypse" with a Pyrophobic Librarian called Neff, who refused to take evocation spells - the entire table accused me of sandbagging by refusing to take fireball...
Let me tell you, half the bosses in the campaign were unable to act, because every spell they cast was counterspelled by a tiny gnome with spell slots not being reserved for DPS. The other half of the bosses suffered from being extraplanar entities hit by the banish spell with a 100% guaranteed success rate. My DM refuses to let anyone play diviner ever again.
Let's see what this terror of the module looks like.
The worst trick I sat on, and I saved it entirely for the final boss fight.
DM's like "here's the final boss, I gave them a huge number of legendary saves so you can't just banish them"
Let me tell you, the noise a DnD table makes when you say "uh DM, please don't roll initiative for the final boss, I'd like them to roll a 1 thank you." gold.
I actually wrote "Like a transformer" in the initial draft, but canned the wording, because I figured that there'd be some (small) proportion of the audience that'd be unfamiliar with the IP.
Mechanically it's a nightmare though. Anything that breaks concentration or spell casting kills you. You do get undead immunities but they only help so much.
If we're getting into the nitty gritty of the 5e game mechanics, there's a wider issue in that the RAW rules don't actually allow you to "raise yourself from the dead"
Glyph of Warding (Spell Glyph) requires the stored spell to target "a creature or an area" and "dead body" is neither, it's an object.
Contingency requires the stored spell to have a casting time of 1 action.
You could probably arrange something like this with wish or stuff that's outside of RAW, but at the point that you're using "rule of cool" you can basically make anything workable and it's all GM fiat anyway. (This is fine, but if your table plays like this, then you're probably not overly concerned with mechanics.)
However... with regards to the point here: Spells in 5e that create undead (such as animate dead) don't usually require concentration - so "I lost concentration" would kind of be fine - you just need to ensure you have the slot each morning to "maintain" the enchantment, (but this is when slots regenerate, so long as you rest you'll be okay)
The bigger problem would be anti-magic fields or dispel magic.
My last game, I ran a Swashbuckler Rogue/Vengeance Paladin who took the Defensive Duelist feat. His primary character motivation was to get revenge on the man who killed his fa-
Fuck it, let's dispense with the pretense, it's Inigo Montoya. I played Inigo Montoya.
That first one reminded me of a story I heard at a small SF convention in LA back in the '90s.
This writer was working on The Real Ghostbusters (long story behind that name) and in the episode they go in the space shuttle to a space station. Everyone on the space station is a Star Trek character analog and so hilarity ensues as the rest of the episode is just a Star Trek spoof.
One of the characters is based on Janice Rand who, in the show, had a basket-weave hairdo. The writer included in the script a note to the animators about her hair. The animators were Asian and did not know what a basket-weave was, and it being pre-Wikipedia, they just made an assumption. The test animation they got back had the Janice Rand-alike with a basket literally woven into her hair.
How did the first tin cans get opened? A chisel and a hammer, writes Kaleigh Rogers for Motherboard. Given that the first can opener famously wasn’t invented for about fifty years after cans went into production, people must have gotten good at the method. But there are reasons the can opener took a while to show up.
Our story starts in 1795, when Napoleon Bonaparte offered a significant prize “for anyone who invented a preservation method that would allow his army’s food to remain unspoiled during its long journey to the troops’ stomachs,” writes Today I Found Out. (In France at the time, it was common to offer financial prizes to encourage scientific innovation–like the one that led to the first true-blue paint.) A scientist named Nicolas Appert cleaned up on the prize in the early 1800s, but his process used glass jars with lids rather than tin cans.
“Later that year,” writes Today I Found Out, “an inventor, Peter Durand, received a patent from King George III for the world’s first can made of iron and tin.” But early cans were more of a niche item: they were produced at a rate of about six per hour, rising to sixty per hour in the 1840s. As they began to penetrate the regular market, can openers finally started to look like a good idea.
But the first cans were just too thick to be opened in that fashion. They were made of wrought iron (like fences) and lined with tin, writes Connecticut History, and they could be as thick as 3/16 of an inch. A hammer and chisel wasn’t just the informal method of opening these cans–it was the manufacturer’s suggested method.
The first can opener was actually an American invention, patented by Ezra J. Warner on January 5, 1858. At this time, writes Connecticut History, “iron cans were just starting to be replaced by thinner steel cans.”
Warner’s can opener was a blade that cut into the can lid with a guard to prevent it from puncturing the can. A user sort of sawed their way around the can’s edge, leaving a jagged rim of raw metal as they went. “Though never a big hit with the public, Warner’s can opener served the U.S. Army during the Civil War and found a home in many grocery stores,” writes Connecticut History, “where clerks would open cans for customers to take home.”
Attempts at improvement followed, and by 1870, the basis of the modern can opener had been invented. William Lyman’s patent was the first to use a rotary cutter to cut around the can, although in other aspects it doesn’t look like the modern one. “The classic toothed-wheel crank design” that we know and use today came around in the 1920s, writes Rogers. That invention, by Charles Arthur Bunker, remains the can opener standard to this day.>