D&D 5e Character Concept: Ripple, Peace Cleric of Eldath
You know when you start idly sketching a D&D character based not on anything mechanical, but on, like. Potential roleplay details?
One of my favourite D&D deities is a Faerûnian deity named Eldath. (I have a whole post on her here). Eldath, the Quiet One, is a goddess of peace and still waters. A goddess of comfort, healing, and calm, whose blessed waters heal the sick, cure madness, and comfort the dying. She is not only a goddess of peace untouched, but also a goddess of peace for those who have known violence. A goddess of silence and peace and recovery, whose ‘temples’ are pools and glades where people can sit in quiet reflection, and leave symbols of past conflicts and violence as offerings and symbols of letting go.
And I was thinking … If one was a cleric of Eldath, what would one’s prayers and rituals look like?
Eldath doesn’t have a centralised priesthood. Most of her priests are itinerant, wandering around caring for her shrines and trying to maintain places of quiet and serenity. And without a centralised priesthood, I’m guessing most of her faithful basically have their own little idiosyncratic ways of communing with her. Eldath is a goddess of peace, and contemplation, and water.
So I was thinking. Prayers to Eldath probably look a lot like meditation. Just … reaching within yourself for the place of stillness where the goddess is closest. Not just for the sake of communion, but also for your own sake. Finding peace, building peace. Carrying it within you. And I feel like there should be an element of water. A natural pool, if there is one near you, but if there isn’t … I feel like a cleric of Eldath would try to always have Create or Destroy Water prepared. Carry a vessel, a bowl, just to make a little pool to centre yourself at. Thaumaturgy, maybe, to create a small sound of rippling water.
So I’m here, sitting inside a character, just imagining them fumbling a bowl out of their pack, after who knows what sort of a day, placing it gently on the ground beside their bedroll, reaching for their waterskin or spending their last spell slot if they happen to have one left, just to make a little pool. Breathing in, breathing out. Maybe some thaumaturgy, the sound of water, just to wash away the day. A ritual, maybe, of resting one hand atop the water, just touching it, just feeling the cool of it, letting the sensation leech the mind away from its troubles and down into the stillness. Slowly sinking the hand deeper, letting it submerge, letting the stillness well up and over them. Feeling, somewhere cool and light and distant, that quiet font of stillness keeping them company.
And I’m sitting there, inside the shaking stillness of this unknown character, and I’m thinking … who are you? Why did you need peace so badly? Why do you still need peace so badly? And why are you out here, adventuring, among all these horrors, when you still need peace so very badly?
“Typical offerings are broken weapons or items that are remembrances of arguments, which the faithful discard while making a wish for peace in the future. Many of those who favor Eldath are pacifists or people who are troubled by violence they have witnessed or experienced.”
Eldath’s faithful are often those who have known violence. Witnessed it, experienced it. Committed it? They offer up broken weapons, to symbolise letting go of that violence and hoping for future peace. Who needs peace more than those shaped so very thoroughly by its lack?
A character born in violence. Literally born? Or perhaps reborn.
My mind did land on the Reborn lineage. Because, let’s be honest, most D&D characters are deeply traumatised. It’s a stereotype for a reason. I could have gone with something a little less traumatic, a mercenary, anything, but I do … I do enjoy horror. So. Someone who not only lived with violence, but died to it, and was reborn from its embrace.
One of the suggested origins for Reborn is: “After clawing free from your grave, you realized you have no memories except for a single name.” But we’re in dire need of Eldath’s comfort, so let’s go a step beyond ‘grave’ and say we clawed our way free of a pile of corpses. Born from the blood. Amnesiac. Horrified. Staggering free from a pit.
A person of violence. Still in broken armour, the armour they died in. I’m just thinking of that oft-ignored line from the PHB regarding starting equipment: “You decide how your character came by this starting equipment. It might have been an inheritance, or goods that the character purchased during his or her upbringing. You might have been equipped with a weapon, armor, and a backpack as part of military service. You might even have stolen your gear.” Eldath’s faithful are usually pacifist. How did they come by armour? Well, from that life of violence they were fleeing. The life they died in.
And look. Look. While we are in shaking horror land, clawing free of graves and in desperate need of peace. I want it to have marked her? The blood, the violence. Literally marked her. Reborn often bear less-than-literal signs of their deaths. I want her to be corpse-pale, tallow-white, but I want the blood to have seeped under her skin. Like birthmarks, or tattoos. Livid red splotches across face and hands and back and chest and head. The blood is under her skin.
And it’s under her heart, too. Reborn suffer discontinuity. They’re often amnesiac. Memories come in flashes to them. And the flashes that have come to her suggest … Well. Suggest that she was very much not a woman of peace. There’s a well at her core, and it’s not a well of peace. She has moments of rage. Titanic, livid, resentful savagery. Sourceless, meaningless. Just flashes. But they terrify her.
I want the bloodmarks, the tattoos, because …
Water washes away the blood. It’s one of the first ways Eldath’s faithful can bring comfort, relief. Washing away the pain, the memory, the dirt. But hers can’t be washed away. She can’t remember it, not properly, not fully. But it’s there. And it cannot be washed away.
Peace can’t be made in spite of what happened to you. It has to be made with it.
Why is she out here? Because she can only make peace with what she once was, who she once was, once she finds out who that is.
And because … Because there are places of peace. They’re small, and they’re fragile, and they have to be so carefully maintained, but they are there. And people deserve to know about them. They deserve to know that peace is possible. It’s hard, and it’s work, and it’s painful, but it’s possible. There are places people can go to put themselves back together. There are people who will help. She isn’t really one of them, she hasn’t got that far herself, but she can at least show people where to go. Keep them alive long enough to get there. She can travel, and she can protect the peaceful places, and she can guide people towards the help that so many of them desperately need.
And as she does, while she does, she can search for the answers she lost inside that pit of blood.
I’m picturing … an elf, or someone who was once an elf. I don’t want one of the stereotypical ‘warlike’ lineages. I don’t want people to be able to look at her and kneejerk think ‘you used to be a monster’. Evil can lurk behind any face. Whatever and whoever she once was, her evil, her rage, her savagery, were likely wholly her own. They might have had a cause, they might not. Maybe it led directly to whatever strange magic brought her back from the grave, or maybe she was just the wrong monster in the right place. That’s … That’s not the point.
The point is facing what she was. What she did. What was done to her.
Peace is not only something you find. Peace is a thing you make, you build. A thing you carry inside you. The stillness waits. The cool touch of water. Her goddess will wait for her. Anyone can find peace, and everyone deserves it. She believes that, or at least hopes for it. She will find out who she was. She will face it down. And she will make a place for peace.
And in the meantime, she’ll help where she can, and she’ll hold to that distant stillness until she can truly find her own.
She was a hermit for a long time, a broken inhabitant of one of Eldath’s quiet shrines. She wears battered armour, once broken and now carefully mended. She doesn’t carry a weapon, or at least none beyond a basic dagger for emergencies. She bears a shield, instead, a wooden shield, the pool and waterfall of Eldath beautifully carved on its face, her holy symbol. There’s a wooden bowl in her backpack, to help her with her prayers, but her shield … her shield is also a little concave. Just a little. Just enough. If all else fails, it’s just curved enough to form a shallow bowl. Her shield and her hope in more ways than one. She keeps the Create or Destroy Water spell always prepared. The red on her hands can’t be washed away when she rests them beneath the water, but that … that’s okay. Or it will be. Some day.
She has a name. It’s not the one she once bore. While she remembers a name, she has no way to know if it was hers, or someone else’s, or even that of the person who killed her. It wasn’t the name she wanted. Not now, not in this life. That was her first true offering to Eldath, the first broken weapon she left beneath the waters. The name she bears now is something else. Better. Different. Cleaner. At least a little bit.
Ripple. The ripples in the water, the gentle eddies. She’s not still enough yet for true peace. Her waters are yet lapping. Maybe even storming. But there’s hope there. The gentle sound of water. There's life. The evidence of presence. Ripples in the water.
Ripple. A Reborn Peace Cleric of Eldath.
Eldath is also a great source of one of the main contradictions of peace, in that if the whole world isn't peaceful you often need to defend it with violence. Now, the devotes of Eldath might be (statistically) more likely to be able to defend themselves, but often that would be giving up the personal hope for peace. Many who could defend themselves may not even want to. The whole 'stepping back into that violence' thing. Can they stop at just this one instance of violence? So who defends the... not the helpless, but the vulnerable. Not vulnerable to getting killed, but vulnerable to being pulled back into that life. I think Ripple would be a good option for that job. She might not be ready to help others find that peace inside themselves, but she can make sure external violence leaves people alone long enough for someone else to help.
