Yao guai was originally a joke character, meant to parody when people make characters obviously tricked out for combat, but with no actual characterization. Then I got sort of attached to him, so I’ve tried to make him make at least some sense. Feel free to let me know if I failed :p I’m open to suggestions for what to do with this guy.

Yao guai was born into an underground fighting ring. Yao’s owner, a pre-war ghoul, basically got the idea top breed his largest, strongest slaves together and see what would happen, and as a result, Yao and his siblings were born. Yao was named for his tendency to use his hands when he fought, like an animal. Yao was soon taken from his mother and trained up to fight, which unfortunately meant that he got very little normal social interaction, which makes it very difficult for Yao to talk to other people. But we’ll get to Yao’s various failings later.

Yao grew very big, very fast, luckily for him as it meant not getting culled, and was encouraged to eat massive amounts of food to keep him growing. It worked, and Yao grew to be someone who would have even been a very big guy before the war. In the wasteland, where most people were sort of stunted by malnutrition, Yao was massive. But, as most food in the wasteland is irradiated and Yao just ate whatever was handed to him, he ended up with radiation poisoning. To his owner’s delight he showed signs of not only turning ghoul, but of turning into a glowing one, which would give him a huge advantage in in a fight. So all Yao guai’s siblings were irradiated to replicate the transformation, which ended up killing every single one of them. Yao on the other hand, turned and soon learned to use his new form to his advantage, and his owner turned his attention to turning him into a force to be reckoned with. Namely by feeding him with human flesh and psycho hoping to turn him meaner.

But Yao Guai was actually a pretty chill dude, and never really enjoyed killing people, even ifhe enjoyed a good fight. He wanted out.

And he got his wish, when one day the subway tunnel his cage was kept in started collapsing. When someone came to let Yao out, Yao made a run for it, killing anyone who got in his way. He wandered off into the most irradiated parts of the wasteland he could find, knowing that the smoothskins his owner employed wouldn’t be able to follow him. However, Yao, being pretty dumb, hadn’t considered little things like that he had to eat. And it’s pretty fucking hard to feed yourself when you’ve never tried it before. Not to mention sneaking up on any kind of animal when you’re huge and glow in the dark. Needless to say, after a week or so, Yao resigned himself to just keep walking until he collapsed somewhere and leave it at that.

Luckily for him he bumped into a group of tribals getting their asses beat by a large yao guai, and decided to jump in. Yao wasn’t at his best, and ended up losing a fair amount of blood, but ended up taking the bear’s head off. The tribals decided to take him with them back, because, you know, that seemed like the thing you ought to do when a stranger wrestles a bear for you.

The tribals belonged to the Right tribe, so named, as their founder was very sure that he was right about everything. The tribe was founded shortly after the bombs dropped, as a surviving group left a schizophrenic survivor in a library to die, fearing that she was dangerous without access to her medication. She was actually quite harmless either way, buts he did end up going through the library and founded a religion based on half a HP Lovecraft book and a waterlogged lexicon of world mythologies. As you can imagine, nobody really understood what the hell she was talking about, but she ended up getting a following consisting of any human, ghoul or whatever that would listen to her ramblings.

As the years went on, the Right tribe’s religion was passed down through the original founder’s bloodline, and at some point, got mixed with the followers of Atom, leaving a very strange and incomprehensible religion that didn’t worship radiation but believed you weren’t a real adult until you’ve turned ghoul, and proceeded to live in a heavily irradiated spot to facilitate this. they also took to wearing tattered radiation suits for religious reasons. Recently the Right tribe has had their leader killed, and were driven out of their territory after a conflict with another tribe, and are now being led by the last member of the founder’s bloodline, a young man named Prophet. Prophet, like many of his predecessors, is schizophrenic, and while he is actually a good leader and strategist, he frequently attributes his own ideas to voices in his head and can be somewhat hard to understand. Most of his high priests do not actually understand the religion (very few do) but got their rank based on their ability to understand Prophet clearly.

Faced with Yao Guai, Prophet decided to keep the big ghoul. Not having anywhere to go in any case, Yao now lives with the Right tribe and acts as Prophet’s bodyguard, making sure that he will not be killed.

Personality wise, Yao is actually a nice enough guy. But he’s also dumb and blunt and awkward and he says the wrong things, which would probably have led to him getting his ass kicked a whole lot if he wasn’t so damn big, that people tend to not want to fight him. Yao has also mellowed out a lot, now that he isn’t constantly being fed psycho, and doesn’t particularly take offence when people call him stupid. This is also because he knows damn well that he isn’t very smart.

Yao also has no real survival skills, being completely unable to hunt or scavenge for himself.

IDK that’s what I’ve got so far. It’s meant to be sort of dumb, in a fun sort of way.