Here is an introduction to some of the characters that populate Empyrea and its environs.
Skylark has wired reflexes, a smart-gun link, and the ability to see sound. Her appearance has ranged from "traditional, conservative, Empyrean" to "shock the establishment", depending on her mood and the needs of the time. Her goal is to become a god. This idea was born from the union of two discoveries:
Having embarked on this path, Skylark must follow it to the end. Her fear of what happens to her soul if she dies instead is too great to consider any other future.
Skylark's relation to the other party members varies from "those she would sacrifice herself for" to "those that may be usefull in the future". She is closest to Delorian, Hopey (who is a sometimes romantic interest), and Welcome. Skylark is most antagonistic to Mris. Mris is Skylark's conscience. She both resents the intrusion and enjoys the arguments.
If Skylark were Kirk, Delorian would be Spock. She is definitely the brains of the outfit, despite usually being extremely quiet. She keeps trying to teach Skylark the basics of magic, but hasn't done well; when you start out with a pupil like Skylark, there's only so much you can expect. She dresses in Canopean clothes: blue jeans, leather jacket, and a nice blouse. She wears glasses because she thinks they make her look even smarter. She has been "ordained" as a vicar of Old Sangfroid, the god of magic and force.
She has a toucan familiar, named Sam. Oxukrix follows her around, and has received religious training from her. She has had better luck training Oxukrix in the ways of Old Sangfroid than she has had teaching Skylark the ways of magic; Oxukrix is a full-fledged priest of Old Sangfroid.
Delorian is the brains, but Trodor is definitely the muscle. Even quieter than Delorian, Trodor nevertheless is the voice of reason when everyone else, even Delorian, has lost their heads. He is more than capable in battle, in large part due to a magical sword he found early in his adventuring career that lets him get an extra surprise attack on the backswing.
Trodor has a lemur animal friend, and an Equs (a type of free-will-impaired horse on Melior) named Chadich.
Mris is 5'4", 130lbs (medium-stocky build), and has brown eyes and dark brown skin. She had the hair on her head permanently removed in her adulthood ritual, and has tattoos on her hands, arms and scalp. Mris is lucky - she looks good with no hair. She has a brilliant smile (very white teeth), but rarely does so in the presence of non-family. She almost always wears robes of a Halcyon priestess in public, and even her armor and cloak have the Halcyon logo on it.
She's belligerent, confrontational, cold, and skeptical, even to her friends; she's infinitely moreso to people unknown to her and unspeakably unpleasant to foes. The only time she's nice is when bargaining at the markets (bargaining is in her blood), or in private with family or a close friend. When opinions or judgments are involved, most everything she says and does is calculated to either get a rise out of someone or to try to make their blood boil. She's been an ideal follower of Halcyon - never strikes the first blow, but make darn sure she strikes the last blow! She responds badly to threats, but does a an awful lot of threatening herself. Among her family and people she really trusts, she is kind and generous to a fault. It mystifies people how differently she behaves, among those who have seen her in company of family, compared to her "public" behavior. Of the group she travels with, only Jetta is regarded as family. The rest are either neutral, or very bad people, in her considered opinion.
Bailey was found in a stasis capsule in space. He unquestionably was involved in the Invader War, but the stasis messed with his memory, so he didn't remember the level of his involvement. His memory was restored when he found two of his subordinates on Haven, an otherwise-uninhabited sphere ouside the Corag sphere. It turns out that he was actually Admiral Bailiol, a bronze dragon that was one of Ravelin's hand-trained paladins.
He is trying to adjust to his new memories and his dual existence as both a dragon and as a human, since he was stuck in human form for so long.
Jetta was formerly a bank teller, and somehow got conned into joining this group of malcontents.
Khorwynn was a member of the Elven Imperial Fleet when he crash-landed on Haven, five thousand years after Bailey's compatriots did. He became their cook. Now he's traveling with the party under orders from the Imperial Fleet to "keep an eye on them, and keep a journal of their activities".
The party first met Bill back when Bran was undergoing the Test of Fitness to become a paladin of Ravelin. Bill and Ted (okay, I wasn't very good at coming up with names back then) were both candidates to become paladins of Punctilio, so the powers that be decided to make all three of them go on a mutual quest. To make a long story short, after Bill got shoved off a ship because he was being too obnoxious, he and Bran failed the Tests (Ted passed). He has since dedicated his life to thwarting the party's plans, and to best do this, he became an illusionist..
Bill and Iliathor share the title of Main Mortal Antagonist in the campaign. Bill knows about the party's ability to travel through space, and, due to a freak accident with some potions, can telekinese anything away from him. He tried to bribe Iliathor into giving him a spelljamming helm, but in true space-elf form Iliathor turned that bribe into his advantage, and used Bill's telekinesis power into the boost he needed to break Mameluke (the moon) from its orbit.
Recently, Bill angered Mris so much that she wished Bill into a paladin of Punctilio again, hoping that this will make him less of a nuisance. Only time will tell whether this has worked or not; meanwhile, Bill has finagled his way into the party, and now has his own spaceship.
One of the Five from Six, Chaiiron is from Melior, the home of the proto-elves (and the world of Talislanta rules). She is a pale-yellow version of Mris, down to the shaved head. The party used to think that she looked a lot like Mris, but after Mris-Gamma showed up, they just don't seem to look quite as close to each other any more. Chaiiron is a total pacifist; her race was able to withstand generations of slavery by bending with the will of their enslavers instead of breaking. She is profocient in a form of martial arts that uses the attacker's own strength against them.
Another one of the Five from Six, Hopey is a character proudly stolen from the Love and Rockets comic book. She's half-Colombian, punk, tomboyish, and short, with a wicked tongue and talent on a bass guitar to match. Hopey and Skylark have a "more-than-friends" sort of relationship. Here's a tidbit to see if any of my players are reading this that I really haven't expanded on in the game yet: it's quite possible that Hopey and Running Cub also have a "more-than-friends" relationship, perhaps borne from the fact that they're the only ones from Canopus in the party.
Imagine a typical dwarf with elephant skin instead of humanoid skin, and you would have a typical Trochilian. Oxukrix is no exception. Formerly very naive to the ways of the universe, he's hung around the party long enough to catch on to a few things... but not many. Delorian trained him how to be a priest of Old Sangfroid (before he became "brown" Sangfroid the Uncaring), and he's pretty good at it, considering he was trained by a mage in a religion that died more than 5000 years ago. Oh yeah, he's one of the Five from Six too.
Before he died, Running Cub was a shaman of Coyote (from Shadowrun rules) that hung out with the party. Then he died in a fight on Melior. Now, on Canopus, "dead is dead", and the party gave up all hope of getting him back. That was before they crash-landed on Sangfroid. Yes, Sangfroid, the actual god, covered in five thousand year's worth of blackish-brown muck. That's where he exiled himself at the end of the Age of War, and he's spend the last Age and a half floating listlessly around inside the Sphere. Since none of the dead souls could go to their final resting place while the Quarantine was still on, they have been congregating on Sangfroid all this time. When the party all died in the crash, they were instructed to leave by The Door most souls enter by. They ran into Running Cub while on Sangfroid, who had been dead for ten years. He piggy-backed his way back out through The Door, and thus became the first Canopean to ever return from the dead.
Ten years being dead changed Running Cub a lot. He used to be a wide-eyed but cautious little shaman of Coyote, which is one of the aspects Imbroglio uses as hed god of Canopus. But he realized that his whole life and belief system had been a fake, that the only true belief system was the one on Empyrea, and that all the gods have been lying to everyone on the rest of the planets since Day 1. He is now one of the few atheists in the Sphere, acknowleding the existence of the gods but not acknowledging their power. "They're all idiots", he's been heard to say more than once.
After the Haven incident (where Bailey got his memory back and the party picked up Khorwynn), Running Cub decided to stay on Haven with Chaiiron and do some farming in a god-free sphere.
Vontrang has always been a mystery. He arrived on Trochil in a space pod while the party was serving a stint as commanders of the space-elf base there. Golden-skinned, with two tentacles at his mouth instead of the usual four, Vontrang is one of the Emendim, or grateful mind flayers, that acknowledge that they aren't the most supreme form of intelligence in the universe.
He has a great deal of psionic power, but rarely uses it except in the direst of situations.
Skylark was the only witness to Welcome's birth, and wasn't aware of the Draconic code that says that the first word that a dragon hears must be its name. Found in an ice-cold pool of water to keep his egg from hatching, Welcome is a black-scaled silver dragon with glowing white sparks in his eye sockets instead of real eyes. Welcome is now about twenty years old, and acts like a typical twenty-foot-long two-ton eight-year-old would act. Welcome's mother is Altariel.
Altariel is Welcome's mother, and one of the original Paladim trained by Ravelin herself.
Galendol gives a new meaning to the term "eco-terrorist". When Iliathor was clear-cutting the forest he lived in, Galendol sent shock troops of dwarves (who on Empyrea are not nice creatures at all) into nearby towns to kill citizens and leave threatening notes. The party was called in to clear up the situation. They made friends of Galendol, and have given and received favors from him since then.
Iliathor is the head of the space-elves building their new base, claled Lionheart, on Mameluke (the moon). He has used the party several times to run favors for him, and keeps the party just satisfied enough in his payments to not consider killing him and blowing up Lionheart. But not by much.
Even more mysterious than Vontrang, Mover is a spaceship with sentience and a built-in spelljamming helm. He is shaped like an elven man-o-war, but is a blackish-brown color with silver veins running across his wings. It was grown on the elven shipyards on Mameluke, but its root ball was planted firmly in a vein of pure orichalcum. That's what the elves say, anyway. Mameluke (the goddess) has hinted at the possibility that Mover is her and Sangfroid's child.
Mover is the party's current spaceship, but it's not really one of the party, which is why it's in this section and not in the "non-Player Party Member" section above.
If you teleport through the very center of Corag (and thus the very center of the sphere), you end up in a parallel dimension. Skylark did this once, and ended up in the "Beta" universe (for lack of a better name). At the same time, another Skylark ended up in this, the "real", universe - and stayed even though the "real" Skylark made it back here. She has become known as Skylark-Omega.
The Omega universe isn't as nice as this one. Quisling is still in charge, for one, and all the planets are highly technological. Skylark-Omega has far more cyberware than the real Skylark has, and is more evil. She even teamed up with Bill for a while, while he was still an illusionist.
Ted is the good half of Bill and Ted. He died once, but since he's an Empyrean, he could be (and was) brought back to life.
I could write a book about Bran. Let's just say that he was the first paladin of Halcyon, and he died spectacularly (as a meteor that half a continent could see), and that because of these two facts, he became a saint. Never mind that he died when he tried to jump from one spaceship to another. Never mind that he had magic boots on that would have saved his life if he had remembered that he had them on. He's a martyr now, and a saint, and that's all that matters.
Coradin was the son of the Pirate King a long time ago, but he didn't get buried properly, so he became a spirit, an ectoplasmic infusion in the ship he was to be buried at sea on... but NOT A GHOST, dangit! Ghosts are mean and spooky. Coradin was nice and spooky, and could only appear if everyone on the ship he was on believed in him. He could only manifest himself on the ship he was currently infused in, until the party crashed into Sangfroid, where he became revered as the one spirit that was here but didn't come through The Door to be here. He became Caretaker of Sangfroid because of this.
This was a long way to read to find out who the Coradin of Coradin's Elite is, wasn't it?