21 - Johnny Ramensky - ThiefThese Days, It Seems Like The Ideal Of The Gentleman Thief Is A Dying Breed.

21 - Johnny Ramensky - Thief These days, it seems like the ideal of the Gentleman Thief is a dying breed. And so we present Johnny Ramensky, Thief-y counterpart to Our Lady of the Rogue Shotgun miss Belle Starr. Johnny here was a career criminal back in Scotland during the early 20th century, and quickly garnered the nickname “Gentle Johnny,” as he never used violence, targetted only businesses, and never resisted arrest. Mr. Ramensky was pretty dang skilled, combining his talent for gymnastics with a knowledge of safecracking that made him a master catburgler of the old school. Johnny further proved his mettle during World War II, when he became -- and this is 100% true -- a parachuting safe-cracking commando. He’d drop below enemy lines, break through Axis defenses, steal their secrets and high-tail it back home. His most amazing caper involved breaking open no fewer than 14 safes in one day, a feat that earned him some impressive commendation. As I mentioned in the Rogue entry, the Thief is the more item-obsessed of the two outlaw-style classes. Thieves specialize in jumping behind the foe’s guard and stealing them blind, sometimes causing damage or status effects at the same time. The line between Thief and Rogue is often a bit thin, just like the line between Robin Hood and common cutpurse, but given Johnny Ramensky’s disavowal of violence and warm regard towards the people who were trying to catch him, I felt Thief was a good fit.

Julie d'Aubigny - Fencer Class

Julie d'Aubigny's life would have worked wonderfully as a trashy bisexual romance novel. She was a wild young noblewoman who went to bars, got into swordfights, and kissed whichever dude she felt like, even if they were ladies. When one of Julie's lovers was sent away to a convent because of their relationship, our young noblewoman snuck in, picked her ladyfriend up, and set fire to the room to cover their escape. She would've made a wonderful Dread Pirate Roberts.

In the world of RPGs, Fencers are usually defined by their well-balanced stats, with a tendency towards focusing on finesse and speed over brute force and strength. Fencers are a little uncommon in games that have actual job class systems, as the Warrior is usually the go-to standard for basic physical fighters, so the Fencer class tends to be rather strongly tied to a specific character. Good examples of Fencers in RPGs are Mitsuru Kirijo of Persona 3, Eclair of La Pucelle Tactics, and Leon Magnus of Tales of Destiny.

Intro to Historical Character Classes 101

You may be familiar with National Novel Writing Month, the challenge to writers to produce an entire novel in thirty days. With NaNoWriMo's growing popularity, a number of similar challenges have popped up that cater to every stripe of artist. This Tumblr is an archive for a challenge that I'll be taking part in this November, the 30 Characters Challenge (http://www.30characters.com/).

As you may have guessed, the point of this particular challenge is to create 30 characters in 30 days. I've always loved history, and RPGs have been a huge influence in my work, so I've decided to design 30 historical figures as members of RPG classes: Teddy Roosevelt as a Berzerker, for example, or Charles Darwin as a Druid.

I don't have a huge number of restrictions on people I'll be pulling out of history for this thing. I'll be trying to keep to relatively modern history - 1600s and on, mostly - because once you get pre-Renaissance, historical figures start to actually be Knights and Paladins and Mages and so on, which kind of defeats the purpose. I'm also going to try to be respectful to the people I'm using, so you won't see, for example, Gandhi as a bare-knuckle Monk, or Giles Corey as a Warlock.

Anyway, those're the basics. I'll post some practice characters over the next couple of days to illustrate the basic idea I'm going for. Hopefully it'll help be get back into the swing of character design, too. Also, I'm still in the process of finalizing the list of people I'll be using for the actual challenge, so feel free to poke me if you have a history crush to suggest. ^^b

19 - Josephine Baker - Dancer Though best known as a depression-era dancer, Josephine Baker was also a civil rights advocate, member of the French Resistance, and adoptive mother to no less than twelve children. She had one heck of a life; she was born into poverty and ended up on the streets at age 12. At age 15, she joined a vaudeville act in St. Louis before moving to New York and performing in various Broadway revues during the Harlem Renaissance. By the time Ms. Baker was 19, she was the highest-paid chorus girl in vaudeville, and that was far from being the most amazing thing that happened during her life. Ms. Baker moved to France and hung out with Ernest Hemmingway and Pablo Picasso. Ms. Baker owned a cheetah with a diamond collar. Ms. Baker invented the banana dance. Ms. Baker was unaccountably badass. In RPGs, the Dancer is sort of an upside-down and backwards Bard. Where Bards can heal and support, Dancers can damage enemies and reduce their stats, or even cause status effects from a distance. Usually an exclusively female class, Dancers tend to be a little rare, and useful Dancers are even more uncommon, but its always nice to see them as an option just to have something to balance out the Bard. And why did I pick Dancer for Josephine Baker? Well, besides the obvious, her danse banane hit me with some serious debuffs.

I have to say, I'm kind of jealous of all the great monsters that are coming out of the 30 characters challenge this year. I kinda wish I'd picked a theme like that, but oh well. By way of compensation, here's one of my favorite monsters from the Final Fantasy series: the Malboro! So cute. :3

Characters #15-17 are coming along nicely, and should be done tomorrow. It's gonna be awesome. :D

10 - Edmund Beckett - Time Mage When choosing historical figures for this project, I mostly looked at the major accomplishments of the person and their personality for cues as to what class would fit them best. It’s not always an easy or exact fit, but for Edmund Beckett, it was pretty dang easy. Mr. Beckett was an architect, you see, but his most famous work was actually as part of the team that designed Big Ben, one of the most iconic and symbolic timepieces on the planet. Not only is Big Ben an easily recognizeable symbol for Great Britain as a whole (much in the same way the Statue of Liberty is for the USA), but its placement in the heart of Westminster Palace is meant to symbolize the power of the British Empire at its height. Here is time, the clock says, and it belongs to the British. And so Edmund Beckett was a cinch for the class of Time Mage -- what else would you call one of the men who captured time itself? Time Mages, as you may have gathered, are magically-based characters with control over aspects of time. Mostly used as support characters, Time Mages can speed up allied units, slow down enemies, or even stop them entirely. They usually have one or two offensive skills, but for the most part, Time Mages stick to the back. This doesn’t make them weak, of course; in some games, the time-manipulating abilities of these mages can be downright game-breaking.