A message sent to Audrey Whitman, describing a character I would have liked to enter into her game. She had asked me to design "a non-munchkin character, with an interesting plot." That sort of thing makes me nervous - I've had bad experiences with "characterization" DMs in the past - but I had an idea I liked, so I wrote it up. Audrey wrote back to me saying she liked it and would try to work me into the plot. But then I never heard from her again. Her game runs on Saturdays, and I'm busy then, so I could not play in it anyway; but, I'm still kind of bummed about it. ================== Okay. Here is an elaboration of Cydon's character background. It contains plot worthy of a Troubleshooter. Before reading this, you should look at the Alienist prestige class, in the Tome and Blood sourcebook. Right! So, Alienists are magic users who are obsessed with "herculean minds that contemplate insanity in the Far Realms where mortal minds must not go", et cetera. My character, Cydon, was originally described as an Alienist: one who studies aliens. But that's boring. Cydon is actually the minion of an alien. ========== Story ============ Our story begins with KttLWrGt, one of the aforementioned Herculean minds. KttLWrGt is quite thoroughly insane, but recently it's been contemplating sanity. Maybe it had a brush with a semisane mortal mind and decided to investigate further. Maybe it's just hungry. (Or curious. When you're a disembodied mind, "curious" and "hungry" are quite similar.) At any rate, it reached out from the Far Realms to see what this "reality" thing was all about. And what plane would it naturally encounter first? The most obvious plane to a dimensional traveller would be the plane that was most active, the plane that had the most connections to other worlds and other planes. Such a plane would be an ideal place for an invasion, erm, observation mission: there would be so many aliens and foreigners there already that nobody would notice if a few of them were just a little more alien than others. Sounds like Sigil to me. (Uh, doesn't it? I don't really know. I _think_ that's the kind of world you're using.) So, KttLWrGt sent a group of emissaries from the Far Reaches to Sigil. They travelled through the Way Out There Region to the Medium Area, got to the Nearby Sector, and finally popped out of a gate in the city. They introduced themselves to some nearby citizens, told them a bit about the Far Reaches, tried to shake tentacles, and were mildly surprised when the citizens all went violently insane. ("Hey, GrTHHmqP - are they supposed to be thrashing about and chewing on the walls? Maybe it's their greeting ritual - think we should do the same?") They tried the same thing with another batch of citizens, just in case there had been something wrong with the first batch, but no better luck. They were looking for a more public place, where they could introduce themselves to everyone at once, when a group of citizens wearing robes introduced them to the concept of "dying". They got that one quite well - on the first try, in fact. KttLWrGt, being insane, wasn't really offended by this. It whipped up another observation team, this time with more emphasis on the "observation" and less on the "contact". The information that team sent back ("The natives don't seem to like our language. Or our tentacles, for some reason.") was enough to give the third team a decent chance of blending in with the populace. My character, cYdtHNkR, is the human-looking half of the third team. He's a fairly low-level [entity descriptor, incomprehensible to humans] that shows a good understanding of concepts such as "reality" and "shape". His mission is to explain to people about KttLWrGt and its desire to know more about reality. He'd like to arrange a situation where lots of people, every day, would make psionic contact with KttLWrGt and tell it about their lives... In other words, cYdtHNkR is a cleric of KttLWrGt, out to recruit followers. (Of course, they're not really using these names. The second observation team picked up a list of "common Common names": Jim, Bob, Ed, Kate, Sue, Tom, Bill. cYdtHNkR introduces himself as "Jim, the cleric of Bob.") ========== Plan ============= The second member of Jim's team, Ed, is more experienced than Jim in the ways of the Far Realms, but this whole "reality" thing is still new to him. He's barely able to hold a fixed shape at all, and his only stable shape looks a lot like a slimy octopus anyway, which isn't really an improvement as far as the "blending in" thing goes. So Ed mostly stays in the basement of the inn where Jim is staying, being his slimy octopus. Nobody really looks down there, and Ed tries to keep the slime to a minimum so nobody will be too disturbed. Ed is a psionicist. (Uh, I actually haven't read the Psionics handbook. What I mean by the above statement is, Ed can read minds.) Being in a dark basement all day doesn't bother him, because he can explore the neighborhood with his mind. Thus far he's learned about grass, and rocks, and buildings, and also about small tasty rodents that live in basements. Ed also tried once or twice to make contact with the humans that lived nearby, but they kind of freaked out and started screaming about tentacles, and since then he has limited himself to animals. (The cats and dogs near Jim's inn have been walking around looking shell-shocked recently, wondering how many limbs they're supposed to have.) Jim is trying to find people who want to learn about Bob; when he finds them, he's going to bring them to the basement and let them have a mind-to-mind chat with Ed. Ed will try to take it very slowly so as not to scare them. But it pretty much has to be Ed that introduces the serious acolytes to the Way of Bob, because Common really doesn't have the words to describe it. A good start would be for Ed to teach converts the Alien language. (Damn, I'm making a reference to a Heinlein book here, aren't I? I swear it's coincidental.) After that, Ed would want to forge a link between their minds and Bob's so that they can personally communicate with Bob. From this it's an easy step to their becoming clerics of Bob themselves... Of course, this process is likely to drive most of them somewhat insane, and insanity is usually considered to damage one's Wisdom score, so they might not make very _effective_ clerics without a rules adjustment. ============ Character ============== Jim is new to the Material Plane, and one of the things that interests him most is material. He loves the way he can make something with his hands, and then leave it somewhere, and when he comes back it will still be there! Well, unless somebody else had taken it in the meantime. But he's been watching his stuff pretty carefully, and he's seen no signs at all of sentience in anything that didn't have it already. Jim probably has a rank in each of several Craft skills - or he could be making things unskilled, that would be just as much fun. Jim likes to introduce himself to new people and tell them about Bob. Usually they look at him funny, but he's come to expect this. He asks people about their lives, what they do, what they want, stuff like that. Sometimes he suggests ways that Bob might be able to improve their lives. Jim also likes to shake hands - something else he didn't get to do in the Far Realms. As far as skills go, Jim is very interested in the Diplomacy skill, since that is the skill that is used to convince people to worship Bob. Jim hasn't actually tried to introduce anyone to Ed yet. Maybe he's a little scared that they'll freak out and try to kill him, so he's putting it off. Jim is _not_ evil; he is true neutral. He doesn't want to hurt people, just to talk to them. It's not his fault that talking to them drives them insane. ============ Recent Events ============ Jim has only been in the city for a few days, and he's spent most of that time getting moved in and figuring out how things work. He wanted to buy a house to serve as a meeting-place, but houses turned out to be really expensive ("You want HOW many little pieces of yellow metal? Well, if I see any lying around I will let you know..."), so instead he found a quiet inn run by a slightly senile old woman. The innkeeper didn't seem interested in his stories about Bob ("I know all about Bob, sonny, he's the grocer down the street. Known him for thirty-four years, I have, since he was just a wee smidgen of a lad. Surprised us all when he took up grocering, he did - we thought he'd grow up to be one of them wizards! But as I always used to say to Fendel, his dad..."), and she also reacted poorly when Ed tried to touch her mind while she was asleep, but she had plenty of empty rooms and was happy to let Jim stay in one. Jim spent most of his second day talking with her, trying to find out everything he could about life in the Material Planes, but after a day of hearing gossip about her neighbors he decided that enough was enough, and maybe Bob would like to get information from a more interesting range of people. Since then, Jim has been wandering through Sigil looking for interesting people. He wasn't wandering for long at all before he came across the party. They looked like a very disparate group of (hopefully) competent people, and Jim was very curious as to what they were doing. He decided to introduce himself and follow them around for a while... ============ Rules =============== The characters I initially proposed all fit fully within the rules. As a munchkin, I feel it's dishonorable for me to gain benefit by asking the DM to make exceptions. But this is not a munchkin character, and some of the stuff I described above can't really be implemented using the standard rules. I would like the fact that Jim is an alien (not a human) to have some in-game effect. I would like there to be some in-game effect when Jim teaches people the Alien language, when they become linked to Bob, and as they become insane. I'm going to suggest some effects that I would like to have happen, but this a bit of a conflict of interest. All that really matters is that _something_ noticeable should happen. And, um, it should not be a strictly negative noticeable thing, because then it will be difficult for me to persuade people that they should worship Bob. --- Effects of Jim being an Alien --- Jim's true form is as a ghastly mass of writhing tentacles. However, when Jim is on the Material Plane, he can appear as a creature from that plane. (See the Alienist description, page 47, under "Pseudonatural Creatures".) Page 47 lists a bunch of other stuff that makes pseudonatural creatures different from normal creatures. That list is intended for creatures, not for players. I would like to apply it (or some of it) to Jim anyway, with some ECL if necessary. That list does not explicitly list the drawbacks of being a pseudonatural creature. Some obvious drawbacks are: - Jim is not human, though he does appear human. He doesn't get an extra feat, and he doesn't get extra skill points at each level. He probably doesn't have a favored class, either, though that will not be important in this game. - Jim is from a plane where material does not exist. He starts with no gold. Presumably he can form pieces of himself into clothing. - Jim is an outsider, not a humanoid. This means the following: - Jim is vulnerable to certain spells (Protection from Good/Law/Chaos/Evil, Magic Circle against the above, etc.) that specifically target outsiders. - Jim is not affected by certain spells (notably, Charm Person and Hold Person) that specifically target humanoids. - Jim cannot be raised or resurrected. The monster manual (page 6) doesn't say anything about reincarnation, but that probably doesn't work either. - Jim has 60 feet of darkvision. One other thing: Jim can assume his original form as a standard action. (Again, this is Page 47, "Alternate Form", if you're willing to allow it.) This makes him go all slimy and sprout tentacles all over. It would be cool if he could transform partway (ie, sprout just one tentacle, or an extra eyeball or mouth, or something). Jim thinks this would be a nice way to sell other people on the advantages of knowing Bob: "Just think - what if you really _needed_ an extra tentacle for something? Well, if you worship Bob, you can grow one - it's as easy as this!" --- Effects of Learning the Alien Language --- It would be cool if people who spoke Alien could sprout a tentacle or eye or something, once per day. The knowledge they gain opens their minds to new possibilities for their material forms. Or something. Or they could gain, say, one point of acid and electricity resistance. Or a much weakened form of the True Strike ability (+2 once per day, instead of +20). In any case, the knowledge should sear some other knowledge out of their mind: loss of two skill points, randomly selected. Learning a language is worth two skill points (see the "Speak Language" skill), so this balances out. And, of course, they start going insane. --- Effects of Becoming Linked to Bob --- Becoming linked to Bob should grant some part of the psuedonatural template. It also means that the person in question spends an hour per day praying to Bob, telling it about his/her experiences and answering its questions. I imagine this could drive someone insane pretty fast. --- Effects of Losing Sanity --- I think the "Mad Certainty" and "Insane Certainty" phobias described on page 46 of the Alienist stuff are nice. There are all kinds of mental dysfunctions you can inflict on players. And, of course, they could always just lose Wisdom points. =================================================