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View Full Version : Looking for advice on my character backstory: Noroch the Earth-dweller



Pauwel
2007-09-16, 05:46 AM
It's meant for an upcoming PbP game on these forums, using and M&M rules with a setting based on a combination of Avatar: The Last Airbender and more traditional fantasy. Benders are called binders, though.
I'm mostly looking for ways to improve the backstory if there is some sort of flaw in it or whatever.

So here he is, Noroch the Earth-dweller:

Story:

Born into a family of earthbinders, Noroch grew up in a remote, cavernous monastery located more than two thousand feet above the ground in a mountain range. Here his ancestors had once dug the cave themselves using their earthbinding powers; for the Great Father, the original leader of the monastery, had by sheer coincidence touched an Elemental Earth Sigil while hunting for food. He had been the leader of an outlaw gang, you see, and he was excellent at surviving in the mountainous wilderness he had been thrown into, as were the other members of the gang.
The Sigil was in a cave, and when the Great Father touched the Sigil he found that he was connected to the very earth and stone of the mountains. He could control it, but more importantly he felt in touch with it.

You see, the Great Father had had a rough life. An orphan, he was forced to grow up by himself in the streets of a town at the foot of the mountains he later would inhabit, and had to steal to survive. He was quick-witted and nimble, so he soon became a notorious criminal and a powerful gang boss. When he was finally caught, he was sentenced to outlawry along with his fellow thieves, and together they learned how to survive in the mountains as they had done in the streets. An important trade route ran through the mountain range, which gave the gang plenty of opportunities for plundering merchants and travellers. As the town watch tried to stop their criminal activities, they were forced to retreat deeper into the mountains.

Once the Great Father found the Earth Sigil, he finally felt satisfied with his life. He found the parents he had never had in the plants and animals of the wilderness. The very ground of the valleys and stone of the mountains became the pillar upon which he could finally rest and find some sort of peace.
He chose, of course, to share the location of the Earth Sigil with the rest of the gang. They were all outcasts like himself, and they were his family.

As they had all found a true home in the mountain cave they had carved around the Earth Sigil, the gang became an actual family. They married each other, the bloodline remained pure, and no outsider ever became part of, as the family called itself, the Children of Earth. This, of course, resulted in a lot of inbreeding, and everyone in the family is slightly disfigured.

Into this family of earthbinders, Noroch was born. Throughout his training it became more and more obvious that Noroch had a special talent for earthbinding. In terms of pure lifting of stone he was not remarkably skilled, but he had developed a binding technique that could breathe life into stone and earth, transforming it into golems. This would require an enormous amount of concentration for a normal earthbinder, but Noroch’s golems seemed to be able to act more or less on their own, as long as they were only given simple orders. As he grew older, Noroch learned how to add large amounts of details to these creations of his.
Since then, he started to create sculptures that unlike his golems didn’t require any concentration on his part at all to remain solid. In the beginning his sculptures were rather innocent depictions of his brothers and sisters, but they soon grew to be more worrying to his parents.
His creations started to suggest a longing for the world outside the mountain, a desire to see more than the monastery and the mountains it lay in. Noroch’s parents tried to tell him even more stories than usually of how the civilized world never supports those who need it, how it only serves those who are born powerful and spoiled and never those less fortunate, how the Great Father was thrown out merely because he did what he had to do to survive…
Noroch, however, didn’t share their point of view.


Inbreeding. Very rarely did Noroch ever see any people of the outside world, but it was very easy to tell the difference between him and them, and he knew exactly why he looked like he did. It was inbreeding. His mother had been his father’s cousin as well as his half-sister, because that was the way of the Children of Earth: not to mix in any of the filthy blood of the so-called “city-dwellers”. No variation, no change, only the pathetic reliance on the cold, hard and unyielding rock.
Not that Noroch didn’t feel contempt for the upper class of the city-dwellers; that was the way he had been brought up. The lower-class, however, was something entirely different.
He had seen the diversity of the city-dwellers themselves, and he found the unpredictability of them refreshing.

As the years went by, Noroch meditated on the state of Earth and nature, his true mother and father. On a moonlit winter night, he had his first true revelation: Nature advocates chaos, not stability.
The ecosystem, the survival of the fittest, the disorder and variety… those are the things that true life is made of, not pointless pondering of flawed ideas that had been thought through to death already, not inbreeding.
He didn’t have to live in a cave for all of his life. He could live in the outside world, see the town at the foot of the mountains for himself, travel the world and then make up his mind. The children’s idea of strength through unity might be true, but when that strength isn’t enough to actually change anything, then what difference is it going to make?
Some day, Noroch thought and hoped, some day the fortresses of the rich and powerful might crash and the weak might feast among the ruins… but the Children can cause no such change. It’ll take a far greater number of people than the Children can muster, no matter how much all of Noroch’s brothers and sisters might think otherwise.
Should he die, then, in this cavern, never to have experienced anything but the hard stone and the cold mountain wind? Noroch thought not.

On that day, he left the monastery, left behind his brothers and sisters and the grotto he had always considered his home. No longer was he a man of the mountain, but a man of the earth at the mountain’s foot, and so he called himself the Earth-dweller. He knew, however, that he would never leave behind his true parents, the parents whose true character had been concealed from him.


Appearance

Noroch is a large, rather muscular man with unusually long arms. His face is remarkably ugly, so he usually tries to hide it under the shadow of his hood, so as to not draw attention to himself. His mouth is a wide, thin line that always forms a strange grimace, almost but not quite like an uneven smile. His nose is rather large and snoutlike and always looks like it’s broken, and one of his eyes is a good bit larger than the other, its colour a strangely pale shade of blue.
Noroch is usually dressed in the simple, dark brown robes he had been given by the Children. He always walks barefoot and rarely bathes, since he finds it comfortable to be in contact with the earth at all times. Noroch is rather oblivious to the fact that this makes him smell horribly, since he’s so used to everyone having bad personal hygiene that he can barely even tell the difference.

Shas aia Toriia
2007-09-16, 08:12 AM
My advice? Shorten it down. Nobody wants to read a couple pages of writing.

tsuyoshikentsu
2007-09-16, 11:01 AM
My advice? Shorten it down. Nobody wants to read a couple pages of writing.

General rule of thumb: if you need to put it in a SBlock, it's probably too long.

Pauwel
2007-09-17, 01:09 AM
General rule of thumb: if you need to put it in a SBlock, it's probably too long.

I didn't need to put it in an SBlock, I just did so because I thought it'd be more convenient for you guys.

Viscount Einstrauss
2007-09-17, 01:13 AM
It's not bad, but it's a little dry. Not that the backstory lacks excitement, you see. It's just that, at that length, it really should be more like a little short story then a history lesson, else others may not be able to read it without quickly falling asleep. Could you possibly keep the same length but add some narrative to it?

Nerd-o-rama
2007-09-17, 01:59 AM
I'm playing in the game, and I only skimmed it.

In my defense, I only ever skim peoples' backstories.

Pauwel
2007-09-17, 11:40 AM
I managed to cut everything almost in half and wrote it less like a history lesson and more like a story. Hopefully this will seem more interesting.


Noroch the Earth-dweller

Before you stands an Earthbinder, clad in brown robes and exuding an overwhelming odour of sweat and dirt. He is a large man, tall and wide. His arms are long and powerful, and his face is concealed under the shadow of his hood. One eye is still visible, however, an eye of sickly and unnatural pale blue.
The few times he reluctantly reveals his face, it is fairly obvious why it had been hidden, for it is a grotesque parody of the human face. One eye (the blue one) is much larger than the other (a small and beady black one), the nose a large and pig-like snout and the mouth a crooked grimace, a mockery of a smile. He doesn’t look sad, however; only grim determination and a queer curiosity is to spot in his expression, a strange sort of rough optimism.
The Earthbinder is completely clean-shaven, walks barefoot at all times and more than anything he looks like something from another world.
A fairly accurate assessment, I’d say.

His name is Noroch. He has no last name, but he calls himself the Earth-dweller.
Noroch’s ancestors were exiles and outlaws, thrown out of the cities by those of nobler blood than they for the crimes they had commited. They had no choice but to try and survive in the mountains, and by sheer coincidence they found an Elemental Earth Sigil left behind by the great giants.
So they became Earthbinders, and as they felt more at peace with the earth and stone of mountains, they became more alienated from the nobility and bureaucracy of the cities. Soon they were consumed with hatred of those who had thrown them into the wilderness, and so they swore to never mingle with the blood of the lesser men of the cities. Thus, the band of outlaws became a family, and they called themselves the Children of Earth.

Several generations since, Noroch was born. As a result of the Children’s inbreeding, Noroch, like almost all other Children, was born heavily disfigured. Ever since the day he first had seen a person from the outside world, he was ashamed of his ugliness; his brothers and sisters believed their parents claim, that it was the city-dwellers who were ugly and disfigured and not the Children. Noroch, however, could feel the untruthfulness in their claims, and while his words were trusting, his heart was not.

Since then, Noroch started using his Earthbinding powers to create artistic sculptures. Disconcerting to his parents, the sculptures often depicted city-dwellers, and seemed to express a longing for the outside world. They tried to explain to him the purity of hard stone and cold wind, the strength of true unity and the evils of the false and cowardly aristocracy, which would never take care of those at the bottom of the food chain.
Noroch, however, thought that the Children’s way of always relying on the unyielding rock was just as cowardly, and he kept feeling that their way of life was draining him of all his energy, vigour, and humanity.
To convince himself, he only had to look at his reflection in the stagnant rainwater.

He knew why he looked like he did. In the cavernous monastery of the Children of Earth, there was no variation, no change; there was only stone. They were passive, and thus their existence only served to forever create more inbred children.
Some day, Noroch thought and hoped, some day the fortresses of the rich and powerful might crash and the weak might feast among the ruins… but the Children can cause no such change. It’ll take a far greater number of people than the Children can muster, no matter how much all of Noroch’s brothers and sisters might think otherwise.
Should he die, then, in this cavern, never to have experienced anything but the hard stone and the cold mountain wind? Noroch thought not.
With this insight, Noroch departed. As he descented upon the earth at the foot of the mountain, he took his new name and with it, a newfound sort of optimism. From above, he felt the stars smile at him from the open night sky, and beneath his bare feet he felt a much softer earth, an Earth he had heard so much about but never truly felt.
He knew that these were the first steps on the path to true wisdom.

Viscount Einstrauss
2007-09-17, 12:46 PM
There you go, much better!