The Campaign Builder's Guild

They play an important role in our settings. Crazy curmudgeons with wisdom wrapped in weirdness, insane inquisitors inquisitively investigating, masterful madmen and their mad machinations. Each is a special, yet crazy, jewel which adds flavor to a setting just by not being quite all there. And where some are totally bonkers others seem to have a sanity of their own, an intelligence that works on a different wavelength if you will. So it's time to share our own madness with each other. Welcome to March Madman Madness.

The Contest
For this contest you will in 500 words or less create a character that is insane in some way. Their insanity may be of whatever variety you wish from The Joker all the Way to the Cheshire Cat and anything in between. The character can be from any cbg setting that is not your own and so you are encouraged to investigate each others settings and find one that you think you'd like to do a character for. You may write anything you want, how the character is crazy, the history of the character, even a short story about a crazy thing they've done, or indeed anything else that you think will reflect on their insanity. The sky is the limit. You have until the 31st of the month at midnight to turn in your submissions, after that we'll have a week of voting to determine who has the craziest character. Who knows, there may even be a prize (tbd). Please submit all entries for the contest as posts in this thread.

[Argh. I need to l2r. Anyway this space is now reserved for the coming attempt to write up a Broken Verge villain.]

From Kindling's Dark Silver:

[ic=Ælfric Once-Elf]Ælfric had seen but three winters when the nihtgengan plucked him from the riverside while his mother washed clothes, her back turned to her child.  Coaxing him into the woods by posing as playmates the goblins soon lured young Ælfric to a secret hollow, an elf-nest deep in the clotted, tenebrous heart of the primeval forest.  Here the child's body was offered up to those malignant beings dwelling in the loathsome reaches Beyond this world.  One such entity invaded Ælfric's supple young flesh, turning the lad into a marionette for its own unwholesome purposes.  As an elf Ælfric joined others of the demon-brood in their sadistic pranks.  While his mind slumbered his hands twisted sinews and tore out organs and painted tree-trunks with bloody pictures in an awful parody of childish play.  With his kindred the elf-possessed Ælfric made gore-pies, tossed eyeballs in place of rune-bones, skipped rope with entrails, and fought mock-battles with human ribs, gleefully tittering with obscene joy as he gambolled from one mutilation to the next.

One day many years later the elf once known as Ælfric, still child-sized, idly pulled the fingernails from a screaming adolescent boy while two of his fellows inflicted their own torments elsewhere upon his body when a group of burly warriors – sworn men of a local Grimdowner thane – burst into the hollow with cruel iron weapons, hewing elf-flesh left and right.  One such warrior hacked off Ælfric's right hand, and the elf fled the hollow to nurse its wound elsewhere, mewling over its painless hurt.  It so happened that as it whined and sulked its cries attracted the attention of a young girl picking berries at the border of the woodland.  Investigating the elf's whimpers the girl discovered what had once been Ælfric hunched against a tree, picking at the ugly stump at its wrist and idly tying a vine round its little forearm in a meagre attempt to mend its broken plaything.  Upon seeing the girl the elf inhabiting Ælfric's body instantly leapt from its broken puppet into the girl's body.  Cackling, the elf launched itself at Ælfric, but at that moment an arrow from a pursuing Grimdowner's bow struck the creature through the heart and it died instantly.  Ælfric passed into unconsciousness and was taken by the warriors back to their settlement.

Reared in the household of a local thane, Ælfric, now called Ælfric Once-Elf, resumed his maturation, growing in queer, misshapen ways into a stunted youth and later an ill-favoured man with the face of a boy.  Though lacking conscious memory of his time as an elf, Ælfric was nightly tortured by intensely vivid dreams of his possessor's atrocities, dreams which left him panting and strangely hungry – and, as he entered manhood, overwhelmingly aroused.  In secret the troubled lad began tentatively imitating the vile activities he witnessed each night with cats and other animals.  When his predilection for viciousness was discovered the local thane discerned a use for the twisted, crippled youth he had taken into his family.  Ælfric, promoted to the rank of huscarl, became the thane's torturer, interrogating enemies and defiling the bodies of rivals during feuds in order to slake the dark desires instilled in him by his "elf-dreams."  Now thoroughly mad, Ælfric Once-Elf occupies a position of considerable prestige in the thane's hird; when the one-handed, dwarfish man enters a room all fall silent, and few dare meet his twinkling, eerily contented gaze.[/ic]

From Humabout's Dunweald:

[ic=The Creeper of Cardeney]Occasionally when traversing the boardwalks outside Cardeney, travelers may meet an old man in simple clothes, rocking slowly back and forth perched atop a stump along the road. The man is friendly but curious and offers much information, often sitting at crossroads and pointing the lost on their way. What the traveler does not know is that the appearance of the old man is a ruse, concealing the monstrous and pestilent swamp thing beneath. The old man, better known as the Creeper of Cardeney is a cunning and malicious predator. In its true form the Creeper is a sickly humanoid, an undead creature that lurks in the marsh and stalks the living. It stands more than a foot taller than a man, with wiry but strong limbs and hands that have become inhuman. Its eyes are a sickly yellow and white as if filled with some festering ooze, and its stench is that of the foulest depths of bog and the decay of a plague-ridden corpse.

The Creeper's interest in the travelers lies in its constant hunger for not just flesh, but particularly the organs of the living. In life it may have been a man with gluttonous and cruel behaviors, but in death now its appetites have turned to the people it was once among. The Creeper uses its swamp magic to disguise its appearance and smell, hiding the dripping bog-water and leathery, moist skin. With this done the Creeper will sit in wait on the road, its eyes sometimes betraying its unearthly hunger and form, but typically holds its head low until the approach of a human. It then talks to them as it heard its previous victims talk before they died, offering them assistance and food. As soon as the traveler's back is turned, however, the Creeper strikes, dragging them off of the road and into the swamp to feast on them. The Creeper knows it cannot readily strike at groups or heavily armored foes as easily as individuals, so it takes opportunities to guide these travelers down treacherous trails and dead-ends, keeping in mind areas hazardous to the living and waiting for the forest to allow it to strike.

The Creeper of Cardeney's consumes its victims slowly beginning with the organs, but the creature avoids devouring a certain organ or body part each time, erratically breaking and tearing them before stitching them back together. With these parts it incessantly toils over the construction of a shape; an effigy made of the remains of its countless victims, made to resemble the people it once knew from fragmented memories drained of meaning. Were it able to complete even one, the creation would quickly be destroyed as the Creeper possesses the memory of the person but feels nothing except hunger for the carrion, and thus toils at a meaningless task. Piecing it together much as a wizard might a homunculus, the Creeper has many unfinished failures as the remains it uses begin to rot and become unusable. Nevertheless it continues to work, each time beginning a new creation; each time failing long before completion. Occasionally its abandoned creations find their way out of the swamp and into waterways in civilized lands. In each case, wise authorities choose to burn the thing without attempting to identify the victim(s), as what little is usually there for discerning features is horribly mutilated. The locals of Dunmire speak in legends of something foul that lurks in the marsh that is the source of these infectious husks, but they do not know the Creeper for what it is, and those that know what it looks like have never survived. The Creeper knows this and cunningly leaves false clues that suggest other forces are at work, casting attention away from the marsh itself; from the stagnant pools at the end of struggling streams that the Creeper uses as its lair, collecting for its next creation...[/ic]