RPG a Day 7: Small

This one is close to my heart. I play a small character.

She’s a little over five feet tall. That half inch would mean a lot to her, if the world were one in which measurements were exact.

Size is, in RuneQuest, one of the things that helps you to do damage. She’s short, but she’s burly and strong. She juuuuuust squeezes in to get an extra 1D4 damage. Her warrior friend Rajar is bigger. He easily gets 1D6, and 2D6 would be possible (and indeed, he often gets there with magic). She has been on the wrong end of wrestling matches with him, where she has to match her strength against his (a small disadvantage) and her size against his (oh dear).

Playing someone small and fighty is great fun. A tiny shouty angry person who is suddenly scary when the NPCs realise that all of her magical tattoos are a bit more Death-themed than they thought, and she’s asking them outside for their choice of sword or spear or else shutting up and not saying that about her friends is great fun. She’s got a habit of writing cheques1Well, she’s illiterate, but you get what I mean. that she has to cash. She’ll fight against terrible odds, because she has something to prove. She finds it hard to back down in a crisis, because people will assume it is because she is afraid, and she hates that idea more than she hates the idea of dying.

The thing that is most adorable about this, though, is that her mentor is even smaller than she is. You see, he’s a were-duck.

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    Well, she’s illiterate, but you get what I mean.

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I dig your character. Reminds me of Reacher from Brian Daley’s Coramonde books. If you don’t mind me asking, how did the were-duck come to be in your Glorantha?

The were-duck is a durulz, the standard ‘duck’ sort of NPC. I’m trying to write this to be accessible to people not in the RQ world, so I used the translation of the word, rather than going with ‘duck’ or ‘durulz’.

How he came to be? I met him, underestimated him because he was small, decided to put him in danger anyhow because to keep him behind lines to protect him would have been insulting, and had a rapid change in understanding of what a duck could do when the zombie horde hit our front line. It was great!

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