Application Sample.

[dies]

▶ PLAYER
HANDLE: chesca
CONTACT: oglops
OVER 18? Yes
CHARACTERS IN-GAME: n/a

▶ CHARACTER
NAME: Agony Unending (Lucas Augustin)
CANON: DnD Original
CANON POINT: Shortly after an incident with a chicken.
AGE: 26, died at 19
BACKGROUND: Agony comes from a world similar to our own, except that the music is so much better and also that whole ‘there’s magic’ thing. Witches, vampires, werewolves, dragons. That kind of thing. A lot of technology is intertwined with magic, to the point where it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.

Unless you grow up in the Church of Humanity, in which case you know where one ends and the other begins because one is perfectly fine and the other is bad and naughty. An organisation that grew out of the not-too-controversial idea that magic ought to be used to make people’s lives better, somewhere along the line the Church of Humanity started preaching the significantly more controversial idea that magic users and non-humans ought to be used to make the lives of the people who count better. The people who count being better, purer people who don’t need magic.

Agony grew up in a gated community that he rarely left. Like the other good children in the community, he had a life that was heavy on structure and light on critical thinking. It was- normal, as far as he was aware. Not always good, but never unbearable. A thoroughly mediocre time, spent studying and eating properly and generally preparing for some time in the future which never seemed to get any closer. He got into a fairly decent university, on the back of a lot of rote memorization rather than actual intelligence, and came perilously close to being that guy who interrupts classes every 5 minutes to be wrong about something.

And then he died.

He died, and it was stupid.

Because he didn’t die of anything dramatic. He choked. On an organic, pesticide-free, grown-free-of-magic apple. And that shouldn’t have killed him, but he was wearing a medical bracelet. One that all members of the Church of Humanity wear. One that said ‘Do not use magical means to treat this patient’. Doctors followed the instructions, and so he died. Died and remained as a ghost.

It was a bit of a bummer, really. Because his community prided itself so much on its aversion to magic, home was fairly well warded against ghosts. He couldn’t go back, and he didn’t have much clue how many people from his church this being a ghost thing happened to. When he finally found family and friends, most couldn’t see him. Those that could pretended not to.

So he tried to make the best of it. Magical things ought to serve humanity, and so went to haunt the dorm room he was meant to be using that year and he tried to do this. It went about as well as one could expect floating around asking local people to let him serve them to. The first people he found who could see ghosts were a pair of boys who would have been his roommates had he lived and while they were kind of assholes about running him around making him do errands and occasionally getting him to help them cheat at exams, they became his first real friends. It was a very transactional, kind of messed up friendship at first, but they grew out of being shitty teenagers and became non-shitty adults.

Through their influence, Agony managed to start experimenting with who, in the absence of the church he’d grown up in, he was. The answer turned out to be ‘someone who unironically gives themselves the name ‘Agony Unending’’. He started to indulge in all the things he couldn’t before - growing his hair out, wearing pajamas to go out, developing a new obsession with junk food (which, sadly, he can’t eat - all food turns to ash in his mouth). He began developing a keen interest in just about anything that seemed interesting, hopping from one fun cool thing to another.

But just as they’d grown out of being shitty teenagers, his friends grew out of being young adults, too. They grew out of it and Agony, both because he’s dead and doesn’t age and because his sheltered upbringing left him as something of a giant kid, never did. They didn’t stop being friends, but the dynamic between them changed. They had family. Kids on the way.

Around the time that this change started to become a real problem, Agony got involved in an incident with a pet chicken monster getting loose and causing problems at a local festival. His contribution was largely throwing his dessert at it and then attempting and failing to possess it, but this somehow got misreported as basic competence, enough to potentially catch people’s attention. People who can see him, anyway.

PERSONALITY:

Agony Unending is (un)living his best (mockery of) life. A sheltered childhood that ended in an abrupt, traumatising, stupid way left him with only two real priorities - earn his place in the world by making people happy to the best of his abilities and experience everything the world has to offer because at any time it might be taken away. And on a good day, that’s how things work out. He’s simultaneously extremely chill and very, very, very dedicated to the pursuit of things he thinks are cool. Things like junk food, shirts with at least 3 wolves on them, very old horror movies and facts about dinosaurs.

On a bad day he’s anxious and feels isolated both by his ‘being a ghost’ situation and by his upbringing. Often this manifests as blurting out the first thing that comes to mind a little too loudly or doing it with a little too much purpose in the hope that being louder and more impulsive will somehow make things less scary and overwhelming. Being loud and impulsive very rarely makes things less overwhelming, as a rule.

He thinks people are good. Really, genuinely good, despite any evidence to the contrary. His nervousness around people isn’t because he believes they mean anyone ill but rather because he feels like he has an unpaid debt to everyone - he’s a magical creature now, and he grew up believing that magic has to serve humanity in order to deserve to exist. If there’s a person around and he hasn’t improved their lives at all, then he kind of doesn’t deserve to be around that person. And those people who he feels like he has earned the right to be around? Those people he will attach to basically forever.

It’d be a little harsh to say that he’s stupid. But sometimes one has to be harsh. He’s not great at the ‘critical thinking’ thing and always tends to go for the simplest solution or explanation. Growing up, he was able to make up for this with a combination of sheer effort and being better at rote memorization than at the ‘thinking’ thing - he tested well. That doesn’t, unfortunately, apply to most actual real life situations and his habit of going for the simplest solution to a problem combined with his impulsiveness can lead to him doing very, very foolish things. If one was going to be nice about his intelligence, maybe the term would be naive rather than stupid. He assumes that things in the world are as they are for a good reason, that as a rule nothing is being hidden from him and that everyone (up to and including the church he used to be part of and large rats about to eat him) has good intentions.

It’s hard to tell from the outside how seriously he takes himself. He is the person who unironically named himself Agony Unending, but his ego doesn’t bruise easily and he doesn’t get bothered by people telling him that he’s acting weird. A naturally inexpressive face and voice don’t help with trying to figure out is he’s serious or not. The truth is that he’s just so very serious about enjoying the things that he enjoys that there’s very little that can make him not enjoy them. He puts his all into absolutely everything he does and despite his insecurities in every other area it never seems to occur to him that he should be embarrassed in any way by having a fun time doing things he loves to do. He is, however, very easily impressed by cool people. ‘Cool’ here can mean a dozen different things but generally comes down to some combination of wearing a lot of black and/or accessories, knowing a lot of facts about dinosaurs, owning a dog or knowing where to buy weed.

He’s always been a nice person, the type to avoid conflict and be generally pleasant to those around him, but since his death he’s also tried to be a kind person as well. Part of this is his need to earn his right to exist, but a lot of it is also a genuine desire to make the world better. He genuinely wants to take care of people and keeps their needs at the front of his mind. He can go a little far with this, though, or assume someone’s needs instead of asking because oh no, talking to people inconveniences them slightly, and his attempts to make things better for people don’t always go as planned.


POWERS/ABILITIES:

In DnD terms, Agony is a Ghost Oathbreaker Paladin (if not currently at the level where the ‘oathbreaker’ thing would affect his abilities at all).

As a ghost, he can float and pass through walls, as well as vanish from the material plane if he wants to.. A range of things that might affect a living human have reduced or little effect on him. He can be really scary if he wants to (I tend to write this as him pulling off his body parts for show), but he rarely wants to. And he can possess people, which is a cool and normal thing to do.

As a lowbie paladin, he has an ability called ‘divine sense’ that will translate here (since things aren’t neatly divided into ‘good’ and ‘evil’ outside of dnd) into a general sense of ‘I get spooky vibes from this’). He can heal some illnesses and minor injuries, and has access to a list of spells.

Also most food turns to ash in his mouth. Which isn’t fun.

Required nerfs/permissions: By DnD rules, he can cause people to physically age by spooking them too bad, which is something I’d like to nerf because it doesn’t fit in great with the game. A few of his abilities (possessing people is the obvious one, but also the spells Command, Compelled Duel and Heroism and his ability to spook people) involve either controlling or forcibly changing the emotional state of another character. When using these abilities I would communicate with the other party in the thread to make sure that their character doesn’t get manipulated without their OOC say-so and to figure out where the sensible limits to this manipulation would be.

INVENTORY: 2 sachets of ketchup, 2 little bags of gummy worms, 1 pack of wet wipes, 1 ‘do not use magic to treat this patient’ medical bracelet.

MOONBLESSING: Iris

▶ SAMPLES

I hit up the TDM super late and so I got no bites on my top level and the threads I did end up with have been kind of short, so I’m submitting one extra. Hope that’s okay!

link #1
link #2
link #3