The Orian Family
The name “Orian” won’t mean much to anybody here, because they exist in a canon that I have no intention of publishing anytime soon, but the short version in the canon these guys come from is that they were a family of ambitious do-gooders who formed a militia, the Orian Alliance, to protect a nation that had more or less been left to rot by the powers that be, and they were damn good at their job. But, authority and adoration went to their heads and the ones in charge became tyrannical and cruel, and the heroic militia went the way of far too many rebel groups (even though they weren’t rebels) and took over the nation with an iron fist. They eventually got torn down, and now the surviving Orians are just trying to live their lives quietly and unobtrusively - most of whom never wanted to be part of the Alliance in the first place, but had no choice because they were forced into it on pain of death.
Having spent the better part of their entire existence as survivors, militiamen, criminals, and hitmen, your average Orian tends to be the following:
- Wary
- Untrusting
- Distant
- Stoic
- World-weary
- Hard-assed
- Deeply, deeply sarcastic
Their many long years of constant conflict and turmoil, along with a… unique bloodline ability (which, for obvious reasons, I can’t replicate whenever I play an Orian in CoG stories - we’ll call it “blood craze” for simplicity’s sake, but it’s more complicated than that), has also made a typical Orian:
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Highly lethal in any fight
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Vicious to the point of cruelty - a sufficiently blood-crazed Orian will not hesitate to kick you in the throat hard enough to prevent you from ever speaking again
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Relentlessly aggressive
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Nigh impossible to kill when they’re in a blood craze (think “local man too angry to die,” but it’s their entire family tree)
Basically, if a game has a combat stat? Yeah, an Orian has that stat maxed out. Literally impossible for them to fail combat checks unless the story outright demands it.
They don’t sound like the nicest people, do they? Well, stick with me, there’s two sides to every coin - while it is extremely difficult to get on an Orian’s good side due to extensive emotional, physical and mental trauma, there are benefits if you do. Most Orians remember their heroic beginnings, and while yes, it got corrupted really badly, there’s still something to be salvaged there:
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They’ll literally walk through a hellstorm of gunfire to save your life (and will be so angry that you got hurt that the bullets won’t even make them bleed, probably)
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Orians value family like it’s practically a god, and if you get in their good graces, you’re family, bud - anybody tries to give you guff, they’re gonna find themselves being stared down by a sea of cold, grey eyes, real quick
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They’re actually super nice folks who will drop everything to help out if you need it, once you get them to open up to you
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Now that the criminal empire has toppled, the Orians are able to focus on honor rather than treachery for once - you do right by them, they’ll do right by you, even if they don’t have a single nice word to say about you
TL;DR: An Orian-type character is a hardcore edgelord who can rip you in half if you piss them off, but who’ll also be your best buddy forever if you put in the time to get to know them. They’re probably the most frustrating character to RP in a CoG game, because most of those games tend to respond poorly to player characters who act standoffish and stubborn towards the ROs.
Appearance-wise, an Orian is recognized for their black hair, grey eyes (ESPECIALLY the grey eyes, that’s their defining feature), tan skin, and chiseled physique. It’s impossible for an Orian to be out of shape. It’s just not in their genes. Orians tend to favor knives, swords, or their own two hands when it comes to fighting, though guns aren’t totally out of the question. And like the true edgelords they are, they prefer the color black and wearing combat gear.
Examples of games where I’ve played Orian characters:
When Life Gives You Lemons - Ryn Hart, formerly Ryn Orian, was a high-ranking enforcer for the Orian Alliance, known back then as the Serpent due to a tattoo of a snake on her back. She hated every second of the job. When she learned of her little sister’s birth, she decided then and there to take the baby and run, because she would be damned before letting the Alliance force another one of her branch of the family tree into the “family business.” Seven years later, the Alliance has crumbled from within, and Ryn, under a new alias, is living in the town of Lemon with her little sister, Maddie - it would be great to say that their new life has been quiet and peaceful, but between an obnoxious ex who will not screw off, a bunch of strangers who all seem to want in Ryn’s pants for some reason (which is more than a little suspicious to a former criminal enforcer on the run), and a salty loser who’s trying to run Ryn out of town for buying the house they wanted, it sometimes feels like Ryn traded one awful life for another one.
Regardless, Ryn does her level best to be as good a big sister and mother figure for Maddie as she can, and god help anybody who even so much as looks at her little baby girl wrong, because Ryn will unleash hell on them and there’s no guarantee that she’ll know when to stop.
OFNA - Given that you get forced, kicking and screaming, into a cult whether you like it or not, it only makes too much sense for me to play a character who wakes up and chooses violence at the first opportunity, and will continue choosing violence until he either gets away or tears the whole organization to the ground.
Enter Jacob Orian: restaurant server who trusts nobody and keeps himself fit for if he needs to start throwing hands. Now if only he could figure out how to throw hands hard enough to knock out the creepy bird freaks who are hell-bent on recruiting him for some asinine reason…
Love❤️Verse - When Millia Orian moved to Paris, her intent was to duck the Alliance. Just fly under the radar and make enough money to keep up with her rent, and hope she didn’t make any waves big enough for the Alliance council to put together that one of their best bean counters was hiding out in another country. She never wanted to have to run a business (even if she does have a sound head for numbers and an Olympic work ethic). Hell, she doesn’t even like people, now she has to be responsible for serving them coffee in order to keep the lights on? For crying out loud…
As if that didn’t suck badly enough, now all of a sudden everybody and their mother seems to have copped the Urge for her, specifically, and will not leave her be. Maybe this might be someone’s ideal fantasy, but Millia has no time, and less interest, in this lovey-dovey soulmate crap, let alone having it split between, like, five people. And one of them’s insane.
Good Guy Redheads
As the name implies, I, for some reason, cannot make a redhead character without them being the chillest of bros, at the very least. Being chill is the baseline. It only goes up from there.
Whether it be a princess who has to dodge assassins on the regular yet selflessly takes all six bullets from a revolver in order to save an innocent person’s life (and survives!), a professional killer with a heart of gold who uses his training to bring comfort and security to people’s lives for once instead of fear and death, or even just some bartender serving up drinks and listening quietly while people pour their stress out on the counter for lack of a shoulder to cry on, the standout trait of this character type is that, “if hair = red, then good guy = yes.”
This character type tends to slot in nicely just about anywhere, since they’re often criminally charismatic, as if being good people wasn’t enough for them.
It doesn’t matter what gender or eye color or height they’ve got going on, the deciding factor is whether their hair is red or not. This is apparently hard-coded into my being.
Examples of games where I’ve played a good guy redhead:
Wayhaven Chronicles - Detective Elizabeth Greene, in another life, would have joined the army, but her family back home said no, so she joined the police instead. Protecting and serving felt like just as true a calling as defending her nation, so she settled into the job quickly, and - if you asked her - being promoted to detective was proof of her efforts bearing fruit. (We’ll just ignore that it was more likely done to fill a recently vacated seat at the precinct…)
Multilingual, whip-smart, a closet tech junkie, and with a mean right hook, Detective Greene puts her best foot forward for the people of Wayhaven, because she refuses to do anything less. Even when a certain agency came rudely waltzing into her life thanks to a certain biological parent who she has nothing positive to say about, Elizabeth never stopped being a champion for her people. She doesn’t work for the agency because she supports them or agrees with their methods - hell, she’d just as soon quit that job if she had a say in it - but because she swore and oath to protect and serve, and even if she is terrified of the supernatural, if they live in her town, they’re her people, and they’re gonna be protected and served just like everybody else.
Just… she’ll have to try to not make a big deal out of them not being human. That’s all. It’s fine, she works with vampires, how hard could it be?
Evertree Saga - One of my three Evertree protagonists is a courageous redhead who, much unlike my timid thief build, was actually able to, you know, save people’s lives. I unfortunately can’t remember how their story went, beyond, “hey, everybody didn’t die!”, so no dramatic retelling of events, here.