Post/Author/DateTime	Post
Rashomon 02-13-06, 01:35 PM	I've been kicking around the concept of a dragonmarked human House Deneith mercenary, fighting in Cyre during the Last War, who was suddenly changed in whatever freak magical disaster caused the Day of Mourning. He didn't die outright - there's at least some evidence to support the idea that the Day of Mourning was not immediately fatal to all life on contact, in the form of things like the Scavenger Crabs, various mutant creatures, and so on. However, whatever the thing was, it turned him into an elan, an immortal psionic aberration (from the Expanded Psionics Handbook). Of course, he doesn't know about the immortal bit, but he essentially goes from a level 4-6 fighter/ranger to a level 1-2 fighter/ranger, with strange new powers that he doesn't know about and can't control properly. Fortunately, one of them includes eliminating the need for him to eat or drink for a day, so he somehow manages to limp back to civilization after nearly a month of being lost. Unfortunately, things don't get better when he returns to his home in Sharn. When he presents himself to the Defender's Guild run by House Deneith, he is immediately clonked about the head and tossed into jail, being that he was reported MIA, probably dead, and nobody else from his unit survived to tell the story. Worse still, his Least Mark of Sentinel (his Dragonmark) is nonfunctional, serving only as a piece of ornamented skin! (This models the loss of the bonus feat a human suffers when becoming an elan) Unable to prove his identity, he languishes in prison for another month, until someone eventually does a check on him and realizes that yes, he *is* telling the truth. He is set free, apologies are handed out all around, and he gets a job as a bog-standard bodyguard. Life returns to normal. Yeah. Right. The Inspired (a race of humans who willingly gave themselves to dream-demons called the quori) receive a report from one of their tentacles in the Defender's Guild about a strange man who returned from the Day of Mourning with the ability to withstand damage, go without food and drink, and most intriguingly of all, demonstrate psychic potential. They make our hero's capture a priority objective, and within days, he is running for his life through the skyways of Sharn, evading the sinister Inquisitors and Shock Troopers of the Inspired. With his former friends feeding the Inspired details of his every movements, our hero realizes that he must cast his life off and make new allies if he is to avoid the grisly fate of the vivisection table. After leaving Sharn behind in a cloud of distant memories, our hero joins a new mercenary band, and begins to start his life over again. So yes, I'd like to know how I can make this better. Any sub-characters / subplots you could recommend? It's nearly 3 in the morning now and I can't think too clearly any more...
JulesCARV 02-13-06, 05:07 PM	Well... it looks very good. Does he know that it's the Inspired who are after him? Does he know about the Kalashtar? Are any Kalashtar trying to protect or help him?
Rashomon 02-13-06, 09:58 PM	Well... it looks very good. Does he know that it's the Inspired who are after him? Does he know about the Kalashtar? Are any Kalashtar trying to protect or help him? Hmm... I would say yes, he does have a kalashtar contact(s) who are trying to get him out of the city, if for no other reason than to stymie the plans of the Inspired. He doesn't know it's the Inspired pulling the strings of his bosses, but he knows that whoever's after him has strange powers which don't correspond to regular magic or artifice.