Gordon. Gordon. I don't miss playing Gordon. I do miss delving into the head of Gordon. Gordon was my first step into Mage the Awakening. He was a paranoid dude. He grew up in a family of mages, with some supposed prophecy that he was going to Awaken someday and be this great mage - he went into his teens, twenties, and late into his 30s without that happening. He felt like a failure. He did ultimately Awaken, but that didn't eliminate his feeling of being inadequate or just altogether unworthy.
That didn't mean he wasn't a valuable asset to the Awakened, he was still a Proximus. He was raised knowing that if things went south with a mage... it couldn't get to that point. He had to strike first and hard. As a result colored his views on how to handle people, situations, and more; don't play defense, play offense and play hard.
He had a B.F.F. sort in the form of another character who was essentially a millionaire playboy who was chronically irresponsible and kind of a terrible person who made terrible choices(in the eyes of Gordon, at least). Playboy made Gordon go with him to some Alice In Wonderland-themed party once. The playboy dressed up as some character. Gordon? Gordon was the caterpillar. Complete with hookah. Which he just sort of dragged around behind him without enthusiasm, as he waddled around in this massive caterpillar outfit - fun fact, he had a shotgun stuffed away in the aft section of the costume, dragging around behind himself. He was not happy to be there because El Gordo was just not an overly happy person.
Playboy's cousin came to work with Gordon once. She could light shit on fire with her mind. When Gordon first met him he basically told her, straight out the gates: "Don't worry. I have no interest in fucking you". I'm fairly sure she gave him the 'good, you wouldn't have had the chance anyway' sort of response, while also being mildly offended. Gordon dgaf. She later caught a chair in his office on fire, during a separate incident. He advised her if she did that again, he'd turn her into a pile of ashes. Despite how confrontational that relationship seemed, the player and I got along famously. 10/10 will always roleplay with again.
At the end of The Reach, Gordon had something like...1,050 XP? And he was a Mage. I, as a player, knew that I could very, very, very, very, very, very easily make things not-fun for other players. Knowing that, I pushed him to Gnosis 7 eventually. I did this because at that point... the plain ol' mortal world just isn't as interesting. There aren't mysteries to be discovered or uncovered there, at least not on the surface. I did this because as shown in one scene among a mixed-bag of other splats, I didn't want to show them up. So while everyone was trying to deduce some family secret, trying to uncover this centuries old tale with their powers and stuff... Gordon wasn't. He was too busy thinking about manipulating time, stopping it, and tying that to when he unholstered his sidearm. And, at one point, discovering a baseball glove that he hadn't seen for two decades - he was SO excited by that. It was only when everyone else's rolls failed, they couldn't make progress, and a challenge presented itself did Gordon(like the eye of Sauron) turn around like 'Ooooh, a mystery...'. I was happy that I, in my opinion, had the maturity to let other people try to drive the Cool Thing forward and only stepped in to throw my own sheet at it, when others failed.
He had a lot under the hood that was never explored or probed by others; I've honestly forgotten so much about him because he had so much about him in terms of backstory. He took things very seriously, usually. One of the moments that always stands out the most to me with that character is when I wrote a little short story on The Reach, featuring Gordon. Gordon seemed so confident and competent, in most cases. The introduction of that little feature on TR was an opportunity for me to show that Gordon wasn't as put-together as he so often seemed. I wrote it out and it was just Gordon, sitting in Lay-Z Boy, a bottle of whiskey next to him(and not good whiskey, I'm talking 'in a plastic bottle', whiskey), watching Fox News(because of course Gordon did, even if I curl my lip at it), a gun(because the dude was always armed), and a big cupcake on a tv tray in front of himself. He grabbed his gun, stared at it for a moment, and had his own little Lethal Weapon-Martin Riggs moment where he thought about eating a bullet - it'd make things a lot easier on him or at least that was his thinking. Ultimately, of course, he put the gun down. Sighed a bit. Picked up his cupcake, started unpeeling it, and then wished himself happy birthday. I posted that up and got a couple pages about it almost immediately, one of them really stood out to me: Person pages, "I really wish I could give Gordon a hug". That, to me, felt like I had written that segment well. I was proud of that writing.
Gordon was a complex character to me and I often credit that fact to just how much I had put into his story that I knew, or suspected, no one would ever see or even attempt to delve into. Even today, a few short years later, I can't properly put my finger on what I really got out of the character or what I'd hoped to get out of him. I can just say that I put a lot into him and that in the end, I did feel satisfied with him. Even if I wouldn't play him again, because overall I think his character was complete, despite his never really having a proper ending.
face, even once she fully accepted the supernatural as a thing. But she was that person who would have your back, no matter what. And my shit dice meant it would generally be pretty hilariously ridiculous through the course of it. She was fun to play and the people I was playing with in Law at the time (Brodie, Tucker, Mike, Dash, Kate...) made it awesome, too.
