Durian is a strongly odorous fruit with a hard, prickly outside "shell" kind of thing, and people seem to have a hard time agreeing on a flavor description.
Agripa is a shortened version of Agrippa or Agrippae, which has popped up in history several times, notably with Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, for whom the Agrippan method of numerology is named.
Symbol:Caltrap, a small and cheap weapon made of nails wrapped on themselves in such a way that a point is always sticking up to injure anyone who steps on it. It's more of a defensive and sabotaging weapon than anything aggressive or offensive.
defensiveAlchemist defensive: He's a prickly guy who will (sometimes) fight if attacked, but prefers to lay traps and snares and get his enemies to hurt themselves... and if he thinks he's being criticized, he gets irritated and tries to criticize whoever he's talking to. alchemist: Thanks to me reading up on his namesake (and ancestor), I decided that in addition to divination, Durian is also into cooking and truth-seeking, so the philosophy of alchemy is important to him.
--TEAL DEER BACKSTORY--
Durian is something like the third character concept I had for Scrib! I really like randomized character generation, it comes from my love of tabletop games and dice. So I checked the in-game trolls to see what colors were sparse, and saw that orange and green were empty.
I figured I'd go with green, and opened up a book on the metaphysical associations of rocks to see if anythign struck me. I liked the description of Malachite I saw, and I started doing research. Apparently Malachite is named after the mallow plant, which conveniently is six letters long, and I took it as a sign that there should be a greenblood named Mallow. Malachite and the mallow plant: green, soft, really absorbant, with a copper theme somehow, and associated with new ideas. I wanted a character who was into numerology, and I noticed how F - O - X were all associated with 6. So I was going to have a fox lusus and a theme to go with 6, and tie in tetrahedrons somehow...
And then I hit "random symbol" on symbols.com a bunch of times, and came up with caltrap and something about caltraps as a symbol struck me. I dropped the soft green theme, and looked around for green and prickly (like a caltrap) instead. I might have gone with some kind of cactus, if I stayed with a greenblood, but as the new concept developed I wanted to go with more of a yellow blood, into traps and sitting to analyze and a bit of a tsundere. I was actually thinking of having a yellow-blooded female, with GLaDOS as my headcanon voice, and that's where the punctuating when angry idea came in. "You don't even care, DO you. You monster." That kind of thing. Overall apathetic and defensive and prickly.
I had about two pieces of newsprint with scribbled notes all over the place, details from my ~extensive~ Google research into foxes and rocks and military tactics, and from that I had a list of possible names. "Mallow," "Cheval," "Tetran," "Cucooh," "Durian," "Glados," and "Vulpes." And I sat in a numerology site, plugging in names to see if any of the pairs would make a good numerological combination that fit with the concepts I had so far. I finally started testing variations of Agrippa to see if any of them worked, and finally I got the 11-6-5 combination that suited the concept.
I opened up Ash's Guide to RPG Personality & Background and rolled things up for him. Motivated by learning mysteries, gaining approval, and chaos. Cynical worldview, mainly honest with people, a bit prone to rash decisions, paranoid about clear danger, flexible with new ideas and passive aggressive with disagreements, needy with emotions, modest in tone, talkative (which i decided tied to his chaos motivation, and he became a gossip), and fond of traditional cultural norms. He'd be crude and direct in flirting, and have a mean-spirited sense of humor. Lots of pieces that I slowly would fit together into a picture.
And... I mean slowly. I was really into the idea of the game, and I sat on the app for a few days after most of us applied, slowly drawing connections between the symbolism concept and the randomly rolled rpg character ideas. I spent at least eight hours looking at art websites (like Dresden Codak's sideblog!) for ideas on designing characters, to see if drawing Durian would give me a better sense of who he was. I figured he would have lots of triangles in his facial features, a face shaped a little like an upsidedown oujia board (divination) and a bushy ponytail to resemble a fox's tail (since apparently foxes are named for their tails!) Even the idea for his vest came from a really, really roughly doodled military coat with triangular lapels.
Finally, once the apps were starting to go in and I realized the spaces were getting REALLY limited, I started to make quick decisions. His blood color should be a variation off those numbers (1165) in some way, and the other part would be letters. I tried every combo of ff, 11 and 65 to see where they all ended up on the spectrum, and liked the 1165-- blue best. So now he was a blueblood. The more I thought about it, the more I liked it. It gave him an excuse for his unfulfilled emotional neediness (entitlement faintly reminiscient of Eridan), an ancestor likely to have lived a long, philosophical life, and being nobility would give him more reason to like the culture that gives him that status. And so on!
TEAL DEER CROSSING
Agripa is a shortened version of Agrippa or Agrippae, which has popped up in history several times, notably with Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, for whom the Agrippan method of numerology is named.
Symbol: Caltrap, a small and cheap weapon made of nails wrapped on themselves in such a way that a point is always sticking up to injure anyone who steps on it. It's more of a defensive and sabotaging weapon than anything aggressive or offensive.
defensiveAlchemist
defensive: He's a prickly guy who will (sometimes) fight if attacked, but prefers to lay traps and snares and get his enemies to hurt themselves... and if he thinks he's being criticized, he gets irritated and tries to criticize whoever he's talking to.
alchemist: Thanks to me reading up on his namesake (and ancestor), I decided that in addition to divination, Durian is also into cooking and truth-seeking, so the philosophy of alchemy is important to him.
--TEAL DEER BACKSTORY--
Durian is something like the third character concept I had for Scrib! I really like randomized character generation, it comes from my love of tabletop games and dice. So I checked the in-game trolls to see what colors were sparse, and saw that orange and green were empty.
I figured I'd go with green, and opened up a book on the metaphysical associations of rocks to see if anythign struck me. I liked the description of Malachite I saw, and I started doing research. Apparently Malachite is named after the mallow plant, which conveniently is six letters long, and I took it as a sign that there should be a greenblood named Mallow. Malachite and the mallow plant: green, soft, really absorbant, with a copper theme somehow, and associated with new ideas. I wanted a character who was into numerology, and I noticed how F - O - X were all associated with 6. So I was going to have a fox lusus and a theme to go with 6, and tie in tetrahedrons somehow...
And then I hit "random symbol" on symbols.com a bunch of times, and came up with caltrap and something about caltraps as a symbol struck me. I dropped the soft green theme, and looked around for green and prickly (like a caltrap) instead. I might have gone with some kind of cactus, if I stayed with a greenblood, but as the new concept developed I wanted to go with more of a yellow blood, into traps and sitting to analyze and a bit of a tsundere. I was actually thinking of having a yellow-blooded female, with GLaDOS as my headcanon voice, and that's where the punctuating when angry idea came in. "You don't even care, DO you. You monster." That kind of thing. Overall apathetic and defensive and prickly.
I had about two pieces of newsprint with scribbled notes all over the place, details from my ~extensive~ Google research into foxes and rocks and military tactics, and from that I had a list of possible names. "Mallow," "Cheval," "Tetran," "Cucooh," "Durian," "Glados," and "Vulpes." And I sat in a numerology site, plugging in names to see if any of the pairs would make a good numerological combination that fit with the concepts I had so far. I finally started testing variations of Agrippa to see if any of them worked, and finally I got the 11-6-5 combination that suited the concept.
I opened up Ash's Guide to RPG Personality & Background and rolled things up for him. Motivated by learning mysteries, gaining approval, and chaos. Cynical worldview, mainly honest with people, a bit prone to rash decisions, paranoid about clear danger, flexible with new ideas and passive aggressive with disagreements, needy with emotions, modest in tone, talkative (which i decided tied to his chaos motivation, and he became a gossip), and fond of traditional cultural norms. He'd be crude and direct in flirting, and have a mean-spirited sense of humor. Lots of pieces that I slowly would fit together into a picture.
And... I mean slowly. I was really into the idea of the game, and I sat on the app for a few days after most of us applied, slowly drawing connections between the symbolism concept and the randomly rolled rpg character ideas. I spent at least eight hours looking at art websites (like Dresden Codak's sideblog!) for ideas on designing characters, to see if drawing Durian would give me a better sense of who he was. I figured he would have lots of triangles in his facial features, a face shaped a little like an upsidedown oujia board (divination) and a bushy ponytail to resemble a fox's tail (since apparently foxes are named for their tails!) Even the idea for his vest came from a really, really roughly doodled military coat with triangular lapels.
Finally, once the apps were starting to go in and I realized the spaces were getting REALLY limited, I started to make quick decisions. His blood color should be a variation off those numbers (1165) in some way, and the other part would be letters. I tried every combo of ff, 11 and 65 to see where they all ended up on the spectrum, and liked the 1165-- blue best. So now he was a blueblood. The more I thought about it, the more I liked it. It gave him an excuse for his unfulfilled emotional neediness (entitlement faintly reminiscient of Eridan), an ancestor likely to have lived a long, philosophical life, and being nobility would give him more reason to like the culture that gives him that status. And so on!