So it seems like there are going to be a lot of characters leaving the game soon. Since their pasts can't really be used against them, I would love to read some of their backgrounds. I've learned over the years that there are few things LARPers like more than telling everyone about their characters. The trouble with this is that then everyone knows things about your character.

I also really like reading origin stories so I would love to read how characters became what they are. Keep in mind if there are things in your background that are spoilers for other characters or the game's plot it's probably best if you edit those parts out.

so to get things started:


v Born Johnny Holland on Jan 17, 1924 in Dothan Alabama.

v Did poorly in school, but excelled at athletics growing up.

v Father disappeared in 1935 during the height of the Great Depression

v “Uncle” came to live with him and his mother until Johnny left home.

v Won First team All-State and Second team All-American in Football (cornerback) during senior year of Highschool.

v Had already been offered full football scholarship to several schools when he dropped out to enlist in the marine corp on his 18^th birthday.

v Shipped out to South Pacific in March of 1942.

v By the end of the War had risen to the rank of Master Sergeant

v In fall of 1943 fell in love with a fellow marine named Henry Jeffery and maintained relationship until end of the war.

v After the war was over was devastated by the decision made by his lover of 2 years to return to the girlfriend he left behind.

v Returned to Dothan and went to work in working on a peanut farm.

v In late 1946, Johnny went to visit Henry in Charleston South Carolina. Henry would only meet with him after countless phone calls and told Johnny that as far as he was concerned nothing ever happened. The meeting ended with Henry spitting in Johnny’s face and saying if he ever saw Johnny again, Johnny would be beaten to death by him and his friends.

v Heartbroken Johnny returned home.

v Accepted a job 100 miles north of Dothan in Columbus Georgia.

v On weekends travelled to various cities in south to enjoy underground amusements.

v In June 1953 was arrested for violating Alabama’s sodomy laws when caught in a public restroom with a black man. Both he and the man he was with were beaten brutally by the police. Johnny was sentenced to 5 years in jail. The man he was with died before reaching the police station.

v By January of 1954, beatings by fellow inmates had become a typical experience. The prison guards did nothing to stop the attacks. Shattered bones, ripped open flesh, and internal bruises became part of daily life. On the day after his 30^th birthday during what was especially severe attack, things changed. It had been one of the worst beatings in months. As his head connected with the floor he could feel something snap. One more punch and his life would be over. He looked up to see a fist hurtling towards his face.



Lying there almost dead, Rada awoke. A flood of memories came back all at once. Countless lifetimes of turmoil filled his mind. A clarion call to war seemed to ring out through eternity as he was suffused with the overwhelming power of the symphony. In the moment time seemed to stop. He could feel drawn to living out the existence of a stalwart warrior constantly resisting, but striking back only as needed. Struggling with that urge there was also a seething hatred.

Thousands of years passed as these two forces struggled against one another. In the war against the Morningstar, he dimly remembered standing fast holding shut the gates of heaven, not striking back against his enemy, knowing that to do so would be releasing the gate. As a Lord in Babylon a distant memory of smashing in the skull of an assassin sent to kill him. As if through a fog, he could see himself as a Roman centurion standing at the entrance to a Gallic village dieing in battle to give the villagers time to flee from a gothic attack. In a jungle somewhere he revelled in the blood as his teeth sank into the heart of an enemy impaled body lay at his feet. A dark Spanish dungeon surrounded him as he forgave his captors while they tortured him, but still refused to betray the trusts of his parishioner’s confessions. He was in a prison in Alabama and looked up to see a fist hurtling towards his face. Thousands of years and a tenth of a second was all he had to make a decision. Roll out of the way or…

Rada reached up and grabbed the fist. Startled, his attacker tried pulling back his hand for another swing but screamed in pain as he looked down at the fleshy sack of blood and crushed bone at the end of his wrist. Rada stood up still surrounded by a half dozen men, but no longer worried for his own safety.

Three counts of murder were added on to his sentence, but Rada worried very little about that now. The knowledge of being abandoned by God was freeing for Rada. Rules that he had attempted to follow before no longer applied to him. Like the son whose parents had always said, “as long as you live under my roof…”, Rada was no longer under the roof of the Lord and even in an earthly prison, he was more free than he had ever been in all eternity.

Rada chose not to escape immediately. There was a knowledge that there were others out there like him and he wanted to gain a better understanding of his condition before encountering them. No longer the prison bitch, Rada became feared amongst everyone. Even the guards were cautious around him now. Early on some prisoners attempted to attack him as a group. The excuse to reek bloody vengeance on those who would attack him was more pleasurable that Rada would have imagined. Eventually no one attacked him any longer and prison became boring.

While working on a chain gang during the summer after his arrest, Rada decided to leave. Ripping the chains in half, Rada used the tool of his oppression as a weapon for his release. The fight was to escape was easy. Knowing what to do next was not.

This is the back-story I wrote for Shapurnippal. I'm not entirely happy about it, but I couldn't bring myself to edit it after I wrote it one afternnoon:






The swing took Shapurnippal in
the gut while he was trying to inhale. He doubled over. The world spun. He
could suddenly feel cool grass against his cheek. The White Knight loomed still
for a moment, but he still seemed to wobble in the Jester’s eyes. For a moment
he felt as if he was falling again, falling through the ground to some ancient
undergloom, and then the light hit him again.


***


Anthony Nashton breathed the
cool, sweet air of the forest around him. It was like something out of a film,
out of a dream. A mighty glacier rose beyond the mists of the trees around him.
He paused for a moment to drink the moment in. The outlines of the Hindu Kush
Mountains hid the sun from him, making this morning feel more like a second
twilight.


Then he set off again. He wasn’t
just here for sightseeing, he repeated to himself. He was there to write a
story about some Mujahedeen group called al-Qaeda,
which had called on Muslims from all around the world to join the resistance
against the Soviets. It was all so idealistic and… romantic. Perfect for some
English Lit prairie boy to make his name. Or so he hoped.


He’d been told in Peshawar that
he could find one of the ISI’s Mujahedeen base camps around here, a few miles
from Gilgit. A lonely mountain trail about 30 miles long was the only route
he’d been given. Well, he needed the exercise.


A few miles up the road – and it
was ‘up’, in every sense of the word- a tiny hamlet that was little more than a
few log porches built onto some caves clung to the side of the Mountain.


He spoke a little Urdu- he’d always
loved the languages of Persia and India, and they seemed to come naturally to
him- and he’d picked up a couple phrases of Shina, the language of the Northern
peoples of Pakistan, during his time here.


A few squirrelly people looked on
from one of the homes. A brief argument ensued between an old crone and her
equally ancient husband, both staring at Nashton from behind an old window,
during which they seemed to be debating whether Anthony was a Russian invader
of some kind or not. After a time they sent out a young lean-looking man- their
son, probably- to –welcome? Interrogate?- the stranger. After brokenly giving
courteous greetings and giving the poor tribal the gift of some coffee beans
and a nice pen (steel, with his father’s name on it), Anthony was welcomed into
the family’s surprisingly comfortable cave. This would make an excellent book.


A few minutes later Anthony was
drinking extremely bitter tea and was delighted to know that the old man and
his daughter-in-law both spoke Urdu. He managed to adapt- badly- a George
Carlin joke he’d heard for these people.


“How does a Baltistani Tibetan
girl know when her mom is, uh,” Slang translated badly. “When her mother’s
river runs red? Her brother’s dick tastes funny!”


He laughed. Everyone laughed. The
father snorted tea.


Still, he could feel a slight
tremor in his left hand. It couldn’t still be nervousness. Anthony was the most
outgoing person he knew, and this old mountain clan was being quite hospitable.
It wasn’t cold, either.


So why did he just spill his cup
of tea all over the floor? Why was the family now looking at him like he had
just spat in their face? Why did he feel like he was falling?


***


Shapurnippal shook his head. No
blackouts. He had to stand, goddamnit. Cheriour wasn’t going to stop anytime
soon, and neither would he. He rose to his knees before he felt something heavy
collide with his back and he fell again. Goddamn. At least with this crazy
bastard the beatings were lessons in how to take beatings- and maybe give some
back by watching how it was done by a pro. Not like he was supposed to gain
some wonderful fucking personal revelations from getting his head bashed in,
like that prick Rada’d assigned to ‘teach’ him.


***


Anthony Nashton swallowed, but
his throat was dry. He was lying in a soft white bed in a nice apartment. The
.38 felt cold and heavy in his clammy hands. The 4 months-old test results lay
at his lap. He felt that it would make a good enough suicide note. Kind of
poignant, really, though he wouldn’t go so far as to say poetic. Oh, fuck it.


He remembered his doctor being
looking at him very seriously. Like a rock. Like this was ‘The hardest part of
the job’, or whatever. And then saying ‘You may have Huntington’s.”


He’d furrowed up his brow for a
moment. “What?”


He remembered hearing that it was
a genetic disorder, that it caused his ‘chorea’- that was what they called the
jerking he’d had- that it would progress…


He’d opened his mouth, and let it
hang there for a second. “Oohh… Like what Woody Guthrie got?”


They told him that they might
have tested him earlier, if his biological parents- killed in a car crash when
he’d been 8- had lived longer. They said maybe the Chorea was what caused the
crash.


How sappy.


That had been 6 months ago.


He’d read up on this stuff.
Library and everything. He’d read that it was fatal. That it was a slow, slow
wasting away. That it would start attacking his brain soon. That there was no
cure. That there was no hope.


Well, you can’t choose how you
come into the world, but you can choose how you go out.


He would not go gentle, as Dylan
Thomas wrote.


He loaded the pistol. It was a
Target-shooter. He’d been pretty good in college. Silver medalist.


He wouldn’t be a victim. He
wouldn’t become some pitiable old soul just to draw out his little life. He
didn’t want to have to be pitied for his crippled limbs, his dementia. He had
to know he would die knowing what was coming. He wouldn’t be looked down upon
as some husk of a person. No.


The safety clicked off.


This was really the best way. All
the hospital had to offer him were drugs to keep his spirits high. Fuck that.


His fingers felt stiff. That was
another symptom. He brought the pistol to his temple. No trembling.


Jesus, he hoped he didn’t miss.
He didn’t know, his hand might jerk or tremble at the last minute. It had been
getting worse ever since it started back in that Middle-of-Nowhere hole.


Well, no more time for
remembrances and happy occasions. His index finger pulled in, he closed his
eyes. This was it. And…











Did he miss? His ears were
ringing like a gong. He didn’t think he’d missed. He pulled the trigger again,
and suddenly his hand was burning and bleeding and oh shit why would the gun
just explode in my hand?


And then it all came flooding
back.


Everything.


He was kissing the princess of
Deccan, her body robed in silk and sapphires, beneath a Crescent moon, the
scent of the blooming lotuses carried over the lake.


He was out of breath, a stampede
of bison a million strong charging towards him, his legs pumping acid, and he
knew this couldn’t last long.


He was shaking with the power of
God’s love for him, the eternity of strength encapsulated for him.


He was flying over the Himalayas,
mighty spires standing proud like the spine of the world, like a hundred hands
reaching to grasp at Heaven itself.


He was eternal. No, he had been
eternal. Now, there was a dark spot where that love had been. An emptiness
where that divine womb had been.


He was Grigori. He was Fallen.


He was Shapurnippal.


His name was whispered to him in
the rush of the Ganges, the chorus of a clan of Tigers. Writ in the ledgers
that were the spinning galaxies around him.


He breathed out.


He breathed in.


He laughed.


Now, to rage against the dying of
the Light.


He looked around. Fragments of
the pistol were lodged in the walls, in the pillow- and in his hand. Well, no
matter. However, his bed was now soaked in blood.


He heard muffled movement around
him. Someone was yelling “Was that a gun?” Another was screaming “Call the
police!” Over-reactors. Oh yeah, this building had thin walls.


Well, no way to explain this
predicament away.


He leapt out of bed and towards
his window. He’d go out though the fire escape. They wouldn’t catch him.


A dying man’s blood and bone, an
open window, a misfired pistol, one fired shot and a medical report. Let the
cops figure that one out.


He wondered what kind of friends
were to be had among the Damned.


***


Shapurnippal walked alone along
Elgin road. It was an odd sort of walk. His right leg hadn’t healed right, and
his left ankle was still sprained, so it was something halfway between a hop
and a limp that he was dancing. Fortunately he had trusty old Falstaff- a
walking stick formerly known as ‘metal bar that this dumbass construction
company isn’t watching’ (he’d thought naming it Falstaff was rather clever at
the time) - to keep him from tumbling all over the street. Today’s tutoring
session had gone… well, he supposed.


It was too bad that there was no
one around to observe this funny-walking vagrant-looking fellow.


Funnily enough, despite his left
hand being put out of commission, despite the fact that he hadn’t eaten for
three days, despite living in an abandoned warehouse that he couldn’t even call
a domus since it was shared with a couple other bums, he felt good about the
training. There was a light at the end of the tunnel. He would see this
through, and he’d be stronger for it. After all, he no longer fell in the first
two blows. He barely felt his broken ribs. He’s almost landed a couple hits on
Cheriour- he thought so, anyway.


“Hey, buddy, you need any help-“


Jesus, that guy came out of
fucking nowhere! The sharp report of Falstaff cracking against the man’s head
shook Shapurnippal from his reveries.


Hey, those were pretty good
reflexes.


He looked down. It was some
middle-aged WASPy-looking businessman type. He was still breathing. And this
would be a residential area, so somebody would see him soon and help him.
Whatever.


-However, he did have a very
fine-looking hat. A Biltmore Royal, genuine felt over leather fedora. Nice. And
it fit.


Speaking of which, he was
reminded of his distinct lack of any nice digs in this town. He’d kind of
picked up and left Saint-Boniface with nothing but a pair of jeans and a
T-shirt. Circumstances, though.


But now he had an obligation to
get something nice. All of his current clothes were torn and dirty and a little
bloody. And he was a Court dignitary, was he not? Sure, it was a joke office,
but weren’t they all? Named after goddamn chess pieces, they all were. And he
was the Jester.


He was the Jester, though. So something nice. Something colourful,
maybe. After all, he didn’t plan to just get up and hide away from this city
too. Something had to be done. After all, his position might be a joke, but
then again, at least it meant that he wasn’t just another pawn.


***


Goddamn motherfuckers.


White court and Black, both full
of assholes. Ever since that self-righteous Rook had left things had gone to
shit. Well, shit happens.


It wasn’t an easy decision to
leave his home of fourty years. But, well, he’d gotten on the wrong sides of a
lot of vengeful people. People who probably couldn’t spell the word ‘Codex’ any
longer. And he heard a voice in his head say ‘Go West, young man.” He’d go to
Regina. Maybe there things would be different. Fresh start. New faces. Hey,
maybe he’d catch up with Malicia and really, he’d only started appreciating her
work once she’d disappeared. Well, et sera, right?


It had really started that night
outside of Saint Boniface Cathedral. Shap and his Murder- his first and only
Murder, Les Cavaliers (he didn’t pick the name) had rivals to get one of their
own on the spot of Bishop- even if you had to leave your Murder, you’d still be
loyal to your comrades, right? – the Vicious Annies. Anyways, the Annies had
challenged the Horsemen to combat outside the Cathedral, the King didn’t care
about his Court eating itself- Slothful bastard- and the Horsemen’s most
commanding member was a bugged-out Wrath. He accepted before he even discussed
it with his ‘comrades’.


Man, that guy- Avrilo, was it?-
might be useful now, Shap thought. He could crack a head when he needed to. He
crunched his way over the gravel on the side of the road. It was a long way to
Regina.


Shap had split from the
honourable group combat the moment he noticed that all of his friends were in
pieces. He would have been killed too the next time the Annies- now technically
disbanded, with two dead and one given a Court position- found him, but an
incursion of the Host made him suddenly useful as another body.


That had been it. The roll of the
dice. The reason- well, part of the reason- why deep down, he couldn’t hold
onto faith. Luck. Arbitrary events outside of his control determining his fate.
Sometimes, horrible events went well for him. Other times, well… After all, it
was that very incursion when the White Knight of Winnipeg had demanded he
charge in against a rampaging angel on his own, without back-up. Refusing a
stupid suicide mission had apparently put him on that woman’s enemies list.


That had been a long time ago,
but Winnipeg is a stagnant fucking city, and old sins die hard in a place like
that. With a Prudence holding the White Court and a Sloth in the Black, nobody
ever did anything. Except that crazy Black Rook. Then she left. And everybody
wanted to take up her mantle. And all of them were united only by their grudges
against one oddball Hope with a weird philosophy of life.


Probably by now the city’d put
the fire in his domus out. He really wished he’d been able to grab more than
Falstaff before he could leave, but those Affections hanging around outside his
house shooting at anything that moved in the windows with SMGs might have been
the work of the same Fallen, or they might not have been. Anyways, it was all
nuts to him now. He could already feel the headaches coming on. His Fallen body
wanted to stay. Well, he wasn’t pressed for time now. Take time to recuperate
somewhere. Then keep going. That was it.


Life goes on.


***


The skull came off the bones with
a dull snapping sound, like bamboo breaking. Now Shapurnippal had to find some
excuse to walk out of the cemetery covered in dirt holding a human skull, since
traffic was just about to start up and he wasn’t sure about hiding in a grave
for several hours.. Hm.


He looked at his newest pet rock
from all angles, tapped it like he would a coconut. The jaw fell off. Oh well,
it looks better without it.


“Welcome to your new family,
Yorick.” He felt a little bad about that. He’d tried to find someone named
‘Yorick’ in the city, but the closest he’d come was this guy named Edward York.
Well, it was close enough, really, wasn’t it?


An idea set upon him. He took his
multi-tool- never leave home without it- and sawed a small hole into Yorick’s
bottom. He proceeded to stick the skull onto the top of Falstaff. They would be
the best of friends, he was sure of it. Now he would just look like some creepy
goth or overworked mortician or something. Or like a pimp. After all, he did
have a new hat and a new coat courtesy of 2035 Massey Road and its stupid
owners.


Shapurnippal hopped up out of the
grave with considerable grace considering his still-untreated injuries. It was
around eight in the morning. The sun was rising. Now, no doubt, things in
Regina had been truly shit so far, but hey, now he had a jester to cheer him
up, and it was a brand new day. The Black Court still made him their bitch but
he had sides they hadn’t seen yet. They’d come around. Or he’d throttle every
one of those bitchy sadistic patronizing fools. He hoped the former. After all,
this was one event he did have control over. Life had taught him that life doesn’t
hand you anything, and sometimes, it punches you in the face. But life included
him, too. And he’s always believed that together, we can change this world in
unspeakable ways.

Rada was ....a PEANUT FARMER!!????

Oh MAN.

*snort*
When Rada starts building houses for poor people, I'll be convinced.

He's kind of like a more angry but effective version of Habitat for Humanity. He just kills the previous owners (who were bad people anyways) and then gives the house to the poor (often times even former victims of the previous owners). He was like Robin Hood and Jimmy Carter all rolled into one.

I should mention that I think this thread is awesome. Rada and Shappurnipal were both so much more interesting than I knew! It's great to know where Rada got that chain; what Shappurnipal thought of Malicia's leaving; all that cool stuff. I especially liked the parts about the even older lives. I neglected that in my own backstory.

Anyway, I can't wait to see more of these, and am eager for the chance to post my own. Thanks!

Dave, that just made my day.

I aim to please.