Our household has decided that we're going to play a Pathfinder campaign consisting of Kyle running the campaign with myself, Jessie, and Noah as players. This will be Noah's and Jessie's first real introduction into the world of Role Playing Games and I'm pretty excited to see them designing their first characters. We decided to use Pathfinder since Kyle already had most of a 3.5 campaign setup and just had to change a few things to get us up and running.
Kyle gave us free reign to create characters in the high fantasy setting he's designed and let me loose with the whole of Pathfinder available to me. In his setting Monstrous Races are more common with less racism so I could have worked out to be a half-gnoll/minotaur bard-monk who uses oversized nunchuku guns he might have allowed it. It really made me think hard about what I wanted to play.
I haven't had a fresh character concept in quite a while and I wasn't sure what I wanted to do. I started off thinking about character classes I enjoy playing a lot and almost ended up going with a gunslinger. A dodgy and swashbuckling gunslinger. I almost kicked myself for going right back to playing Karrak again.
Every single character concept I came up with was something I played before. Echoes of Karrak, Erik, Ramses, Talos, Nolan, and a host of others came up and I couldn't shake the idea that I was just out of creative juices and was completely out of practice with character design. It was pretty disheartening. I used to be able to pump out a new character and a basic background or concept in a matter of hours. Nothing was inspiring me this time around.
Eventually I was just going through the Pathfinder SRD while ranting to Clint about my lack of ideas and I came across the Summoner class. I've looked at them before but never really gave them much thought. It felt like a class a much younger and less experienced me would have wanted to play and maybe I unconsciously avoided it because I still feel like I'm sometimes still trying to play the same stereotypes I used to back in my high school days.
I decided to read through it and really liked the idea. It's a pretty cool class, creating your own special summoned monster, supporting combat through a combat class that you can change the strategy of on the fly based on the critters you bring to the table. My inner collectible card gamer nerd may have squeed a little bit thinking about the possibilities.
So I tried to think about what would cause someone to become a summoner and I had a hilarious idea pop into my head. What if a summoner came into his power because he really didn't want to touch things himself? Like he was a little germaphobic, didn't like to get dirty, and wasn't always "there" with everyone else unless his Eidolon (his special critter) was there with him in the material plane. He'd be a guy who could end up being stuck in an unlocked room because he couldn't touch the latch on the door. I immediately laughed out loud and decided that this guy could only be a Gnome.
The concept started to come together after that. Clearly this guy doesn't have all his faculties there, he'd need some type of people there that he trusts that will open doors, carry things, and handle everyday tasks while his mind is lost in the ether. I figured he'd need a bodyguard and a manservant. I also thought about making his eidolon a butler, but I couldn't entirely justify the meta loss of combat capabilities that would result from taking a bipedal form over a quadruped.
The character was pretty well set at that point. Now all I had to do was plot out the per level character progression and to fully design the eidolon. The eidolon proved to be a bit of a challenge for me. Again it was because there are so many options. I didn't have any idea what I wanted to accomplish with it. Looking through the options and a couple of guides gave me an idea of what directions I could take it.
Meta-wise a quadruped base form gives the best options for a "Striker" style summon. Biped seemed thematically appropriate, and Avian seemed kind of cool. I ended up selecting the quadruped base because I felt it would end up giving the play experience I'd enjoy the most. I just had to figure out what it looked like now. So... off to Wikipedia!
After about 2 hours of falling down that rabbit hole I finally started narrowing down the choices. I felt like basing the look off a real animal. I didn't want to use a wolf or a big cat. Too obvious, too easy. I didn't want a fantastic reptilian beast. It also felt too typical. I started to look at other apex predators. Atypical canids and felines. I ended spotting the Maned Wolf of South America and looked into that a bit more. Digging deeper they turn out to be related to African Wild Dogs, which then made me look into other African predators. It became pretty obvious to me what fit what was becoming my vision. The Hyena.
So the germaphobe Gnome summoner and his extraplanar Hyena monster have the framework I needed to throw a few finishing touches together and he'd be ready to play. I was pretty happy with how the character has turned out. I'm looking forward to playing him more and developing his personality. He'll be an interesting challenge to play. I haven't played a Gnome, I rarely play magic users, and his personality is so very different from one I've played before.
