But I can't pick just one! And I'm damnably wordy... particularly since I can't explain half of my characters' backgrounds without having to explain in detail the world setting they're from. sweatdrop
There's always my beloved Yadu Harriyan. Yadu was a male, human fighter, from the Southern culture in my GM's homebrewed D&D setting. The setting is one large continent with five cultural regions generalized into cardinal directions- South, North, East, West, and the Midlands. The trade-based Midlands are where most of the action tends to happen, but the characters often come from the larger nations to the sides. The South is based on the middle-east and Arabian myth, and as such is primarily a vast desert, peopled by nomadic tribes of dark-skinned, horse-loving, paternalistic merchants and herders, with walled cities here and there containing the pleasure palaces of Sheiks and desert princes. In Yadu's timeframe, Southerners are quickly accepting a new religion of the One God- a religion which happens to be even more restrictive to women and hateful of foreigners than the Southern culture already was on its own.
Southerners are generally disliked by those of other nations, as they consider their own culture superior to all others, and are hostile and quick to anger. Generally, the only Southerners you'll see out of the South are merchants in the Midlands, so a Southern PC is always a curiosity.
Another noteworthy thing about the setting: the Gods left this world to entropy many thousands of years ago. Clerics are rare and generally can't advance past fourth level or so. Paladins do not exist. Druids are rarer than clerics, and hated due to a long-ago war between the races that occurred after the Gods left the planes. Dragons have been absent from this world for such a long time that there hardly remains a trace of them in even the most ancient of recorded folklore- the people of this setting have no conception of them at all, even the great loremasters. Elves, Gnomes and Dwarves have never existed in the conventional sense, and instead are merely sub-types of Fey folk from the plane of Faerie (which is very much akin to Irish folklore.) Thus, these races are not playable, nor is the half-dragon template applicable. The GM instead ran a modified "bloodline" system, by which a PC could have any of these races, or even just about any monster race if they could come up with a good template for it, in their distant ancestry, and thus manifest a few of the benefits.
Yadu was the ONLY PC in that game, counting sixteen PCs during the full course of gameplay as players joined and characters died and were replaced, that DID NOT have any kind of bloodline.
Yadu Harriyan was the son of an embittered prostitute. His name, Yadu, means "Hateful abyss" in the Southern tongue, which is an excellent reflection of just how much his mother despised him. He abandoned her to her hate at the age of 6 to work as a stableboy, a lowly career which he followed for many years. In his 17th year, the ever-promiscuous young lad made love to a pretty young woman, only to discover himself a wanted man shortly thereafter. It seems that she had been the daughter of a major tribal prince, snuck out for a night on the town... and she had become pregnant. Upon finding his life forfeit, Yadu stole the finest warhorse in the stables of the general that he worked under, and fled to the Midlands.
Here our noble (if a bit gruff) wanderer meets Ruby, a beautiful (if air-headed) Bard, whom he becomes smitten with. Thus attached to the party, most of whom are pretty odd in their own rights, he and his compatriots have many exciting low-level adventures, like rescuing babies from goblins. Or, rather, failing to rescue babies from goblins, and having to deal with the sobbing parents with a -1 Cha score. xp
Eventually, though, after a long succession of extreme weirdness and very humorous (to the players, rarely the PCs) situations, some REALLY BIG s**t went down, most of which Yadu wound up at the center of.
For one, Yadu a a certain point collected a pair of unusual magical gauntlets from a recently deceased party member. (If you've ever read the comic Battle Chasers... you already have a very good idea of what I'm talking about.) Said gloves gave the wearer a +6 to STR, upping Yadu's STR score to 24, and if two large blue gems on them were struck together, the gloves created a ten-foot-diameter bolt of natural (not spell-like, but natural, deadly!) lightening that struck... wherever it wanted to in the general vicinity, since no one ever figured out how to control the blast. Yay, party deaths! xd Yet despite a 24 STR, Yadu's fighting capabilities still paled in comparison to the half-ogre psion's. (Grrr.) The gauntlets happened to contain a fraction of the soul of the legendary ogre mage who originally created them, Vim. Yadu had a tendency to fail Will saves. Thus, Vim took over every so often.
Trying to rescue the spirits of an entire city that had been sucked into the Spirit Realm, the party entered and started shepherding souls back to the material plane, while fighting ethereal filchers and marauders. Having failed his Will save yet again, Yadu's soul got shoved to the 'back' as Vim took over and manifested his body instead of Yadu's in the spirit realm... but sucessfully conned the rest of the party (save our really weird-a** loremaster rogue/cleric character named Him) into believing that he was really Yadu, and didn't know what was up with the body. Vim was singlehandedly kicking a**, until... he detected an Astral Destroyer headed toward the dearth of souls near the portal.
To give us an example of the size of this monster, the GM picked up the d4 I used to mark my character and said, "You." Then he picked up his huge, fat cat, and said, "The Destroyer."
eek
Vim wasn't exactly a Good character, but he realized exactly how ******** the entire world would be if the Astral Destroyer made it through the portal. He ordered the rest of the party back through to the material plane, and stayed behind in the hopes that his death would take the monster along for the ride, or at least force the portal shut. He tackles the think head-on, as meanwhile the party wake up in their bodies on the material plane, and realize that Yadu hasn't followed them out. Ruby heads back into the portal after Yads.
Cue dramatic, heart-rending goodbye scene, as Vim takes pity on weak-willed Yadu and allows the boy's personality to surface for a calm moment, to say goodbye to his love before pushing her back through the portal and activating the gloves point-blank on both portal and monster.
And then everything SPLODES!
The crater from the forced closure of the portal is blocks wide- the PCs barely made it out of the blast radius in time. Ruby, distraught, runs into the wreckage- Him and the party cleric follow, to stop her from getting herself hurt. But what do they find in the center of the crater? Nothing less than the sprawled figure of Yadu, butt-naked, utterly hairless, and completely unequipped save for the Gloves of Vim.
Yadu was in a coma for a week... and when he woke up, instead of being glad or amazed that he was alive, he was upset that he'd lost all of his gorgeous hair. xd
This does not end the chronicles of Yadu, but I have typed long enough. Perhaps I will regale you with the tale of how Yadu became the Grand Sultan of the South at a later date... heh. Or perhaps how the party managed to call down a genuine God, in a setting in which the Gods no longer exist. whee
I miss that game.
