Let’s Play D&D With Rick O’Connell From 1999’s Bi-conic Cinematic Masterpiece ‘The Mummy’
It looks to me like you’re on the right side of the river and about to play D&D with The Mummy‘s Rick O’Connell.
1999’s The Mummy is a movie that started out fairly popular and over the last twenty-five years has taken on an entire life of its own. Even if you haven’t seen it, you know of The Mummy. Is it only through memes? Possibly. but is that enough to know the general vibe of the whole thing? Honestly, yeah. That said, it’s a fun vibe and if you’ve missed out on it up until this point, definitely check it.
Rick O’Connell is the quintessential late-nineties-early-aughts action adventure guy. He’s got the aim, the quips, and the hair that never looks bad. Just like we want for all of our D&D characters. So let’s cut right to the chase and go on our next dungeon crawl with…
Rick O’Connell
Rick is a pretty simple dude who would probably do well in most action-adventure settings. Mummies? No problem. Dragons? He’ll probably also be fine. He’s got a couple of key abilities—generally physical- and doesn’t sweat the minutia. So it’s good that he’s not generally the brains of the operation. But that means that while other characters would be clunky and awkward to add to your next D&D campaign, I think Rick would probably fit right in.
We started with a Rogue since he’s got that silver-tongued treasure-hunter thing going on. This is also where we started with the Indiana Jones sheet. But while Indy is an “Inquisitive” sort of Rogue who wants to get to the bottom of things and unlock the artifact’s secrets, Rick isn’t super worried about the history or knowledge.
I gave him Scout-Rogue. It’s a subclass a little more focused on survival, street smarts, and survival. It also works well if one of your first contributions to the group is the ability to say, ‘Oh yeah, I’ve been there. I’ll show you where it is.’
After a whole bunch of levels in Rogue, we added just a few in Fighter. Rick is very good at punching and shooting his way out of trouble. Or into trouble. But those often go hand-in-hand.
We see him primarily using various guns against the ancient horrors, so I wanted to make sure that he had as many advantages in firearms as possible. So we started with Archery for his fighting style (not the same, but close enough) and made sure he had the Gunner feat to boost everything else up.
Speaking of feats, he also has Lucky. I love the Lucky feat, but so few characters really encapsulate the “that should have killed me but I decided to say nah” or the “there’s no way this should have worked but I really wanted it to and there are only fifteen minutes left in the movie, so everything miraculously went to plan…. sort of” energy quite like Rick O’Connell.
How would you make Rick or any of the other Mummy characters for a D&D setting? Which movie in the Mummy series is your favorite? What movie, show, game, book, or comic should we make sheets from next time? Let us know in the comments!
Happy adventuring, just maybe don’t steal those fancy organ jars.
