This tale centers around one of my players creating a new character. Everyone playing the game had many characters. We just picked up characters from our portfolio according to whim every time we sat down at our custom built plywood and 2x4 gaming table. When we didn't feel like playing one of our existing characters at the moment, we simply rolled up a new one for the day and added them to our portfolio.

The character involved in this story eventually became one of my four banes as a gamemaster. Two of my players were extremely creative, and this always resulted in good rewards. The more creative the solution to a problem, the more the player was rewarded for it. They each had two characters which were powerful enough to be a disruption to the world order everywhere they went. The character in this story is a Drow Elf based upon the Forgotten Realms Drow which are a chaotic, and mostly evil, race of underground dwelling elves.

This character began to show signs of danger from the beginning, rolling extremely high on every roll in the character creation process. There were only two rolls which were more than 2 away from the max, in fact. This qualified my player to create a Drow, which was designed to be a very rare type of player character, and thus had been a quest of everyone when we rolled up new characters.

Having qualified to play a Drow, my player immediately began working out an extensive back story for his character as he chose his starting equipment. My die rolls for his potential starting equipment were no less astounding, and foreboding, than his rolls to create the character. He started out with phenomenal stats and phenomenal equipment. One of my other players, already running another of my "bane" characters leaned over and whispered, "Cripes, he's going to be a bloody Cuisanart!" adding to my sense of foreboding that this Drow was going to be a test on my ability to control.

With his stats, equipment, and back story developed, there remained only one blank line on his new character sheet: Character Name.

This had always been a decision one had to make carefully in our gaming group. One's choice of name had to be carefully vetted in order to avoid anything that could be corrupted into a joke. "Wilburn" had already branded one of my brother's characters with constant "Mr. Ed" jokes. "Sanderen Fordson" naturally branded another player's character with a chorus of people humming the "Sanford and Son" theme.

The player in question chose not to play his new Drow character that day, deciding to spend a little time considering his character's name instead. He played a sadistic brawler named Zeothrox for that day's game session. The next day, his new Drow likewise sat on the sidelines as Zeothrox completed an adventure he had started the day before. The following three days, his Drow still sat idle with that blank Character Name line while he ran a recently created Paladin through his paces.

Upon completion of his Paladin's first quest, locating and bonding with his magnificent war horse, my player pulled out the character sheet for his Drow and put a pen to that long blank line. The Drow's first name emerged, Razza. It was meant to be reminiscent of Drizzt, a Drow Elf Ranger from R.A. Salvatore's novels. All the jokes we came up were weak and lame, and would never stick. Scott had succeeded in the first part of his quest to come up with a name his Drow could live with.

There was a break in gaming for a few days, as a couple of parties and sessions jumping off the cliffs at a strip mine pit took precedence over the game. When we returned to our cobbled together table, Scott pulled out that character sheet once more, now with a full name...

Razza Rogan.

Immediately, one of my other players stood up and put on his best obviously-reading-it-off-the-teleprompter voice...

"Hello. I'm Razza Rogaine and I'm not only the President of the Hair Club for Drow, I'm also a client."

The hilarity which ensued faded my sense of foreboding, for a time. The character's surname was changed to Kilsek after a few more days of consideration, after which the Drow stepped forth from the dark recesses of a cave at the bottom of the Great Crater. The damage had been done, however, and the "Rogaine" joke stuck with him.