#iziador

[strixhaven]

Okay you've been mentioning Iziador a bunch recently and you've officially piqued my interest lol. What's his deal? You've mentioned a Curse, some vampire-adjacent qualities, and his one morbillion problems but I'd love to hear more about him/ his backstory 🩵

Iziador’s my Ghostslayer Blood Hunter, now also a Phantom Rogue given our current game is a 5e Gestalt one! He’s a character I’ve had for a few years now and played for a while in a now-defunct campaign, but his backstory was way messier and not as thematically coherent as it is now. I’d been rewriting him and swapping some stuff about his backstory, personality, and aforementioned curse in my free time when my good friend and former fellow player @ aterabyte offered to DM a game with me and another friend after I told her about some of the stuff I’d changed.

His exact deal for 2.0 isn’t 100% set in stone yet, but so far I’ve got a lot of the outlining done and have just been chatting w Tera and the other players/moth about it (also spoilers warning right here for Red and Jade if you happen to be reading this!)

Bit of lore groundwork to cover before digging into his whole deal though—souls and the magic tied to them, how to manipulate souls, are a big part of both of his campaigns and a large part of Izzy’s story has to do with his soul. Setting-wise, the current campaign is taking place several hundred years after an apocalypse killed off a huge chunk of the planet, but everyone left living is on landmasses that vary from the size of a farm to the size of large countries that were rocketed into the sky to avoid the apocalypse. Lots of cool floating islands and airship shenanigans. It whips! Ghostslayer Blood Hunters specifically also have a lot of lore relevant to their base of operations, the dead city of Bourreé, that’s closely tied to Izzy, but I’ll get to that in a bit.

Tera also pulled from my homebrew world when it comes to some of the lore, mechanics, and nature of tieflings and aasimar for the setting. Tieflings and aasimar are actually the same species that simply exist on a very wide spectrum when it comes to their appearances and the distinction is a largely arbitrary one made based off cultural values about appearances and how that relates to their views on a person’s morality, worth, and social role. And because they were created by Scávaun, the goddess of symmetry, they’re always either born as twins or two people sharing/having an identical soul. Tera added some lore to that for her world where there’s a set number for how many pairs exist at a time, and they both have to die before another pair enters the world—they now make up a larger portion of the setting per capita as a result of the apocalypse, given that they used to be spread throughout the world and now populations are much smaller and more concentrated in the far tinier landmasses.

Aaaand with that explained, Iziador’s deal should hopefully be a bit easier to understand in the context of the game.

Iziador being cursed is (understandably) integral to pretty much every aspect of his character and life. The exact mechanics and reasoning for it aren’t 100% set in stone as of yet, but the way he’s cursed has a lot to do with the nature of his soul and the aforementioned city of Bourreé. While the exact cause of the city’s death and destruction is unknown (for now at least), the city is to a degree undead and a kind of cultic mass of souls, and Iziador is functionally an extension of Bourreé given physical form. When I talk about vampiric-adjacent qualities of his curse, a lot of that has to do with how the curse manifests through his soul—he’s directly tied to the city even pre-becoming a hunter, and Bourreé uses him as a conduit to feed and accrue more power/satiate its hunger through the souls of the creatures and people he kills, is present for the death of, and/or more passively feeds through the bits of despair and misery surrounding him. Iziador acts as a life for death & tragedy as a result, and finds himself drawn to and draws a lot of this to him.

That he’s so fundamentally tied to Bourreé and the why of his being is something he doesn’t know, and is most likely a mystery to all but the city itself. He wasn’t born in Bourreé, he has no hunters in his family history that he knows of (doesn’t even have any tieflings/aasimar, it’s all just humans and half-elves), neither of his parents had any connection to the city as far as he’s aware.

The other Ghostslayers could definitely tell that there was something both deeply off and deeply familiar about him, but no one was sure of the why or how either—all they know is that his mentor in the order found him one day, went “shit, if we don’t take this kid in, someone else is going to find him, and it is not going to turn out well,” and it’s been a mess ever since. Iziador was a controversial recruit to say the least, and more than a few of them thought he was far too big of a risk to have properly join and undergo the Hunter’s Bane, but ultimately “we’ll train him and see if his curse can be better understood over time and under our care” tentatively ended up winning out. It was definitely a huge improvement over his previous life—he’d been kicked out of his home and living on his own in the Carisian capital for a few years when his mentor found him, and for as much of a dysfunctional mess the Ghostslayers were and for how wary many of them were towards him, Izzy found Bourreé to be place he was ultimately quite comfortable in. For reasons that cannot possibly be explained, the city felt familiar and like he belonged there.

But the Ghostslayers have always been and will likely always be a tense, messy group of people, and Izzy fucking up and accidentally getting a fellow recruit killed not long after he’d undergone the Hunter’s Bane made that a lot worse. Made much worse by the fact that the recruit he got killed was the twin to a guy he was close friends with and also the apprentice of one of the leaders that pretty openly hated his guts and was very vocal against his joining. One thing lead to another and by one thing I mean his friend’s mentor trying to kill him, and by another I mean Izzy just murking his ass instead and bolting from Bourreé because ohh boy oh man this is. a mess. to say the least.

So he’s currently level 1 Ghostslayer Blood Hunter/ Phantom Rogue and on the run. Good times!

There’s a lot more to him all and I’m sure I’ll be chatting Even More about him in the near future, especially as the game gets going, but this is already a lot LMAOO. But yeah. Rotating him in my mind.

[smuclge]

Iziador, The Most Cursed Man Alive🩸😱✨️

My second artfight attack of the year! This one's a custom plushie for @strixhaven of his gorgeous bloodhunter, Izzy 🩵

[reiddoesart]

more attacks! this time with MEMES! im team seafoam this year, and you can find me at reiddoesart

char credits under the read more

Iziador belongs to ghostlandcowboy

Falura Lavellan belongs to treatyofversigh

Kitsa Flume belongs to treatyofversigh

Thioranna Khetzan belongs to ghostlandcowboy

Xavier Alexandrè Sri'Vandor belongs to TwilightPossum

annnnd Deirdre is mine!

[oc-smashorpass]

Blorbo from my defunct dnd campaign who I miss dearly. He's a Levistan-ish tiefling, Ghostslayer blood hunter. Part of a blood cult that lives in a city filled with the dead and ghosts. He's very chill except for when he's suffering from The CurseTM and then he's paranoid as all hell and anxiety incarnate. Has Texan accent but is, regrettably, fantasy fr*nch. Great partner to have, extremely bisexual in an aro way.

oc by @strixhaven !

[aterabyte]

No D&D today but we learned that I’m even more easily distracted by sexy men than previously thought

[strixhaven]

just realized i never uploaded the izzy drawing dump. i miss him. carnally.

[strixhaven]

dndoodles

[strixhaven]

Rest Achilles, the world will wait, p.d. / Lyra Wren / More and More, Margaret Atwood / Waterborne, Natasha Trethewhey / The Night There, Mahmoud Darwish / Elm, Sylvia Plath (collected image by @ cursed-and-haunted) / Franz Kafka, Letter to Milena Jesenská (14 Sept 1920) / The City, C. P. Cavafy (trans. Edmund Keely)

[strixhaven]

oh no i actually quite like pacing about the room back and forth with dread in my eyes and the aura of a cornered and dying dog about to snap. builds character it’s a good outlet. you know.

[strixhaven]

don’t remember if i ever uploaded this full party line-up, but here’s something approximating canon looks for them all from last year

[strixhaven]

he was born all alone in a wet cardboard box. ok maybe not all alone the wet cardboard box was full of unsold dsm iv copies but it’s not like that’s all that much better

[strixhaven]

i miss solace

[strixhaven]

there’s something to be said about a character that knows he’s better off dead. that no matter how you look at it, his existence is one of cruelty, of misfortune, of sorrow, of death. forever carrying the weight of guilt around his neck. slowly being strangled by it. and still say “i want to live.” i want to live. despite it all, i want to live. to know that there are people who will still care for you, who still hold so much love for you, who cherish your existence despite it all, and knowing full well that it means their doom. i want to live. and other people will too. and despite it all the world is better for having you in it, at least to them. at least for this one moment that matters.

[strixhaven]

no i can’t sleep no i can’t hang out no i can’t come into work today i’m having a category 11 mental illness event about The Character. yes it’s going to be an all-day thing. forever.

[strixhaven]

iziador

[strixhaven]

“you, noted vampire hater, have made this a way more fucked up version of vampirism” i dont like vampirism usually because it’s BORING!!! they don’t do it in a way that’s FUN or interesting of course i’m going to take the basic premise and run with it to its logical conclusion.