One of the things that has fascinated me this campaign is how ready-built Ashton is to be a leader, but how Taliesin plays low charisma to constantly stop them from being one. Ashton has great ideas, and tends to be one of the two most grounded members of the group. He has excellent moral intelligence (far better than they’ll admit), and one-on-one Ashton excels at talking people down from their worst points.
But they also are in constant pain, and they’ve spent their entire life being told that they’re worthless as anything other than a slab of muscle. So they silence themselves. And the more unfamiliar the environment or the more people around them, the more they clam up.
Last episode was one of the best examples I’ve seen yet. Ashton was almost entirely silent this episode. He admitted to hating camping, likely to do with the chronic pain, but also to do with the unfamiliar environment. Ashton is a city barbarian through and through, and they thrive in cities. They are far more confident in cities, even when they don’t know them as well as Jrusar or Bassuras. But the wilderness? On an unknown continent? He’s already on the wrong foot.
And then they go to the village, and before they know it things are spiraling. It turns out this place was a powderkeg waiting to blow, with two factions that are, at least from appearance, both highly suspect. The Vasselheim faction are clearly outsiders come here to impose their culture on the locals, taking too much from their land, bleeding their farms dry for distant tribute, and recently sending more and more armed thugs and more religious oppression. Add to that the Flameguide being clearly an asshole who won’t listen to reason (very classic lawful stupid paladin, and I agree with Emily, likely a Conquest Paladin, some of the worst to deal with), and the Dawnfather folks are clearly assholes who aren’t wanted there.
But though the townsfolk in general seem sympathetic and just want to live free and worship as they will, their charismatic leader also seems to be full-on with Ruby Vanguard ideology. She wants to tear the gods down, mistaking gods who are behind a divine gate and can’t interact with humans without a great deal of faith, with the corrupt religious institutions that sprung up around them. But at the same time she gives a distinct feeling of hating those institutions because she’s not them. She flat-out said that she didn’t want to stop with the town. She wanted her own elemental worship to take over the world.
It’s a great set-up, because the townsfolk just want to be free, so they’re throwing in their lot with someone who has grand and terrible ambitions. It’s Ludinus writ small, and playing out on an intimate scale.
And the team wasn’t really given any choice. Once they were exploring the options, they were already sort of stuck with the elementalists. And they mostly just want to prevent casualties, but the people in charge of those potential casualties have no care for the people who could die. They see only glory and their own faith.
Orym spoke up, because that’s what Orym does. But Orym’s confidence has been shaken, and there was little to no way he was going to manage to sway two fanatics. Denise sort-of spoke up, as did Laudna, both trying but both also failing. Bor’Dor and Prism were both basically on the side of ‘let’s fuck up the gods, whoo!’ from the off, Bor’Dor because he doesn’t really know what’s going on, and Prism out of academic bitterness. In another life, she would have been hard-core Rube Vanguard fairly easily.
And then there’s Ashton, silent in the back, deeply uncomfortable, surrounded by an elementalist group that feels a lot like a cult with a charismatic leader. How much must he be associating this with the Hishari? Does it have any connection? Some remnant faction? Are they fighting on the side of his nightmares?
But they say nothing. They stay silent. They are barely noticed, despite being a big rock person in an elemental-worshipping town. People should be all over them in fascination, but they aren’t, because Ashton has practically vanished. They needed to speak up. They needed to stand with Orym to try to de-escalate things, but instead they are sneaking in the background. Why? Lack of confidence. Self-loathing. Fear. This is where Asthon’s low charisma springs from: they will never trust themselves to do the right thing, to say the right words, to really step up and be counted. So they hide, and things crumble.
