Haven’t gotten to play either of these yet, but I might someday.

1. Aberrant Mind sorcerer, race tbd. Basically, was an eldritch abomination who got bored, and turned itself into a mortal for a change of pace. We’re talking “Had 30 Int and Wis” levels of abomination. So now it’s stuck in a limited mortal form with all this knowledge, and no ability to use it. Can’t even pronounce its own name anymore.

2. Incubus/succubus (reflavored tiefling) paladin of redemption. Nommed on the wrong soul and got purified, and now trying to atone for their past misdeeds. They’re virtually starving themselves, which is why they’re using a tiefling statblock instead of the normal one, only having the ability to switch sex, and the draining kiss that they never use save to keep themselves alive with a consenting travelling partner.

Mine was a minotaur gladiator turned monster hunter (ua fighter subclass). His name was Daniel Notmonster and he’d been called monster so much during his days in the arena that he internalized a hatred of monstrosities. He was driven to prove he wasn’t a monster by killing any he came across. He would also collect a bone from each monstrosity killed to scrimshaw a scene of the battle to kill it.

A Reborn Necromancer that acted like a Children’s Edutainer. All my undead were just guests on the show to teach people morals, math, and words.

Delightfully deranged.

For a short adventure / one-shot, I played an intelligence-based tome warlock (using some of the play test materials). His patron was… himself, in the past. He was a terrible evil wizard who realized the error of his ways, wiped his own memory, and restarted. His tome was just his old spell book, most of which was pretty gnarly stuff. Slowly finding that out would have been a fun journey if he was a long-term character.

Oh Trullius, my poor bard of oration, a rhetorical master of sophistry. He may never see the light of a campaign, and maybe that’s for the best.

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We were playing a Ravnica campaign so I made an Orzhov Order Cleric who was a criminal attorney.

A gnoll taken as a cub and raised by good clerics as a test of nature vs nurture. He was all about freeing slaves and offering redemption to evildoers, but was also bloodthirsty in battle with the truly evil.

A Gnome Artificer who was mute. It was interesting to use only visual langauge to communicate with people. I had a “system” where I could use the magic items / features you get from Gnome and Artificer to talk if I decided I really needed to, but I tried to limit that both for in universe reasons, and meta reasons. Kinda defeats the purpose if you can just magic your way out of it. The idea was that she was cursed by a fey creature, and could cheat a little bit with magic, but eventually the curse would hurt too much to talk more than a little. Eventually I started to feel like the trope of Nynaeve from The Wheel of Time, only replace hair pulling with glares and knowing smiles etc.

Big beefy warrior with a heart of gold and a peanut brain that could crush anyone easily but she would rather be friends with everyone and have everyone play along. It’s a heartbreaking character to play in games that just assume all you’re gonna be doing is killing, but it could be pretty cute as the muscle of more diplomatic sorts of campigns.

I’ll preface this by noting that the sin of sloth has traditionally been understood to be a sin of omission, not just commission, i.e., you are insufficiently devoted to the things you ought to be.

Which means you could, in theory, have a (reflavored tiefling) devil paladin so devoted to sloth he works against evil causes. He’s not interested in good per se, it’s just that advancing the interests of good and traveling with a good adventuring party has the best ROI for failing to carry out his evil responsibilities.

Naturally, this has caused a fair amount of controversy among sloth devils, and there is a multi-century trial going on in the Hells about whether this ought to be allowed. This is not expected to be resolved in the foreseeable future because the advocates for both parties keep filing their responses well after petition deadlines expire.

A warforged that escaped the war, met another defector, and together tried to start a new life. Unfortunately, the kingdom sent assassins after them in order to silence them and make sure that they would not switch sides. The human died, but the warforged lived on, carrying with it the remorse of not being able to save them. To honor its friend, it kept the nickname that the human gave it - Hector, which was a pun based on its model name (Tactical Heavy Operations Robot, model H -> H, T.H.O.R. -> Hector).

Survivor’s guilt was the main idea behind the build: It was a Fighter Rune Knight built to tank damage and protect its allies as better as it could (Heavy armor master, Interception fighting style, Cloud rune).

Tanking damage is not optimal in DnD (killing the damage dealer is always the best choice) but it was meant to be a low-level one shot, so it was fine. Unfortunately work, family and other real life issues got in the way and the party wasn’t able to convene on a date where everyone could gather and play for four hours straight.

I had a quite literally hottest character I ever came up with: A wizard that liked fire a bit too much for his own good. He was a master of flames, the best from the Monastery he spent decades on. But the more power he gained through the fire, the more and more he lost his own mind. At the time of the campaign, he was in a sort of Limbo. He couldn’t remember most of his life, and he couldn’t shake off the insatiable desire to spread the flames he encountered. If he spent too long besides a fire, he would start to hear It louder and louder, to the point where he would lose control and be possessed by his flaming desire, which had full memory and access to the spells he no longer remembered, which often resulted in the complete destruction of everything around.

I actually got to play this character, and was a ton of fun with the party I had, but unfortunately the campaign was put on hold indefinitely due to personal matters of the DM.

Reborn tabaxi artificer armorer with a mechanically different though RP similar “living armor”. The living armor is the reason i was “reborn” as its keeping me alive longer but the curse of the living armor is of divine nature as i stole it from an evil cult, so removing it required a monumental effort (high level NPCs basically didnt exist).

The character reached an actual satisfying conclusion as there was an “enlightenment” challenge we managed to find that was heavily skill based and artificers are obscenely good at skill challenges (dm also liked tool checks where relevant, and was lenient with the skill training rules, reborn helped too, resulted in being able to roll d20+stat+prof*expertise+int+guidance(d4)+reborn(d6) on checks i needed to push). The enlightenment ultimately lead to access to enough divine power to break both the curse of the armor and of my undeath.

Ultimately though, despite how fun the RP around it was, it was one of my more OP characters considering how much it trivialized skill checks which that DM really loved.

I tried and failed to tone it down with my next character, which thanks to party dynamic became the single most OP BS i ever made even if it wasnt crazy good alone. Wanted to make a magic infiltrator and went with changeling + aberrant mind sorcerer. Ended up getting a shadowfell shard too. Mindsliver leading to a subtle quickened shadowfell shard boosted CC spell (fav was psychic lance since it wasnt concentration and almost nothing is immune to incapacitated, though hold person, and hypnotic pattern, and the like were also thrown frequently too) was an obscenely powerful combo, and since another new player made a DPS rogue+gloomstalker build, the only way for anything to have any chance of living is lots of legendary resistance and an obscene health pool. This was also a crazy fun build, that the power of it ended up being its downfall as everything we fought ended up being several CR higher than anyone of our level had any right to tangle with. (also yes, i know you can’t normally subtle + quicken, read the Psionic Sorcery power of aberrant sorcerers)