#she's giving some aiglamene but haunted which...god. way to make her even more appealing to me personally

[frenchy-and-the-sea]

HELLO WOULD YOU LIKE A DEPRESSED ELF? we just started a new campaign and i am currently playing Lieutenant Nordylva Rook, standard-bearer of the Knights of Ozem and proud child of Lastwall (Lastwall was completely obliterated by a lich three years ago) (nori is coping). she's old as balls, she's tired, she's missing an arm and all of her fucks, and she's still remembering how to socialize outside of a formal military hierarchy—not helped by the fact that she's been living as a hermit since Lastwall fell and all of her friends died. (she's coping.)

also don't ask her what she's been doing as a hermit in the woods because she's terrified to tell anyone the answer (it's wrestling with her own bestial urges after being mauled and turned into a werewolf) (She's Coping)

(From my match their freak ask game)

I ALWAYS LIKE A DEPRESSED ELF!!!

You know who would also probably like a crotchety old soldier type? My sailor-gone-fighter-gone-paladin, Val! She doesn't get put off by gruffness — might even find it comfortable, after the years she spent with various mentors who never smiled and who called her exclusively by her last name — and aside from all of the wandering do-gooding, she's a bit of a hermit herself! She spent her early years living out of a travel wagon with her perpetually nomadic family, so she takes an immediate, unshakable kinship with anyone who has spent some time on the road. She is maybe a bit more easy going than someone like Nori might appreciate, and tends to regard authority as more of a suggestion when there isn’t any immediate danger around, but I feel like they could do the whole 'comfortable, soldierly grousing' thing about their various hardships together.

Like, for example, running away to the wilderness to cope after a disaster killed all of your friends.

See, prior to The Campaign, Val was serving on what was technically a merchant vessel, but whose captain was particularly fond of monster hunting. His proclivities and the skill of his crew were well known, so they were often hired on as security for other ships traveling between continents. On the last such occasion, they were attacked by an aboleth. (This, Val found out later. She has little memory of the actual attack except for fire and blood and pulling bodies out of the water.) They lost the ship and a sizable portion of the crew, and Val — the only tiefling aboard, who believes strongly in her negative effect on the luck of people around her — took it rather badly. The minute she was healed up, she vanished up the trade road from the coast and took to wandering aimlessly from city to city in a fugue of grief and survivor’s guilt. And it was in that state that she came upon a rather backwater city whose prejudices got under her skin enough that she ended up killing a man in a fit of rage after he tried to throw hands with her. SO WHEN I SAY THAT SHE WOULD SYMPATHIZE WITH NORI’S SITUATION. I FEEL LIKE SHE WOULD REALLY SYMPATHIZE. 

Thus, follow-up questions: what does the esteemed Nordylva Rook do to wile away the hours in her solitude? Is there anyone in particular that she regularly interacted with in order to get supplies while away from civilization? And is she the star of any ghost stories from nearby settlements that keep people out of her swamp woods?