Category: Characters

Learn more about the Players of the Game saga’s characters!

Players of the Game Character Spotlight: Tempes

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Tempes is not the favorite child of Corsis.

He’s neither brave nor charismatic. He’s been known to sabotage his other family members’ interests to further his own pursuits. And he makes no secret of doing so, which earns him no allies within the ambitious and treacherous clan. However, Corsis abides all these shortcomings because his son can do something no one else can.

Manipulate time.

Tempes greedily guards his knowledge of chronomancy. Actively furthering his own mastery. Though its side effect has made his skin jaundiced. Which he accentuates with his garish yellow attire.

He murders those who attempt to learn the temporal art. Or sabotages others’ efforts to explore other avenues of the ethereal discipline, including even his father. Though Corsis has never proved that suspicion. Not yet.

In the meantime, Corsis leverages his son’s power in Dread Corps. Inflicting Tempes’s hateful knowledge on those who oppose his father. Others like Ashe Stelfire. Like Avril Enzali.

Learn more about Tempes’s spite in Repenter and The Brigands.

Art by Moonarc.

Players of the Game Character Spotlight: Jarah

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This is the ViRauni armor, but the person inside of it is not Mol Granz.

Another wore the crimson demonic plating before the Queen of the Grells.  Someone without kindness.  Without morality.  Without sanity.

Let’s peer beneath the helmet and see her face.
This is Jarah.

A Long Lived Grell who’s immortality slowly drove her insane over the centuries.  But another beheld beauty in her madness.

Corsis.

The Master of the Game delighted in the violence she inflicted in her mania.  And her passion.

The pair shared an unwed union for centuries.  She bore three children.  Tempes and two others.

But her neuro divergence worsened as time went on.  Corsis could no longer nudge or control her.  And he had no interest in finding her help.

So he granted her one last gift.  And a curse to go with it.  He rune raveled the ViRauni armor for her.  And he planted a seed in her mind.

An inane question a child might ask a parent.  One that never will have an actual answer.  One that she will destroy everything to carve out its truth.

She asked it as she went on a rampage centuries before the Eruption.  She asked it as she died at Vick Burnhelt’s hands.

And she still asks it as a spirit tethered in eternal service to her onetime lover.  Stalking those who have the misfortune of encountering her.  Such as a living ghost named Avril Enzali.

Jarah will ask the question.  And she will relentlessly hunt Avril to rip the truth from her. 

Whether she knows it or not.

Learn what question Jarah asks in The Brigands.

Players of the Game Character Spotlight: Thebes

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Thebes doesn’t mean to annoy his allies.  It just happens.

The Imp moves faster than bullets, which while tactically useful, the trait also makes him impetuous and motor mouthed.

Ashe Stelfire has little love lost with the toddler-sized Demon.

And yet.

Thebes is reliable.  He excels at reconnaissance and piloting.  He helps teammates under fire, performing acts of bravery that save lives of those on his side.  The Imp often slashes into foes before they even see him.

His daggers look like short swords in his grasp, causing corrosive harm to those he pricks.

While many of the Brigands might describe him as a little prick himself, he’s their little prick.

Read more about Thebes in Repenter and The Brigands.

Art by Moonarc.

Players of the Game Character Spotlight: Skred

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Players of the Game Character Spotlight: Skred
Skred is not what he seems.

He looks like a Demon fused with a horrific form of ethereal cybernetics.  An ugly fighter who does ugly deeds.

He is a holographic alias used by Xax when he needs to mix in with rougher locales.  Something unlike his simplistic silver chassis.  But also similar.

Especially his smile.  Not ridiculously proportioned, but still most notable.

Even half-covered by a metal plate.

Find out how Xax uses his Skred disguise in The New Players.

Art by Moonarc.

Players of the Game Character Spotlight: Xax!

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Yes.  Xax gets an exclamation point for his long pending introduction.

Xax is something that looks like a robot with a ridiculously disproportionate smile.  But he’s actually something… weirder.  Something he is hesitant to tell the new people he just met.

He has bounced through history.  Showing up in the years since the Eruption.  Sometimes working alone.  Sometimes working with others like the Burnhelts. 

Or the Bucklers.

His depleted Irreality energy blasts and fist cones grant him immense power.  Enough to coldcock a Dragon God with a lucky shot.  His fighting style looks sloppy, like a rag doll tossing itself around.  Yet, more often than not, he lands devastating hits either up close or from afar.

However, the silver brawler is just as likely to talk his way out of a fight.  His jokes and strange maxims range from terrible to crudely humorous to prescient.

His stiff grin doesn’t move when he talks, though its expression will sometimes change. 

He’s been sighted in the frontier city of Findenton of late.  And he will certainly encounter a certain fort master and certain reluctant assassin sooner than any of them think.

Read more about Xax starting in The New Players.

Art by Hokunin.

Players of the Game Character Spotlight: Slader

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Slader just wants to get through the crazy.  Get on the other side of it.  That’s all.

The rot infecting his city has other ideas.

The Lan Thedin marine sergeant watches reports of grey-skinned mutations in the megalopolis’s subterranean sections.  And they’ve started coming up to the surface.  And they’re tougher than even his cybernetic arms can handle.

His boss wants to bring in some team of hyper-powered Grells to combat the horrors creeping into the streets.  Normally, Slader would have a problem with bringing in outsiders.

But right now, he’ll take help in any form he can find it. 

Read more about Slader’s interactions with the Burnhelts and their allies in The New Players.

Players of the Game Character Spotlight: Candice Quentra

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Candice wants to leave her sins in the past.

Corsis won’t let her.

She is a parasitic life force entity called a Draqu.  She can siphon away all aspects of life from those upon whom she feeds.  Strength, powers, memories, consciousness, a victim’s very will. 

And she relished this power in her a century ago under her original name.  Mary Night.  She terrorized a megalopolis, stoking the simmering resentment of its many inhabitants.  It culminated in a citywide riot and murder spree.  And she was confronted by a quartet of champions of that era.  The Bucklers.

Mary did not survive the encounter.

But death is not permanent for a Draqu.  And Corsis hastened her respawning years sooner than it would have naturally occurred.  He ordered her appearance altered.  And threatened to send her back to her hellish between life torment unless she continued to work for him.

And he gave her a new name.

And so, Candice Quentra infiltrated the Demonic spies of the Horrinshal.  Started a working relationship with a certain fort master named Harry Mang.

A partnership that will certainly lead to her crossing paths with the Burnhelts and their allies.

All while she struggles to free herself.  Her time of torment in between lives changed her.  She wants to atone for crimes for which there is no atonement.

That will not stop her from trying.  Candice wants to be better.

She just needs the right opportunity.

Find out more about Candice starting in The New Players.

Players of the Game Character Spotlight: Deva Falc

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Deva Falc once despised Nirva Iniv.  In the early days of the War of Reunification, the Arch Demon Baroness of Barithania led an army against the Palle Empire.  Before its ascendance gained momentum.  Had things gone differently, perhaps Deva might have claimed dominion over her own empire.  She held all manner of dark ambitions.

No more.

Nirva used the dark language of Hrolish to negate Deva’s will.  She is now Nirva’s dispassionately loyal bodyguard.  The enthralled baroness only wants what the Empress of Palle wants. 

That includes transforming her mind with an immaterial creature, giving her artificial psionics.  And perhaps even altering her body into something stronger, something worse.

Whenever it finally tatters her mind, no matter.  Nirva cares not, and neither does Deva.  Because she can’t.

If any hint of the true Deva remains, it is buried deep in the darkness of her fraying psyche.

And if someone should find that lingering shred, then Deva may just speak her mind.

Players of the Game Character Spotlight: Jasphir Iniv

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Jasphir Iniv stands out in his family of conniving and abhorrent Demonic royalty.

He’s a decent person.

Naturally, they want him dead for that alone. 

His partnership with Ashe Stelfire and love affair with Nunaker only moved him to the very top of their hit list.

He’s a Human-like Sokenti who can see in all directions in his vicinity despite his race’s innate bleeding, eyeless sockets.  He covers this horrible aspect of himself with a white blindfold and white leather armor that never get stained with his viscera, or that of others.

Despite his affability, Jasphir radiates menace.  The assassin uses his panoramic natural sight to find weak points in the strongest of foes with his etherea-infused daggers.

But his many family members aren’t as easy to dispatch. 

They stalk him and his fortune hunter allies.

And their reach is long.

Players of the Game Character Spotlight: Nunaker

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Nunaker finds sentient bipeds fascinating.  So much so that she usually takes the form of a woman in formfitting armor.

She has no true shape.  She is a Lokna.  A being of silvery liquid.  Capable of forming all manner of weapons upon her body.  Simple ones, like blades.

Or more… elaborate instruments of harm, such as her dual, barb-covered tentacle whips that can rip through flesh with uncanny ease.

She partners with Ashe Stelfire’s team of fortune hunters for the thrill of the raid.  It exhilarates her.

As does the love of another partner, Jashir Iniv.  Her romance with the Sokenti assassin is vibrant and intense.

And woe to any who might take away the happiness it brings her.