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yubishines) wrote2015-07-24 08:53 pm
yubishines) wrote2015-07-24 08:53 pm
Entry tags:
13th age: shrike
Stop naming all your characters after birds, they say. YOU DON'T OWN ME I reply.
OC fleshing out, trying to figure out where she comes from and so on -- 13th Age as a setting is kind of more broad strokes than anything, leaving you to make up the fiddly details. Shrike is a tiefling brewmaster, sort of a monk/drunken-fist class. She's the cheerist, if mildly incoherent, person in the party who gets along with everyone, but since everyone in 13th Age has their little pet issue (the "one unique thing"), it's not all sunshine.
Hint: Look for hovertext.
The family legend is that your great-grandfather was (is?) a proper demon, crawled out of the Abyss with dirty great horns and wings and digitigrade legs and everything. By all accounts, he was quite happily married to your human great-grandmother, despite the whole "being stranded on another plane of existence." You sort of wish you could have met her. Family legend also goes that her side of the family lived on the outskirts of Foothold, dangerously close to the Hell Marsh -- presumably the parts of it that aren't actively vomiting up stygian horrors from beyond the pale, you were never clear on the details -- and everyone knows that people who enter the marsh don't always come out the same.
So maybe it comes from both branches of the family tree. Who knows? Like many legends, it's the parts they left out that are the most interesting.
Anyway, despite the origins, you're not ashamed of your family. Sure, a distressing number of your relatives have flocked under the Diabolist's banner. You know for a fact that one of them is a cultist priestess. Family reunions are awkward. Even more awkward is the one cousin who declared that siding with the forces of evil was mad, found himself a sword and shield, and stormed off to First Triumph. He stopped writing home after a week. You think he's still alive and actually a guardsman now, which is a lot more worrisome than if he were rotting in a dungeon. You try not to think about it.
If there is one characteristic that brings your family together, it's an understanding that everyone has their own path to walk, no matter how weird, no matter how many screaming arguments it's going to cause. Great-Grandma decided to marry an actual literal devil, so hey, follow your dreams and see where they lead, they say. So when you turned to your parents and said, you know, I don't really think I'm cut out for the army after all, they nodded and helped you get apprenticed to a local chef.
From there you ended up in Horizon, with your own restaurant/pub, taking catering orders for minor nobility and serving beer to university students, working eighteen-hour days most weeks. A success story by any measure, even though you sometimes wondered if this really was an easier route than signing up to be cannon fodder.
Contrary to popular belief, tieflings are not generally immune to fire. Instead, cooks learn to handle things straight out of the oven without flinching, because with orders piling up and twenty other things to do at once, there's no time to waste be fussy. You still enjoy the look on people's faces when you sail out of the kitchen carrying hot plates barehanded that (they think) would blister an ordinary person. For fun, you include a few hot curries and novelty spicy drinks in the menu. Just to play up the illusion.
There's something about cooks. Maybe it's genetic, maybe it's cultural (eating being a social activity and you're the one providing for it), maybe there's something to that morphic resonance blather you hear the university mages arguing about all the time. You're not really sure. But cooks, even the most sullen, antisocial, cantankerous of them all, tend to like people. Because you do! You really do believe that most people in the world mean well. Even your relatives -- they think that what they're doing is right. And there you were, in arguably the most interesting city in the world, feeding and nourishing people who go off to study the secrets of the universe or whatever it is mages do. It's practically a vocation.
And you knew you were exactly where you meant to be in the world.
And you never dreamed of anything else out of life.
And you lived happily ever after.
OC fleshing out, trying to figure out where she comes from and so on -- 13th Age as a setting is kind of more broad strokes than anything, leaving you to make up the fiddly details. Shrike is a tiefling brewmaster, sort of a monk/drunken-fist class. She's the cheerist, if mildly incoherent, person in the party who gets along with everyone, but since everyone in 13th Age has their little pet issue (the "one unique thing"), it's not all sunshine.
Hint: Look for hovertext.
The family legend is that your great-grandfather was (is?) a proper demon, crawled out of the Abyss with dirty great horns and wings and digitigrade legs and everything. By all accounts, he was quite happily married to your human great-grandmother, despite the whole "being stranded on another plane of existence." You sort of wish you could have met her. Family legend also goes that her side of the family lived on the outskirts of Foothold, dangerously close to the Hell Marsh -- presumably the parts of it that aren't actively vomiting up stygian horrors from beyond the pale, you were never clear on the details -- and everyone knows that people who enter the marsh don't always come out the same.
So maybe it comes from both branches of the family tree. Who knows? Like many legends, it's the parts they left out that are the most interesting.
Anyway, despite the origins, you're not ashamed of your family. Sure, a distressing number of your relatives have flocked under the Diabolist's banner. You know for a fact that one of them is a cultist priestess. Family reunions are awkward. Even more awkward is the one cousin who declared that siding with the forces of evil was mad, found himself a sword and shield, and stormed off to First Triumph. He stopped writing home after a week. You think he's still alive and actually a guardsman now, which is a lot more worrisome than if he were rotting in a dungeon. You try not to think about it.
If there is one characteristic that brings your family together, it's an understanding that everyone has their own path to walk, no matter how weird, no matter how many screaming arguments it's going to cause. Great-Grandma decided to marry an actual literal devil, so hey, follow your dreams and see where they lead, they say. So when you turned to your parents and said, you know, I don't really think I'm cut out for the army after all, they nodded and helped you get apprenticed to a local chef.
From there you ended up in Horizon, with your own restaurant/pub, taking catering orders for minor nobility and serving beer to university students, working eighteen-hour days most weeks. A success story by any measure, even though you sometimes wondered if this really was an easier route than signing up to be cannon fodder.
Contrary to popular belief, tieflings are not generally immune to fire. Instead, cooks learn to handle things straight out of the oven without flinching, because with orders piling up and twenty other things to do at once, there's no time to waste be fussy. You still enjoy the look on people's faces when you sail out of the kitchen carrying hot plates barehanded that (they think) would blister an ordinary person. For fun, you include a few hot curries and novelty spicy drinks in the menu. Just to play up the illusion.
There's something about cooks. Maybe it's genetic, maybe it's cultural (eating being a social activity and you're the one providing for it), maybe there's something to that morphic resonance blather you hear the university mages arguing about all the time. You're not really sure. But cooks, even the most sullen, antisocial, cantankerous of them all, tend to like people. Because you do! You really do believe that most people in the world mean well. Even your relatives -- they think that what they're doing is right. And there you were, in arguably the most interesting city in the world, feeding and nourishing people who go off to study the secrets of the universe or whatever it is mages do. It's practically a vocation.
And you knew you were exactly where you meant to be in the world.
And you never dreamed of anything else out of life.
And you lived happily ever after.