Okay tg, I've read your write-up and you're on the right track but I'll toss in some things I remember and you can include them or not.
tec-goblin wrote:History
Jokey’s past seems a straight line of adventures, jokes and prank-made mayhem. There are secrets, though, no Smurf would expect: secrets regarding the events around his first creation of his signature bombs…
Jokey, as a smurfling smurfed, around with the other smurflings, making fun of Papa Smurf – Jokey was the only stain in Papa’s image of seriousness and knowledge. This went one step too far, when Jokey put a small bug in Papa’s pants, making him jumping around and screaming in a smurfishly funny way.
This was Jokey’s biggest exploit and he was thrilled by the experience. He wanted to test his limits. Then, all of a sudden, he fell on one of Papa’s books, full of receipts for dangerous explosive solutions – wow, that would make a great show!.
You're close here, but the book in question was , in fact, a completely foreign book called simply 'The Big Book of Laughs', which was a lexicon of mean but harmless pranks. Jokey hid it away when Papa threatened to take it from him. Whenever Jokey or the other smurfs get bored with his joke boxes, he need only open the Big Book of Laughs for something new and entirely different. Sadly whenever he does this, circumstances conspire to make these pranks far more disruptive to everything than would be expected by so simple a prank. So Jokey dips into this tome very rarely either out of deference to his fellow smurfs or to use fresh material sparingly.
tec-goblin wrote:
Jokey never stopped to think of the reason he found that book so easily – maybe our canny reader will be thinking of complicated plots and paranoid scenarios. The result was him smurfing his first bomb – a bomb he was too eager to test, despite the dangers involved.
And so he did – in one of his lone expeditions to the forest (he was old enough to get away with some sneaking outside of the village), he found a passing knight and gave him the first of the yellow boxes ever created by his hands. The knight thought it was some kind of magical fey gift and opened it…
Oh! That was a surprisingly huge explosion by Smurfish standards. Even a human knight couldn’t stand it without harm. That’s what Jokey thought – and, still blinded and deafened by the burst, he ran off to the village, leaving the injured knight alone in the forest – only the Mists know what happened to the Knight – because the Mists saw everything. And they were intrigued…
Jokey found himself being able to create bombs that could almost convince someone to open them. That was a frightening gift, he thought… He could injure more people with this – and he didn’t want such a thing. That’s why he smurfed on researching harmless bombs – Jokey’s Hillarious Bombs.
Current Sketch
The past is very far away… Jokey has been more careful since. The only thing that reminds him his past error is a nasty little habit he has – when alone, he has to eat one red ribbon each day or suffer from nausea for the rest of the day. No other Smurf has shown any sign of knowing his little secret.
And life goes on – Jokey is still messing around with other Smurfs – one of the best moments of his career was the resistance against the short period of Brainy’s dictatorship (it happened when Papa was away – smurf the relevant episode), when Brainy called him “anarchic” and ordered the rest of the Smurfs to hunt him. Sometimes he feels alone, though. Is he the only Smurf bored under Papa’s rule?
Combat
Jokey is not a combatant, but he can be very dangerous in the rare case he gets really annoyed with someone. A Smurf that can smurf into your home, deceive you and plant explosives that can stun you or even damage you (that’s very rare practice for Jokey) is a formidable foe indeed.
In straight combat, Jokey usually distracts the enemy to gain time for other Smurfs and then tries to hide.
Lair
Jokey’s home is full of ribbons, yellow cardboxes and all the materials needed for his bombs. He usually keeps one of his signature bombs around and can also create simple normal explosives (due to the limited PL of the smurf village, halve the damage of all explosives created by Jokey). Jokey usually traps the windows and the door in various harmless but smurfishly inconvenient and humiliating ways.
Gargamel & Azrael
History
Gargamel’s past is unknown to all but a few secretive scholars. Had S visited the Smurf village, she would have probably been able to probe his mind for details, but her Master never had Smurfs high in his list of priorities.
The truth is that Gargamel was an alchemist. A very dedicated one indeed – his goal was the pinnacle of an alchemist’s dreams: metastoiheiwsis – turning some material to something other. Actually, it was more blunt than this. Gargamel wanted to create gold. Much gold. He want to get rich and he wanted it now, but he was too much of a coward to do it in a more straightforward way (stealing for example – it wasn’t that his morals were above this – he was just a coward).
Gargamel tried various materials: lead, iron, wood. All this was for nothing. Until he heard some young physicist in his home town telling him one thing: “You cannot create value from nothing, mon ami. That’s why you’ll never succeed. You cannot change things as simple as lead to the most-perfect-of-metals, gold. The only thing that’s more valuable than gold is life. So stop this nonsense”.
Of course Gargamel did not. He had just found his answer! Life! He would turn living things to gold! He started with small lizards, then birds, then cats… all for naught. This wasn’t enough he though. Who sells a lizard for gold? Only human people are sold for gold… Here Gargamel starting hesitating. But no, it was a noble purpose after all! He would find a sick person who was ready to die. Yeah, he would cover him with blue ink to make his condition seem even more severe and convince his family that he should take him to his home to try to save him. That was the best plan he’d ever thought.
And so he did. He found the sick man. He bluffed him out of his home. And then, as he was ready to begin his experiments, mists settled into his home. He found himself into a tower away from all civilization. Only his lab and his miserable cat were with him. The worst part: the only thing that was really complicatedly alive there were some… nasty blue funny things, who called themselves Smurfs….
Here's what I remember from the show:
In a certain time-travel episode, it was shown that Gargamel's mother when he was a baby, would commonly tell him that she'd take care of him and that when he grew up, he'd become a rich and powerful wizard who would take as good care of his mother. She never did forgive him for failing wizard school. Gargamel, apparently came from a family of wizards which included two shrewish sisters and a very formidable godfather, Balthazar. He was sent to a very fine wizards school where he became legendary for his poor abilities. In the lab, he was a menace to himself, his classmates, and his professors. Every instructor dreaded him because his presence in their classrooms was not just disruptive, but dangerous. His classmates detested him not just for his incompetance, but for his family background. They resented the fact that his family had handed him a place in the school where most of them had to earn theirs, especially given his inabilities. His only friend was a little kitten named Azrael. The final blow to his academic career was, coincidentally, his first encounter withe the smurfs. In his final year, Gargamel was told that the only chance he had to graduate was to come up with a truly spectacular senior project. Gargamel was wandering around outside the school grounds when he quite literally tripped over a smurf. He managed to catch the smurf with only his hand and then looked at it carefully. He finally recognized it as a smurf, the mythical ingredient to the formula to change lead into gold. (he'd gotten it wrong on a test the year before) Realizing he had the necessary project to save his academic career and place in the family, he immediately raced back toward the school. He didn't get two feet before Papa Smurf, who was nearby, stopped him (I can't remember how) and made him release the smurf. "I'm sorry but I couldn't let you turn my little smurf into gold!" Papa said in his typical way. I can't remeber any of the following conflict except for the ending which had the smurfs running away and Gargamel behind them shaking his fist and cursing them, for the first time of many in his life, for ruining his life. Apparantly, he forgot about the formula until much later and was reminded of it when he went to his Godfather Balthazar for advice on catching smurfs and was reminded of it. Balthazar, who scoffed at smurfs as mythical, let slip that he had a book with a formula to turn lead into gold by boiling six smurfs. Gargamel stole the book and gained with it his continuing ambition to turn smurfs into gold.
tec-goblin wrote:
Current Sketch
Gargamel has turned old trying to catch the Smurfs and turn them to gold. And he feels very very tired. Sometimes he thinks of giving up, stopping this – after all he ends up ridiculed each time. Even his only companion, this strangely intelligent cat-who-just-refuses-to-age gets into his nerves.
But then, he sleeps and the dreams come… Dreams of gold and all the joys gold can buy. And whispers reminding him the words and incantations to turn a smurf to gold…
Combat
Gargamel isn’t particularly courageous, but he will enter combat if hunting this only-good-for-gold-blue-pest. He will use his scrolls and canning plans to gain a strategic advantage and then he will try to grapple Smurfs and put them into his bag to boil them later.
Incompetence against Smurfs (Su): Gargamel suffers -2 penalty in all his rolls against Smurfs. Smufs get a +2 bonus to saves against scrolls, spells and special abilities used by Gargamel. This is a result of his curse as a darklord, so it cannot be negated with an antimagic field or anything similar.
Smurf to gold (Sp): Gargamel can cast the spell Smurf to Gold (see the New Spells section) at will, at a caster level equal to his occultist level. Doing so consumes the normal casting time and spell components as the spell.
You’ll never kill me (Su): Smurfs are too goody-goody to harm Gargamel permanently. Any Smurf performing an action that could directly kill Gargamel (for example any Smurf performing a coup de grace against him) stops in its tracks and doesn’t do it. This is a mind-affecting, compulsion effect.
Lair
We’ve all seen this dilapidated tower at least once in their lives. If you are Smurf chances is that you’d be captured at least once in your life in Gargamel’s lab (or is it a kitchen?). You’ll recognize the orthogonal single-floor building with a narrow good-for-nothing tower, the big (big enough to accommodate for all 101+ smurfs) dirty cauldron and the fact that it’s full of cat hair.
Closing the Borders
Gargamel isn’t interested in keeping anyone near him – he is not a very social person. Of course, he doesn’t want Smurfs to escape his clutch either. That’s why he keeps his borders usually closed, but only regarding to Smurfs. Any Smurf trying to escape the domain finds itself overcome by an irresistible nostalgia for its village and turns back trying to return to the Smurf Village for 1 full hour. This is a mind-affecting, compulsion effect.
If anyone's interested in the .doc, please tell me.
Well, That's all I can add.
- I'll try to merge these two stories. "The Big Book of Laughs" is a very very funny title!
