Character Growth / Character-Defining Moments [Archive]

Roger_Druid

2020-09-22, 02:26 PM

Hi all!

I used to play a 2nd Ed. ADnD human Druid of the Forgotten Realms setting. I was very fond of my character and I really tried to do everything he was supposed to do: I slept under the stars, killed animals only to eat, kept the Balance by constantly angering my co-players since I never seemed to completely wipe out threats (i.e. killing all foes if not necessary). I even missed a tavern brawl 'cause I refused to get inside an inn! Moreover, I had befriended a female wolf and I brought her everywhere with me, her not being wild only with me, as you can imagine. When I lost her to a fireball by a mage (the DM ruled that she was also to take damage HPs thus saving at least one of us that didn't get them), I mourned her so intensely that I refused to use healing magic to help my team for a period! Also, I used to write poems (my native language is Greek but I risked some in English, too) for every spell I cast... So, when at last I got to 7th level and acquired the shapechanging ability, it was as I had reached heaven... My first shifting was to an eagle, to escape a mad (what else?) lich; by that, I got 1d6 x 10% of my lost HPs back, too (yes, there was such a rule back then)! The only really bad thing, however, was that we played no more since then with those guys, each went on her / his separate way...

Another time, I played a 2nd Ed., again, human Specialty Priest of Finder; the background(sic!) was Planescape. During my voyage from my birthing place (Arborea) to Sigil, I happened to be able to get a special fruit from a tree. That tree was described in a small paragraph at the end of a Planescape accessory I don't recall and the DM allowed me to have it on a whim, having no special traits. Adventuring in 'The Wheel of the Worlds' my team decided to planewalk to a pocket dimension to try and loot a castle. I was without healing spells by then (those of you having played ADnD 2nd Ed. know that each spell slot you had ought to be named), but they didn't listened to me not wanting to go before resting. Well, we had a number of healing potions, but that was all. As you can imagine, they all managed to drop unconscious, though victory was only 3 fighters away... No healing potions left, I alone had my life and wits. What to do? You have to consider that we had reached 5th level and adventured at least 7 times since we got to Sigil. To cut my story short, I rummaged through my things and found the 'fruit' still fresh and gale... I used it to my half orc comrade (a berserk barbarian) and the rest is history! My DM, although allowing to use the fruit, made me to painstakingly tell how I made the barbarian swallow the all while being unconscious...

Lastly, I once played a 3.5 Ed. DnD human Paladin; we were in Greyhawk chasing false Iggwilv. Since I already told the story in another entry, I'll only say that I had gathered 151 HPs being 13th level (with a 'Con' booster) and she broke a Staff of Magi near me not succeeding in slaying me. At the time I had 103 HPs, having battled some other monsters, first, so when her act completed, I smiled at her with my all 3 HPs left, said 'That, only?' and slayed her with my Holy Avenger (breaking the staff cost me 100HPs flat. I succeeded in my 'Con' die)... It was a great victory, especially since the DM had taken great care to do me (later we had a fight in another DnD session), only because I had managed not to 'fall' that far...

Roger Druid

Phoenixguard09

2020-09-26, 09:47 AM

This one may take some setting up, but hopefully it will be worth it.

I've been running a game now for just over two years, for four players. One of the characters is ostensibly a Danann warlock (Danann are the rough elf-analogue in our setting, carnivorous, vaguely Celtic, wild, their society quite wolf-like. Warlock utilise Black magic, which is drawn from the daemonic Otherworld). Her name is Bedelia.

For most of the campaign so far, Bedelia has been very quiet, and it took a fair bit of time to realise that she is afflicted by near-constant whispers which she can't help but interact with. At some stage it became apparent to the party that the whispers have a tendency to actually aid her in small ways, giving her advice and even occasional warnings. When it is raised with her, she tells the rest of the party that the whispers have been with her for as long as she can remember (which she figures to be approximately 60 years).

Bedelia, for as long as she can remember, has been trying to determine just what these whispers are. She can recall however, her mother being afflicted in the same way, and she attributes that as the reason her father had her mother burned alive. Her father claimed the whispers were those of the Formoraigh (the Danann 'gods', in reality interstellar hyper-predators on a god-like scale. Now said to be slumbering deep beneath the earth, last time they were awake, everything went to ****. The Danann have a thriving practice of blood sacrifice which they believe keeps the Formoraigh satiated and asleep), and that by communicating with them, Bedelia's mother would rouse them and potentially destroy the world. Bedelia has her own theories as to why her father would do such a thing, and proceeded to attack him when she found him shacked up with a new lover, burning down some of the village and hoping he would die in the process. She was mistaken.

Over the years, she has still been unable to determine if the voices are a figment of her imagination, daemons, spirits or something else entirely. She has however, begun to experience visions (or visual hallucinations) but such is the nature of Black magic, she cannot know what these visions are either. One particular vision she sees fairly regularly is that of her father's sword, normally embedded, improbably within something around her, once in a stone pillar in a ruined and long-abandoned temple, another time embedded to the hilt within the interior of the stone wall of the city of Araecan, and once even in the door-frame of her personal bedchamber in the party's house.

Much later into the campaign, the party find themselves leading a rescue and then fighting a rearguard against two massive enemy hordes as the excursion from the city they nominally protect and have made home (Araecan) attempts to retreat. (How they ended up in this position is going to take way too long to summarise) Fighting in a gigantic underground cavern before the ruins of an ancient city lost well over a thousand years ago, against the Swallowed (the remnants of the corrupted footsoldiers who made up the armies of Maudh, a massively powerful tainted sidhe who was responsible for the destruction of this city, and many others all those centuries ago) and the Krona (another horrifically twisted slave/construct race, crafted from the wildlife of the far-away Kandsza Isles when yet another interstellar being landed on the planet. Read the Great Maw campaign log in my signature for details on them), the companions are amazed to note a storm brewing overhead, in the uppermost reaches of the cavern, as dark, bruise-coloured clouds start to indiscriminately spit bolts of blood-red lightning down into the massed armies. It doesn't take long for the party to realise that this magic bears all the hallmarks of Bedelia's own personal casting, but it is clearly not her doing it. She's concerned by this, until, in an attempt to probe the consciousness behind the magic and determine what it could be, she pushes too hard. The voices, normally whispers, scream at her to stop, and then they fall silent.

Bedelia and the rest of the party pass through a magical barrier protecting a tower which bars daemons from entering. Both Bedelia, and another member of the party, a Jeleni berserker/ranger, Harper, feel very sick upon entering this tower, and Bedelia finds she cannot use her magic. In the tower, amongst many other things, the party find an archive of sorts, and amongst the books they find, Bedelia spots one written in the language of her people, the Cainte. She takes the book, noting it is about Balor, the Betrayer. (Balor was a Danann who, according to legend, gave up the hidden location of the Ri-Foraoirse, the last of the world-building Aen'Cead, to the Formoraigh in the Mythic Era, in exchange for great power. This backfired on him spectacularly, and the power he received nearly killed him, sending him fleeing north. He returned to the world in the service of Maudh centuries later, and was his foremost general, but also had his own agenda and eventually went missing which led, indirectly to Maudh's defeat) Reading the book, Bedelia is quite stunned to see the image of a blade which looks eerily similar to that of her father within the back pages of the book.

While all this is happening, her other companions, mainly Kari, an Invarrian alchemist, egged on by an NPC, another Invarrian, a lorekeeper named Olorin, start to wonder just what Bedelia is. Eventually those two, aided by the fourth PC, Florian, a Leathe druid, break into the Hidden Archive of Order of the Valravn and before burning it down (sort of incidentally) steal, amongst many other things, documents the Order have been collating on the members of the party. These notes suggest that they have determined through what are implied to be forensic means that Bedelia is not entirely a Danann, though what other blood she may have is unknown.

Kari is convinced she must discover the answer to this, and is now plotting ways to get Bedelia alone to experiment upon her (without the ridiculously powerful and paranoid warlock outright destroying her).

Meanwhile however, the companions return to Araecan, Bedelia still without her whispers. She starts to feel intensely lonely, and can't stand the silence in her mind. At first she starts to make trips out, on her own, into the city (which is not a great idea. A major theme of this campaign has been about how there is strength in numbers and that predators will pounce on isolated prey). At first it is just so she can take in the muffled sounds of city-life, but then she needs more and more. Eventually, she sets fire to a significant part of the city's central district. As the bells ring and the clamour of the disaster starts to ring in the air, she realises what she has done and quietly tries to slip in and help the rescue effort. She does so, but many homes are lost and quite a few civilians die. Her companions come upon her and they piece together fairly quickly that it was Bedelia that did it, and they hurry to get her home and away from the whole thing.

Bedelia then has to grapple with her remorse for what she did, her own disgust at her weakness and the fact that after all that loss, she still hasn't brought her whispers back. Harper takes her aside, and they speak about how they each deal with losing control of self, Harper being a berserker is familiar with losing himself. (Harper has always had rage issues, which culminated in an event where he messily devoured an assassin they had captured after a failed assassination attempt on two of the party's political allies. Since then, Harper has been possessed by the urge to consume fallen enemies in the heat of desperate battle, most recently the corporeal form of a massive daemonic entity accidentally unleashed in a skirmish upon the streets of Araecan which Harper ended up basically pulling apart with his bare hands)

In their conversation, they grow much closer together, and Harper swiftly fashions what the two of them term a 'clicker', two little wooden slats which can be clicked together between the fingers to create a clicking noise which he hopes will give Bedelia the noise she craves.

Some time after this, Kari accidentally lets on to an NPC political ally of the party, now Kari's lover, whose main character trait is her overall sense of duty to her city and its people, that Bedelia was behind the fire. The NPC, Aranessa, loses her **** and confronts Bedelia about it, which has caused even more tension within the group.

It's been an incredibly wild ride, and we're not done yet. She doesn't know it, but there's yet another further twist in the story of Bedelia's true parentage.

(Also, it looks like our campaign focusses heavily on Bedelia from reading this, but honestly it doesn't really. We've covered a hell of a lot from all characters as while Bedelia spirals into full-blown schizophrenia, Harper deals with loss, depression and a sense of becoming a monster, which at first he attributes to himself and then to the daemon which has been lying dormant in his blood for his whole life, and is now acting as a beacon to an even more powerful daemon which is slowly coming to collect its due. Kari has been dealing with copious guilt, an overwhelming urge to find new knowledge regardless of rhe cost and an evergrowing list of addictions to her own concoctions and Florian has a dark past she's running from, a constant fear of the body-horror inherent in changing her form regularly (she once got stuck, Animorphs style, in a nightmarish combination of owl, mouse and possum-like Leathe) and an interspecies relationship with a somewhat sketchy NPC who is equal parts helpful and problematic for the party.

Basically, everyone gets their fair share of horror in this game, and we wouldn't have it any other way.