I hope you enjoyed meeting Harken Darken. As the description for that piece indicated he’s a character from a table top roleplaying game one of my friends runs. He was originally built for 5th edition DnD as an Artificer (and its armorer specialty) and then later adapted to Pathfinder 2nd Edition as an Inventor. He’s not a character in Illithiust but outside of Quartes he may be one of the characters I have most enjoyed playing.

Like Donald Duck, Harken was built off of a voice: an impersonation of the gruff mercenary Zaeed Massani from the Mass Effect series. In that game the now departed Robin Sachs voiced the character. I enjoyed doing a take on a character who sounds like they spent all their time screaming or grumbling and so had an eternal gravel note to their voice. Though, when I first started playing Harken (and admittedly really played up the gravel in his voice) I had to learn some vocal chord warm up techniques otherwise voicing him for a whole session would leave barely able to talk by the end. That voice lent itself to a grumpy, “thisworld is against me but I’ll show them” character who fit perfectly into the Druid dominated world my friend had made for his campaign.

Probably the most unique thing about Harken though is that he is the closest I have ever managed to play to an evil character. The best I have found I can manage is a grumpy, selfish jerk and that’s exactly what Harken is. His arrogance makes for fun situations where he gets himself in over his head and the inventor class, while a bit underpowered, creates for so many opportunities to do something cinematic and bonkers to get himself out of that trouble. Harken is just smart enough for his creations to actually bail him out and yet just arrogant enough to keep getting himself in over his head.

The best part about playing Harken though is another player in the campaign plays a senile elder druid. Harken loves playing a one man Statler-and-Waldorf to said druid’s Fozzi Bear. Finding new ways to insult and yell at the druid is fun and thankfully my friend seems to enjoy the dynamic between out characters.

Not sure how much we’ll see of Harken on these pages. I’ve actually had him start writing journal entries after each session and I suppose if there’s interests (and if my friendly DM approves) those could make their way here. Still, it was fun to explore a different character and I hope you enjoyed it.

Go forth and do good things,

Sean