Meet the New Guys: Now with added bonus footage!

Work has been well, work so I haven't been able to finish up the wrap up of our last campaign yet. I'll finish that up on Sunday morning with one more grand post, and then the first session of the new campaign recap should go up Monday afternoon.

In the meantime...

The new characters for our D&D group will be starting their grand adventure on Saturday, so I'm going to go ahead and give a primer on the who is who and what is what.

First we have my character, Soren Ashwind an Aasimar (Human with angelic ancestry) Cleric devoted to the elemental forces of the universe. He had a rough childhood, with a mother killed by dragon fire and a father who's reaction to that tragedy was to become a drunkard. After bouncing around a bit (and his father died from a fire at the jail he was being held in for theft), he found himself in a small seminary in a remote village. He learned the ways of the priesthood, married, and settled down to start a family.

Then his wife gave birth to a son that was definitely not his. The marriage quickly dissolved, and Soren, not able to bear the sight of his ex-wife living with the biological father of what was supposed to be his child, decided to take up a spear and become a wandering priest.


Next, there is Erich's character Kalvik, a Bugbear gladiatorial slave who is fresh off of gaining his freedom by killing his master and guard after he over heard them discussing how he was to be traded to a notoriously cruel slave master for a Minotaur.

Kalvik's life has also been hard, much harder than Soren's in fact. Gnolls slaughtered his tribe and dragged the survivors off to sell into slavery, stopping to eat one of them when they got hungry. Kalvik was sold to a Halfling (Hobbit) slave master who trained him to fight. That same slave master's daughter taught him to read, write, and speak the Halfling language, which is how he learned of his impending trade, which caused him to fight for his freedom.

Then we have Sadimac's Rossthaylock. She's a Killoren, which is a type of faerie that the world made in a fit of grief over the extinction of a fragile plant species. They are a young people, and are just now sending the their first members out to the world at large. She is impetuous, affectionate, and a bit naive. The defining trait of her people is that each day they can take on a different personality aspect: either the Ancient, the Hunter, or the Destroyer.

She has been teleported to "civilization" with all her gear, and her beloved pony, Pony. She is meeting her first people outside of her own kind, and she's already found a bit of trouble...

and now, a the tale of how the Kelorian came to be (by Sadimac):

The Lost Elves

In the year we were born, the wood elves left this island and this is why.

The young of the elven village had a talent for sorcery. When their mainland kinsmen warned of a horrible war and called all the elves to give aid, the village elders sent the youths out of the village to hone their arcane battle skills.

"Prepare to fight," they said. And "take care you do not harm the birds or the worms or the delicate young vines. Be wary of infecting any babes still in womb or egg with unnatural power."

And so the group of mages found a desolate scrub. They saw no tails or leaves. They heard no songs. They could not smell even the smallest hint of turning earth. Being sylvan elves, they were certain The World had given them the keenest senses. Cry for the pride of the elves, who sent not a single druid to temper youthful determination. Laugh with The World for She always has the final word.

All day they blasted, and took notes, and argued, and made plans.

"When the foul army does this, we shall do that. The greatest wizards of the cities will be stunned by our precision, by our deadly force."

Through the starlight they developed secret signals, thinking themselves subtle. But they never saw the seedlings.

What seedlings? This all happened before we were made, so we have no name for them. The sprites tell us they smelled a new smell. The rocks sing only an echo of those seedlings' song. Even the birds cannot find just that shade of green in all the world. They were new, the World's latest offspring, our elder brothers. And they were young, still just two birth-leaves each. And then the ice and fire and lightning flying out of the elves struck them down. Every little one killed. Dream of their screams, dance for their short lives.

Now The World is love and loves all the children upon Him, the elves no less than the mightiest waterfall. But the murder of the seedlings turned love to grief. And in Her grief, The World sent Her hunting beasts to kill the sorcerers in their blankets. She called the village's companions back into the forest. Only the magical beasts born of elven wizardry stayed. She blocked their clerics from harnessing any natural domain. She turned their crops and gardens to dust. She let every beast they hunted escape. The dryads say they saw a unicorn kill his paladin maiden. And the druids who were so neglectful of their duty to guide were stripped of every gift She had given them, returned to a child-like innocence with no knowledge or power.

But The World is love and He loves the sylvan elves, with their careful balance of learning and wisdom. He gave them one last gift. He let them find the scorched field of elven corpses. In that field, they saw vines bearing large fruit. The fruit pulsed with life and sang a song even the densest of them heard. The vines burrowed their feeding suckers into the sorcerers' remains and the village fled, pursued by a primal fear.

"Remember the fear," the fruit sang. "Tell all the humanoids - When you needlessly kill a blade of grass, you poison your kingdoms at their roots. The World is making new children to show you how to heed His call."

In less than a sweet-fly's lifespan, the entire village sailed away. The fruit continued to grow and grow and grow. Soon, the first of us broke through the peels. The birds gave us eggs, the trees gave us flowers, the worms came willingly to our mouths, and so we grew. The World has taught us for sixty-four seasons. We shall go out from this island to see if people have learned the lost elves' lesson.