My characters are usually based elsewhere. I literally have a pool of characters to choose from these days. But they've often evolved elsewhere.

My first character ever, Rachel, was based on me. The Star Trek version of her merged with a character from the book Kahless, Kellein. That character wound up with Q from Star Trek, and she adopted Trelane due to events in the book Q Squared. I revamped Trelane and brought him over here to SS. You know, his father's name was John Quincy. Q was played by John DeLancie. Get it?

Yeah, anyway...

My previous character here on SS was Kaida Ryu, who was the daughter of Zellanna, who was the daughter of Xellos and Carabella, which all happened back in the same chat system that I raised Kellein in.

A lot of my characters come from that chat, actually. Or, again, from other sources. Carabella was the daughter of Merlin and Coral from the Amber Chronicles. Xellos was someone else's character from Slayers.

Armand is one of the oddities in my character pool. His first creation was to be an NPC that was more powerful than the current NPC in our larp (live action role play), so he was completely designed around being a bored elder, and extremely powerful, vampire. And a lot of him was centered around the other NPC, Slade, who was played by my partner in storytelling in the larp. So the character became defined by another character, rather than a matter of actual character building. And of course, beyond that he was defined by his clan, his powers, his age, etc. And I just sorta had to let him figure the rest of himself out.

Funny, though. Without talking with each other, the other ST and I designed Armand and Slade to look very nearly like twins.

In larp, if I'm not 'borrowing' a character concept, I think about what I want to do, or play off of something on my mind (I had two characters based around songs) then build it.

Even now, I have a few things in mind from hard-rule roleplaying so much. Nature, demeanor, virtue, vice, traits, abilities... Armand, for instance, would be a nature of visionary, demeanor of celebrant, virtue of patience, vice of (censored. )... Traits, he'd be mainly mental with a lot of knowledge based traits. Seconded by being social, mainly appearance traits, and a little intimidation. And physically he'd be focused on strength. However he's not quite as graceful. He can be. On a flat surface. Abilities and such... well, I think most of that's classified for now.

Usually by the time all that's figured out, there's simply an image of that person in my mind. I know their hair, hair color, eye color, build, etc. Like everything I've figured out has already defined their appearance.

I tend to favor black hair.