The characters of Rimworld Tales.
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The Ant Colony
Andrew
One of the main Deuteragonists.
- Flat Character: He's had relatively little focus despite being one of the main driving characters of the primary storyline.
- The Hero: The most unambiguously heroic character with the most narrative focus.
Mike
Andrew's best friend.
- Heroic Sacrifice: He goes out with a bang in the first strip saving Andrew from a pack of scythers.
Stan
The main mechanic of the Ant colony.
- Token Minority: He might not necessarily be token, as the minimalist art style makes it impossible to tell the specific ethnicities of the characters, but he's the only black character so far.
Iris
The leader of the Ant colony.
- Artificial Limbs: Her right arm is mechanical, and of notably lesser quality than those of the Spiders or Moths.
Raiders
Tynan
One of the main Deuteragonists. Not technically a raider, but more than happy to seize leadership of them to serve his goals.
- The Ace: He's by far the best character at combat.
- Androcles' Lion: Averted hard with him as the lion. Tarn saved his life from a wild beast and let him go on his way, but when Tynan witnesses Tarn massacre a colony with artillery, he doesn't hesitate to slaughter the entire group responsible, stab Tarn in the gut, and kidnap his kid.
- Badass Cape: He goes through a few over the course of the story. Chronologically he starts with a fur-trimmed cloak he wore while working with Oliver to hunt down raiders. Later he trades it out for a ragged cape he took as a Tragic Keepsake from the Firefly colony after it was attacked. His current cape is long, flowing cape with a notable pair of clasps he took from a raider leader after killing him.
- Barrier Warrior: He has a shield belt that makes him essentially bulletproof so long as it holds. Enough hits can bring it down, and a single powerful blast can shred through it and kill him anyways, so it's not a perfect defense, but it's one of the best.
- Cain and Abel: With Oliver, with Tynan as the Abel.
- Color-Coded for Your Convenience: A version only the readers can appreciate, his line art shifts between red and black depending on his mindset. When he's just trying to do right by his colony and when he's considering settling down, it's black. When he's in ruthless hunt-my-foes-to-the-ends-of-the-world mode, which is most of the time nowadays, it's red. You can actually see it change between panels in certain strips, and in the middle of a panel on page 62
. - Death Seeker: For a time after his brother's death.
- The Dreaded: To the raiders for his near single-handed massacre of them.
- Even Evil Has Standards: He'll cross a lot of lines in pursuit of whatever his current goal is, but he doesn't like to kill just for the sake of it and he doesn't kill kids.
- Heel–Face Door-Slam: After coming to the Firefly colony and talking with the Huntsman, he was on the verge of settling down with the child and giving up his violent lifestyle. The attack on the colony and kidnapping of the child, as well as the subsequent rejection by the Huntsman, see that chance quickly ruined.
- Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: How he dies at Evan's hands.
- I Take Offense to That Last One: Objects to being called a raider, but cops to being a shithead.
- Off with His Head!: His preferred method of execution, and the origin of his Red Baron title among raiders.
- Red Baron: The Head Collector, though only the raiders use it.
- Religious Bruiser: Tynan is perhaps the strongest fighter in the comic and the only one who's mentioned genuinely believing in gods.
- Rugged Scar: He has a scar over his left eye that he got when Oliver gouged his face during their final fight.
- Tragic Keepsake: A star badge, which his mother gave to him as a child and he gave to his brother Oliver when the latter was bitter over being The Unfavorite. Tynan later takes it off Oliver's corpse after killing him in self-defense.
- You Kill It, You Bought It: How he won control of a raider group and got his current cape.
Tarn
A former crewmember of a spaceship and a current raider chief.
- Died in Your Arms Tonight: Inverted, he dies while cradling his adoptive son.
- Eyepatch of Power: He lost his right eye in his crashlanding on the Rimworld.
- Parental Substitute: He serves as a surrogate father for the nameless child.
- Posthumous Character: Not that it matters much due to the Anachronic Order of the story, but he's dead at the time of the first strip.
- Secretly Dying: Done very subtlely, he's still wearing bandages implying he's fighting infection.
"Noodles"
A nameless child who inadvertently drives most of the conflict as people try and protect him, often from each other.
- A Child Is Innocent: He is adorable and happy despite being surrounded by brutal people. They all try to train him to be hard to help him survive.
- Living Macguffin: Everyone seems to be trying to rescue him from everyone else.
- Tarn is his adoptive father and wants to get him back.
- Tynan took him from Tarn after leaving the latter for dead and has taken it upon himself to see the kid is safe and protected.
- Andrew rescued the kid from a cryopod without knowing his prior history and wants to get him back to his colony.
- Even a Scyther tries to protect him from the Spiders because it reminded it of its peaceful creator's son.
- George, the cannibal victim, fights through all his crippled limbs to release the kid, speeding up the timeline for him to get butchered.
- Morality Pet: To Tarn. To Tynan. To everyone really. In fact, it's deconstructed. Most of the characters want to help the kid, but instead of coming together as a community for all of their children, they are trying to kill each other to "save him".
The Firefly Colony
The Huntsman
An expert sharpshooter, who serves as the Fireflies' protector.
- The Alcoholic: Almost perpetually drunk at the Firefly colony.
- Boom, Headshot!: His preferred method of killing, when he has to kill. Also how he dies at the hands of the Moth troopers.
- Electronic Eyes: His right eye is a prosthetic, which he got unwillingly after a landmine ruined the original.
- Improbable Aiming Skills: The Huntsman misses when he wants to and only when he wants to, and getting a mechanical eye only improved his aim.
- Living Lie Detector: His artificial eye is good enough to make out microexpressions and tell when someone's lying.
- Religion Is Wrong: He's an atheist and clearly thinks of gods in the same category as children's stories. Downplayed though, as he doesn't outright reject Tynan's beliefs so much as he just doesn't share them, as well as the fact that there's no actual established religions, just personal faith.
The Spider Colony
Val
An expert surgeon and the source of his colony's high number of prosthetics.
- Transhuman Treachery: He and his followers replace their limbs with prosthetics and harvest anyone who doesn't want any or who aren't useful enough. He ends up splicing himself with a Syther.
Sophie
Val's daughter and one of the Spiders' best hunters.
The Moth Colony
The Moth Queen
Leader of the Moth colony.
- Always Someone Better: The cybernetics give her an edge, but she utterly thrashes Tynan in a fight.
- Animal Motifs: Moths, as you might expect. Her hair decoration resembles a moth's antennae and her cloak resembles their wings.
- Axe-Crazy: She viciously murders an underling who has the misfortune of being the one to tell her that a colony was destroyed.
- Barrier Warrior: Like Tynan she has a personal forcefield.
- Came Back Wrong: Not her, but she's seen what happened to the Major when he's brought back, and as a result she orders him not to bring her back to life if she dies.
- Character Development: As a child, she didn't like silver. Now it's her greatest obsession, largely due to a particularly traumatic event with a raider when she was young.Raider: [while performing a Neck Lift on Sara] Do you know how much silver I can get for your organs? Listen to me, and listen carefully: the world runs on silver.
- Cyborg: She has four Artificial Limbs, and a procedure she undergoes partway through the comic replaces her torso as well.
- Dual Wielding: She uses two short swords when she needs to get her own hands dirty.
- From Nobody to Nightmare: From a little girl in Tynan's colony to leader of the most powerful colony on the planet.
- Leitmotif: Jigoku Shoujo, as suggested by the author.
- Nigh-Invulnerable: She takes an IED to the face and her mechanical body isn't even scratched. Her face, on the other hand...
- Nightmare Face: When she's pissed, here eyes become elongated gashes with jagged black outlines and her mouth becomes a ragged tear of needle-sharp teeth that takes up half her face.
- Red Eyes, Take Warning: She's notably the only character in the comic to have solid red eyes.
The Major
The Moth's Queen's number two.
- All for Nothing: All his deaths and all his struggles to protect his sister, and she's killed for good when he's not there.
- Big Brother Instinct: He's Sara's brother, though it's not clear which of them is older. What is clear though is that Evan has gone through hell to protect Sara, up to and including dying multiple times for her sake.
- Death Is Cheap: The Moth Queen revives him whenever he dies, and has been doing so ever since they were kids.
- I Shall Taunt You: As a child, he relentlessly mocked the raiders that captured him and Sara so they'd torture him instead of her.
- I Will Only Slow You Down: When he and Sara were kidnapped by raiders as kids, Sara had an opportunity to escape, but refused to take it because a raider threatened to kill Evan if she left. He promptly taunted the raider into killing him, thus removing the raider's leverage and allowing Sara to escape.
- Laser-Guided Amnesia: Thanks to the resurrector mech serum, he loses his memories with every death, and he's died a lot. The Moth Queen's experimented with withholding certain information when he comes back, but his basic behavior has remained largely the same even with mostly absent memories.
- Malevolent Masked Man: He wears a mask over his lower face and is both a ruthless commander of the Moth troops and an expert assassin in his own right.
- Neck Snap: How he dies the first time.
The Defiler
The true ruler of the Moths.
- Bad Boss: Casually kills a subordinate in a gruesome manner, then brings them back to life just to punctuate a statement.
- Cassandra Truth: He saw the Man in Black and tried to tell people about it, only to be laughed at and dismissed.
- Creepy Monotone: Hard to tell due to the medium, but take a look at his dialogue. Not a single exclamation point to be found, and unlike other characters, not a single word is bolded for empahsis.
- Faux Affably Evil: Maintains a mild smile throughout his whole conversation with the Moth Queen, which only makes it more frightening when he casually has her torn to pieces, undoes the damage, and continues the conversation like nothing happened.
- From Nobody to Nightmare: In the present he rules over the Moths, the most powerful colony on the Rimworld, and personally wields power that none of his underlings or enemies can hope to match. But before that he was an ordinary man dismissed as a lunatic with only a dog to comfort him, who nearly tried to blow his own brains out when said dog died and left him alone.
- Glowing Eyes of Doom: Unlike everyone else's solid black dot eyes, his are a glowing white, notably brighter even than
- Leitmotif: Delirum, as suggested by the author.
- Noticing the Fourth Wall: Strongly implied to have seen past the world of Rimworld and seen the player. Nobody but the Pantomath (which is implied to be Randy Random, the personification of the game's random events) and the dog being able to see them, with everybody else dismissing him as a madman, is what led to his current state.
- The Omniscient: His encounter with the Pantomath granted this to him. This is also the source of his ability to basically use console commands.
- Precision F-Strike: He curses once in his first appearance, and with the circumstances, it makes an impression.The Defiler: You don't know shit about control.
- Right-Hand Attack Dog: He has a pack of adorable puppies that seems at odds with his menacing appearance… until he sics them on someone and they tear the unfortunate soul to pieces. He started keeping them because when everyone else dismissed his warnings about the Man in Black, a dog saw the figure and provided reassurance that he wasn't going mad.
Others
Oliver
Tynan's brother.
- Axe-Crazy: He uses the excuse of revenge to sate his bloodlust by slaughtering raiders. When Tynan tries to cut ties because of this, Oliver immediately takes this as a betrayal and tries to kill him too.
- Cain and Abel: With Tynan, with Oliver as the Cain.
- Roaring Rampage of Revenge: After raiders kill their parents, he sets out with Tynan to hunt down as many raiders as they can.
- Would Hurt a Child: He wouldn't shoot a kid... because that would be a waste of bullets. He uses a knife for that.
Skye
A woman Andrew meets while bringing the child back to his colony.
Z
A crewmember of Tarn's ship.
- Heroic Sacrifice: Stays behind on a doomed ship and gives up his chance at medical treatment to give Tarn a better chance of survival.
The Cannibal Family
A father and two sons who live alone in the woods. Those they find often end up on the menu.
- Cannibal Larder: The people they keep chained up outside their house serve as this.
- Can't Kill You, Still Need You: Simply killing the people they capture would leave the meat to go bad. Instead the cannibals simply drive spikes through the joints of their victims legs so they can't get away and leave them tied up until it comes time to butcher their next meal.
- Dissonant Serenity: They treat butchering other people and cooking their flesh like any normal family would a fun familial bonding session.
- Karma Houdini: Their fate is never revealed, thus we are left to assume they are still alive by the comic’s end.
- No Name Given: The older son's name is Jim, but the father and younger child go unnamed.
The Man in Black/The Player(?)
A nigh-mythical figure on the Rimworld, and one who may be connected to the disappearance of various colonies. Heavily implied to be a person playing a session of Rimworld on their computer.
- The Ghost: Has yet to appear in the story in person. By the end of the story, they still didn’t, leaving their true identity a mystery.
- Power Floats: The most enduring description of him is that his feet don't touch the ground. Possibly a reference to the fact that Rimworld has an overhead view of the gameworld.
The Polymath/Randy Random
An immortal, omniscient being.
- Humanoid Abomination: What the hell is it? It looks like a rotting corpse, wields bizarre powers, and very clearly isn't human. Though whether it was human to begin with is another question.
- I See Them, Too: It can see the Man in Black.
- Nightmare Face: Dear God, yes. Slash-like eyes, a fanged mouth that spreads from temple to temple, a patch of dark hair that seems almost out of place with the way it clings to the scalp like weeds on a stone.
- The Omniscient: It knows everything and offers this knowledge to a select other.
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One-Scene Wonder: Shows up for exactly one scene in the comic, but it does a lot with its time. - Time Master: Seems to be this, with how it undoes a major injury to itself and teaches the Defiler the same power. On the other hand, it may be more of a victim of it than a master, with such feats merely being a result of its curse.The Polymath: It loops endlessly once you know.
The Fireflies
A Colony of peaceful rice farmers who welcome all into their town. They drink rice beer and celebrate New Years.
- Fourth-Wall Observer: Peter seems aware that the AI is making their lives hell. He even says that "Randy" took "Noodles" despite it clearly being Tarn.
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Peter just understands what's going on. Peter can see Tynan is a raider just by looking at him (implying that he can see his red outline), seemly rambles about game mechanics while drunk, and calls out Randy by name and talks about how the Glitterworld isn't shiny while dying.
- Nice Guy: They are a Colony of nice guys. It's not that they don't know what the Rimworld is like, Peter figures out Tynan is a raider immediately, it's that they want to have a good time and help everyone.
- Purple Is Powerful: Peter's speech balloons are purple. He isn't physically powerful, but Peter has a better understanding of what's going on in the Rimworld.
