Uruk

A friend of mine recently decided to run a Rifts game to which Bekka and I were invited. For those of you who don't know, Rifts is a pen and paper RPG, published by Palladium Books, that is set in a post-apocalyptic world in which the end was brought about by the surging of the world's Ley Lines and an explosion of magic. In this setting, you can play pretty much anything you want too, and our GM is letting us use pretty much any of the source books, so I was having a bit of difficulty deciding what to play. When I used to play Rifts years ago, my go to character type was a Psi-Stalker but I really didn't feel like it this time around.

The answer came when Bekka said she wanted to play an Unseelie type fey obsessed with getting people to endenture themselves to her, and another player said they wanted to make a version of one of the Nightmare Bears from the TMNT game. This started me thinking along fairy-tale lines which, for some reason, got me thinking about an old Thor villain called Ulik. Ulik was the strongest and later King of the Rock Trolls in the Marvel Comics universe. Basically, he's a rather vicious wall of muscle, or a hand-to-hand combat Tank.

So, using the Rifts conversion for Heroes Unlimited, I came up with my own version of him that I'm calling Uruk in honor of the Uruk-hai orcs from the Lord of the Rings. Basically, I've decided to make him simply one of a similarly powerful race that had been enslaved by a psionic race similar to Mindflayers without the bodies. Uruk would have been a young gladiator who, when offered the opportunity to free his people by Bekka's character in return for his lifelong servitude to her, took it. She would have then provided, by some means, a device which blocked psionics within a hundred mile radius, allowing Uruks tribe to rise up and overthrow there captors. Of course, he would not know that only that city was saved as she had already taken him to another realm. Vicious from his upbringing, and caring only for his race and his own oath, I see Uruk basically as a super-strong super-tough mafia thug type of character; a refreshing change of pace from the strategists and mentors I have been playing for a while now.