Lynn was vicious. I think that’s the best way to describe that girl. I dropped her into a mecha-powered dystopia game. The PCs belong to a place called “The Living City”, run by a group of individuals who style themselves as “gods”. Well, the campaign kicked off as a mysterious entity handed out mechs to the Godblind, select members of the population who are immune to the gods’ ability to track their subject. Lynn thrived on the ensuing upheaval.
Lynn showed up anonymously during an early fight where the PCs were getting the rough end of the stick. They were very close to getting thoroughly taken out, partially due to my lack of understanding about combat balance. So I sent some enemies away and brought Lynn in. She helped knock the enemy mechs out of commission, advised the others to leave, and then–dragged the last surviving enemy pilot out of her mech to kill her, once the PCs had left her sight.
I later brought Lynn into a scene with Nathan, the NPC lover of one of the PCs. I established a bit of her ruthless personality, and then revealed that she was Nathan’s sister. Then, the two of them started patrolling for the gods, and ran into the PCs again. Nathan’s girl was naturally shocked, and Lynn used that time to start twisting the knife.
See, both she and Nathan were the children of one of the gods, a fact that had previously been unknown to the PCs. When she revealed that, it put an enormous strain on Nathan’s relationship. Lynn did everything she could to make Nathan look bad, going so far as to scold him and physically beat him down in front of the PCs.
Lynn slipped out the back door as the uproar swelled against Nathan, and didn’t appear again for a short time. Her last act was to kill off a child NPC who’d attached himself to the group; after that, she was assimilated into a hybrid monster-creature-thing created by one of the gods.
Lynn’s ambition and cruelty were really her defining hallmarks. She saw an opportunity to unseat her parents in the chaos of the rebellion, but underestimated the power and overestimated the cooperation of the gods. Furthermore, as a character who took pleasure in hurting others, she motivated the PCs strongly to defeat her, even though she had been victimized herself by the gods.
Andy Hauge
Andy blogs about roleplaying games from a roleplayer's perspective. He also sometimes peeks into other geeky things - from Player's Side of the Screen.