Mark was the first of my three characters in the second and longest Icon campaign. Icon was the name of the GM's self-designed game system, used most frequently for fantasy roleplaying campaigns but also for some short-length modern scenarios. The "grand campaign" lasted for over three years (making it the third-longest game I've been involved in), during which time the game system evolved and changed, the storyline become increasingly complex and the "core" characters more closely tied together.
The original concept for Mark was based on someone with the power to use words and song to control magic. Unfortunately, the original concept for magic in the "grand campaign" was that it was caused by controlling the Trace, the magical force that permeates the world, and the only way to control the Trace was to draw patterns using silver and mercury (both metals were attuned to the Trace). These patterns (called Tracery) would circumvent the normal rules of the physical world if you got them right: you could become invisible, heal rapidly, control fire, and so on. Because I wanted to play a character who could use magic, I adapted my original concept and became someone with expertise in drawing Tracery spells and who had artistic talent as a singer, musician, poet, and sculptor. He was also the first character whose appearance I modelled on a real person, Daniel Day-Lewis, starting what is now a tradition of using pictures of real people for my characters.
Icon was the first game I played in that emphasised character interaction so much that the actual campaign storyline was often submerged below the soap opera of the characters' lives. Mark didn't contribute very much to the direction of the campaign, because I played him as a passive, peaceful man with inoffensive liberal beliefs who didn't have much initiative. That, combined with the equally inconvenient interests and traits of the other players, left one player carrying the responsibility of advancing the principal storyline, which contributed to existing tensions between members of the playing group. The number of players gradually shrank from an almost unmanagable ten down to the six who would advance into the second act, half (including myself) with a different character, Kirsten Eissfeldt.
However, that wasn't the end for Mark. I returned to playing Mark for the then-final act of the "grand campaign", thanks to the suitably genre coincidence of meeting the principal villain in a public library and the two of them falling in love at first sight. It made the morning after a little awkward at first ... the GM and I arranged this so that I would have a character present in the final few sessions of the campaign, because Rafe Martel didn't have a connection to the campaign storyline strong enough to take him away from his family and his contractual obligations as a gladiator. This was the first (and so far only) time I returned to take up a character again after a long break, and I found Mark frustrating because he was too passive. What had been interesting to try once was not much fun to repeat, but it was only for a brief few weeks.
About half a year after the "grand campaign" ended, the GM decided to go on with a "five years later" sequel. I planned initially to play a new character, Charity, because one of the two"core" characters (the villain's son-in-law, as opposed to his son) who would be providing the reason for the group to get together and go and do things was not especially good at fighting and needed a bodyguard. However, the GM asked me if I would play Mark instead, because he would be a third "core" character (the son-in-law, the son, the lover) and free up the bodyguard slot for a new player's character. I agreed, but we worked together to make significant changes to Mark's character.
First, I found him a spine. He had become a prominent support of the republican movement, a noted poet and philosopher, who spent time in prison as a political prisoner when the republic had been overthown by the losers of the general election. He still couldn't fight worth a damn, but now he had translated his liberal personal beliefs into a political philosophy he was willing to support even in the face of death. Second, the GM's concept of the Trace had gradually acquired complexity over time, and there were now two ways of manipulating the Trace: the mechanistic Tracery patterns, or direct interaction while in an altered state of consciousness (ASC). Mark would gain the ability to do the latter after drinking a "magic potion" in a tribal ceremony in the jungles of the south: he wouldn't be able to control the ability until after they travelled on and reached a land where the Trace had been exhausted by too much use, allowing him to return to normal and gain control over entering and exiting an ASC.
Unfortunately, the "grand campaign" petered out after Mark's wits had been addled by the "magic potion" and before we reached the "low-magic" kingdoms. Thus, this version of Mark spent most of his time being an impediment and a burden on the other characters, which wasn't much fun for any of us. Looking back on the "grand campaign" as a whole, I'm generally struck by how much fun we managed to have on the whole despite the large number of meta-game problems we encountered along the way (genre assumption clashes, unresponsive characters, characters trying to avoid the campaign storyline, trouble-making players) and didn't know how to resolve. In many ways, the "grand campaign" (which I consider the best of all the Icon campaigns) was the training-ground where I learned many of my roleplaying group management skills and developed the meta-game tools to stop these sorts of things spiralling out of control.
I no longer have early versions of Mark's character design: both he and Icon went through so many revisions together. What I have done is adapted the final version of Mark's design for 3rd edition D&D, because I expect that system will mean more to the great majority of you than the Icon system. Do note, however, that the magic system of the "grand campaign" doesn't match the D&D system at all: Tracery magic was essentially a D&D skill (if you did it right, the effect would occur, and the only limitation on the number of times a day you could draw the pattern was how long it took to get it exactly right), and ASC magic wasn't limited to a certain number of effects a day. Spellcasters in the "grand campaign" were very, very powerful, unbalancingly so without GM-imposed restrictions on what spells they knew and player-imposed restrictions on how effectively they used them.