#vera darbek

[aquadestinyswriting]

Hiya :)

From that tea ask game, for the most recent and therefore least fleshed out OC:

Lapsang Souchong: If your OC was a scented candle, what would they smell like?

Peppermint: How does your OC handle the cold?

Rooibos: What kind of lighting does your OC prefer? Dim, bright, moody, secret fourth thing?

Hi Dru, thanks very much for the asks. The most recent OC is Vera, so I shall be answering these for her.

Lapsang Souchong: If your OC was a scented candle, what would they smell like?

I'm not usually very good at these kinds of questions, but I'm actually pretty good about scents for some bizarre reason. I think Vera would smell a little of incense (as most clerics would) but mostly of fresh ink and parchment as she is mostly used to carry reports back and forth. I think there might also be a little bit of barley in there as well, thanks to the influence of Throff in her life, despite her being a strict Moradhir.

Peppermint: How does your OC handle the cold?

Vera, like most dwarves who have spent the vast majority of their lives within Fangthane, doesn't do very well with the cold since Fangthane itself is at a relatively constant temperature. She can adapt to it fairly easily though, which means she doesn't complain about it for too long.

Rooibos: What kind of lighting does your OC prefer? Dim, bright, moody, secret fourth thing?

Even though dwarves can see perfectly well in the dark, writing out reports requires either bright light or total darkness, not dim and dingy as that tends to cause eyestrain. Vera tends to prefer it bright since it means that she can (almost literally) 'switch off' when she's done with work. It helps her brain to be able to delineate between work and home, and working in bright light helps with that since most of Fangthane is reasonably dim to dark.

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[aquadestinyswriting]

Funnily enough, 🍀 right back at you. I'm always really fascinated by the process of creating characters for DnD, mostly because it's collaborative, and idk, at least in my experience, you might start off with a concept, but you're not necessarily going to end with it thanks to DM intervention, haha. Tl;dr, 🍀 for as many characters that are yours and that you're willing to talk about? :D

I am so, so sorry it took this long to answer this Jax. December was.... a month. I am fully back now though and will finally get around to answering this. Question is from this ask game.

🍀 - What originally inspired the OC?

Alright, so I will answer only for those OCs I was the creator of and not for those whose lore I expanded upon from the original DM of the campaign. There aren't quite as many as you'd think in all honesty.

Selene: I won't lie. Selene was totally inspired by the character of Evelyn from The Mummy (1999). When I was asked if I wanted to join my then new boyfriend's D&D group, I knew instantly what kind of character I wanted to play since I loved the concept of a character that started out as a librarian going out on an adventure and getting in way over her head since seeing Rachel Weiss play Evelyn in that movie. Of course since Selene was my first ever roleplay character, her personality is still very much a reflection of my own, though it has since been fleshed out quite a bit since she was retired.

Chrackle: What is a wizard without a familiar? I knew I wanted a corvid as a familiar as the typical image is of a wizard with a raven. However, I wanted something a little different and already knew that unlike ravens, magpies could identify themselves in mirrors (animal behaviour classes at uni for the win here). I loved the idea of having a familiar that was a little smarter than average, could speak in a limited manner and could potentially get his wizard into trouble by stealing valuable stuff any time he could get away with it. Chrackle's personality was mostly developed through gameplay and he was much more set in stone by the time that first campaign (for me) ended.

Meredith: Merri was actually kind of inspired by one of my fellow roleplayers. He is a devout Christian, and his mannerisms playing his own clerics during the previous campaign gave me a little bit of insight into how I wanted to play mine. The rest is mostly based on myself at the time and quite a lot more on the person I aspired to be. it helps a little that, while lapsed, my father was brought up Catholic, so I also incorporated some of the stuff he told me about his time as a choir boy and being involved in that community as the DM was quite clear about his inspirations for the Temple of Moradin.

Yoruk: Yoruk was created quite a lot later than Meredith was. At the time, I was writing Meredith's backstory and wasn't sure if I wanted her to already be betrothed to someone before leaving on her adventure (mostly because I was umm-ing and ah-ing about shipping Merri with Elowyn at the time. Talk about the slowest of slow burn potential relationships). Then Yoruk went ahead and introduced himself and his relationship with his mother (who was an npc mentioned by the DM at one point) and I went 'Yes!' (which then, sadly, put paid to the idea of Merri getting with Elowyn at all). I will not lie; Yoruk's relationship with his mother is one that is partially inspired by my own fractious relationship with my mum. Thankfully my upbringing was not nearly that bad, but I did project onto him a teeny bit.

Skarld Firetome: Firetome was heavily inspired by Frollo in Disney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame (and a little bit by all the huge controversies regarding the leaders of the catholic church that was big news for a while at the time). I needed someone semi-competent in the upper echelons of the Church of Moradin in Fangthane for the plot I was weaving once I took over the reigns of the campaign and those inspirations helped a lot. Hubs then helped me out by pointing me towards the Wordbearers Legion from Warhammer 40k lore, which helped fill out the rest and gave me the idea of Firetome secretly being part of a demonic cult working to undermine the church he purportedly worked for (fuck you, Erebus :P). I am working to fill out what he was up to in the leadup to Fangthane's Folly and adding in hints of him working with Darkhide and the Cabal (which, I acknowledge, we still need to come up with a new name for at some point) to tie the overall story together a bit better.

Vera: The last OC I'll talk about here (or we'll be here forever otherwise) and the most recent OC I've created. I'm not too sure what inspired Vera if I'm quite honest. Or at least what specifically inspired her. It seems like she was inspired by all the 'Strong Woman' main characters in popular teenage fantasy fiction that I grew up reading and watching and that still persists to this day. Of course, since she's technically a background character, I doubt we'll see too many of the stereotypes associated with this kind of character, but you might see a few and I'll try to keep them to a minimum as I work out more of what she's actually about. Needless to say, I wanted a mirror to Meredith that stayed around Fangthane while everything was going down in the background of the campaign events. As a result she's suspicious, but didn't quite know the extent of what was going on until Merri showed back up in Fangthane and got herself caught.

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