Shemping Player Characters: Followup

As a continuation of this post, I went to the game session last night prepared to create a character. I brought along my three personality shemps, and my list of names. It turned out we were creating characters for a different playtest than I thought (this is a little think-tank group created specifically to playtest three, possibly four different games). I came prepared to make a character in a contemporary setting; all I can say is that the game we’re tackling first is an historical setting. So the shemps worked, because personalities are universal and the descriptions I put together were purposely loose so they could be adapted, but the names I had didn’t. I originally generated about 40 random names, and pared the list down to 10 that I felt were usable. And they would have been, for what i thought were were doing. Too modern, or too much the wrong ethnicity. To get the right “feel”, though, I used one of the first names, Clayton, as the last name, and came up with the first name Ned. My take-away: be sure you know what you’re playing so the names fit, and maybe generate a longer list of names to fiddle with.

I used Shemp #2 for the personality:  “Has destructive impulses, possibly self-destructive. Trying to overcome those demons and start a new life. May be new to this role, or may have had an epiphany as recent back story. Has empathy, a social conscience, is a sharing and cooperative person.” This dovetailed nicely with the theme of the game. Without revealing too much about what the game is, Ned Clayton was a young naval officer who opposed the slave trade. This got him into a quite a bit of trouble, and he ran afoul of (legal) slave traders who had some clout with the government. When he helped some slaves escape, he ended up branded for theft and was set to be hung. The slaves in turn helped him escape, and he joined the crew of a whaling ship, where no one cares that he’s an outlaw.

My hope is that very soon I’ll be able to reveal what this game is, and I won’t have to subject you to painful teasers. And no, I won’t tell you if you guess right, so don’t guess.