Nope, there were a ton of insectoid monstrous races in 2nd Edition, this guy was something different than a thri-kreen. He looked more like a beetle than a mantis and he had some other significant differences- immunities, equipment restrictions, ect.
Chitine, maybe?
Anyway, my favorite character is one I actually just wrapped up in a game of pbp Vampire: Dark Ages.
Andrei of Clan Assamite
By birth, Andrei was nothing more than a peasant born in a humble village nestled in the Romanian Carpathians. But Andrei was notable for three things. First, he was incredibly clever and thoughtful, and if given half a chance he could (and did) outwit vampires hundreds of years older than he was. Second, he used his intelligence and cunning to become one of the finest hunters in the world even before he was turned into a vampire. And the third thing: Andrei was born a deaf/mute, which meant that in the medieval world he was usually taken for an imbecile.
The result of this confluence of extreme talent and persistent discrimination was a character who was almost torn in two between his desire to do the right thing and help other people, and his desire to have someone, anyone recognize his talents and show him the basic level of affection and respect. This manifested in an extremely brittle and sharp-edged form of compassion. On the surface, he was humane and gentle, but if he even suspected that his honor had been pricked, he turned icy and aloof, a trait only enhanced by the fact that, since he was deaf, he sometimes missed other people trying to be friendly and approach him. Underneath, he basically had a split personality, with the other personality constantly whispering in his ear that he had earned the right to rage against the world for all the misfortunes that had been done to him. But he was also honorable, compassionate, and utterly unyielding in the face of hardship. And this was before he was turned into a vampire. It was also what got him killed.
He was selected less as a prospect for conversion into a vampire than as a meal. He went to a castle expecting that he'd receive a commission to take a lord hunting, and that he could leverage that into genuine recognition for his talents, maybe even a wife. What happened instead was that he stumbled onto a cabal of vampires who had brought a number of exceptional "vintages" of blood for a feast. Andrei died bloodied and bruised after being overwhelmed by the guards, trussed up and hung on a wall with a tap driven into his neck, but not before doing his level best to stake the vampire in charge with an arrow (V:TM fans will know the vampire as
the Claudius Giovanni). If you imagine a Red Wedding where the Freys eat the Starks, you wouldn't be far off the mark. And when the party was interrupted by another cabal of elders attacking the castle, Andrei was reborn as vampiric cannon fodder.
Andrei, however, persevered. Vampires when they come awake in the World of Darkness are usually driven mad by hunger, killing until they're filled with blood. Andrei? He retained control, caught up a young serving girl and hid in the corner while his fellow guests massacred the human servants. And when he got loose, began a hunt for the cabal of vampires that had damned his soul. When he'd succeeded in his hunt, he disappeared into the wilderness for the next two hundred years.
Of particular stories of his cleverness and derring-do, I can remember three. The first was how he impressed his future sire at the party before he was summarily eaten. His sire proposed a game of hunt-the-person: he would wander about the hall for ten minutes, in which time Andrei had to find a way to get into killing position or . . . well, things would go badly for him, because the person he mistakenly thought was just a Muslim observing a strange custom was actually a 400-year old vampiric assassin. But the thing is, Andrei knew one thing better than anything else, and that was how to hunt. And the trick to hunting? Always give your prey exactly what they expect to see right up until the moment you kill them. What kind of prey it is doesn't really matter.
So he flagged over a servant and asked if she could read (he had been taught to spell for the purpose of confession, a rare trait for a peasant); the DM humored me and said she could. So I wrote that I would give her all the silver I had, and protection besides, if she did three things. One, pretend that I had propositioned her rudely and refuse. Two, take the letter I wrote threatening to brutally retaliate to the steward of the castle who, wouldn't you know, was talking to my sire, and mention that I'd planned to attack from a certain direction. Three, when the sire looked that way, take the dagger I left on the table and tap his neck. It worked like a charm, and I never even had to get close, even though I did approach from a different direction with an arrow nocked. The DM even gave me extra xp for creativity, and when I gave the serving girl one of my prize possessions (a bear-claw necklace from a bear I'd slain to save my brother), I basically got a best friend and eventual wife for the rest of the game.
Story two, I had managed to infiltrate the cabal I was hunting, on the pretext that I was trying to survive and they were the closest thing I had to friends. But along the way, the cabal's Brujah (for those not familiar with White Wolf, the Brujah are vampires famous for being strong, fast and very hot-tempered) had tried to bully one of my friends, and took offense when I had tried to stake him with an arrow in the chest. Funny that. So needless to say, he took my serving girl friend and held her hostage against my fighting a duel to the death.
So I met him. On my terms. He was a brilliant melee combatant who could hack me in half with one swipe of his axe. I was a great huntsman who could vanish at will. So I shot him with an arrow, ran into the woods, and vanished. While he was fumbling about for me, I doubled back, killed the guy the Brujah had guarding my serving girl (the only human I ever killed in the story), and freed her to run off. The DM found this enraged the Brujah so much that, rather than using the axe, he tried to kill Andrei with his bare hands. Well, for those of you not familiar with Andrei, there was one quirk of his that I haven't mentioned: rather than investing heavily in the standard abilities of an Assamite, which are geared around silent and super-fast killing, I had invested in the non-standard ability to shapeshift. One of the talents associated with the shapeshifting Discipline of Protean is the ability to grow claws that do severe damage and is very hard for a vampire to heal. And I had never shown any indication to this point, to anyone, that I could do it. So this Brujah jumped on top of me and started punching me in the face . . . only to be very surprised when I sprouted claws and gouged his eyeballs out. And when he tried to run, he found that even with super-speed, he couldn't outrun the arrow I put in his back. I lost a point of humanity for the eye-gouge (I did it specifically to hurt the guy, and I was a very, very moral vampire), but I was a 2-day old vampire that dropped a 300-year old Brujah built for hand-to-hand.
The third story was what eventually happened to my sire in the climax and epilogue. In the climactic fight, the remainder of the cabal that had made us went up against our group and the vampire cabal that had broken up the party (long story short, we bought our survival by agreeing to take down our sires, which wasn't exactly something we were loathe to do). My sire attacked me by projectile-vomiting blood that had been turned into an extremely corrosive acid. He fumbled the damage roll. I attacked him with my claws. I didn't. So he basically ended up on the ground with his legs hanging by threads, and I had initiative. I pinned him to the floor with a stake, paralyzing him. And in the epilogue, I silently held up a parchment I had carefully made for the occasion, promising that I would survive to learn how to master the Assamite control of vampiric blood, with a special twist. Most Assamites are bloodthirsty cannibals, because in the World of Darkness, one can gain power by draining a vampire of a lower generation (the more vampires spawned between you and the mythical First Vampire, the lower your character's abilities can max out at). The effect is a bit like splicing the drained vampire's soul into yours, allowing you higher maximums in addition to some of their knowledge and power. It's also something Assamites are infamous for, and one that my sire had done multiple times and considered a religious imperative.
Andrei, however, was going to master the Assamite's abilities specifically to reverse the process: if he fed from a vampire, he would be able to un-splice the consumed elements from the original vampire and release both to what lay beyond Death. Because Andrei also had a religion, namely the Christian religion. And in that religion, only One had the right to judge and condemn souls, and that was God. And Andrei promised to give his sire the gift of God's mercy, once he could un-splice all the other vampires his sire had consumed over his hundreds of years, taking away everything his sire had fought for and valued most. And then he buried his sire alive, still paralyzed by the stake, and rode off into the sunset with his still-mortal, and truly loving, wife.
Never got a chance to reach the next chapter where he would have had ultimately to face his demons and change to become more genuinely caring and let go of the hate and rage that was simmering beneath the surface, but while it lasted? Andrei was a very, very fun character to play.
