ER:Rip

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A player character in the Errant Road free-form role-playing game, introduced here. (He's the guy with poor firearm safety skills, not Shorty, who first appears a couple of segments later.) Needless to say, he doesn't exist in the Poe-verse.

Rupert "Rip" Ricordiel, to give him his full name (although almost nobody calls him "Rupert" except Argus, who knows him slightly from when they both lived in Tsuirakushiti). is a former professor at a mediocre Tsuirakuan university, now turned privateer and adventurer. His basic concept is here, from which the following is taken:

Description

Name: Rupert Ricordiel; goes by "Rip" or "Ripcord"

Age: 42

Race: Human

Origins: Rip is the child of a man (fully human) from the Northern Confederacy and a Tsuirakuan woman from a high-class family. (How they got together is a long story, and he himself doesn't know all of it.) His experience growing up partly in the north, partly in Tsuirakushiti was quite similar to Bani Igaaru's in the main story. On completion of his D.Thm., he took a faculty position in the sociology department at one of the "community-college" level institutions in Tsuirakushiti, and in this capacity, ran into Sasha Mitchel when she took a class from him there; however, the two wouldn't remember each other, neither the class nor the professor nor the student being particularly memorable.

About two years back, he went on a sabbatical to Farrel, intending to live off the land while he researched a paper on Farrelite guilds that he was going to write when he got back home. However, he discovered that he enjoyed the privateering lifestyle enough that he's been in no hurry to resume his humdrum life in Tsuiraku. Being single and unattached (he fancies himself a ladies' man, and pretends not to notice that his luck with the ladies really isn't all that good), he simply settled down in Isabel, taking the role of ground crew with one of the mercenary bands that he was "researching" when they went into the airship-pirate business. He mainly fills this role (his one area of exceptional magical virtuosity is in repairing things, which comes in handy in that line of work) and sticks around Isabel most of the time, but goes on the occasional raid with his employers when they're short staffed and/or he's getting bored.

Appearance: Rip looks his age (42) but no more. He's of average height and slender build, with brown hair (just a touch of gray at the temples) and eyes. He normally is clean shaven but lets his beard grow out when he's out with an airship, which gives him a somewhat scruffy look. He wears clothes to try to fit in with his surroundings, nothing out of the ordinary, but again, generally on the shabby side -- he could afford better, but keeping a low profile is a good thing in his line of work.

Equipment: Mainly Thurston, the cigar-smoking parrot. (Rip, incidentally, does not smoke himself.) Thurston is a typical Tsuirakuan familiar of no abnormal abilities, apart from familiarish intelligence and unusual skill with languages -- he was hard-wired with a Translation spell at creation. This has come in handy when "out in the field." Rip carries a revolver but rarely uses it (in the episode at the beginning of the story, it wasn't even loaded), a dagger that he also rarely uses, and a wand for spellcasting that he uses rather more often, but mainly just to repair the airship, do analyses on weird items plundered on raids, and generally, do supportive stuff. His few other belongings are usually carried in a Pocket Dimension that he opens only on rare, almost extraordinary, occasions. Included among these is a crystal ball that he literally hadn't used in years before story time ... but it's there in case things get really messy, as they do almost as soon as his on-stage time begins.

He is competent in a fight, whether physical or manual, and can cast the usual array of offensive and defensive spells that a Tsuirakuan generalist can use, but has no specializations anywhere near the battlemage level and generally avoids combat where possible. In short, he's just another Tsuirakuan out to see the world, although one with an advanced degree and probably some serious magical skills if he ever bothered to tap them; he simply doesn't.

Appearances

He makes his first appearance in the "Airship Pirates, Chapter 1: Isabel" thread, as the guy recruiting fresh meat for the ER:Bonny Read, the pirate airship of the title. Most of the people in the sleazy bars of Isabel have the good sense to avoid an operation this sketchy, but enough succumb to wanderlust and the (dubious) claims about pirate treasure that the ship eventually heads off for various adventures. Needless to say, these don't go exactly according to plan.

Like almost all player characters in Errant Road, he eventually gets dragged into more conventional battles either in relatively civilized Lorrel or in the barbaric wastes of the Northern Confederacy, near the unpleasant city of Goriel. These don't go exactly according to plan either. Later still, he parts company with the Bonny Read and shows up on the Southern Continent, having acquired his own airship and set off with fellow BR crewman Shorty to see the world. This airship, however, is a junker, and falls apart at the very start of the thread, leaving him and Shorty groundbound, desperately scheming to get back to somewhere civilized, and fortuitously, in the company of a band of kobolds, long-time PC adventurer Tamina among them. And there, more than ten years after the start of Errant Road, the adventures still continue.

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