@Tulpa: They're comparable to and derive their inspiration from the deities from the Ancient Near East (Babylonian, Assyrian, Akkadian, Semitic, etc.), the pantheon from which the Abrahamic God descends. For my own ends though, these gods are completely made up to fit the scope of the roleplay.
Appearance. 5'3 - 130 lbs. Not traditionally skinny, but not overweight. She's curvy in all the right ways. Long semi-curly hair extends most of the way down her back. Her eyes are a piercing light blue. The kind of eyes that seem to look right into your soul.
Personality. From an outside perspective, Athena is extremely confident. She uses sarcasm to her advantage, and doesn't tend to back down from any situation. Personally, that confidence hides her insecurities and her emotions. Only a select few people know the real her. She loves nature, animals, going on walks through the woods. She can drink with just about anyone, and enjoys a good drink... emphasis on good. She doesn't like anyone making fun of her height, but aside from that doesn't tend to take things too personally. Her other biggest vice in the world is music.
Skills. Athena is a poet. Whether free verse, spoken word, or lyrics, putting her emotion on paper soothes her soul in a way nothing else can. She's also a talented singer/songwriter, but usually doesn't have the nerve to let anyone in on that skill.
Biography. Athena grew up in a small farming town in Indiana. Nothing about life was particularly challenging. She always felt like there was something else out there for her though. There was more to the world than cornfields. At 18 she was married, and at 21 she was divorced. They both were to blame. He pressed extreme religious views on her, and tried to force her to change... so she rebelled and had an affair.
Divorced life led to all kinds of wild nights and experimenting, which ultimately led to her love of the female form. Nothing beats sipping on bourbon and staring at a great ass. She's just as bad as any man when it comes to oogling over a pretty lady. She doesn't tend to be shy about saying something either.
Professionally, she was very successful. She managed to work her way up to Assistant Manager of a multi-million dollar retail store by the age of 20. That only made her feel more stuck.
As she continued to let time pass by, her family moved away and it left her with a choice. Stay in Indiana, and keep being content with life, or go out into the world and try and find happiness, whatever that is. She chose the latter, and set her sights on Seattle. Taking practically nothing, and leaving everything she knew behind, she now finds herself trying to find a new identity... a new purpose.
I'm intrigued, and shall start writing up my character for this shortly. Before I start, though, I have to ask: are we able to begin with anything resembling any above-average amount of the six Essences in this game, @ravenDivinity? For instance, say I wrote up a character who, thanks to a relatively good constitution and the miracle of modern medicine, fairly recently survived being stabbed through the heart. Would it be the case that he started off with a higher Vitality Essence than a normal person, or would he just be "a guy who happened to survive being stabbed through the heart" until he started training himself in magic? I would, of course, assume that you allocate starting Essences based on backstory/in-game actions either way, but I'm just curious about how that situation works.
@BCTheEntity: Mmmm, I don't mind people putting odd events into their history, but I don't want people clamoring to freely define their character's Essences, the main reason for that being I don't want to give characters an early advantage over other characters if they don't deserve it. Basically the idea is that any of those weird events just 'happened' and have no real explanation. Later in the story if someone has one such event in their biography, I intend to give it a story that may or may not have to do with magic.
@deadpixel101: They're fine if they're approved, but if they do end up working together for whatever reason, it can't be beyond the scope of the character's personality.
@ravenDivinity: Alright, that's fair. So something like surviving a penetrating heart injury would basically just be sheer dumb luck in experiencing something of that caliber?
Appearance: Joe is white, about 180 cm tall, and has a relatively average build for somebody his age, with wavey dark blond hair and light blue eyes. Typical attire includes a shirt of some shade of blue, dark grey trousers, black shoes, and occasionally a suit of the same shade as his trousers.
Personality: Joe is a very opinionated, and often quite abrasive individual. He tends to try and learn as much about the world as he can, often regarding issues that few others are willing or able to look into, and the results he comes up with frequently go against what many other people believe, being highly conservative in a fairly liberal society. For example, he strongly believes that, not all, but quite a large majority of modern feminists are overweight, narcissistic radicals and/or extremists whose only goal is to twist Western society to their own selfish ends, and that the recent influx of migration to Germany, Sweden, and the UK is a very bad thing indeed for their respective cultures and economies, especially since most migrants are not refugees from Syria, but invaders looking to improve their living standards, or even jihadists that seek to bring down foreign societies such as theirs. Naturally, beliefs of this sort do not make him a lot of friends, but he is relatively content to do his own thing for the most part; he believes that the truth will always come out sooner or later, though ideally sooner in all cases, and usually enjoys going against the grain of society to bring people the facts, all evidence accounted for.
Skills: Speaking of which, he worked as a reporter for a right-wing news facility until recently, and is currently a freelance reporter on current events. But not one of those story-twisting reporters of the sort who work for Daily Mail, oh no; his goal is and has always been to bring people the truth and nothing else, no matter how hard it is to hear. To this end, he has developed a very good ability to gather and divulge information, and can be highly charismatic when required; on top of a relatively high intelligence to begin with, his ability to inform is quite formidable. Also, whilst not strictly the sort of person to "bulk up" and acquire large amounts of muscle just because he can, he is a reasonably fit individual who eats healthily and exercises fairly often, leading to a good degree of physical ability and, perhaps surprisingly, a mildly exceptional constitution.
Biography: Born in England, Joe spent his early years in a household that prided fairness and the truth over all else - liars were punished appropriately, and injustice was a thing to abhor. These strong views carried over to Joe himself, and he found himself in trouble a few times throughout his school life for dealing with bullies and other unsavoury individuals in ways that he saw to be fair, but which his schools disapproved of. Even so, he passed through university education with flying colours, and soon began a career as a reporter, working for a major news company. However, he quickly became disillusioned with the role in question - rather than being allowed to tell people the truth of any given current event, he was being made to report on utterly meaningless tales of local scope, or worse being given major reports that he was then asked to tell in a more "viewer-appropriate" way - in other words, to twist these stories almost to the point of lying outright, to ensure that the news station's reputation was well-preserved.
He soon began to look for a new job. "Something outside of news reporting", he said to himself at the time, for no matter how many news stations he looked at, all seemed to have an agenda of truth-twisting... all, that is, except for one. It was a company within the early field of online media, dedicated to almost exactly the sort of stories Joe really wanted to tell, and the only caveat was that the company's members sometimes tended toward conspiracy theorism rather than actual news. Not a problem for Joe himself, it seemed at the time; and so he applied for and ultimately succeeded in acquiring a job at the company, said farewell to his initial workplace, and began a career that spanned more than a decade - whilst not always appreciated for his work, he was no happier than when he was informing people that the world they lived in could be harsh, and that what the media fed to them was sometimes utterly false in nature.
But of course, views of this sort will always lead to enemies cropping up. In Joe's case, he acquired a small yet notable hatedom, often stating that his stories were totally wrong, and that he should accept that society simply wasn't as bad as he claimed it was. He would not, he stated, change his views to satisfy a small number of people who couldn't see the world for what it really was, or worse who wanted to transform society to serve their own needs and put down anyone else who disagreed with them; and so it was that, one unfortunate day, he happened across a mugger who just so happened to be a member of this small hatedom. One moment of recognition and a certain degree of implied insults of cowardice and stupidity later, Joe found himself bleeding out through a stab wound in his chest.
He would later learn, after waking up in hospital, that the knife had gone through both walls of his heart, and that he'd survived largely thanks to his good health, the presence of a nearby doctor at the time, and the rapid advancement of modern medicine. Even so, he was very lucky to have survived at all; it took a while for him to recover, but recover he did. In the process of recovery, he decided to look back at his past articles just to see how far he'd come up to that point... and what he found shocked him quite deeply. Not overly frequently, but far too often for his liking, he realised that he'd described tales which, with hindsight, sounded exactly like the conspiracies that his coworkers frequently peddled to the masses who tuned into the news station, and that that tendency toward conspiracy, not only from him but from the station as a whole, had increased substantially in the time prior to his near-death experience. The company was influencing him in exactly the ways he despised, and he did not enjoy what he saw.
Long story short, he moved to America. Partially for his own future safety, and partially as an excuse to depart from the company and begin making his own way in the world, but he packed his things, acquired a Visa, and travelled across the Atlantic Ocean. He considered stopping in New York, but eventually decided to go much further, eventually making his way to the West Coast, to Seattle, and to a new house in the city in question, where he has since continued his career up to the present day. he does not yet know of the existence of magic, nor has he ever considered how he might reveal it to the world on the off-chance that it does exist... but, as they say, the truth will out, and there's a good chance that Joe will be the one to out it given the chance.
Alright, I'm going to make the first IC post in the next day or so, I'll send everyone a mention when that happens. I'll also clean up the character tab to present the lists better.
To prepare, think about what your character might be doing on a normal day, get a feel for the character, the usual. Plot will kick in shortly thereafter.
Edit: Also, how do you like that? References to actual locations in the city. You don't have to be specific about geography, but I will just to set the mood and ground the roleplay more to reality.