#they have a complicated relationship with adherents of the trickster god

[zigraves]

"All over the city, the masked cultists of the death god" It's quite benign, really; the adherents of the death god hold that each person's death is their sacred own death and it is a dishonourable thing to give someone a death that wasn't intended to be theirs. As such, devotees tend to wear masks and gloves to ensure they don't spread any diseases, because they absolutely cannot, in their devotion, risk being responsible for someone else dying of their own illness

They're amazing at safe sex because death god forbid you give someone a potentially serious STI - that's your illness to live or die with, not your partner's!

Once you get past all the skulls and ossuaries they're also super into civic planning because one person's careless match or gas fire shouldn't result in dozens of other, wholly unrelated, people's deaths. Creepy fucks, to be quite honest, but nobody maintains a safe gas line or designs adequate sewerage systems quite like them.

The flipside is that they do rather venerate suicides and heart attacks, because those are so much more personal, and yes their civil engineering is amazing but they're very casual about workplace accidents. Wonderfully clean water and a distinct lack of guardrails for anyone who has to climb up to do maintenance. Sometimes death god has decreed that your own personal death is you falling from a great height into superaerated water.

They run a great end-of-life hospice but there is a concerted effort by every single other faith and most of the faithless to prevent them getting involved with hospitals unless there's an epidemic on.

[betweenrivers-betweenworlds]

Is there anything all your OCs have in common?

Huh that’s. That’s a good question. The smartass answer is that they’re all made by me.

(more under the cut b/c holy fuck I didn’t expect to write this much and I don’t want to piss you guys off)(PS I added a bit)

Which leads into an actual commonality they tend to have: being smartasses. I bleed into my characters and I am a rather snarky individual. My usual dm has commented on the fact that my characters tend to snark at/interrupt bosses during speeches. One actually got hurled into a river and knocked unconscious due to this (although that was an illusion, Michael).

A lot of them, especially as I’ve put more effort into creating personalities, tend to be prideful/arrogant. Thistle for example considered himself the smartest man in the room always (although to be fair he had 20 int at level 1 so…). Madhi was actually defined by his intelligence - it was his noun (Numenera). Vulthreck is charismatic af, but he’s also got a greedy, hungry, grasping side to him. Cinderheart is also prideful af, and definitely the most arrogant one that I’ve created (he’s also very, very Slytherin which is fun to play as a Hufflepuff).

You could argue that Helio is a prideful being, but I think that misses the point of who he is. He has followed a path that runs entirely contrary to his people and his family and led to him getting cursed. But I’ve tried to craft him as more confident than prideful. If anything, his cardinal sin would be Envy - envious of those who fit better into orc society than he ever could as a half-orc, envious of those who can still feel love (that fun curse), and so on. He has his pride, but nowhere near to the point of arrogance. (He’ll also hopefully be more punny/funny than snarky/assholey).

Drannillis will be more of a trickster than arrogant, although possibly a bit vain. I haven’t dug too deep into her as yet.

A good number of them have been/are fairly religiously devout as well. All of my dnd characters have been aligned with some deity or another to varying degrees, minus Thistle. He was explicitly against the gods, seeing them as having abandoned his continent to burn in a nasty civil war. The truth is more complicated, but that’s how he saw it. Helio’s devotion for Corellon is matched only by that of his devotion to the theatre, and is a large part of what led to him leaving home/getting exiled. It’s a central part of who he is. Drannillis is a fairly devout adherent of the Dawnworn, but again, need to dig deeper on her. The others are happy with their deities, and Nerfherder may possibly be getting visions from his deity. Madhi had a religion I came up with for his character and community within Numenera, and Lewe has a deep faith in one that I’ve created for that as well. Shit, same with Cinderheart. If I decided what Ford Jone’s religious beliefs were, I can’t recall them now.

I also like to make my characters tall lol. Drannillis is 6′2″ cuz it’s a legal height and seemed funny. Helio is either the same or close, and so on. Thistle, being a gnome is naturally short, as were Adoril and Ulahassee, being halflings.

A lot of them have tended to be my age/age equivalent as well. I’ve also tended to map my sexuality onto them, although I never really tended to explore it in them anyway? Aside from a couple campaigns where it became relevant. (I did make Madhi ace but looking back I probably could have done a better job with that). Waaaay after I started playing Thistle I thought it might be interesting to play him as bi, and Lewe is def not straight. It’s something I try to keep in mind now, just to be able to better get into my character’s headspace.

They also tend to have either large families, or one brother/sister, sorta mirroring my sitch (and happy relationships with their parents). Helio is probs the closest in that he has older half-brothers who are almost a separate generation from him. Thistle has an (older) sister who he’s close to in age, as well as being close to her period. I think Adoril had a brother?? Ambolt ended up killing his “father“ but that was a complicated situation. Vulthreck fucking hates his family (no sibs) and no longer considers himself part of his clan (his cos Abraxas is aight tho). Nerfherder probably has the largest family.

tl;dr, they’re smartasses, they’re arrogant, their sib sitch reflects mine a bit, they tend to be religious, tall and my age/generally straight.