Please be careful with spoilers from major campaigns, particularly Curse of Strand cos I’m playing through that atm please thank you 😊
I’ll go first…
I’m running a homebrew pirate campaign and I have a character called Rusty Ben who’s great fun to play. He’s a warforged in the form of a skeleton made of rusted iron. He wears a pirate hat and he has a stuffed parrot nailed to his shoulder. He’s a great sailor, who never tires, or eats, and he even keeps watch as he ‘sleeps’, because warforged. He’s also handy with repair work, so he’s a valuable member of the party’s pirate crew. He’s very friendly and speaks in a kind of silly Southern US accent. When he asked to join the party’s crew, he held put a gold piece and said “I can pay my own way!”. They declined and one of them gave him a silver piece as wages. He was bowled over by their generosity. Another player offered him a copper piece as well, and he got all serious and said, “No, no… let me earn the copper piece.”
He acts as a kind of sailoring guide for the party. He has worked aboard quite a few pirate ships, until he was aboard one that sank in battle. He walked for a long time across the bottom of the sea and eventually found an island and just walked up onto the beach, where he met the crew of The Candlestick Maker’s Revenge and joined them, which is where the party met him at the start of the campaign. They took passage on that ship to get to the island chain that is the setting fornthe canpaign. He’s one of my favourite people that I’ve ever made up!
It’s always the bard
In my campaign I made a bard nemesis for the party’s bard to be in competition with. He’s a one-man-band Tortle named Shelldon who is incredibly haughty and superior sounding. The first time they met, Sheldon was performing and one of the party put a silver piece in his collection hat. He looked at it and gave them a judgey look, so the party bard said “fuck this guy” and they had a Dueling Banjoes style battle. The party bard won and Shelldon got butthurt and accused him of bad musicianship. Some cutting remarks fron the party had Shelldon running away crying. I’ve had him pop up again throughout the campaign trying to one-up them.