Etrennes, where life is cheap and the locals breed like rabbits! Etrennes, where the rabble pay in ever-devalued coinage to watch young men with no other prospects fight in the public arenas, hoping for the glory and notoreity of winning fifty battles and earning a portait in the "hall of fame"! Etrennes, where slavery is legal and the government is overthrown in coups so often nobody knows who is actually running the country! Etrennes, where everyone with ambition plans to travel north to Stadthagen, where they will be paid more to dig ditches and construct houses than they would be paid in Etrennes being an artisan or a teacher! Etrennes, beautiful Etrennes!
Given this wealth of material to work with and some pictures that I liked, Rafe Martel's personality came together so quickly it wasn't funny. After Mark and Kirsten, he was very easy to play: fun-loving, extroverted, over the top in many ways. His character design (adapted for 3rd edition D&D) was also very straightforward when compared to my previous Icon characters: he hit things, either with his sword or his good looks (I'd write charm, but I don't think it was his personality that attracted most of his partners). Like Kirsten, he wasn't tied in to the campaign storyline (leaving that up to the three other players still in the game) and he provided opportunities for culture shock. However, the sorts of culture shock you get in Etrennes were very different to those in Stadthagen.
Favourite memories include: reducing one player to helpless tears of mirth as she watched Rafe fend off an unhappy father by insisting that "I couldn't have gotten your daughter pregnant - we did it standing up!"; rendering another player speechless when he realised that Rafe hadn't bought the handsome young slave-boy from his unkind masters to set him free; infuriating the first player, during an in-character argument in which she insisted that God isn't a bearded man in the sky, with the argument that "God must have ears because how else could He hear people when they pray?" Fun, lightweight stuff - though I know some of the other players found him overbearing and too "in-your-face", particularly his habit of flirting constantly with anything that moved on two legs, including them.