Homes of your characters Options

[mirocu]

Nice work with Agarmir´s house, gpstr. And a really nice touch with the alchemy set being static and set as activators

[gpstr]

One of my more ambitious houses - this one was built for a specific character.

My cool and collected little elf archer and claymore fighter Cressida is also one of my longest-lived and favorite characters. After many adventures in Cyrodiil, she spent a long time in the Shivering Isles, exploring everywhere (and notably, being calm and collected and all-business, she came out of it just as she went into it - entirely sane).

I had long wanted to do my own version of the Cheydinhal house that Llevana Nedaren lives in, and Cressida was about ready to retire, and she's used pretty much nothing but Adonnay's Elven Weapons, and the vendor for those lives in a house north of the road to Cheydinhal, and all of that came together, and I decided to give her a version of that house somewhere near that road.

After exploring and experimenting, I ended up putting it on top of one of the hills east of the IC.

Here's the proud owner in front of the gate.

And a better shot of the front.

Two shots of the ground floor - the living area is all vanilla pieces, but the kitchen (as with most of the kitchens in my houses) depends heavily on Stroti's meshes. I particularly like the stove.

Three shots of the second floor - nothing really special there - it's just cozy.

And two shots of the loft - an enchanted garden and alchemy lab (with leveled static equipment).

She's another character who rarely leaves her house now, but I was prepared for that this time. And actually, since I spent some time taking those shots, I took her out for a while last night and ran through a couple of nearby dungeons, which made it all worth it by itself.

This post has been edited by gpstr: Aug 31 2016, 01:59 AM

[Acadian]

Nice work, gpstr! A good combo of cozy and stately. It is nice that Cressida has a beautiful semi-retirement place to relax.

[SubRosa]

Now that is the kind of place I would love to live in.

[mALX]

One of my more ambitious houses - this one was built for a specific character.

My cool and collected little elf archer and claymore fighter Cressida is also one of my longest-lived and favorite characters. After many adventures in Cyrodiil, she spent a long time in the Shivering Isles, exploring everywhere (and notably, being calm and collected and all-business, she came out of it just as she went into it - entirely sane).

I had long wanted to do my own version of the Cheydinhal house that Llevana Nedaren lives in, and Cressida was about ready to retire, and she's used pretty much nothing but Adonnay's Elven Weapons, and the vendor for those lives in a house north of the road to Cheydinhal, and all of that came together, and I decided to give her a version of that house somewhere near that road.

After exploring and experimenting, I ended up putting it on top of one of the hills east of the IC.

Here's the proud owner in front of the gate.

And a better shot of the front.

Two shots of the ground floor - the living area is all vanilla pieces, but the kitchen (as with most of the kitchens in my houses) depends heavily on Stroti's meshes. I particularly like the stove.

Three shots of the second floor - nothing really special there - it's just cozy.

And two shots of the loft - an enchanted garden and alchemy lab (with leveled static equipment).

She's another character who rarely leaves her house now, but I was prepared for that this time. And actually, since I spent some time taking those shots, I took her out for a while last night and ran through a couple of nearby dungeons, which made it all worth it by itself.

This place is Awesome! Just gorgeous!

Now that is the kind of place I would love to live in.

Ditto!!!

[gpstr]

Thanks all. I like it and Cressida likes it, but I wasn't sure about the tastes of either of us...

The next one is someone else's creation, only somewhat modded by me. It's the home for my scruffy Orc ex-adventurer turned thief, Lud gro-Dalum - Kendo's Elven Gardens Apartment.

It's the standard narrow IC house (the same model as Agarmir's house, except flipped left to right).

Two views of the upper floor bedroom, where Lud spends most of his time while he's there.

And the ground floor, which also includes the reason that Lud spends most of his time upstairs.

Yes - the apartment includes a maid - Molly. Lud thought that would be pretty nifty - he's a bit of a social climber, and he quite liked the idea of having a maid, and a pretty one to boot. The problem though... well here's another shot of her. That's one of her friendlier faces.

In the early days, he'd come home and she'd be there and he'd go to talk to her, and she'd give him that look (or worse), and he'd slink up the stairs. Now he pretty much just sees that she's there, and slinks up the stairs.

Her dress, by the bye, is one of Retma's Bare Shoulder Dresses - a mod I've had knocking around for years now and never had an opportunity to use.

Lud's not really attached to the ground floor anyway, so it's not that much of a problem (save for those uncomfortable moments when he's slinking from the door to the stairs, and feeling her eyes burning into his back). But the other part of the house he likes is through the basement door, and for that, it might as well be on the other side of the planet.

When you go through the basement door, it goes down one flight, then there's this little nook built off of the landing. It's a cozy little magic library and alchemy lab, and he'd actually like to spend some time there. But just another flight down from there is Molly's apartment. That's actually just the front room of it - mostly storage, and that wonderful fireplace. There's another room with her bed and the rest of her personal stuff, but there's no way he's going to even go near that door.

I've actually considered modding her out of the game, and playing it that he fired her, but I honestly don't think he'd have the courage to confront her directly enough to fire her. And really, it sort of amuses me to torture him.

This post has been edited by gpstr: Sep 1 2016, 03:40 AM

[mALX]

Thanks all. I like it and Cressida likes it, but I wasn't sure about the tastes of either of us...

The next one is someone else's creation, only somewhat modded by me. It's the home for my scruffy Orc ex-adventurer turned thief, Lud gro-Dalum - Kendo's Elven Gardens Apartment.

It's the standard narrow IC house (the same model as Agarmir's house, except flipped left to right).

Two views of the upper floor bedroom, where Lud spends most of his time while he's there.

And the ground floor, which also includes the reason that Lud spends most of his time upstairs.

Yes - the apartment includes a maid - Molly. Lud thought that would be pretty nifty - he's a bit of a social climber, and he quite liked the idea of having a maid, and a pretty one to boot. The problem though... well here's another shot of her. That's one of her friendlier faces.

In the early days, he'd come home and she'd be there and he'd go to talk to her, and she'd give him that look (or worse), and he'd slink up the stairs. Now he pretty much just sees that she's there, and slinks up the stairs.

Her dress, by the bye, is one of Retma's Bare Shoulder Dresses - a mod I've had knocking around for years now and never had an opportunity to use.

Lud's not really attached to the ground floor anyway, so it's not that much of a problem (save for those uncomfortable moments when he's slinking from the door to the stairs, and feeling her eyes burning into his back). But the other part of the house he likes is through the basement door, and for that, it might as well be on the other side of the planet.

When you go through the basement door, it goes down one flight, then there's this little nook built off of the landing. It's a cozy little magic library and alchemy lab, and he'd actually like to spend some time there. But just another flight down from there is Molly's apartment. That's actually just the front room of it - mostly storage, and that wonderful fireplace. There's another room with her bed and the rest of her personal stuff, but there's no way he's going to even go near that door.

I've actually considered modding her out of the game, and playing it that he fired her, but I honestly don't think he'd have the courage to confront her directly enough to fire her. And really, it sort of amuses me to torture him.

You had me rolling with the "Molly," - Yeah, she most def would have gotten the axe from my game before installing unless she had some great dialogue or something.

What bothers me so much on this mod (other than Molly) is the downstairs - someone has oversized the furniture so it fits into the spaces; and it looks really strange; kind of like that room in Aarkved's Tower.





This post has been edited by mALX: Sep 2 2016, 04:48 PM

[gpstr]

@mALX - actually, that was probably me. I'm not sure now - I know I edited that house a fair bit, but it was mostly upstairs. I didn't do much downstairs, but I might've done that. I know those upper class bookshelves have long irritated me because the proportions are all wrong for bookshelves - the shelves are generally too short to stand books up on them - and I remember at least experimenting with upscaling them, and would presume, since that one's clearly upscaled, that that was where and when. The "couch" looks a bit oversized, but that's just a trick of perspective.

I hadn't thought about it, since I haven't done a house with upper class furniture lately, but now that I've figured out how to get around in Blender, I think I'll see if I can put together some better upper class shelves - what I've always wanted is something about the proportions of the middle class ones or even the wall shelves. I can already visualize how to edit the meshes to work, but the textures are potentially going to be a problem...

Next up is just an edit - Frostcrag Spire, as it exists for the home of my arrogant and ambitious Orc mage Ughoth gro-Sharam.

This started with Frostcrag Disannoyed, which is just a clean and simple few tweaks to make it a bit more reasonable - more and better furniture, better lighting, better landscaping and the like. I then tweaked that a bit, and ended up with this.

Ground floor, left and right. It's not radically different from the original, and I think it's mostly what came with Disannoyed - as I remember, I just added a few containers.

Living area, left and right. This is changed more from the original (though I can't say for certain at this point exactly what's different, since this is my edit of someone else's edit). It includes a set of leveled static alchemy equipment, and the detail I'm most pleased with. If you look at the alchemy table, you can see two silvery rectangles at either end of the front. Those are Crystal Chests from SI, downscaled, rotated and embedded in the table model, so it has two containers - one for ingredients and one for potions.

I have a long term goal of doing something with the underground storage room, but I might not get around to actually doing it, since I sort of doubt that Ughoth is going to use it anyway - he already has pretty much all the storage he needs, and if he does want some more, there's still a good bit of wasted space on the main floor.

[SubRosa]

mALX: Molly definitely wants that axe!

gpstr: Your simplified Frostcrag looks a lot more inviting than the vanilla version. I never used it for any of my characters. It is too far from everything, and I just never really liked the dwarven stuff.

[mALX]

I hadn't thought about it, since I haven't done a house with upper class furniture lately, but now that I've figured out how to get around in Blender, I think I'll see if I can put together some better upper class shelves - what I've always wanted is something about the proportions of the middle class ones or even the wall shelves. I can already visualize how to edit the meshes to work, but the textures are potentially going to be a problem...

Next up is just an edit - Frostcrag Spire, as it exists for the home of my arrogant and ambitious Orc mage Ughoth gro-Sharam.

This started with Frostcrag Disannoyed, which is just a clean and simple few tweaks to make it a bit more reasonable - more and better furniture, better lighting, better landscaping and the like. I then tweaked that a bit, and ended up with this.

Ground floor, left and right. It's not radically different from the original, and I think it's mostly what came with Disannoyed - as I remember, I just added a few containers.

Living area, left and right. This is changed more from the original (though I can't say for certain at this point exactly what's different, since this is my edit of someone else's edit). It includes a set of leveled static alchemy equipment, and the detail I'm most pleased with. If you look at the alchemy table, you can see two silvery rectangles at either end of the front. Those are Crystal Chests from SI, downscaled, rotated and embedded in the table model, so it has two containers - one for ingredients and one for potions.

I have a long term goal of doing something with the underground storage room, but I might not get around to actually doing it, since I sort of doubt that Ughoth is going to use it anyway - he already has pretty much all the storage he needs, and if he does want some more, there's still a good bit of wasted space on the main floor.

I also preferred the middle and lower class styles in Oblivion = agree the upper shelves were not made to actually hold books; they are nearly impossible to add books to without using a lot of calculations on the axes (axixes)

What I did in my mods was to retexture the wood on the middle and low class furniture to make a very pleasing result that was also more utile than the upper class furniture.

That table sounds Awesome!!!! I don't have Shivering Isles for my PC game, really sad because they had so many things I would have loved to use in my mods!

mALX: Molly definitely wants that axe!

gpstr: Your simplified Frostcrag looks a lot more inviting than the vanilla version. I never used it for any of my characters. It is too far from everything, and I just never really liked the dwarven stuff.

Molly Hatchet!!!


and ...


*cough...cough...er, Persephones Tower ...cough* BWAAHAA!


One of the very few things I didn't like about vanilla Oblivion was the lack of food on the tables. Other than card games; my houses always got a good dose of food around the dining areas - and if food was on a plate and a cup beside it, that cup was never empty. Same as in Fallout, I don't like to see empty plates, lol.

What I did was make the plates respawning containers and created food to go in them that was a little better than what one might find in the game (sort of like how Eyja's Shepherd's Pie was a cut above any other food in the game). That way the table always had food at it, and the player could actually sit down and eat something = interactive.


Here is an example of both a retex of the lower class furniture and the food in the dining area. This is the Leyawiin house with a coat of yellow paint. The room divider was just retexed with a carpet texture. The lower class gray wood was replaced with a warm blonde wood texture, and the lower class cloth seats I used some cleaner white cloth texture.

The dinner plates at the table each contain a portion of what you are seeing; I even created the gravy to go with those ribs. The food on the shelves is alsol respawning containers of whatever you see. The bread has slices of bread inside that the Player can eat; the apple pie has slices of apple pie inside. (the cheese plate has wedges of cheese, etc.) The drinks are the same, either ale, beer, wine, or mead depending on what you see:







This post has been edited by mALX: Sep 3 2016, 07:52 AM

[SubRosa]

I really love that lower class wood retexture. It looks simpler and not-expensive, but not all rickety and falling apart like the vanilla textures do.

[gpstr]

@SubRosa - the only thing that makes Frostcrag workable for Ughoth is that he has a teleport spell to get up there in the first place, then the Mages Guild portals to get back down to any of the cities. If it wasn't for that, he wouldn't use it.

@mALX - Mmm... yeah. The respawning plates are a good idea. I was familiar with the underlying concept, since Stroti did a bunch of meshes like that - food statics that are actually containers. I often use some of them - a ham shank hanging on a hook, a round of cheese on a plate, a box of potatoes.

But my houses generally don't have food on the table. The way I see it is that the only time that a table would normally have food on it is when people are actually sitting there eating. The rest of the time, they either have nothing on them other than maybe a centerpiece, or have whatever's accumulated since the last meal, so that's generally the way I set up the tables in my houses.

On to another house, and this one is going to be... a bit disturbing.

This is almost entirely untouched. It's aoringo's ICEG House - a mansion in the Elven Gardens district, and it's the ancestral home of my vile scumbag of an Imperial mage/assassin Clive.

It's built into the dead end in the middle outer wall of the EG district. Here's a shot of the front of the house, and the view back from the balcony.

The main room. More accurately, that's half of the main room - the other half is a bar, which at that moment had two naked maids behind it. The maids aren't actually set to be naked - they have a relatively complex scripted system for dressing and undressing on schedule, but the "problem" with that (it's not a problem for Clive, though it sort of is for me) is that they can get stuck on the undressed side of one of the scripted transitions, then they keep spawning that way unless I hang around long enough to get them over to the dressed side of it. Molly, in Lud's apartment, actually has the same set of scripts, and the same problem, but that doesn't make her any less intimidating to Lud - just the opposite in fact.

The library. This actually sits above a trophy room that I didn't bother to get a shot of, since it's mostly empty pedestals and empty shelves, since Clive hasn't accumulated many trophies yet. And as I think about it, I should mod some older stuff in that would've come from his ancestors... Yeah... I think I'll be doing that later. Anyway... the door you can see in this pic leads off to the guest wing, which is just a guest wing, then the maid's wing beyond that. There's another door around the corner that leads up another flight of stairs to Clives rooms.

Clive's rooms. That's the large IC upper story model. The first shot is from the loft looking down into the room, the second shot's from the end of the room looking back toward the loft and the third shot is the magic library and alchemy lab inside the room with the sliding doors. This is the only room that I edited much, and I just rearranged furniture and lights a bit and added some cabinets.

Now we start getting into the unsettling stuff.

The maids wing includes a large open bath that they use on schedule every evening (and is one of the reasons that they're scripted to undress and dress on schedule). In the library, directly below Clive's rooms, there's a hidden entrance to a secret passage. The secret passage leads to the air vents that are built into the walls of the maids' bath.

That's just a little creepy. The next one - the house has an enormous basement, with a network of rooms - storage, wine cellar and the like. One room has a pair of cabinets built into the walls, facing each other. One is a cabinet, but the other opens onto a locked door. The door, when unlocked, leads down to a really disturbing sort of sexual torture chamber built over a dungeon. It's the sort of ad hoc "arena" model that's built into the basement of the fighters guild hall in Leyawiin - you can see the viewing area in the background of the first pic - except obviously not set up for combat. Something much more sinister and disturbing goes on down there.

When I first poked around in the house after downloading it, years ago, it really sort of creeped me out, and I never thought I'd use it. After I got Clive going and figured out just what sort of person he is, I remembered that house and tried it out in his game, and (unfortunately?) it's a perfect fit for him - large and old and obviously stately once but now a bit shabby and timeworn, and creepy.

[mALX]

I really love that lower class wood retexture. It looks simpler and not-expensive, but not all rickety and falling apart like the vanilla textures do.

Thank you! I actually like it better than the upper class look; although I prefer the middle class round table (because no slats). I also switched to the middle class bed with this same wood retex on it for the Leyawiin; Bravil; and Waterfront Shack player homes. (retextured the bed covers also)







This post has been edited by mALX: Sep 3 2016, 08:40 PM

[mALX]

@SubRosa - the only thing that makes Frostcrag workable for Ughoth is that he has a teleport spell to get up there in the first place, then the Mages Guild portals to get back down to any of the cities. If it wasn't for that, he wouldn't use it.

@mALX - Mmm... yeah. The respawning plates are a good idea. I was familiar with the underlying concept, since Stroti did a bunch of meshes like that - food statics that are actually containers. I often use some of them - a ham shank hanging on a hook, a round of cheese on a plate, a box of potatoes.

But my houses generally don't have food on the table. The way I see it is that the only time that a table would normally have food on it is when people are actually sitting there eating. The rest of the time, they either have nothing on them other than maybe a centerpiece, or have whatever's accumulated since the last meal, so that's generally the way I set up the tables in my houses.

On to another house, and this one is going to be... a bit disturbing.

This is almost entirely untouched. It's aoringo's ICEG House - a mansion in the Elven Gardens district, and it's the ancestral home of my vile scumbag of an Imperial mage/assassin Clive.

It's built into the dead end in the middle outer wall of the EG district. Here's a shot of the front of the house, and the view back from the balcony.

The main room. More accurately, that's half of the main room - the other half is a bar, which at that moment had two naked maids behind it. The maids aren't actually set to be naked - they have a relatively complex scripted system for dressing and undressing on schedule, but the "problem" with that (it's not a problem for Clive, though it sort of is for me) is that they can get stuck on the undressed side of one of the scripted transitions, then they keep spawning that way unless I hang around long enough to get them over to the dressed side of it. Molly, in Lud's apartment, actually has the same set of scripts, and the same problem, but that doesn't make her any less intimidating to Lud - just the opposite in fact.

The library. This actually sits above a trophy room that I didn't bother to get a shot of, since it's mostly empty pedestals and empty shelves, since Clive hasn't accumulated many trophies yet. And as I think about it, I should mod some older stuff in that would've come from his ancestors... Yeah... I think I'll be doing that later. Anyway... the door you can see in this pic leads off to the guest wing, which is just a guest wing, then the maid's wing beyond that. There's another door around the corner that leads up another flight of stairs to Clives rooms.

Clive's rooms. That's the large IC upper story model. The first shot is from the loft looking down into the room, the second shot's from the end of the room looking back toward the loft and the third shot is the magic library and alchemy lab inside the room with the sliding doors. This is the only room that I edited much, and I just rearranged furniture and lights a bit and added some cabinets.

Now we start getting into the unsettling stuff.

The maids wing includes a large open bath that they use on schedule every evening (and is one of the reasons that they're scripted to undress and dress on schedule). In the library, directly below Clive's rooms, there's a hidden entrance to a secret passage. The secret passage leads to the air vents that are built into the walls of the maids' bath.

That's just a little creepy. The next one - the house has an enormous basement, with a network of rooms - storage, wine cellar and the like. One room has a pair of cabinets built into the walls, facing each other. One is a cabinet, but the other opens onto a locked door. The door, when unlocked, leads down to a really disturbing sort of sexual torture chamber built over a dungeon. It's the sort of ad hoc "arena" model that's built into the basement of the fighters guild hall in Leyawiin - you can see the viewing area in the background of the first pic - except obviously not set up for combat. Something much more sinister and disturbing goes on down there.

When I first poked around in the house after downloading it, years ago, it really sort of creeped me out, and I never thought I'd use it. After I got Clive going and figured out just what sort of person he is, I remembered that house and tried it out in his game, and (unfortunately?) it's a perfect fit for him - large and old and obviously stately once but now a bit shabby and timeworn, and creepy.

BWAAHAA! Clive is a bit of a voyeur, huh?

Well, if you don't like seeing food on tables; you really won't like this: Aside from having a signature card game going on in all my player homes, another signature of them is a used chamber pot,

It is a ceramic wide mouthed urn or pot with a small amount of yellow colored water in the bottom ... along with a strategically placed (black soul gem) - and these pots are all actually sit-able for player or NPC's too - I have seen Vilja taking a potty break on one many times, (in fact, I blame her for the black soul gem in the pot, lol !!!! )








This post has been edited by mALX: Sep 3 2016, 09:08 PM

[gpstr]

Well... Clive is certainly a voyeur, but more to the point, he's a sadist.

That actually extends to his approach to surviving in the world. He not only doesn't use weapons - he doesn't even use overtly offensive magic. That's just not his thing. Instead, he uses illusion and conjuration so that someone or something else is doing the work for him, and he just stands back and watches. Superficially, he considers it beneath his dignity to do anything that seems like his own labor, but underneath it all, a lot of it is just that he's sort of craven, and that he just likes to watch violence and death. The closest he gets to direct violence is reverse-pickpocketing a poisoned apple or a shock enchanted hood onto someone else, which is really just a slightly more personal way to get to the point at which he can stand back and watch them suffer and die. It's not for nothing that I stress that he's a vile scumbag - he really is.

It's not that I dislike seeing food on tables - I'm used to it. I just don't put it on tables in my own houses, since it makes more sense to me for the table to be mostly clear. Thinking about it, that would likely be my response to the chamberpot too - I don't mind the basic idea, but I'm pretty sure that after a while of seeing that same chamberpot with the same contents, I'd be thinking, "For gods' sake, doesn't anybody ever empty that thing?" And with that, I'd be more likely to just make it empty from the start if it was in one of my houses.

To each their own though, as they say...

[gpstr]

And this'll likely be the last one (or two, more precisely), at least for now. I have one more that's mostly finished, and another in the planning stages, but with this one, I'll have covered all of the ones that currently exist in my games.

First, a quick one - Tina the Imperial's version of Shetcombe Farm. It's a long story, but she did the MQ and went a bit sideways and ended up joining the DB, then went a bit sideways again and ended up just wandering Cyrodiil, lonely and unhappy. When she happened on Shetcombe, she loved it - it was just such an quiet and idyllic spot, where she could finally stop a while and maybe even relax. I didn't touch the exterior at all, but completely redid the interior. Four shots of it, from right to left from the door. The best part of it, to me, is that it worked - Tina finally knows some peace. The only (predictable) downside is that she's not very interested in leaving.

And the last one - Claudia's Shoreline Cottage.

This is my favorite, which is good, since Claudia is probably my all time favorite character. She was my first female character, and my first real roleplaying character, so she's been around for a long time now. I actually put off building her house for a while, because I wanted to make sure it was right when I finally did it.

It's on the northwest shore of Lake Rumare - just north of the turn-off to Chorrol, on the lake side of the road. It's one of Stroti's village houses.

Two shots of the exterior, from the front, and looking across the front toward Weye and the IC bridge.

Looking right from just inside the door - alchemy lab with leveled static equipment in the nook.

Further in, looking right toward the living area. This includes a feature I'd been threatening to do for some time. The books are mostly rare, and whenever possible, complete series, but a lot of them are not the vanilla books, since there are a number of series that use different models for the different volumes in the series, and a number of the individual books that are skill books. Whenever that's the case, I added another version of the book that used a matching model and/or was not a skill book, just to complete the series. So, for instance, the long row of purple ones is actually a complete set of the 2920 series, all using that model and none of them skill books.

Looking left toward the dining area and the kitchen. Mostly empty table and lots of Stroti meshes in the kitchen.

And around the corner to the bedroom, three views. Not coincidentally, the most cozy room in the house.

Like Jibran and Cressida and Tina, Claudia doesn't go far these days - she loves her house too much to stay away for too long. I take her out from time to time, just because I enjoy being with her so much, but I can feel her itching to get back home again, so it never lasts long.

[mALX]

I also love Shetcombe Farm and have made it into a nice player home with a quest that involves completing the original quest for it before being able to take possession and get the upgraded interior. But I fixed it up nice inside; added a basement; fixed up the stable some; added a Player horse; and created a third quest for the Player that puts some of those garden ingredients to use in a "Still" making "Kvatch Kickapoo," (White Lightning) in a "Still" set up in the stables.

It gives the Player a way to earn some income and something to do finding the previous "Customers" to build up his clientele list; and he can sell it to fences or people like "Shady Sam." If the Player takes a drink of the Kvatch Kickapoo there is a scripted event that occurs - really funny. But it does give him various boosts that last a while afterward.

The "Still" in the stables:




This post has been edited by mALX: Sep 5 2016, 01:50 AM

[Renee]

I agree about Shetcombe. My first character who discovered it (whoever she was) was awed by the place.

Claudia sounds very special, for sure. First real roleplay, Yeah I can dig that.

[gpstr]

Claudia came about through a synthesis of a few things.

At that point, I had played the original version of Bob, and a Redguard named Jean, who was really only different in that he was a Redguard, and favored heavy armor instead of light. Otherwise, he was just another who was bulldozing through everything and had no particular personality.

I was spending a fair bit of time on the Beth forums, and reading Acadian's Buffy stories and bobg's Angel stories. And one day, Jean met Tamika, and I thought she was beautiful and decided right then and there that I wanted a green-eyed Redguard woman in my game. So I created the original version of Claudia.

When I started trying to play her, I ran into problems fairly quickly, since I was suddenly aware of the fact that she wasn't me-in-the-game. I don't think I'd ever really come to terms with that before - I had some vague notion that the characters had their own personalities, but it didn't translate into actually doing the things they'd choose to do. I still just did whatever I'd choose to do. But between the simple fact that she's female, the fact that I saw her from the beginning as a separate individual (the green-eyed Redguard I wanted in my game) and what I'd seen of what Acadian and bobg were doing with their characters, I came to see that she was her own person. So then I had to figure out how to make her her own person.

That was a bit of a struggle really, and with some fits and starts and poor decisions on my part, but it all worked out in the long run. Luckily, it was also my first experiment with a slow character build, and she ended up with one of the slowest I've ever done (at almost 300 hours, she's still only level 17). That gave me plenty of time to do things with her and get her sorted out. And she's a very pleasant and sunny personality, which provided a good justification for the erratic path she's taken - she's just a bit overly enthusiastic and easily distracted. She falls into things, and has a wonderful time doing them, then other things grab her attention and she just blithely shifts direction and keeps on going. In fact, in the long run, the way in which I explained away what really came as a result of me not yet being able to fully sort out her personality and her desires ended up being one of her most endearing qualities.

A few years ago, back when she was dabbling with being a thief (and she was a very successful one, aside from the fact that she didn't much like stealing from people, and ended up mostly stealing from jerks like Alval Uvani), I got a series of shots of her in Bravil that neatly sum up her path through the world..

Nothing much to do with player homes, but I have a hard time passing up an opportunity to blather about my characters...