A journey through a land of fantasy…

As I write more of the current adventures, I have mentioned two new characters, Mahdi and Osiris, which I have never described.  I had hoped to write the old adventures up and introduce these characters when they arrived, but I’m not sure that day’s ever going to come, so I’m going to describe them now.

(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.)

Bret, who played Brother Steplan, was the first player to leave the game.  While the party was in Fin Quil, Steplan decided that the adventuring life wasn’t for him, and he decided to establish a magic item creation business in Fin Quil.  Thus, we needed a new cleric.

Little Eleanor was born in Valuria, to a mother who died in childbirth and a father who died while hunting during the first year of her life.  Her only other relative, her father’s sister, promptly left the child on the doorstep of a monastery.  There, she lived, until the age of five, when the monastery was burned down by “large men on horses,” as she recalls.  Led through the woods with the other children to another monastery, she lived there until the age of nine.  Her aunt (or so she called herself; Osiris is unsure now if this woman was actually her aunt) joined the monastery and found her there, and told the child of her parents and their fate.  Then, one spring day, while playing outside the monastery walls, she heard screams.  She ran into the woods outside the monastery, and from there could men on horses, setting fire to the monastery and killing all the people she knew, including the children and her aunt. 

The next morning, she was found, cold and starving, by a ranger named Aaron, who took her in, taking care of her while teaching her to survive, hunt small game, and ride horses.  They travelled to the Seldaya Wood, near Tallidon, where he lived.  He never learned her name, and called her Tash.

When Tash turned twelve, Aaron took her to another monastery, feeling that she needed more education than he could give.  She prompty ran away, but Aaron tracked her down and took her to a monastery in Valuria.  She realized that he was gone for good and that she would have to stay and learn.  But, before she became ordained as a cleric, an accidental fire in the monastery set off waves of terror in her heart and she fled.  She found safe passage to Talnoor and became involved in a cult of death, feeling that for once, she would be on the other side of the mayhem and terror.

Her final rite of passage to become ordained as a cleric of death was to kill someone in cold blood.  Though she would never know the name of the man she killed, the act was enough to convince her that this wasn’t what she wanted, and she left without completing the rite. 

Taking what money she had, she traveled north.  In meditation, she realized that her path was not to follow one ideal, but all ideals in balance, and within that idea, she sensed her own path to divinity.  Taking the name Isis, though telling all others that her name is Osiris, she began to follow the path of learning of all the gods and worshipping them all.

In her travels, she was abducted by a cult of blood, who wished to sacrifice her.  A group of paladins saved her just in time, and she spent some time with them, falling in love with one of the paladins, who later was killed during the last battle with the cult of blood.  She, however, realized that as a traveler, her small, dainty stature was a liability, and obtained a hat of disguise and a war horse, to appear as a tall knight in plate armor.

Asia’s intent was to play her as a brooding, meditating cleric, who speaks to all gods and seeks to become a god herself, but who also is haunted by her bloody past, and to some extent, he’s doing a pretty good job.  He had the party confused for quite a bit, as he would refer to different gods in different situations.  He also managed to give himself a personal goal that really had nothing to do with the party goal, so that saved me the hassle of doing so.

His one weakness in the way that he plays her is that he puts a bit too much of himself into the character.  Asia is a bit of a anti-government paranoid, and thus, so is Osiris, even though the character truly has no interest in or opinions about the current government.  Thus, Osiris makes a lot of decisions based on Asia’s belief that the government (not just the monarchy, but the local lords’ governments) are evil and corrupt.

Asia, however, found it difficult to justify his character staying in the party, since she’s following her own spiritual journey.  Thus, I gave her a revelation.  During meditation one day, she had a vision.  What she saw, she could only describe as a great wondrous orb, overseeing all of the world.  This orb was not smoothly round, but had an infinite number of facets, in each of which she could dimly see all of the different gods.  She began to realize that the gods are not separate individuals, but only facets of something greater, which she called the One.  The One watches but does little, but, in her dream, she realized that she was being asked to do something.  “The Prince must survive.”

At the time she had the dream, Osiris had barely any knowledge of the current politics, and certainly didn’t know that the real prince was one of her traveling companions.  But she realized that whatever the vision meant, she couldn’t do it by wandering randomly through the wilderness, and decided to stay with the party to learn more.

Osiris also has a recurring dream, the detail of which are hazy and change a bit each time, in which knights in black, silver, and gray are charging out of a fog, defending something.  She travels to find the meaning of the dream, which she thinks is that she is to found an order of knights to defend whatever it is.

One last note:  Asia is a very serious D&D player, which is good, considering that except for Robert, the rest of the party is not dedicated (at least until the addition of Mahdi).  He definitely helps in keeping the party on track, though he often overly analytical.  Even simple tasks like setting up alarm spells before going to sleep can take 30 minutes, as he maps out the perfect placement of the spells with reference to the terrain.  On the one hand, I often need to push the party past these things to keep it going smoothly (and remove the boredom for the other players), but on the other hand, sometimes, when I don’t have enough material for a session, I can usually count on Asia (and Mac playing Mahdi) to protract something out long enough to cover for me.