So, I’m going to be playing some sort of rpg over carnival with friends. It’s looking like Arcana Unearthed may be a possibility, about which I’d be pretty jazzed. It has some neat ideas. And I keep tossing around character concepts. So I’ll get the big one out of my head, so I can let it go.
One of the races in this world is the mojh. They are essentially humans who undergo a deliberate transformation to become a genderless humanoid/dragon hybrid, smarter, very long lived (hundreds of years), and generally not terribly social. This is the [outline of the] story of one such character:
She was an especially bright woman in a rural farming community. She was the first of her siblings (she had several younger siblings) Her scribe great uncle taught her to read and write as a child. Her parents, were initially indulgent. But, as she neared fertility, they began to discourage her learning, and encourage her to work on her “wifely attributes”. Eventually, it got to the point where she was forbidden to talk to her great uncle, he was forbidden to see her, much smack was handed out. At an early age, she was married off to a younger son of a very well to do farmer.
Her husband was uneducated, illiterate and tremendously insecure. He burned whatever writings of hers he found, and beat her often. She kept on writing, secretively. She became pregnant and gave birth to a daughter, much to her parents’ delight and her own dismay. She feared that her daughter would become trapped in the same circumstances she found herself in. The years wore on. As she passed her twenty second birthday, and her daughter turned 6, she began teaching her to read and write in secret. Her husband discovered the lessons, and beat them both severely. He sent their daughter to far away relatives and locked his wife up.
She managed to escape, and ran away into the wilderness. She found a 3 mojh clutch. Though she found them unsettling, they fed her, and healed her. She told them her story, and it stirred them with sympathy and anger. Taking the long view typical of the mojh, they offered to teach her. And, as she learned, and grew comfortable with them, and their distant, abstract ways, they offered to make her one of them. And she accepted.
After the transformation, it began to learn the ways of the rune thane. Though it never forgave, and never forgot the wrongs done to it when it was still she, and nonmojh.
All the AU races are freaky! Though kudos to them for using the rules for Large and Tiny players. I’m still undecided about the classes. Some are thinly veiled Player’s Handbook classes, but I do like the Spellblade and the Witch.
I much prefer the way they handle spells to the way that straight up d&d 3rd ed does. It reminds me vaguely of the sphere stuff from 2nd ed.
Also, the removal of explicit divine intervention and alignment (though they maintain a throwback or two, like, say, the champion of darkness). For that alone, I likes it.
And the race level thing just gives me a warm tingly