From Deadlands Classic:

A snake handling Pentecostal Blessed with the “grim servant of death” flaw. As he genuinely tries to save souls, people often get bit by the rattlesnakes he carries with him. Technically he doesn’t break the law but most sheriffs don’t want him sticking around. Sadly the campaign never got started.

Shadowrun 4e. A hacker who was way into drag racing. I got really into statting his race car, and even made driving equal to hacking. He was in deep in the underworld, trying to buy his childhood friend out of her indentured servitude at a brothel.

Mad Max style wasteland campaign: A Shepard boy, skilled at archery, wandering the wasteland with a talking dog (who was named Blood, but wasn’t evil). I saw this kid as being on the more idealistic and good side, and I picked a concept connected to society in contrast to what the other PCs picked (A reformed Mohawker, a powerful mutated woman wielding a stop sign, and a “priest of KISS” following the concert routes his roadie parents took before the bombs dropped, mistaking them for religious pilgrimage)… sorry that one had a lot of gas.

Superheroes: A jewish journalist who learns he is the inheritor of the Golem of Prague, and with it, a tradition of Talmudic magic. The other party members were a Bisexual paramedic/ vigilante by night (me and her player agreed that we were roommates lol) and the last one was a black teenager who killed a cop after he had paralyzed his brother. The campaign started and we were “the cop killers” and were protecting a small minority community but I keep thinking that had so much gas in the tank and room to grow and I might spin that off into its own campaign.

I’m just so sick of heroic high fantasy

Not mine, but a collaborativr effort: Young dryad loses physical body and is imprisoned in a robotic shell. She escapes and now all of her former magical druid powers are a combination of mechanical contraptions and just a dash of magic. She runs on magic energy, but her acid spray cantrip is truly a small vaporizer embedded in her palm. Really cool, but the Player stop playing that char vecause we restricted her wild shape to much :/ in hindsight, i really dont like my dming decisions regarding that char

These are amazing.

I’m going to shamelessly steal some of these for NPCs in my campaigns.

An insane Bavarian retired geology professor, turned conspiracy theorist, who was trying to bring his dead wife back, and win back the approval of his estranged daughter. Died one session in after being bitten by an insane cultist.

Yes, I did a Bavarian dialect the whole time. No, I’m not good at it. Yes, there where real Bavarians at the table (well, one of them was Franconian, but same difference (don’t tell her I said that)).

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

I got to play this character for several sessions, but he deserved more.

A lesser Devil modified bard chef. D&D Pirate Game with a drow captain of a haunted ship.

My bard powers were all based on cooking. In order to buff the crew I had to feed them. I had a constant supply of hors d’oeuvres, tiny deserts, etc. After combat, I would heal the party by cooking 5 star gourmet meals. I fought with a meat cleaver.

My back story: I was basically on the run. I was Gold Star Master of Sauces and Boilings, 3rd Degree Initiate of the Sulfur Ovens and Bonded Sous-chef of the School of Flesh and Broth in the City of Dis, 87 years into a 500 year Sous-chef contract that I was AWOL from. I got summoned to the Prime Material Plane in order to cater a wedding party for the daughter of a shady wizard and I managed to exploit a loop hole in the contract I signed with him to leave to get ingredients and never come back. He was pissed at me for ruining his daughter’s wedding reception and my masters at the School of Flesh and Broth told him “Capture and return our Sous-chef, or else!” So he was my primary antagonist.

But I had a plan! I wrote up a contract for people to sign to try to get them to be my apprentices. By Prime Material Plane standards, I was a genuine gold star level chef. All those poor sods you see competing on Hell’s Kitchen would kill to study under someone of my skill level. Basically, the contract was structured such that if they managed to complete an apprenticeship with me, they should be able to obtain employment with kings, popes and sultans. However, if they failed to complete their apprenticeship, I would own their soul. My goal was to be a complete dick to my apprentices to the point that they would give up and run away and fail to complete their training. Then, when I had a small collection of souls, I could return to the 9 Hells and buy out my contract and get them to stop chasing me.

Sadly, the campaign only lasted three sessions.

A few of my favourite clauses from the contract:

Apprentice certifies that, to the best of their knowledge, their Mortal Soul is in sound and original condition, not bound into their body through any enchantments, curses or blessings of undeath or deathlessness (or other mystical bindings), not owed to any other being of the Lower Planes or other Outer Planar Origin, not claimed by any deity or near-deity for any purpose and in no other ways is it’s transfer into Chef’s lawful possession in the event of a breach (5.0). impeded. Furthermore, that they will NOT promise, commit, sell, license or gift their soul to any third party during the terms of this contract.

Neither party shall be liable for any failure to perform their obligations under this agreement if prevented from doing so by a cause or causes reasonably beyond their control. Without limiting the generality of the foregoing, such causes include Acts of deities or near-deities, disruptions to the structure of the planes of existence, infernal war operations (the Blood War), temporal disruptions, Wishes made by third parties or other similar cause or causes which could not with reasonable diligence be controlled or prevented by the party. This clause IN NO WAY waives the obligations of the Apprentice with respect to clause clause 1.1 i.

If Apprentice abandons the apprenticeship due to unanticipated death (2.5), a grace period of 3 days will be granted, during which time Apprentice may be resurrected or otherwise returned to life (including as an undead being), upon which event Apprentice agrees to immediately and without delay return to their Apprenticeship. Failure to do so shall be considered a breach of this contract.

Silver Dragonborn Ancients Barbarian - I wanted to try a tanky build again, after not liking my attempt with paladin. He was Con primary, Str secondary, using a Warhammer and shield, and I was excited to see how the path of the ancients intersected with things like shield Master or sentinel. He was from a tribe of remnant Dragonborn after Abeir split back off. His tribe used to rely on shamans that communicated with their ancestors, but the last one had passed in his grandfather before he was identified as a new shaman. His sister died in a horrible accident, and his communication with her spirit was how he was identified. No one in the tribe knew how to help with his gift, so he went out into the world, accompanied by the spirit of his sister, to see what he could learn. His rage manifested as an icy white cloud rolling over him and falling to the ground, slowly revealing the spirits that accompanied him. I planned for him to notice and get to know more and more of his ancestors’ spirits as he got more powerful - including his grandfather, a taciturn half-dragon, and a happy-go-lucky silver dragon. Unfortunately, I had to bow out of the campaign just as we hit level 3, so I never got to experience any of it. ☹️

A human beastmaster whose spellcasting focus was a tiny awakened shrub (which was slightly on fire) and had a flying snake pet.

He was a Pokemon trainer. “Cindertwig, use your Thorn Whip! Now, Create Bonfire!” “Flython, do a Poison Fang attack!”

We only had one very short combat for the 1 shot.

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.

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)

Low wis warlock who is convinced he’s actually a Paladin, and is confused why his oath keeps seeming to change arbitrarily. Thought that signing the contract was making his oath.

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.