Characters Inspired By Songs [Archive] - Wizards Community

Characters Inspired By Songs [Archive] - Wizards Community

Post/Author/DateTime Post
The Ethereal Wickerman
01-18-05, 06:06 AM Have you ever been influenced by a song, a particular piece of music/band/etc ever given you an idea for a cool character concept. Try listening to a piece of music and tell what kind of character would have a song like that...

"Keep On Rotting In The Free World" by a band called Carcass just gave me this idea. A CN Zombie Fighter (Thug). I've just got this image in my head of a rotting human baring his teeth and with cleched fists. He looks and acts like your typical anarchistic metalhead, he has huge messy dreadlocks and baggy clothes. Disdains the use of weapons prefering to beat his enemies to a bloody pulp. Plus the way the bands singer growls is perfect for his half-rotten, street-wise voice.

This is a serious discussion, not mindless spam. Have any ideas... :)
RadicalTaoist
01-18-05, 07:11 PM I had this idea... (http://boards.wizards.com/showthread.php?t=333334) ;)
Tempest Stormwind
01-19-05, 03:24 AM I've had a few, but mostly instrumentals off of little-known CDs (Phantasmagoria, by Nobuo Uematsu, has a bunch of these. Robert Miles, Paul Oakenfold, and independant trance/techno artists make up most of the others). A good source for this, surprisingly, is Newgrounds -- yes, the very same site full of questionable flash animations that prevent me from linking it under the CoC. Just click on Audio and look under Ambient. I'm particularily fond of Evil-Dog, Dreamscaper, and Darkened_Jedi's works, in that order. They work particularily well when imagining concepts or worlds, and I still use them when I need to define a group of people's outlook quickly -- the last world I planned with my DM involved three groups inspired by three separate songs by Evil-Dog, for instance (Lake of Truth, Stone Altar, and Southern Tribe, for the record).

One of my more successful one-shots came from one such clip (Golem War: March, Evil-Dog's most highly-rated song). It was for an Arabian-Nights-esque one-shot at level 8. Listen to that song -- it goes from a dark and dreary opening to an almost opressive war march, and then to an almost mystic contemplative tune, and finally breaks loose into a triumphant flourish before ending on an open note. My only idea before hearing that song was that the character would be of Good alignment, since I play those best.
The character began as a former thief rather in the Aladdin-style (the original book, not the Disney version), only to be caught and sold to an agent of a desert maurauder, where he was forced to put his natural gifts to work as a warrior (I rolled rather well on the ability scores). The maurauders were eventually routed by another nomadic band, with only a few slaves spared and thus liberated, including my character... who, at that point, had been driven nearly mad by the horrors (good-aligned people opressed into evil acts often get scarred) and the heat. He joined the nomads for a while, but never fully recovered his sanity... instead, he started to hear music all the time. This affected his fighting style and his senses, which he'd continued to adapt over the years, until eventually he left on his own to get a particular artifact the band was looking for (the adventure hook). The history was anchored more fully in the homebrew world the DM was using, so it sounded far more dynamic there than it does here.
The final character? Arayn Shikadi, Chaotic Good Human Rogue 2 / Fighter 4 / Dervish 2, with capable physical scores and a terrible wisdom score (hardly optimal, but we needed both muscle and finesse in the party, plus CW had just come out at the time, so there was the novelty issue. On top of that, I'd recently finished Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, so the dervish in particular stood out).
The big pun? There's a saying that I first heard from George Carlin (I don't know if he wrote it or not), and everyone at the game table knew it: "Those who dance are considered insane by those who can't hear the music." Fitting, for a character inspired entirely by song, especially one without any words.
(And bonus points to anyone who caught the terrible joke with his surname, which thankfully was never spoken in-game because I KNOW the fellow players would have caught it if they saw it. Both names did sound a lot like the place names my DM was using, so they weren't given the second glance).

If I'm going for lyrics to inspire characters, I pull from an obvious but relatively unknown source -- fantasy metal. Bands like Blind Guardian, Hammerfall, Avantasia, Rhapsody, Manowar, and so on have suitably epic-sounding, awe-inspiring songs that often are based off of history or fantasy (and include lines like "I will smite my evil enemies" or "fight with your heart and you're destined for glory"). Admittedly, you won't find many mage concepts in these guys (as they prefer the gallantry of the flashing sword and the questing knight to the aged wizard), but for warrior-type characters (say, any combat class at or above the rogue, bard, or cleric's combat effectiveness), you'll find something in their songs to inspire you.
(By the way, many of Blind Guardian's songs are also inspired by one of the other big sources of fantasy ideas -- classical literature. They've got plenty of Lord of the Rings tribute songs, and they date long before anyone had heard of Peter Jackson. That takes a special kind of fan-craze to do, and they did it well, in my opinion.)

The only character I've played recently that actually DID use a lyric song (The Soulforged, by Blind Guardian) wasn't a typical one, because the mechanics came first -- I used a variant of the infamous King of Smack build in a min/max fest. I figured the elan race's description reminded me a bit of that song, particularily if the elan in question was in the lower-right end of the alignment grid... and after listening to it twice, I had my personality (which, in that particular min/max fest, was second to your mechanics. In my case, it was one of the few interesting ones there -- most of the others had degenerated to the "I'm a dwarf!" level, while mine was a bitter and cold TN, driven so from lifetimes of isolation and exile, watching those he knew as friends and relatives grow up and die of age while he endured).

A friend of mine made a creepy tiefling assassin with rather dramatic, if effective, techniques based on the song Bonecracker, by Shocore (it's an easy song to find lyrics to. The verses are incomprehensible; the chorus is "I'm the bonecracker/I'm the bonecracker/I'm the come-from-behind/I'm the back attacker!"). It's a common anthem on WWE wrestling, I'm told, which is what in part made him choose the garotte as his weapon of choice. It was one of the more successful characters I've seen that was song-inspired. He's apparently done more, but I have never heard details on them.

Wow, that was long. Sorry for my self-indulging drivel. I guess some of those examples were really extended.
Fox Lee
01-19-05, 03:57 AM "Adia I thought that we could make it,
I know I can't change the way you feel
I'll leave you with your misery, a friend who won't betray,
Pull you from your tower, and take away your pain,
Show you all the beauty you possess, If you'd only let yourself believe
That we are born innocent;
Believe me, Adia, we are still innocent
It's easy, we all falter,
Does it matter?"

My d20Modern character, Adia, was based on the Sarah McLachlan song of the same name. She was a crowbar-weilding bouncer who, back when she was a teenager, found out that her (single parent) father had been sexually abusing her younger sister. The crowbar was what she used to kill him when she found out. Unfortunately, her little sister was pretty messed up by that stage; living alone with Adia as her protector, she wound up developing a misguided romantic interest in her older sister. Not knowing how to deal with this, Adia was eventually forced to leave her sister in an institution and flee to another city. FWIW, though, they did eventually meet up and reconcile in a side story.

I guess that the moral of this story is that beautiful, melancholy songs give messed-up character ideas :p On a lighter note, the Captain Tractor Song Mary Donnell also inspired my pirate character, "Bloody" Mary Donnell, an Irish lass who ran away from home and drifted from crappy job to crappy barmaid job until she was harrassed by the wrong drunk, cracked his skull with her serving tray, and stowed away on a pirate ship (of which she later wound up becoming the captain, mostly thourgh bloody-minded stubborness).
The Ethereal Wickerman
01-19-05, 05:01 AM "Drinking From The Necks Of The Ones You Love" by These Arms Are Snakes
CN Male Yuan-Ti Halfblood Wizard
This guy suffers from a lot of mental illnesses, due to his fascination with the Far Realm. He see's his cultist kin and other religions as deluded fools. He believes that everything ends up being false, hence he has an incredibly derealized view of the universe, hence his motto 'tell the future that the stars are no more'. He believes that the pseudonaturals are the only true beings and he aspires to become one. "Even the weakest pseudnatural is greater than the most powerful god, because at the end of the day the god is nothing more than the most powerful mass of dust and ashes in the universe, the pseudonaturals are invincible for they were never actually alive".

"The **** Sisters" by These Arms Are Snakes
NE Female Yuan-Ti Pureblood Rogue/Hexblade
A bit of a nymph, this lady is mysteriously beautiful and just as deadly. Works as a professional hitman (or should I say hitwoman?), but she has a secret depraved world all of her own. She can rarely pass up an opportunity to pervert innocence and control someone weaker than herself. Despite her cockiness and vanity she is very cowardly. "Sampling what the fairer sex has to offer is just a professional perk, i've earned it, wether my victims want it or not".

"Master Blaster" by Thisgirl
NG Female Thri-Kreen Swashbuckler/Ranger
This lady is the leader of a group of vigilantes called The Mercy. They track down criminals and kill them, but those that show promise of redemption are given another chance to turn their immoral lives around. She is known for her signature fighting style, using a longbow and shortbow at the same time with her 2 sets of hands. "If you decide to keep walking this path, you die now".

Post/Author/DateTime	Post
The Ethereal Wickerman 01-18-05, 06:06 AM	Have you ever been influenced by a song, a particular piece of music/band/etc ever given you an idea for a cool character concept. Try listening to a piece of music and tell what kind of character would have a song like that... "Keep On Rotting In The Free World" by a band called Carcass just gave me this idea. A CN Zombie Fighter (Thug). I've just got this image in my head of a rotting human baring his teeth and with cleched fists. He looks and acts like your typical anarchistic metalhead, he has huge messy dreadlocks and baggy clothes. Disdains the use of weapons prefering to beat his enemies to a bloody pulp. Plus the way the bands singer growls is perfect for his half-rotten, street-wise voice. This is a serious discussion, not mindless spam. Have any ideas... :)
RadicalTaoist 01-18-05, 07:11 PM	I had this idea... (http://boards.wizards.com/showthread.php?t=333334) ;)
Tempest Stormwind 01-19-05, 03:24 AM	I've had a few, but mostly instrumentals off of little-known CDs (Phantasmagoria, by Nobuo Uematsu, has a bunch of these. Robert Miles, Paul Oakenfold, and independant trance/techno artists make up most of the others). A good source for this, surprisingly, is Newgrounds -- yes, the very same site full of questionable flash animations that prevent me from linking it under the CoC. Just click on Audio and look under Ambient. I'm particularily fond of Evil-Dog, Dreamscaper, and Darkened_Jedi's works, in that order. They work particularily well when imagining concepts or worlds, and I still use them when I need to define a group of people's outlook quickly -- the last world I planned with my DM involved three groups inspired by three separate songs by Evil-Dog, for instance (Lake of Truth, Stone Altar, and Southern Tribe, for the record). One of my more successful one-shots came from one such clip (Golem War: March, Evil-Dog's most highly-rated song). It was for an Arabian-Nights-esque one-shot at level 8. Listen to that song -- it goes from a dark and dreary opening to an almost opressive war march, and then to an almost mystic contemplative tune, and finally breaks loose into a triumphant flourish before ending on an open note. My only idea before hearing that song was that the character would be of Good alignment, since I play those best. The character began as a former thief rather in the Aladdin-style (the original book, not the Disney version), only to be caught and sold to an agent of a desert maurauder, where he was forced to put his natural gifts to work as a warrior (I rolled rather well on the ability scores). The maurauders were eventually routed by another nomadic band, with only a few slaves spared and thus liberated, including my character... who, at that point, had been driven nearly mad by the horrors (good-aligned people opressed into evil acts often get scarred) and the heat. He joined the nomads for a while, but never fully recovered his sanity... instead, he started to hear music all the time. This affected his fighting style and his senses, which he'd continued to adapt over the years, until eventually he left on his own to get a particular artifact the band was looking for (the adventure hook). The history was anchored more fully in the homebrew world the DM was using, so it sounded far more dynamic there than it does here. The final character? Arayn Shikadi, Chaotic Good Human Rogue 2 / Fighter 4 / Dervish 2, with capable physical scores and a terrible wisdom score (hardly optimal, but we needed both muscle and finesse in the party, plus CW had just come out at the time, so there was the novelty issue. On top of that, I'd recently finished Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, so the dervish in particular stood out). The big pun? There's a saying that I first heard from George Carlin (I don't know if he wrote it or not), and everyone at the game table knew it: "Those who dance are considered insane by those who can't hear the music." Fitting, for a character inspired entirely by song, especially one without any words. (And bonus points to anyone who caught the terrible joke with his surname, which thankfully was never spoken in-game because I KNOW the fellow players would have caught it if they saw it. Both names did sound a lot like the place names my DM was using, so they weren't given the second glance). If I'm going for lyrics to inspire characters, I pull from an obvious but relatively unknown source -- fantasy metal. Bands like Blind Guardian, Hammerfall, Avantasia, Rhapsody, Manowar, and so on have suitably epic-sounding, awe-inspiring songs that often are based off of history or fantasy (and include lines like "I will smite my evil enemies" or "fight with your heart and you're destined for glory"). Admittedly, you won't find many mage concepts in these guys (as they prefer the gallantry of the flashing sword and the questing knight to the aged wizard), but for warrior-type characters (say, any combat class at or above the rogue, bard, or cleric's combat effectiveness), you'll find something in their songs to inspire you. (By the way, many of Blind Guardian's songs are also inspired by one of the other big sources of fantasy ideas -- classical literature. They've got plenty of Lord of the Rings tribute songs, and they date long before anyone had heard of Peter Jackson. That takes a special kind of fan-craze to do, and they did it well, in my opinion.) The only character I've played recently that actually DID use a lyric song (The Soulforged, by Blind Guardian) wasn't a typical one, because the mechanics came first -- I used a variant of the infamous King of Smack build in a min/max fest. I figured the elan race's description reminded me a bit of that song, particularily if the elan in question was in the lower-right end of the alignment grid... and after listening to it twice, I had my personality (which, in that particular min/max fest, was second to your mechanics. In my case, it was one of the few interesting ones there -- most of the others had degenerated to the "I'm a dwarf!" level, while mine was a bitter and cold TN, driven so from lifetimes of isolation and exile, watching those he knew as friends and relatives grow up and die of age while he endured). A friend of mine made a creepy tiefling assassin with rather dramatic, if effective, techniques based on the song Bonecracker, by Shocore (it's an easy song to find lyrics to. The verses are incomprehensible; the chorus is "I'm the bonecracker/I'm the bonecracker/I'm the come-from-behind/I'm the back attacker!"). It's a common anthem on WWE wrestling, I'm told, which is what in part made him choose the garotte as his weapon of choice. It was one of the more successful characters I've seen that was song-inspired. He's apparently done more, but I have never heard details on them. Wow, that was long. Sorry for my self-indulging drivel. I guess some of those examples were really extended.
Fox Lee 01-19-05, 03:57 AM	"Adia I thought that we could make it, I know I can't change the way you feel I'll leave you with your misery, a friend who won't betray, Pull you from your tower, and take away your pain, Show you all the beauty you possess, If you'd only let yourself believe That we are born innocent; Believe me, Adia, we are still innocent It's easy, we all falter, Does it matter?" My d20Modern character, Adia, was based on the Sarah McLachlan song of the same name. She was a crowbar-weilding bouncer who, back when she was a teenager, found out that her (single parent) father had been sexually abusing her younger sister. The crowbar was what she used to kill him when she found out. Unfortunately, her little sister was pretty messed up by that stage; living alone with Adia as her protector, she wound up developing a misguided romantic interest in her older sister. Not knowing how to deal with this, Adia was eventually forced to leave her sister in an institution and flee to another city. FWIW, though, they did eventually meet up and reconcile in a side story. I guess that the moral of this story is that beautiful, melancholy songs give messed-up character ideas :p On a lighter note, the Captain Tractor Song Mary Donnell also inspired my pirate character, "Bloody" Mary Donnell, an Irish lass who ran away from home and drifted from crappy job to crappy barmaid job until she was harrassed by the wrong drunk, cracked his skull with her serving tray, and stowed away on a pirate ship (of which she later wound up becoming the captain, mostly thourgh bloody-minded stubborness).
The Ethereal Wickerman 01-19-05, 05:01 AM	"Drinking From The Necks Of The Ones You Love" by These Arms Are Snakes CN Male Yuan-Ti Halfblood Wizard This guy suffers from a lot of mental illnesses, due to his fascination with the Far Realm. He see's his cultist kin and other religions as deluded fools. He believes that everything ends up being false, hence he has an incredibly derealized view of the universe, hence his motto 'tell the future that the stars are no more'. He believes that the pseudonaturals are the only true beings and he aspires to become one. "Even the weakest pseudnatural is greater than the most powerful god, because at the end of the day the god is nothing more than the most powerful mass of dust and ashes in the universe, the pseudonaturals are invincible for they were never actually alive". "The **** Sisters" by These Arms Are Snakes NE Female Yuan-Ti Pureblood Rogue/Hexblade A bit of a nymph, this lady is mysteriously beautiful and just as deadly. Works as a professional hitman (or should I say hitwoman?), but she has a secret depraved world all of her own. She can rarely pass up an opportunity to pervert innocence and control someone weaker than herself. Despite her cockiness and vanity she is very cowardly. "Sampling what the fairer sex has to offer is just a professional perk, i've earned it, wether my victims want it or not". "Master Blaster" by Thisgirl NG Female Thri-Kreen Swashbuckler/Ranger This lady is the leader of a group of vigilantes called The Mercy. They track down criminals and kill them, but those that show promise of redemption are given another chance to turn their immoral lives around. She is known for her signature fighting style, using a longbow and shortbow at the same time with her 2 sets of hands. "If you decide to keep walking this path, you die now".