CoX — Raptorex

Time to time, I write up an explication of characters I’ve played in RPGs or made for my own purpose.  This is an exercise in character building and creative writing.


Not many people go out near the edges of Crey’s Folly, no more. They know it’s a dangerous place, with the Crey staff trying to recover lost research, the Nemesis forces trying to establish a bunkhead, Devouring Earth and Rikti and worse!

And there, lurking, is the dinosaur king, the beast woman of mysterious origin known as RAPTOREX!

You know, the science cryptid is an underserved part of the superhero genre. We have them, sure, we have things like Swamp Thing and you can make a case that The Hulk in some incarnation hits it, but we don’t have a lot of women who live out in the woods or ruins and scare the shit out of people who come near them for fear of being eaten. Raptorex, whose origin is a mystery, is that kind of thing for the turf known as Crey’s Folly.

The area is a teeming, wet ruined industrial park. There are corporate raiders and security forces patrolling, gangs making their own little shanty towns, and alien invaders that try to steal people to turn them into more aliens.

There isn’t really a like, narrative hook for how Raptorex behaves in groups or in combat? I know she’s a dinosaur, I know she fights with her claws and spines? But I don’t know more than that. But it’s okay to sometimes have a character who’s just a violent cyptid.

Mechanics

Raptorex is a Spines/Willpower scrapper. I have been, in the past, pretty dismissive of the extremely easy and boring Willpower set, and it can handle me making fun of it because it’s one of the most popular armour sets in the game. Unlike a lot of other sets that decide to be good at one thing and have holes, Willpower is instead good at everything and has no holes. Well, it doesn’t have a ton of -regeneration resistance, but hey, when’s that going to come up?

(Death mages. Thorns death mages. They’re what makes willpower tanks faceplant the first time.)

When I thought about Raptorex’s build, I mentally described it as ‘pretty cheap, right?’ because I didn’t remember putting any really big ticket items in her build. Stuff like the powerful Winter IO sets or a full set of both ATOs. Then I pulled open her build and looked at it and realised it isn’t that her build is cheap, it’s that I’ve completely forgotten what ‘cheap’ is.

The build does hit these targets:

  • 45% defense in smashing, lethal, and melee
  • Dummy Thicc regen
  • 4.66 endurance recovery, meaning she can run All The Toggles
  • 5 seconds downtime on Hasten for a typical 140% global recharge
  • 22% global damage

The build is here, with its Scrapper ATOs, its PVP heal set, its purple set in Throw Spines.

History

The term raptorex is from a type of dinosaur we call a dubious clade. The technical term is nomen dubium, or ‘doubtful name’ which means basically ‘we’re not sure this name is usefully describing something unique.’ The term means literally king of thieves, and was used to describe a tyrannosaurid dinosaur from Mongolia of which we have found… one… fossil. Basically the fossil was found in a way that implied it was a very old, small pre-T-rex style dinosaur, then followup research found it was actually more likely much younger, and maybe even a juvenile form of the dinosaur type we call Tarbosaurus, which is kind of like a second cousin to Tyrannosaurus Rex. The name is nonetheless, extremely cool, and I really liked it.

When I made my farmer account on Homecoming, the first character I made was a speed farmer called Raptorex, just because it was a cool name and nobody would immediately attach it to me. I didn’t want to start on Homecoming, get noticed and when I got bored/fell away from it, leave people feeling abandoned.

I also, it turns out, made Raptorex on the wrong server to what I wanted to, so she got deleted real quick, but now the account’s global identity was set to Raptorex.

Fast forward to newer days and playing around with costumes. I figured I wanted to see how stocky women with shorter legs and higher physical stats looked, when made very tall. The result was the dinosaur look of Raptorex – and well, I wasn’t doing anything that weekend, and it wasn’t hard to build her and play her up to fifty, and so… bam. Dinosaur lady.

That’s it. I don’t think anyone’s ever met her.