#she's snarky and stubborn and kind of dumb but ultimately she's SUCH a sweetheart and i wanna protect her

[suits-of-woe]

I would love to hear more about your DnD character(s)! I'm still such a newbie hehe but I love to hear what others are up to! (Also if you wanna put this on the other blog that's totally cool too) :)

Thanks for asking! I love going off about this stuff. Tagging my fellow DnD players @panhasablog and @illusion-of-death in case you guys are interested. This is very long, I’m sorry.

My current character (like I might have posted before) is vaguely based on Philip the Bastard from King John, but besides name and kind of backstory they don’t actually have that many similarities. My character’s name is Pippa Terrell and she’s a 16-year-old red draconic sorcerer who thought she was born to live a completely normal, down-trodden life as a factory worker (since the campaign setting is vaguely industrial revolution) until the day she got so angry at her supervisor mistreating a young girl that, oops, she set him on fire. Turned out, she had dragon blood, so she set off to try to become an adventurer.

My DM makes fun of me because I play DnD like a total English major and I like to have ~central themes~ around my characters. Pippa’s main theme is an exploration of the idea that power corrupts. What happens when you take a totally unremarkable, genuinely goodhearted but pretty un-heroic girl who’s been powerless all her life and suddenly give her more power than she’s ever dreamed of? Pippa’s magic is mostly fire-based and is volatile and dangerous. She can adapt it a bit to various circumstances, but there’s no question -- killing is what it does best. And being half red dragon (spoilers), her basest instincts tend toward violence and domination, so the few times she has killed someone, she’s been overcome by triumph and ecstasy before realizing what she’d done. But Pippa’s also been the victim of abuses of power all her life, and since she’s down to fight capitalists and eat the rich, she refuses to buy that some people are just meant to have power because they were born with it. Her philosophy is basically “if someone’s gonna have this super dangerous power, better me than somebody else” and she’s determined to prove that she can maintain her humanity and use her magic for good, even she’s terrified that she can’t fully trust herself to keep to that goal.

As for the campaign, the party has gained and lost a few members due to logistics, but her current best friend/awkward father figure is our Tiefling College of Swords Bard. They constantly snark at each other but really care about each other, even if they’ll only say it in emotional circumstances. He was there for her first kill and the trauma that followed, that time she met her red dragon dad and subsequently helped kill him (partially due to a failed insight check that I’m still salty about), and lots more family drama. Currently, the party is trying to defeat four elemental lords scattered across the world using some powerful artifacts they’ve found. Apparently they’re prophesied to be the ones to do this, which Pippa thinks is BS, because again, she’s not down with fate, and really distrusts anyone who wants to enlist her help because of how easily her magic can be used to hurt people. But we’ll see how it goes...

Mechanically, if you’re curious, Pippa is currently Sorcerer 6 (Red Draconic Bloodline)/Paladin 1 (Oath of Redemption) because she recently decided an oath might help her with the whole goal of not turning evil. Her alignment is Neutral Good. She’s a variant human with an Urchin background and I rolled quite high on her stats: STR: 13, DEX: 16, CON: 16, INT: 9, WIS: 13, CHA: 18. Her -1 to arcana checks as an uneducated magic user who doesn’t know SHIT about magic is a constant source of comedy. Between her high CON, Tough feat, and Draconic bloodline feature, she’s the world’s tankiest sorcerer at 74 HP. Her spells are currently: Create Bonfire, Fire Bolt, Message, Prestidigitation, Green Flame Blade, Control Flames (from a magic item), Chromatic Orb, Sleep, Healing Word (from a deal she struck with a god), Scorching Ray, Mirror Image, Dragon’s Breath (which I’m gonna drop soon tbh), Haste, and, of course, FIREBALL. Oh also, she speaks with my bad attempt at a lower class British/vaguely cockney accent :)

And very briefly, I have two other big DnD characters. For my past campaign, I played a changeling Mastermind Rogue named Kez. That was before I was good at RP and character building, so they weren’t super fleshed out, but they were super chaotic neutral, slippery, and non-committal. They also banged a storm giant once. And for my next campaign that my friend is working on setting up, I have big plans for Meriele Tyrvalsa, aka the least Barbarian-like Barbarian I could come up with. She’s a beautiful noble high-elf who smiles constantly, but she got kidnapped by a band of orcs a few years back and proceeded to fall in love and realize, after a century of being repressed as hell, letting loose and raging a bit might not be a bad thing. Until she was forced back to her family and once again became repressed :) as :) hell :) :) :) but that just makes her rage, when it comes out, even more terrifying.