#kenrenaqposting

[agamemnon-sux]

Ongoing list of D&D characters I've played (excluding characters from pathfinder, GURPS, etc.). Why did this post take me over a year to write.

-Bongo bard (D&D one-shot, autogenerated): simple one-shot character. Update with name if I can find the sheet. Happy-go-lucky, impulsive. Played this game in anno domini 2019.

-Ribble "Turtledove" Itheroy (D&D campaign): this character means Everything to me & my tablemates for this game. Gnome paladin in service of Lady Boldrei, the hearthkeeper, with protector fighting style and oath of redemption. Has a mild temper, a deeply ingrained set of morals and a bleeding heart type of charisma. He's a wide-eyed young man away from his huge family and sprawling burrows on his first quest, and his arc ended up exploring what it means to be taught kindness, empathy, protecting the weak, and self-sacrifice vs what it means to actually apply those values in tense & nuanced situations. He also is about what it means to love and unconditionally care for people who don't always want you around, and who you can't expect to be with forever. I love this little church man and his unending choice to make home, whatever it takes. He also has a Summoned Mount, a big ol chow chow named Yona. I roleplayed so hard on this dude that when Ribble convinced himself he was going to have to die fighting the BBEG I made myself & my DM cry.

-wibble (D&D campaign): Wibble is a ribble retooling using elements that I played with for Ribble but ultimately couldn't make work. I play him in a highly infrequent campaign I do with my brothers like twice a year. He's a forest gnome instead of a rock gnome, oath of the Ancients, and leans much harder into being a silly little fey trickster who operates under his own opaque moral compass.

-Maud Wraithmore (D&D one-shot): much like Ribble, this character wormed her way into my brain and has taken up residence in my psyche. It started with a friend helping me min-max for a one-shot and we ended up with a bladesinger wizard who started with one level in barbarian, plus a little bit of metamagic. To make sense of that, Maud is a variant human kid from nowheresville, grew up by the swamp and wanted out, got into an underground fighting ring when all she had was her rage and her fists, and after that she started leaning into her spark of magic, making deals for scraps of spell instructions and moving into some more performative fighting circles, creating this WWE-inspired wizard streetfighter persona. I've got this idea that she's called back to the swamp by her hometown by some worrying dreams and ends up living in the ribcage of the dead titan that summoned her for a while, which is where she's able to learn most of her formal magic before she goes off and joins the BBEG she works under in the one-shot I made her for (she's evil, by the way). She's got a pretty broad stat spread so of course she has a -2 to Chr. This lady is intelligent and competent and will fall flat on her face in ANY conversation. Fortunately she is somehow able to poorly flirt her way into the heart of the DM's traveling salesperson, Rosie the Tiefling, who she will eventually marry & have a moss dweeb circle of spores daughter (Adelhaid) with. Disaster swamp wizard with a lust for life. Uproariously fun to play. I also have a build I made for a one-shot of Teenage Maud, while she's in the midst of growing her fighting ring reputation and not particularly evil yet besides just being an angsty rage-filled teenage girl.

-Volans (D&D oneshot, not mine): a borrowed character for a last-minute one-shot, a circle of stars Tiefling druid w/ his star map tattooed across his chest and an obsession with immortality. Interesting dude who got me interested in circle of stars for the first time (more on that later).

-Sorrel (D&D oneshot): a Tabaxi way of shadow monk I made for an Oops! All monks! one-shot, and one of my simplest characters personality-wise. I made him on a bootleg online character sheet creator that was mostly in French. His background was anthropologist specializing in... elves, I think? He was just a mildly slippery cat trying to prove his worth as a martial artist, who considered himself more an outsider & documentarian than a direct participant in his life.

-Feverfew (D&D oneshot): Feverfew is a funny case; I made her as an alternate to Sorrel depending on monk party comp, using the limited free options on D&D beyond. They clearly have the same history (why else would they both be named after herbs) but her background is Haunted One. I still had her character sheet up when our RA came by and we strong-armed him into playing for like half an hour, so bam, Feverfew was Real. So, she & Sorrel were brought to the monastery together and they trained until in her teens she had a nightmare so bad it changed her forever (maybe accidentally astral projected into the Abyss or something) and went out on the run, wandering in search of either answers or means of protecting herself, but occasionally still contacting Sorrel (or, in the case of the one-shot, being spectrally summoned to fight alongside her old classmates in a multidimensional Monk Tournament, which sounds way cooler than the game actually was).

-Mira (desert, D&D campaign): MIRA! Miramiramira. This character has everything: she's a crowgirl (crow cowgirl) druid with a rifle who has been stalking the Magnolia desert for the whole of her adult life, killed a dragon once, and has an innate hatred of being infantilized. She's circle of stars and her star map is an intricate embroidery project on the underside of her hat, the result of many long, lonely nights watching the stars. Mira (MiraBile, mee-RAH-bee-lay, btw) was hatched and raised in a traveling circus (owned by two very difficult women who called themselves sisters) and performed with another Kenku, AnDerLwm (OHN-dare-loom) as another "sister act." They were unrelated birds, but AnDi kept Mira safe, taught her most of her words, gave her her name, and was generally the brightest star in Mira's sky, until she disappeared. Mira, still a child, escaped from the circus soon after intent on finding her sister, and picked up her gun skills by long practice and her druid spells from a wandering deputy. Mostly, she watched the stars. For the campaign, her tendency to overhear things she shouldn't gets her looped into a series of fetch quests for incredibly powerful, potentially world-ending artifacts with a secret organization masquerading as a normal organization. Her arc & development revolve mostly around her willingness to trust others to understand her wants/needs and to look out for her, and her recapturing her lost childhood by embracing simple joy and silliness with her companions. She's even learning to play guitar from her warforged friend, a form of expression unhindered by her imitative speech. As her attunement with nature grows, she gains access to divination and seeking magic, which will allow her an understanding of the universe bigger than her missing "sister."

-Mira (islands, D&D campaign): My beloved crowgirl was my PC for more than one campaign; she was dreamed up for this one but played first in the desert (where she is ultimately a better fit...). The islands Mira has a similar backstory but is significantly more driven towards finding AnDi, falling in with her travelling group at the beck of some gods she doesn't understand (one thing that's true about Mira in every universe: gods and religion are near-completely foreign to her. She just Doesn't Get It). She's a grumpy crow lady who never knows when to call it quits. She has spent a lot of time learning how to front, how to deal with civilization without getting killed or mugged or run out of town, and she did her best to pass that information on to some of her companions who had similar trouble with social norms, to limited effect. Funny enough she also learned guitar, this time as a gift from a god to give her some form of social expression (the bass guitar, this time). She died in a scripted TPK to a zealot, that the DM intended to revive us from but we mutually agreed to stay dead. Because that campaign is behind us (rip Styx, the raddest character in the world), I get to decide what happened to that Mira, and I think she probably came back some three hundred years later as a false duragh (a wonderful idea from @/filibusterfrog). She was a restless, hunting soul who died outside of her home forest, and so the land itself would eventually shake her awake and send her on her way, dooming her to wander until she could find her sister. I wonder how that would shake out for her, given what I know about AnDi, but Mira does not.

-Hermés Mercurie (D&D oneshot): bubbly Satyr drag bard that I drew up for a heist one-shot. My beloved. The reason that I could do a Greek accent for like twelve hours before losing it again. A great solution for my DMs calling my characters by female pronouns regardless of their genders. It's important that you know that she's just here for the job. She's just here to get paid, man. She plays like a dozen instruments and can vogue with the best of them. I managed to roll two nat 20s in a row to keep a vampire count distracted long enough with a lute/piano duet for the party to steal the macguffin so that count is gonna remember her forever.

-"Chestnut" the Firbolg (D&D oneshot): the Firbolg, like most of its kin, doesn't really have a name, but its party insists on calling it "Chestnut." It's an unnerving mountain of a person who shouldn't be left alone around still-warm corpses. Absolute savant with a quarter-staff.

-Sid "The Id" Wicked, the priest of the people (D&D oneshot): My bastard son. The priest of the people. As a half-elf son of a wealthy elf socialite put to shame by her fling with a human, Sid grows up contemptuous and irreverent, gallivanting the streets of fantasy London and eventually falling into the newly-reignited cult of Argos, a minor god of vision (Argos's domain is... complicated, but I like to think of him as the god of Witnessing, and of feeds from unsecured security cameras). The cult was meant to just be a front for a bunch of punk-ish street kids to operate behind but unfortunately Sid & his friend Teddy commit to the bit perhaps a little too hard and end up properly pulling Argos from obscurity, leaving Sid a legitimate cleric ready to adventure. Sid is gross, mean, and way, way too excited to get your skull under his elaborately studded boot for someone who has cleric HP. He's besties with the party's bald wizard and makes Pal'leth the githyanki deeply nervous. I only got to play Sid for a brief window, but I've had lots of time to think since about the dreams Sid might start to have after prolonged contact with Argos, the Visions, and how well he might be able to handle that.

But I digress... Sid dresses himself somewhere between a mantis shrimp and an 80s goth rocker. He's got a stupid little French mustache. He carries a once-ceremonial mace that he stole from home into which he's inscribed "pick a god and pray". He's bisexual but he doesn't know that yet. He has a relationship with his mother constantly bordering on violence but he's also the only person in the world who understands her. He dyes his hair black to piss her off and then begs her for money. He says he's the frontman of a band that existed for like six months when he was 16. Literally what's not to like.

-Nizoirse "Nisa," the New (et Hrothgar, D&D oneshot): the instant I found out they had added Verdans to the game I knew I wanted to play one for a one-shot. Additionally, I had agreed with another player prior to create a pair of characters that we could play in-tandem, allowing him to play a private, unexpressive character and lean on my roleplaying skills for the both of us. We landed on a bugbear & a Verdan, giving them camaraderie as goblinoids. Both monks, though the bugbear (Hrothgar) had some prior levels in assassin rogue. She exists in a one-shot world in which most humans vanished from existence in semi-recent history. She woke up in the shadows of the Teeth (a mountain ridge), amnesiac and in an unfamiliar body. She was taken in easily by a nearby monastery and trained in martial arts, meditative grounding, and pottery. The monastery was headed by a'Era the Inquisitive, a curious and kindly copper dragon. She was ambushed by Hrothgar while traveling and subdued him, but recognized in him a hungry, desperate man and invited him to study at the monastery. After many trials of self-denial and physical resilience, she underwent a sudden physical transformation (a Verdan growth spurt, but when you're the only Verdan you know that's not exactly self-explanatory) and became an object of fascination for a'Era; she began training under him directly and received a dragon's name: Nizoirse (knee-ZER-shuh) the New. She & Hrothgar would eventually leave the monastery in pursuit of knowledge and adventure, meet new friends, and make a few interesting discoveries.

Nisa's area of fascination is anthropology, especially of humans-- she associates the disappearance of humans with the mystery of how she came to exist, and pursues cultural knowledge to fill the void of the absolute nil of her own past. She will put the discovery and preservation of knowledge above her and her party's safety. She prides herself on being extremely composed & unflappable, and keeping her emotions from affecting her work. She would fight and die for Hrothgar and cares deeply for the rest of her crew as well, but finds their worldly attachments misaligned and frustrating. I find Nizoirse really compelling, especially her brand of positive nihilism and the fact that she can manifest sick ass dragon wings from her ki.

-Designation 24 (D&D oneshot): I had a few thoughts when making this one-shot character: what if an angel was a robot, and what could possibly be going on in-world with a paladin-warlock multiclass? In terms of characterization and dogma she borrows heavily from Gabriel Ultrakill, because I wanted to play Gabriel Ultrakill, sue me!! I decided she wouldn't have a name, because she's someone who gave up their whole personhood, whole past for a higher purpose, instead she would be designated 24, a number I chose at random. She's a paladin sworn to some sort of angelic order of the sun, which, um. Nobody told me until after about the Solari, a race of sun angels in the D&D cosmology OF WHICH THERE ARE ONLY AND EXACTLY TWENTY-FOUR. She was DESTINED to be.

Anyways, Designation 24 is a giant heavily armored woman with flaming sword and shield. She follows a goddess of cleansing fire and ancient pacts (unnamed at this time but in fact another facet of Boldrei), and was trained in a secretive ultra-militaristic cloister of angels, her Sisters. She doesn't fly nor is she particularly fast but she does a kind of threatening lumbering teleport. She has an ongoing issue where the very sunfire that fuels her will rip through her, pouring from the gaps in her armor and burning her awfully in the process. She thinks in the past few years that she's been in closer contact than ever with her God, but when you're staring into the brilliant fire in front of you it's nearly impossible to tell that the Voice you're hearing is coming from the deep, cold shadows pooling behind you...

Under the helmet she looks exactly like Rorshach from Watchmen. I <3 you scary dyke of all time.

-Sycorax Font-of-Tumult (D&D campaign): oh, my boy. My baby... Sycorax is a fairy & a wild magic sorceror. They were born from a condensed pool of chaos and immediately stood up, dusted himself off, and became a low-level politician utterly and disastrously outspoken against the king. He had enough sense to be an activist generally within the law, but got themself in immense trouble when a wild magic surge went haywire at a demonstration and disfigured one of the king's generals.

Sycorax is an idealist, finds it hard to sit still, and is very difficult to tell no. They believe that the ultimate forms of good include small joys, whimsy, and regicide. If you leave him in a room full of people long enough he WILL start a riot and it doesn't really matter to them what it's about. There's a brief period where they wild magic surge himself down to about 3 inches tall and bright blue, which messes with his relationship to their physical body for the rest of his life. He figures out eventually that the robot they've been traveling with is constructed from the same chaos he bubbled out of and immediately latches onto it as their sworn brother.

They're dead, by the way. I knew I wouldn't be able to make it to the campaign's finale session so I asked the DM to kill me. Sycorax was shot clean through by never-before-seen assault weaponry during a capital riot, and guided their party and the remaining protestors to a safehouse before succumbing to the injury. His last words were "what a wonderful thing it is to be alive" before dissolving back into the chaos he was born from. And yet they linger; in every oil-slick shine on the ground, in every flickering shadow, in every murmur of unrest and its following outcry for change. In every cicada's song rests Sycorax, waiting to be the crack where light gets in.

-Ethel of Sunspring (et Frederick, D&D oneshot): Another one-shot character I built in tandem with another player, in this case my brother! We decided it would be fun to play in-game siblings and wrote up Ethel and Frederick of Sunspring, both warlock multiclasses who belong to the Nightwatchers, a local cult following a Lady Umbra, a historic nighttime vigilante (Robin Hood style) who was powerful and beloved enough to ascend to demigod-hood. They were two orphans who grew up together and Frederick mainly pursued the Arcane (divine sorcerer, fey-touched) while Ethel, the more grounded of the two, pursued martial excellence (samurai fighter, devil-sight).

The DM pulled a fun trick on us for this one-shot; we knew the party knew each other in advance, but we showed up and he said "okay, you've all known each other for decades at this point, you're all elderly and live in a retirement community together" which is so much fun, it instantly made Ethel (and everyone else) into cool ass grandparent adventurers taking on One Last Job. So you get this old-lady rōnin type character with otherwordly red eyes and impeccable aim. And she and her brother are still constantly messing with each other and conspiring amongst themselves. We need more grandmas who kill people in media.

-Posey Lanier, "the Jester" (D&D oneshot): Posey is the nomenclative punchline in a rule-of-threes joke involving a trio of pink tieflings (Mowzie, Rosie, Posey, the worst cousins in the world who you should never trust with anything, most especially your money. Rosie is the one who's married to Maud!). He calls himself "The Jester" and wears a blue and white porcelain Venetian mask with a jester's outfit to match. He's a rake rogue (a "swashbuckler" if you're nasty) with an especial talent for mockery; if you need a guy eviscerated in public but without any bloodshed, the Jester is your guy. He's genuinely mean, but at least he's genuine! Except also not genuine at all, since he's a sneak using Batesian mimicry to convince you he's some kind of bard.

Whatever the dynamic was with the one-shot's fairy mead crew was borderline polycule. I'm convinced they all sleep in one heap in the middle of the floor. He's especially sweet on one of the crew's druids (Rivari, I think, but it could have been Yinner. I really should start putting down player names when I make these lists) and has been roped into collecting a great many botanical field samples at personal expense that way. Posey occupies the Faceless archetype, and so goes between the Jester alter ego (loud, exuberant and deliberate) and Posey-as-himself, who is lank, reserved, and generally kind of a bummer. These days, he's the Jester most of the time. It's all fun and games with Posey until the jingling of bells ominously stops.

-Ken'renaq (Pathfinder 2e campaign): I said I wasn't gonna talk about my Pathfinder characters but that was over a year ago and I would like to tell you about her. She's from my brother's campaign & he has a really fun set of player races (essentially re-categorizing all the humanoids into elvish or goblinish) including a handful of beastfolk, one of which is bearfolk, the Takiaq. Ken'renaq is a champion (Pathfinder Paladin) who is surprisingly sneaky for a fully grown brown bear wearing armor. She follows the Liberator cause which means she respects the hell out of people for making their own decisions and demands freedom at all costs (weirdly enough, this campaign is also about regicide. Even here, Sycorax haunts the narrative). She's friends with Solid Snake from the metal gear solid franchise. I don't remember a ton about her background because we haven't played in months and I can't check my character sheet outside of Foundry.

She's just Ken.

-Doctor Flichard "Flinch" Underfoot (D&D oneshot, sort of): a wonderfully eloquent friend of mine could only describe Flinch as a "little creep" and I couldn't agree more. This guy sucks so bad. I got to drop in for a session on the campaign my old group had been playing for the last year as a weirdly pathetic lackey to the Big Bad. As with many of my characters, he's just a string of keywords that I've smushed together into a person: he's a bard but his performance skill is university lecture on planar cosmologeology, a field in which he was a premiere researcher. He had a psychic Incident 400-something years ago in an attempt to "open his mind" that left his head permanently cracked open to the psychosphere and him vulnerable to predatory thought entities (and gave him some sick ass lightning scarring cause. duh) and made him into a psychic halfling vampire who doesn't need brain juice to survive per se but just kind of likes it. He has a strong Jersey accent and says shit like "in my salad days". He's been living in Hades for at least decades and his coworkers have been stiffing him out of some of his pay because he sucks and because he's the only one that's not a yugoloth. My siblings and I spent so long laughing at shitty halfling names when I was trying to make him. I wish him as well as he deserves wherever Banishment spit him out.

IMAGES TIME

Ribble (& Yona!)

Maud, Maud & Mira pride art

Sorrel (left)

Mira

Hermes

Sid

Nisa

24 (insanely sick commission by @bedrock-to-buildheight)

Sycorax