Finally, the cat, or lizard in this case, is out of the bag! Deema has been introduced to the world!
Deema started out as a non-player character (NPC) I created for the Star Wars roleplaying game campaign I ran some years back. She was a Trandoshan child destined for slavery until the player characters stepped in. In the Star Wars universe, Trandoshans are a typically agressive reptilian race with a deep-rooted hatred for Wookiees.. The most known example is the bounty hunter Bossk, seen in The Empire Strikes Back. Deema’s father however, was not the typical Trandoshan. He was a scientist living in peace with the Wookiees on Kashyyyk. He was killed trying to save his Wookiee friends from slavers who were raiding the Wookiee homeworld. The slavers captured Deema, intending to sell her as a slave as well.
I specifically made Deema a Trandoshan as a test of character for one of my players’ character, Mowat, who had a grudge against them. Would Mowat’s sense of right outweigh his hatred of Trandoshans? (Yes it would). His player cursed me (in jest) for trying to make his character show some depth and growth, which I took as a compliment.
Deema’s personality was originally patterned as a cross between Ed from Cowboy Bebop and Elmo from Sesame Street. She was a charmingly innocent, curious and overly affectionate girl with a knack for mechanical engineering. Like Ed, she would always refer to herself by name, “Deema likes buttons!” She would also rename everyone she met (Mowat being the exception) with a cute nickname that made sense to her, if nobody else. The most infamous of these nicknames, Mouse Man, was given to a Sullustan member of the crew because she thought he had mouse-like eyes. I can’t remember the Sullustan’s real name anymore (even though I created him) because for all intents and purposes he was “Mouse Man”.
From the moment Deema first gleefully said, “Deema likes buttons,” I think I’d won the players over. With a nudge from Deema herself, they adopted her as a member of the crew. Mowat eventually became her adoptive father.
The campaign ended prematurely, as so many roleplaying campaigns do, and Deema went into dormancy. Because she’d stood out so much, when I later started a new campaign that was set a few years after the events of the first, I used Deema as a bridge between the two stories. I decided that she had come to inherit Mowat’s starship and was flying the galaxy as an independent contractor with her partner, the Sullustan’s daughter (Mouse Girl, of course). In the session she met the new player characters, she told them her life story, and in doing so, told the players what happened to their old characters after the campaign ended, something I think the players really appreciated since we never got to finish the campaign.
Deema and Mouse Girl were later captured and tortured by Imperial agents trying to locate the players. Throughout the following adventures, I would narrate these interrogation scenes, thereby creating animosity towards an NPC the players hadn’t even met yet, but whom I’d designed as the big bad for that part of the campaign. In the last of these scenes, the Imperial officer crossed the line, destroying Deema’s most cherished possession, her last recordings of Mowat’s voice. In typical Deema fashion, she hissed out the worst word she could think of, “MEANIE!” with as much venom as she could. Even at her worst, I refused to compromise her innocence. The scenes did what they were supposed to, anger the players and make them want to get even (which they did).
That second campaign has long since ended, and with it, my opportunities to write stuff for Deema. I’ve missed her though, which is why I decided to adapt her for Age of Animus. I find that her personality is a good fit for the Funnies and she has a ready-made Mouse Girl to drive crazy, in Zoë. I made her a lizard as a nod to her Trandoshan roots, and a tinkerer to reflect her mechanical skills.
This was all decided months ago, but since I didn’t want to spoil things, I kept all references on the site to the new character that was coming, vague. Her first appearance strip was published on the site last week, but because I work on the Funnies in advance, the strip had been drawn a month earlier. The script for that strip had been written at least a month and a half before that. All that time, I’ve been anxiously awaiting the date of June 12, 2012, so that I could share Deema with the world. She’s had to miss out on all the mash-ups that have gone before her introduction, but I plan on making up for that sometime in the near future.
So that’s the story of how Deema came to join the Age of Animus cast. I hope you all love her as much as I do!
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