I guess I could finally take a crack at one of these weekly discussions for once. So, my base inspiration for Claire was fairly simple. When I first checked the game out, I noticed that the only characters were either Hyperhumans or Celestials. I decided to fill in one of the other roles.   The Venari became my final choice after a few people stated interest in wanting to play Hellions; that left only the Draoi and Venari, with the Venari offering me more potential in terms of character interaction. With a 'type' of character in mind, I looked through stuff I was interested in for inspiration. There's a character in the game League of Legends named Vayne. I thought her crossbow and ability to turn invisible were both interesting enough to act as a skeleton for Claire. Her middle and last name are both drawn from champions from the same game. 

Once I had a basic powerset in mind, her personality fell through pretty quickly. Her choice of weapons meant that she wasn't averse to killing, and this acted as a foundation for who she was- Claire, fundamentally, values her own goals above the lives of others. She's selfish, angry and willing to do anything to get what she wants. 

I needed a reason for why she was so vengeful. My first thought was to draw from Batman, and traumatize her through the killing of her family. Motivation for becoming a Venari out of the way, my next step was establishing the cast of secondary characters. Noctis needed a master to teach her how to hunt and a scholar to maintain her tattoos. If I went with that set up, there would be three different Venari running around Crescent City that were my characters alone. Since Wraith stated in the OP that the Venari were dying out, and there were two other slots for Venari, I thought that it'd be a little weird to have two Venari NPCs. That's how I came up with her father having been a prominent hunter, and leaving her a journal that she could use in place of an ordinary master. Everything kind of fell into place at that point.

Dunno how interesting this all was, but there you go!