What is Jenx?
Jenx is a name
Specifically, the name of a character that I have played for years in various free-form RP games, as well as forum based offshoots of those games, in browser-based MMOs and in other disconnected freeform RPs, and now (finally) in an actual D&D game!
I have spent so many years being referred to as Jenx online that I ended up just adopting the name as my default online handle. I will be using this post to also post art, mostly old, of the character.
Jenx is a character
Jenx began as a drawing, more than anything else. The basic concept is dead simple, bordering on non-existent. A fire-based blaster mage with a cranky attitude. Very original. However, if playing OSR spaces should teach you something (besides endlessly arguing about taxonomy) it should be that you don't need more than that to get going, and that character comes from play.
I would often depict Jenx in a very anime-inspired way, being a hardcore weeb at the time. This was the broader typical design he had for years:
I created him in order to play in an ongoing very loose and casual freeform roleplay that some people I had become friends with were already doing. That general crew mostly went by InsaneSoft and all of them were artists, writers or generally people focused on creativity and expression. The roleplay was loose, mostly consisting of in-character quips at each other, with people portraying NPCs only when a NPC was necessary. People had multiple characters each, as well as specific NPCs they would portray regularly when we would interact with them.
I have a lot of fond memories of that time in my life. These people were close friends of mine, despite only interacting with them online (save for some rare occasions of meeting them in person once when American members of the group had come to visit Bulgaria).
As I grew up and my own artistic tastes changed and evolved, Jenx changed with them. While he was always at least partially a self-insert (as all good OC-do-not-steals are!) he started to kind of take a life of his own. As time went on, Jenx became sort of divorced from my own personality, becoming a truly self-formed character. Not a particularly deep or complex one, because I never had any need for him to be that, but a separate identity than my own regardless.
Eventually that freeform RP moved onto a dedicated forum, rather than the instant messaging apps we had used, and the rest of the crew became referees mostly running their characters as NPCs and opened up the game to wider group of players. We had at one point or another i think well over 20 people participating in the game, with various events and set pieces going on including a proper war story arc and everything.
During that time I chose to remain as a player rather than a GM. Jenx was just another character in the game, though with a few house rules to account for his long history at that point.
Jenx is the product of setting
Let's step away from Jenx specifically for a second, and talk about his environment. As creative types exercising their imagination, the RP was not your typical early-to-mid-2000s teenager shlock of random anime characters mashed together. It had its own setting, lore and internal logic. There were multiple games made on RPG Maker set in there, over the years my friend Denny had written a novel in it along with several webcomics.
FanFyria, as the setting was called, is a fairly typical Second World - A place that exists connected to our own world, but separate from it. FanFyria's metaphysical laws were governed by the elemental Muse forces. The Muse of Air, the Muse of Fire, the Muse of Water and the Muse of Earth (who was the very world itself).
The setting was populated primarily by two types of beings. Fyrians, who are effectively just regular ass people, and Muses. Muses are semi-ethereal beings formed by a direct link to a creative human on earth. Muses wield fairly strong magical powers in Fyria and those with very strong connections to their humans are even able to transport them from Earth into the world of FanFyria. People transported that way often are able to travel back and forth as needed, as well as bring various items from our world into the second world. They also often, but no always, were able to also wield magical powers while in Fyria, as magic and artistic expression were effectively the same thing.
While this might sound like fairly trite isekai story now, this was decades before that genre of japanimation curdled into the awful slop that it is today. And as my friend WeirdWriter has often pointed out, Second World or Portal Fantasy has been the predominant genre of fantasy fiction for quite a few decades.
So, that is the setting in which Jenx was created. While I had no real idea of what his deal was initially ,beyond being a fire mage, over the years it became settled that Jenx was not a human from Earth, but a native Fyrian. While native Fyrians can also use magic, it is not as prominent as with humans visiting the world, but not super rare either. As such Jenx also did not (initially!) have a muse, as I personally did not really have a strong connection to a singular source or theme for my creativity.
Jenx is the history of play
Through years of playing Jenx he eventually did things and in doing things - became a character. He gained a Muse, for one thing. Dorienne, which manifested as a young girl that he had a paternal relationship to, was the muse of dying artist from Earth, who the crew managed to keep alive and Jenx became caretaker of. By that point he had very much settled into his "grumpy old man" shtick, again a reflection of my own sensibilities and personality, and so having a young kid to look after fit that character type quite well.
He went on many adventures, fighting pirates, ghosts, ghost pirates, thieves, zombies and who knows what else. He traveled to the beginning of reality itself and witnessed the first primeval creatures fight and eventually die in their struggle, their war birthing the elemental muses which then shaped and stabilized the his own world.
Once the game moved onto that forum, Jenx participated in various adventures, fought in a war (an easy prospect for someone who is just a walking artillery piece) and eventually started to grow rather bored of his life. As a wizard, I had always envisioned Jenx as never looking his own age. In my mind, wizards should look either way younger than they are, or way older than they are, but never his real age.
At this point, years of playing as this character, I had decided that despite his look of a slightly haggard and thin 20-30year old, Jenx was approaching his late 90s, and was starting to grow weary of adventuring. My own interests had shifted an I did not want to stick around with the game as much. But I also did not want to simply leave the character be, it was a thing I had spent so many years of my life thinking about, drawing and portraying.
So as a final act, Jenx communed with Fira, the Muse of Fire and the force was most closely linked to, and asked her to take him with her. She granted his wish, with Jenx transcending his mortal body and becoming effectively a fire spirit.
This was not the end of the character, though. At this point I had spent years using the name as an online handle and in any video game I played. He was a recurring character of mine in RaganarokOnline as i played that game, and also prominently in a small browser-based MMO called Nexus War. That one mattered, because its very premise was of a multi-dimensional war to end the universe and create the new one. It fit where Jenx had been in his other setting, a being transcending beyond mortality and into other fields.
The image above is Jenx as a Nexus Champion, a fighter-mage class in the game. No matter what, Jenx always was ultimately a magician of some kind.
A few years ago, reminiscing about all of this with my partners, we started a discord play by post freeform RP of our own, similar to the one I used to play with the InsaneSoft crew a decade+ ago. The tone was different, as it would be, as I was no longer a teenager or a 20 something, and neither were the people I was playing with. Jenx had again grown bored, this time of his ethereal existence, and so reincarnated once again as a mortal. But this time in a new world, with new friends, new adventures and new connections to make. I have a piece of writing on my blog that you can read here, which came from that roleplay and was a nice bit of setting building.
As that game itself also broke down and ended for various reasons, Jenx was again left in limbo, as he often is. But with Nathan starting up his new arcade-style campaign, I am now determined to play a Wizard because effectively all the characters I had in Devil's World Heroes were fighters (with Meatface simply becoming one over time). And while I love playing fighters, I have had the itch for something else.
And if I am going to play a wizard, there is only one wizard that this can be. So Jenx is back, once again reborn into a mortal body, a lot of his power stripped away to make things more interesting. And if he dies, which he likely will? Eh, he'll have another go. He's had eternity to grow bored, and it's time go make new friends, meet new people and set them on fire.
Jenx is art exercise
As I attended Animation classes in university I was doing more drawing than ever, and I never stopped drawing Jenx. I had not played the character in a while at that point, at least not the original version of him, but he still exited. When I needed something or someone to try out a style, I simply reached for Jenx. He was a subject I was so familiar with I could draw him on auto pilot.
When I was getting into Planescape as a setting, I would draw him as a Planescape character
When I needed him to be stylized and cartoony, he was. when I needed him to be realistic, he was. My understanding of his visual language evolved and changed with time.
As I was working on filling out and finishing my latest sketchbook (a thing which I finally achieved a few days ago, much to my delight), whenever I had a day where I didn't have an idea on what to draw...I decided to just go back to drawing Jenx.
My partner noted that Jenx looks a lot more haggard and tired and even older now, and that is true. Some of it is the way I draw him now, some of it is simply the fact that I myself am older and tired. And because Jenx never stopped being part of me, that is ultimately going to reflect in his depiction as well. Curiously, as I have grown more dumpy with age, my artistic sensibilities have pushed Jenx into ever more extreme stylization. While he started as a fairly typical bland anime character, over the years he became taller, leaner and bonier, with his face growing longer, his nose and eyebrows bigger and just becoming more and more of a lamp post basically.
As I promised Nathan, I will take the random joke in his house rules about writing 5 pages of backstory seriously, and this post is the result of that. IF you read this far, thank you. This was deeply self-indulgent, and mostly unnecessary. But it is good to indulge in nostalgia once in a while.