The first MMO I ever played was Everquest. It lasted all of a week before I decided I truly disliked it. I liked the idea of an MMO, just not that particular implementation. I played a Barbarian and I think he was named Olethros though he wasn’t of the Grey d’Miyu template.
I switched over to Asheron’s Call and fell in love with not only the game, but the genre. I’ve been active in at least one MMO ever since. So it should be no surprise that the character I created there has become one of my staple toons.
During character creation I found that I was having trouble coming up with what I wanted to play. AC is a classless game so people were open to mix-and-match the skills they wanted. I finally tackled that problem by deciding to come up with a basic character concept as if I were playing a pen and paper RPG.
At the time I was really into Matt Wagner’s Grendel. Specifically the second incarnation, Christine Spar. However I didn’t want to just take names directly from sources like that. I’m not above using it for inspiration but I needed to make it my own. So I decided since one of the weapons one could use in AC was a spear and Christine used a forked spear I would pattern my AC toon on her. For the name I changed the spelling from Christine to Kristn. Like most MMOs the game suggested different naming conventions for flair, one was “bint” as “Daughter of”. The first incarnation of Wagner’s Grendel, and Christine’s father, was Hunter Rose. Thus Kristn bint Rose was born.
During the years I played Asheron’s Call she was fleshed out. Of all the mobs in AC I enjoyed fighting the insectoid Olthoi the most. So Kristn’s story was woven into one where she was constantly battling the Olthoi threat. After leaving AC Kristn has reappeared from time to time.
Whenever I need a non-tank melee fighter, especially if the game allows for spears to be used, Kristn is revised. She’s always tall, dark skinned with scars, dark red hair and either dark green or purple eyes. This look was created in AC and is essential in creating her in other games. Presently Kristn is named Kryston (other variations were taken) and is a Warden in LotRO. And yes, she most often wields a spear and hunts down insectoid baddies.
Kitsume (Second Life version)
After Asheron’s Call I bounced over to Anarchy Online. Again I was faced with lots of choices and again I decided to first come up with a character concept to guide my character decisions. This time I decided I wanted to play a martial artist. One of the races was the Opifex, the typical agile but none-too-sturdy archetype. They are smaller than average, exceptionally pale, well suited for many roles where taking damage wasn’t a requirement. This played into my latent Goth (see Faith and the Muse above) so having a Goth girl martial artist kicking ass and taking names really appealed to me.
For the name I recalled one of my former MUSH characters who was supposed to be sly and cunning so was named after an animal, the fox. I poked around the interwebs and found out that the Japanese word for fox is Kitsune. To make it slightly more femme I switched it to Kitsume or Kitsumi. I forget which and use both variants when one or the other is taken.
Kitsume was a small, pale female with dark, dramatic make-up, dark clothes, who excelled at martial arts. Often she is bald except for a top-knot or single pony-tail. That character concept appeared again in City of Heroes where she was a robotic claws scrapper, a fair match for the cyberpunk inspired original. She’s also morphed into one of the central characters of a book I plan(ned) to write with the same basic looks, attitude and kick ass style.
