Barmoz
2013-03-01, 01:06 PM
Lesandra was cold hearted evil personified. Rumors whispered by her rivals credit her inhuman beauty to a succubus parent. These tales amused her because they were ironically close to the truth. As it happens, she was fathered by a fiendish creature; however it was no demon of chaos. Calculating and manipulative, she worked her way up the hierarchy of the church of Bane, his return to power coinciding with the rise of her own.
The ritual was a dark thing of blood and lust, she viewed the conception as a symbol of Bane’s favor. However, she had no interest in being a mother, she had aspirations of power, and ambitions to pursue. Let the father worry about the whelp.
Dartor was a twisted bitter man, himself abandoned at an early age, his father a renowned sorcerer with dragon’s blood flowing in his veins, his mother taken as a sacrifice to the dread cult he supported. After his father’s death, he was taken in by the Zhentarim. A strikingly handsome man, but one possessing little natural ability, and even less ambition, Dartor blamed the world for his lot in life. Belittled by his peers, passed over for responsibility, he lusted in secret after the Dreadmaster Lesandra.
At the time, he viewed the night of the ritual as the highlight of his life, in the years to come however, he viewed it as one more sign of the world’s conspiracy against him. Relegated to information gathering in a meaningless village in the back end of nowhere, he came to blame the boy for all of his failures. He turned to drink and to violence, lashing out at the defenseless child that had been thrust into his care.
Jon was a beautiful child, angelic of face and quick of mind. Jon was also a child who loved secrets. His first secret was his ability to know what others were thinking. He learned early on to keep that knowledge to himself as saying such things out loud led to even more beatings at the hands of his drunken father. He collected these secrets, the things his father thought about the neighbor’s wife, the things that lady thought about the butcher, these thoughts were his treasures.
As he got older, Jon had other secrets. The box under his bed was full of secrets, grizzly trophies someone might recognize as once belonging to villager’s missing pets, commonly thought taken by wild animals roaming the nearby woods. The girls of his village found him so easy to talk to, he just seemed to understand what they were thinking so well. They confessed their deepest fears and thoughts to him, and explored their darkest passions with him. Maybe they regretted their actions in the light of day, but after all, everything that had happened had been what they really wanted… wasn’t it? Jon’s father grew frightened of him, but Jon liked the sympathy and attention the bruises he once got at his father’s hands garnered him from the adults in the village, so he simply created them himself.
Jon had a deeper secret, the ancient alter he had discovered deep in the woods. Jon learned that the voices he heard in his head didn’t always belong to his neighbors, and he learned a name, Belial.
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I wanted to make a deeply disturbed character, either to use as a recurring BBEG in my games, or maybe even to play because I’ve never played an evil character before. The idea for this came to me in a conversation about kids watching violent movies before they were old enough to understand fiction vs reality. Now imagine a child with an abusive father, who was able to read minds. Being exposed to the darkness within even the nicest seeming people, like the jovial blacksmith who fought against the Tuigan horde and still has nightmares about the battlefield or the baker who’s a closet pedophile and always had an extra sweetcake for him.
My plan is to make him a Psion (Telepath) / Warlock. Create his adult setting as a respected and successful businessman (who wouldn’t successful be if you could read the mind of all your customers, vendors, and negotiating partners) with a dark secret life in slavery and associated other evil enterprises. While he’s one quarter fiend and has some amount of dragon blood from his father’s side, I haven’t given him any templates, I just put that stuff in for fluff to explain his telepathic wild talent. To the extent that he’s capable of normal emotions, I think he resents the evil deities of Faerun, particularly Bane, given his horrible father and absent mother, so having him dedicated to an arch-devil feels like a cool twist. I showed this to a friend and he called it a pre-Voldemort Tom Riddle written by Stephen King. I’d like suggestions on how to build his class choices to make him as optimized as possible, while still keeping his character theme intact.
The ritual was a dark thing of blood and lust, she viewed the conception as a symbol of Bane’s favor. However, she had no interest in being a mother, she had aspirations of power, and ambitions to pursue. Let the father worry about the whelp.
Dartor was a twisted bitter man, himself abandoned at an early age, his father a renowned sorcerer with dragon’s blood flowing in his veins, his mother taken as a sacrifice to the dread cult he supported. After his father’s death, he was taken in by the Zhentarim. A strikingly handsome man, but one possessing little natural ability, and even less ambition, Dartor blamed the world for his lot in life. Belittled by his peers, passed over for responsibility, he lusted in secret after the Dreadmaster Lesandra.
At the time, he viewed the night of the ritual as the highlight of his life, in the years to come however, he viewed it as one more sign of the world’s conspiracy against him. Relegated to information gathering in a meaningless village in the back end of nowhere, he came to blame the boy for all of his failures. He turned to drink and to violence, lashing out at the defenseless child that had been thrust into his care.
Jon was a beautiful child, angelic of face and quick of mind. Jon was also a child who loved secrets. His first secret was his ability to know what others were thinking. He learned early on to keep that knowledge to himself as saying such things out loud led to even more beatings at the hands of his drunken father. He collected these secrets, the things his father thought about the neighbor’s wife, the things that lady thought about the butcher, these thoughts were his treasures.
As he got older, Jon had other secrets. The box under his bed was full of secrets, grizzly trophies someone might recognize as once belonging to villager’s missing pets, commonly thought taken by wild animals roaming the nearby woods. The girls of his village found him so easy to talk to, he just seemed to understand what they were thinking so well. They confessed their deepest fears and thoughts to him, and explored their darkest passions with him. Maybe they regretted their actions in the light of day, but after all, everything that had happened had been what they really wanted… wasn’t it? Jon’s father grew frightened of him, but Jon liked the sympathy and attention the bruises he once got at his father’s hands garnered him from the adults in the village, so he simply created them himself.
Jon had a deeper secret, the ancient alter he had discovered deep in the woods. Jon learned that the voices he heard in his head didn’t always belong to his neighbors, and he learned a name, Belial.
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I wanted to make a deeply disturbed character, either to use as a recurring BBEG in my games, or maybe even to play because I’ve never played an evil character before. The idea for this came to me in a conversation about kids watching violent movies before they were old enough to understand fiction vs reality. Now imagine a child with an abusive father, who was able to read minds. Being exposed to the darkness within even the nicest seeming people, like the jovial blacksmith who fought against the Tuigan horde and still has nightmares about the battlefield or the baker who’s a closet pedophile and always had an extra sweetcake for him.
My plan is to make him a Psion (Telepath) / Warlock. Create his adult setting as a respected and successful businessman (who wouldn’t successful be if you could read the mind of all your customers, vendors, and negotiating partners) with a dark secret life in slavery and associated other evil enterprises. While he’s one quarter fiend and has some amount of dragon blood from his father’s side, I haven’t given him any templates, I just put that stuff in for fluff to explain his telepathic wild talent. To the extent that he’s capable of normal emotions, I think he resents the evil deities of Faerun, particularly Bane, given his horrible father and absent mother, so having him dedicated to an arch-devil feels like a cool twist. I showed this to a friend and he called it a pre-Voldemort Tom Riddle written by Stephen King. I’d like suggestions on how to build his class choices to make him as optimized as possible, while still keeping his character theme intact.