A journey through a land of fantasy…

(Spoilers)

(Note:  My descriptions here will be about both the character and player, because you cannot separate the two.  Thus, some of what I write may seem harsh or critical.)

Now we come to the most difficult of the characters to discuss:  my husband’s.  Not because I don’t want to be critical of him — we’ve been married 11 years so I’ve had plenty of practice — but because his is by far the most complicated and ambitious.  The story of Robert’s character’s creation may also be instructive, since we had to compromise to come up with something that would work for both of us.

You might remember that I stipulated that all the player characters had to be human.  Zoriya ended up as a half-elf (which is what Mel wanted) mostly because of what happened with Robert.  After he received the world and campaign description (which included that it would be a heavy roleplay game), he came up with the following idea (heavily paraphrased from his original text).

Vryn Smithson is a half-doppelganger (real name is Xephnon), a member of a group of doppelgangers from Faerun whose spelljammer malfunctioned and crash-landed on an island beyond the shores of Chorenn.  Seeking to make their way in this strange new world, they sent some scouts out to learn of the ways of the human, but after one disastrous incident, they realized they needed a breed of doppelgangers that would not be revealed by such simple spells as dispel magic.  They bred a small number of half-doppelgangers, who hold on to the form they choose in areas of no magic, but do not have any telepathic abilities.

The original Vryn was an inhabitant of a small fishing village in Japrilis.  One day, when he went out to fish, Xephnon captured him, learned of his life and attitudes, and then killed him, taking on his persona.  He then declared to his “family” that he felt the call of a wandering life and left the village to travel to distant parts of Chorenn.

The doppelgangers intend to slowly invade the human world, taking over the populace and seizing their lands.  They eventually plan to usurp the throne from the (in their eyes) weak and pitiful human king and rule the land secretly.

I think you can probably see the problem here.  I’m going through all this trouble of creating a campaign in which Nathan’s character is going to take the throne, and Robert’s character is going to murder him and take his place the moment Nathan utters a word of it!

Thus, a number of days of discussion (verging on argument) passed.  While I felt that it was an interesting character, I also felt that it was intended to destroy the world that I had spent so much time creating.   On the other hand, I didn’t want to disappoint Robert by nixing the character he wanted to play. 

That’s one of the problems with playing with your spouse, by the way: There’s more than just the game at stake.  It’s not like the game is going to destroy your marriage, but there are other feelings at work.  Luckily, neither Robert nor I take things that happen in the game personally (though I do want to make him happy in the game, too). 

After much wrangling, we came to a compromise that made us both happy.  The doppelgangers find Chorenn to be boring and backwards (especially compared to Faerun!) and want to fix their crashed spelljammer and get the hell out.  To do this, they need to amass magical items to drain their power into the spelljammer’s engine, then start it using psionic power.  However, the doppelgangers are unable to provide the flavor of psionic power that it needs, and must organize at least two hundred humans to provide it (even humans without obvious psionic power have a bit of psionic energy that the doppelgangers can harness).  Vryn and his half-breed brethren are seeded in the human world and are attempting to solve the problem.

With this, we were able to satisfy Robert’s craving to play a shapeshifter and yet avoid the destruction of my campaign.  While Vryn is wholly dedicated to his task and will not balk at committing evil deeds to accomplish it, he will look for and take alternate routes, since causing chaos and possibly attracting attention to himself will only hinder him.

Vryn is definitely single-minded in his pursuits (his specific task is to gather magical items and feed as much information about Chorennii religion back to the doppelgangers as possible), and that has opened him up to character development: Will he learn to work with the humans with which he travels?  Perhaps he might find other goals that he finds more worthy.  You’ll learn about this when we get to appropriate points in the actual campaign history.

The character was built with 2 effective character levels from his doppelganger heritage; Robert and I both agree it should have been 4, but that would be too hard to reverse-engineer now.  I believe (without actually checking my notes right now) that his original character had levels in ranger (with favored enemy human), fighter, and the prestige class War Shaper.  My husband is quite the powergamer, so Vryn has become a very powerful front-line fighter, but this turned out to be good, since the only other melee character in the group, Sparrow, is heavily built towards defense and diplomacy.  On the other hand, it means that Vryn is extremely difficult to kill (*wink*).

Vryn has made the character interaction and storyline of the campaign much more interesting, and while I had envisioned a group of human adventurers, I am glad that I allowed the character.  Robert, of course, has much to do with it, since he plays the character as not quite so nice as everyone else, adding much-needed tension to the group.  In retrospect, I should not have allowed Zoriya to be half-elven, because it added nothing to her background or roleplay; the character and her history would have been the same if her mother had been human.  I think if I were ever to write a novel of this campaign (I’ve considered it, though I am not a skilled prose author), Zoriya will be human.