Name: Xavier Beauchene a.k.a. the Voice
Campaign: The Umbrageous Sodality and the Ghost Opera
Full disclosure: I started putting together the list of characters for these posts months ago to make sure it was actually possible. It turned out I had never run a campaign with a character whose name began with an X or a Y (though I did run for a character named the Roman numeral IX, which is so close). Around that time I was starting the vigilante campaign, so I asked the players if they could kindly help me out. Conveniently these letters are right next to each other, which lets me do a bit of comparison. You may even want to skip this post and come back tomorrow so you can read them back-to-back.
Xavier was, obviously, a vigilante. He didn’t start the campaign with a code name but was soon forced to adopt “The Voice” given his predilection for very high Stealth checks during conversations with characters who had very low Perception. A member of the town guard by day, he worked the beat so he could explore the city as research for his nighttime activities. As a build he was focused on the sap, which let him apprehend criminals without killing them, and mobility, using a vigilante trick that let him get a sneak attack during the movement he made to get into position for further sneak attacks.
If I had to pick a superhero analogue for Xavier it would be Superman, not because he was a top-tier powerhouse but because he wanted to do what was right both in and out of costume. Xavier is his identity and the Voice is his mask; he joined the guard to fight for justice, and when the legal system proved too corrupt to mete it out he starting doing it himself. Despite using stealth he still took his fight to his enemies up front, and he did no permanent harm when he could help it. Most of the time he approached the other party members to talk rather than the other way around, and he was probably more into the idea of a superhero team-up than any other character (which I appreciate, since that’s what the campaign was about and I made sure everybody knew that). He is most definitely the hero.
I’ll admit I was frustrated when I saw how easy it was for Xavier to knock out an opponent in a single turn, approaching an enemy and making two sneak attacks with bonus damage before the enemy even knew he was there. But that only really happened with low-level mooks, which is the exact point of low-level mooks. The more I saw Xavier work the more I liked him, and he could be the unofficial leader of the unofficial vigilante team if they ever got around to considering such things (this does make the fourth time this player has been the party leader, so I’m starting to think he has a type). I think it’ll be really interesting to see how he works when he’s not in a town where he’s working in the guard and how the character changes as he works with people who have his back.
The good guys won, so Xavier is still alive and active. One of the explicit points of this campaign was to build the characters as antagonists for a future campaign, where the two groups the players have in this setting face off against each other (take a drink). I’m looking forward to that.