Post/Author/DateTime	Post
EvilVegan 03-19-07, 03:17 PM	Nessa Everbright, daughter of the head wizard of Glerandale was a promising young gnome. She was the head of her class in all things illusory and was well gnown for her joyous laughter and delightful pranks. She was the friend of everyone in her school and never had a bad word to say about anyone and stood up for herself and others. It was on one particularly ill-fated day that her ever-reaching goodness doomed her to a life of pain and solitude. Nessa and her friends Weeblot and Toninot were out collecting herbs and other reagents for their alchemy classes and Toninot got the clever idea to take the old highway through a desolate, uncharted portion of the wilderness. The old highway was a remnant of an ancient human civilization, the ruins of which dotted the lands in this area. Even Nessa and her family lived in what was formerly a human archmage's sanctum. The highway and forest were not as desolate as she would have hoped. On the return from succesfully collecting her ingredients the trio returned the way they came. Shortly after nightfall their merry band was waylaid by gnoll marauders. The three were captured and taken to a camp and all of them would have died gruesome gnawing deaths if not for the quick thinking and skill of ill-fated Nessa. She managed to get her hands free enough to blast their captors with a color spray and freed her friends quickly. As they ran on their stubby little legs to escape the gnolls, it became clear that the three of them were quickly losing the race with the long-legged gnolls. Nessa turned to face the gnolls and told her younger friends to return to the village for help. That was the last time Weeblot and Toninot saw Nessa complete. The unspeakable horrors that befell poor Nessa are. . . well, unspeakable. Needless to say she's not too stable and has trouble with the whole "talking" and "manipulating with her hands". The gnoll tribal leader was a powerful shaman who not only punished her for outwitting his underlings, he made it so that she'd never be able to cast one of her spells again. They removed her tongue and hands and kept them. They cursed poor Nessa with a hex that prevents her from receiving regenerative assistance. By the time the gnomish militia arrived it was too late, but they did save her life. . . to a degree. Nessa the Silent, however, learned to deal. She quickly learned to focus on spells without verbal or somatic components and used her gnomish heritage to great advantage. She uses silent images to create elaborate descriptive images in place of speech. She disguises her form so that others don't realize she has no hands, mostly for their benefit. Poor Nessa. The gnolls will pay for what they did to poor Nessa. --------- Anyway, I've always wanted to play a character with severe problems. Not the blind swordsman type of problems where they're more powerful because of them, but the "holy crap someone cut off my hand and I can't do magic without increasing the level with metamagics" sort of problem. Thanks to gnomish wizard substitution levels and shadowcraft mage this can actually be a 'decent' character. If anything I think the No Hands and No Tongue thing could probably qualify as flaws. As an added bonus I'm going to give up transmutation and evocation as my schools. Thus no polymorph or alter self to grow new hands. I want a monkey as an animal companion to do my scribing. At high levels I may replace my hands, but I want to be able to function as a wizard without them until at least 13th level. Anyways, any suggestions on where to go with this whole thing?
bagelbyheart 03-19-07, 04:45 PM	No real suggestions, but that is really creative and cool. I like the way you make up for her disabilities. But other than telling you, "good job" I'm kinda useless.
Sands_Of_Chaos 03-20-07, 11:05 PM	Yeah that was a good way to make up for those shortcomings: I'd be a total jackalope about it and turn my no handed guy into a retarded pirate. Warrior: what do you have to offer our party, nomac the handless? Nomac: Yarr!
MrCelsius 03-30-07, 12:33 PM	You might want to consider the Master Specialist from Complete Mage; prestige class you can take at level 4 which, taken as a Master Illusionist, automatically applies Still Spell and Silent Spell to any illusions you cast. It has a few other handy (ooh, sorry :( ) abilities as well. Good job, by the way. Perchance inspired by Lavinia of Titus Andronicus?
EvilVegan 04-01-07, 12:43 PM	You might want to consider the Master Specialist from Complete Mage; prestige class you can take at level 4 which, taken as a Master Illusionist, automatically applies Still Spell and Silent Spell to any illusions you cast. It has a few other handy (ooh, sorry :( ) abilities as well. Excellent suggestion, my only other option was mindbender for the telepathy (which would help a bit). Also, most excellent pun! Good job, by the way. Perchance inspired by Lavinia of Titus Andronicus?Most definitely!
nihility 04-02-07, 01:15 AM	I was actually going to guess that the inspiration was inspired by war crimes. This is a disturbingly common (http://www.crimesofwar.org/archive/archive-sierracase.html) act in times of war, regardless of the nations involved. (http://www.richmond.edu/~ebolt/history398/JohnKerryTestimony.html) There are similar crimes alleged in the ongoing trial (http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/05/news/hague.php) of Kosovo's former prime minister, to cite an example of this sort of thing in the current news. So, yeah, this sort of thing happens a lot. Based on what I've seen, I'd venture that events like this probably go hand-in-hand with human conflict and the dehumanization of your "enemy" - which means, of course, that if you take your RPG evil pure, naked, and uncut, then it probably happens all the time in DnD. Anyway, on a lighter note, a Hand of the Mage (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/magicItems/wondrousItems.htm#handoftheMage) would be a cheap and useful item for eating, dressing, and the like.