13 - Jerry Thomas - ChemistTheres A Lot Of Focus In History On The Big Players; Your Generals, Your Presidents,

13 - Jerry Thomas - Chemist There’s a lot of focus in history on the big players; your Generals, your Presidents, your Attillas the Hun. But history is full of people whose accomplishments never really made it out of their own subculture, but that doesn’t make them any less significant. Take Jerry Thomas, for example. A bartender in the mid-19th century, Mr. Thomas wrote a book called The Bar-Tender’s Guide, a work which more or less writes out the basic theory behind creating cocktails. That’s right, this doughy, middle-aged guy with the fancy vest basically invented the mixed drink. His inventions include the Tom Collins, the Martinez (a sort of proto-Martini), and the Blue Blazer, the precursor of all flaming alcoholic drinks. So even though Mr. Thomas never rode into war, never signed a treaty or ruled a nation, his impact on history is still felt today. The Chemist, sometimes known as the Salve-Maker or Alchemist, is one of the more basic classes found in RPGs today. Focused around creating and using items, Chemists tend to be the most basic of healing classes, with abilities that quickly outlive their usefulness. Still, in some games, with the right setups, the Chemist can become quite useful. Sometimes they even get a unique Mix command, which allows them to combine and use items in battle, boosting their healing or offensive abilities to useful levels. Though seldom a high-impact class, the Chemist remains a personal favorite of mine.

I have to say, I'm kind of jealous of all the great monsters that are coming out of the 30 characters challenge this year. I kinda wish I'd picked a theme like that, but oh well. By way of compensation, here's one of my favorite monsters from the Final Fantasy series: the Malboro! So cute. :3

Characters #15-17 are coming along nicely, and should be done tomorrow. It's gonna be awesome. :D

19 - Josephine Baker - Dancer Though best known as a depression-era dancer, Josephine Baker was also a civil rights advocate, member of the French Resistance, and adoptive mother to no less than twelve children. She had one heck of a life; she was born into poverty and ended up on the streets at age 12. At age 15, she joined a vaudeville act in St. Louis before moving to New York and performing in various Broadway revues during the Harlem Renaissance. By the time Ms. Baker was 19, she was the highest-paid chorus girl in vaudeville, and that was far from being the most amazing thing that happened during her life. Ms. Baker moved to France and hung out with Ernest Hemmingway and Pablo Picasso. Ms. Baker owned a cheetah with a diamond collar. Ms. Baker invented the banana dance. Ms. Baker was unaccountably badass. In RPGs, the Dancer is sort of an upside-down and backwards Bard. Where Bards can heal and support, Dancers can damage enemies and reduce their stats, or even cause status effects from a distance. Usually an exclusively female class, Dancers tend to be a little rare, and useful Dancers are even more uncommon, but its always nice to see them as an option just to have something to balance out the Bard. And why did I pick Dancer for Josephine Baker? Well, besides the obvious, her danse banane hit me with some serious debuffs.

More commonly known as the rabble-rousing journalist who whipped the populace into murderous frenzies during the French Revolution, Jean-Paul Marat’s rise to power actually started based on his medical abilities. And indeed, throughout Marat’s life, he constantly believed himself to be working for the betterment of his fellow man, whether they liked it or not. It’s this aspect of Marat’s character that led me to cast him as a White Mage. The White Mage, or Cleric, is generally the go-to magically-based healing class. White Mages seal up wounds and use boosting spells to improve the efficacy of their allies in combat. Jean-Paul Marat was definitely interested in improving the people around him, but his main method was, essentially, to pick a target and point the populace at them. If anything, Marat is a great example of a sickly, manipulative White Mage.

07 and 08 - Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh There are some historical figures that only work when paired with one another. Just like Butch makes no sense without the Sundance Kid, as Marie Curie needed Pierre, Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh would have been nonsensical without each other. Of course, unlike Butch or Madame Curie, Cope and Marsh hated each other. Hated hated hated each other. Like tiny little mustachio’d Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots. Cope and Marsh were both prominent archaeologists back in the mid-19th century, when the railroads were just beginning to truly open up the American west. Edward Drinker Cope was an archaeologist of the old school; a gentleman, in fact. He operated on the principles of polite society, and expected others to do the same. Conversely, Othniel Charles Marsh was closer to a businessman of the era. Marsh saw paleontology as a business to be exploited, and they way you did that in the 1800s was by setting up a trust -- what we’d call a monopoly today. You got control of a resource and you wrung it until all the money came out. As strange as it might seem, the two got along at first. They were both learned men of science, and although they came from different backgrounds, their interests were largely the same. Cope had found an excellent source of fossils in New Jersey, and when Marsh asked to see it, well, Cope the gentleman could hardly refuse. Unfortunately, Marsh was so taken by the fossils that he went around Cope’s back and paid the man who shipped the fossils to send them to Marsh’s office instead. Bitter words were exchanged, and the two began a rivalry that would last their entire lives. This period of archaeology is generally known as the Bone Wars, or the Great Dinosaur Rush. Despite the rather unpleasant personalities involved, it marks one of the greatest eras of prehistoric discovery, with the efforts of Cope and Marsh alone introducing almost 150 new species of ancient animals and providing spectacular evidence for the brand new theory of evolution. Although Cope and Marsh spent their declining years largely sniping at each others bank accounts and fossil collections, the end result of their intense hatred for each other was, strangely enough, positive. Since Cope and Marsh basically approached the same subject from radically different angles, it made sense to give them classes that did the same. Cope’s class is the Monster Hunter, also known as the Monster Tamer or Trainer, a job that specializes in trapping enemies. The use of this varies by game, but the most common one has the Hunter either training the monster for use in combat on the player’s side, or harvesting them for items. Conversely, Marsh’s class is the Blue Mage. Blue Mages are fairly straightforward magic-casting classes except for one major detail: all of their abilities have to be harvested from monsters in some way. In some games, this is done by collecting certain items, while other games require you to actually be damaged by specific skills in order to learn them. Either way, both classes rely almost entirely on monsters in some way for their effectiveness in combat, and although their methods vary, both can be exceptionally powerful with a large enough collection.

Quite likely the first computer programmer as well as an icon of ladies in science, Ada Lovelace was one of the few people who thought early computers could be more than just counting engines. She was stylish, smart, and had family trouble out the wazoo, so her story has something for everybody. She also died very, very young — only 36 — which is just freaking criminal. In RPGs, Calculators are characters that use — shock shock — math in some way when they attack. This class is most popular in the Final Fantasy series, where they use magic attacks that hit enemies whose level or position are multiples of specific numbers. At first glance the decision to make Ada a Calculator might seem a bit obvious, but it really made sense to me that Ada would look at magic as just another problem that math could solve. Especially when you consider that her biggest insight was seeing how a mathematical engine could be used to solve non-mathematical problems.