I lack a LOT of pictures right now, but what the heck.
LOTRO:
My first dip into MMO RP was a Hobbit Minstrel, one Nedwyrd Rednettle, an adventurous but soft-spoken individual who spent much of his time gazing up at an admiring the taller, stronger folk who took him in and gave him a place in the world. He would later acquire a larger family -his father, his sister, the Human girl they adopted, and the smirking guardsman who took a shine to them. This started my trend of forming entire families and being a terrible altoholic. But it was this game that made me take seriously RPing a bard - I loved the game's music system, and led a number of concerts with my guildies, as well as spent a lot of nights at the Prancing Pony sharing tunes and hobnobbing with other musicians.
AGE OF CONAN.
Ok, this game was a little bit more on the gritty side, and that's being conservative. Nedwyrd became Nedrigan, the son of a Cimmerian man and a hardbitten Aquilonian woman with a nasty past of dark magics. He was trained as a killer (I chose Assassin as my class, since there was no bard), but had always been rather thin and delicate compared to his sister, who their mother had been imbuing secretly with enhancement magic since the two were young. The boy fled home after besting his sister in a street argument using trickery and agility, and ran off, taking up a lute and learning songs to create a new life for himself that did not involve black magic and murder. The siblings were reunited later, and reconciled, becoming finally very protective of each other, and joined a mercenary company, making gil off their combat training and finding friends and sometimes too-close companions in the group. The server I was on, Wiccana, offered up a weekly storytelling contest, and I spent many a night telling stories and pretending NOT to be a knife-wielding killer.
FALLEN EARTH.
It was here that the Telluride name was born, in this post-apocalyptic setting. I needed a change. Enter Nathan Edward "Ned" Telluride, a former Army Ranger / Combat Medic who had died in his 90's, and found himself cloned as a 25-year-old man again, remembering his old skills to survive and find allies among a group of survivalists determined to carve some order out of the chaotic society humanity had become. "Ned" Telluride was not a bard, but a voice of reason among his companions, and who became more so after finding romance with a troubled and young woman, and reuniting with his daughter, who had likewise lived into her seventies before being reborn as a young woman again.
RIFT
The fantasy pendulum swung back, and the call of the bard grew too powerful to ignore, and the Guardian bard Gellor (a reference to a character from the GORD THE ROGUE series, by Gary Gygax) was born, spinning tales and charming his way into a group of misfits, finally finding romance with a lovely priestess, though not without having to do a LOT of convincing of her that he wasn't just another pain-in-the-arse. The RP scene dried up, and I created a new character on the Defiant side, a lecherous gem-thief who used his clerical gifts for building wealth and meeting women, but before I could really get a good feel for him, it was time for a new game.
SWTOR
It was time for a new start. Enter the Falstaff Siblings - Weyd and Wyra, a pair of gifted technicians determined to build their family name into a tech empire. They started in an Imperial special Regiment, once formed to experiment in having Sith and Skilled military operatives working in tandem and as equals, offering their services as logistics officers. Weyd was essentially a mix of Tony Stark and Lando Calrissian, who nursed a resentment towards force-users, natural charm, and a talent for circuity and robotics into a lucrative career; his sister, Wyra, was a metallurgical prodigy who got off on engine oil and shipbuilding. When their regiment collapsed from Sith intrigues, they set off on their own, finding romance with another pair of siblings, from a family of Echani with talents in special ops. Between times, I ended up playing an Echani of my own - a smarmy singer/musician with a talent for lewdness and savoir faire - and a hulking Cybernetic Sith named Gorrd, who had once been an Alderaanian noble before being killed by a rival, revived and wired with a new personality, and later became a different sort of person entirely, a warrior-poet, trained in heretical force techniques, who made a living as a roving hunter. I had fun with all of them, but there were a lot of times I wished I could mix and match their personalities up a bit more, but then there was...
WILDSTAR
2.5 years in TOR left me wanting a new place to play, and in Wildstar, I could take what I liked from SWTOR and use it in another SciFi universe. The Falstaffs were reborn as a family of three siblings: Weyd and Wyra, lifted almost whole cloth from TOR; their brother Waylon, a mischievous computer guru and garage musician (molded by my Echani troublemaker), and F.I.N.N., a Mechari weapons instructor with a personality based loosely on my old Sith. It started out well, but Wildstar... well, it tanked. So, then I came to..
FFXIV
... and thus was born Nathan Telluride, who melded a LOT of these characters - The name from my Fallen Earth main, the imposing height and fondness for wandering of my old Sith, the pithy charm and composition skills of my previous bards and Weyd, and that touch of "Chivalrous Pervert" that defined my old Echani. Notably, I haven't really started a family in this game. My active alts are largely independent of one another, and though I am trying to start an association between some of them, I have been happy to have Nathan be his own self-contained agglomeration of years of character building.
LOTRO:
My first dip into MMO RP was a Hobbit Minstrel, one Nedwyrd Rednettle, an adventurous but soft-spoken individual who spent much of his time gazing up at an admiring the taller, stronger folk who took him in and gave him a place in the world. He would later acquire a larger family -his father, his sister, the Human girl they adopted, and the smirking guardsman who took a shine to them. This started my trend of forming entire families and being a terrible altoholic. But it was this game that made me take seriously RPing a bard - I loved the game's music system, and led a number of concerts with my guildies, as well as spent a lot of nights at the Prancing Pony sharing tunes and hobnobbing with other musicians.
AGE OF CONAN.
Ok, this game was a little bit more on the gritty side, and that's being conservative. Nedwyrd became Nedrigan, the son of a Cimmerian man and a hardbitten Aquilonian woman with a nasty past of dark magics. He was trained as a killer (I chose Assassin as my class, since there was no bard), but had always been rather thin and delicate compared to his sister, who their mother had been imbuing secretly with enhancement magic since the two were young. The boy fled home after besting his sister in a street argument using trickery and agility, and ran off, taking up a lute and learning songs to create a new life for himself that did not involve black magic and murder. The siblings were reunited later, and reconciled, becoming finally very protective of each other, and joined a mercenary company, making gil off their combat training and finding friends and sometimes too-close companions in the group. The server I was on, Wiccana, offered up a weekly storytelling contest, and I spent many a night telling stories and pretending NOT to be a knife-wielding killer.
FALLEN EARTH.
It was here that the Telluride name was born, in this post-apocalyptic setting. I needed a change. Enter Nathan Edward "Ned" Telluride, a former Army Ranger / Combat Medic who had died in his 90's, and found himself cloned as a 25-year-old man again, remembering his old skills to survive and find allies among a group of survivalists determined to carve some order out of the chaotic society humanity had become. "Ned" Telluride was not a bard, but a voice of reason among his companions, and who became more so after finding romance with a troubled and young woman, and reuniting with his daughter, who had likewise lived into her seventies before being reborn as a young woman again.
RIFT
The fantasy pendulum swung back, and the call of the bard grew too powerful to ignore, and the Guardian bard Gellor (a reference to a character from the GORD THE ROGUE series, by Gary Gygax) was born, spinning tales and charming his way into a group of misfits, finally finding romance with a lovely priestess, though not without having to do a LOT of convincing of her that he wasn't just another pain-in-the-arse. The RP scene dried up, and I created a new character on the Defiant side, a lecherous gem-thief who used his clerical gifts for building wealth and meeting women, but before I could really get a good feel for him, it was time for a new game.
SWTOR
It was time for a new start. Enter the Falstaff Siblings - Weyd and Wyra, a pair of gifted technicians determined to build their family name into a tech empire. They started in an Imperial special Regiment, once formed to experiment in having Sith and Skilled military operatives working in tandem and as equals, offering their services as logistics officers. Weyd was essentially a mix of Tony Stark and Lando Calrissian, who nursed a resentment towards force-users, natural charm, and a talent for circuity and robotics into a lucrative career; his sister, Wyra, was a metallurgical prodigy who got off on engine oil and shipbuilding. When their regiment collapsed from Sith intrigues, they set off on their own, finding romance with another pair of siblings, from a family of Echani with talents in special ops. Between times, I ended up playing an Echani of my own - a smarmy singer/musician with a talent for lewdness and savoir faire - and a hulking Cybernetic Sith named Gorrd, who had once been an Alderaanian noble before being killed by a rival, revived and wired with a new personality, and later became a different sort of person entirely, a warrior-poet, trained in heretical force techniques, who made a living as a roving hunter. I had fun with all of them, but there were a lot of times I wished I could mix and match their personalities up a bit more, but then there was...
WILDSTAR
2.5 years in TOR left me wanting a new place to play, and in Wildstar, I could take what I liked from SWTOR and use it in another SciFi universe. The Falstaffs were reborn as a family of three siblings: Weyd and Wyra, lifted almost whole cloth from TOR; their brother Waylon, a mischievous computer guru and garage musician (molded by my Echani troublemaker), and F.I.N.N., a Mechari weapons instructor with a personality based loosely on my old Sith. It started out well, but Wildstar... well, it tanked. So, then I came to..
FFXIV
... and thus was born Nathan Telluride, who melded a LOT of these characters - The name from my Fallen Earth main, the imposing height and fondness for wandering of my old Sith, the pithy charm and composition skills of my previous bards and Weyd, and that touch of "Chivalrous Pervert" that defined my old Echani. Notably, I haven't really started a family in this game. My active alts are largely independent of one another, and though I am trying to start an association between some of them, I have been happy to have Nathan be his own self-contained agglomeration of years of character building.
"But in the laugh there was another voice. A clearer laugh, an ironic laugh. A laugh which laughs because it chooses not to weep."