Space o' Kase

Art n' OCs. Mainly D&D. Icon by machinedoggerism!

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Got to meet Threnn's mentor, Kitheros, during dnd today

They're very fey, trickstery and whimsical, and act as a sort of guardian for Threnn's home, The Walking Wood, which is a forest thats very mysterious and... alive. And cool Very cool

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Got to meet Threnn's mentor, Kitheros, during dnd today

They're very fey, trickstery and whimsical, and act as a sort of guardian for Threnn's home, The Walking Wood, which is a forest thats very mysterious and... alive. And cool Very cool

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I know she is literally chaotic evil and has canonically in-game eaten a person but to me Threnn is sooo babygirl, actually

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I haven't drawn a whole lot b/c this past month or so has been crazy + my body suuuucks

But the stuff I have drawn I don't wanna post yet b/c dnd spoilers, which helps even less rip

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I doodled this pic of my gnoll cleric Khara a while ago to figure out her fur pattern and seeing it makes me laugh so here you go

censored bc the modern day internet is a hellscape and i don't feel like playing roulette with tumblr's bs

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Some other Threnn party looks pre and post corpse eating (after getting cleaned up and borrowing one of the host's dresses)

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Session before last, we went to a fancy soiree where someone got viscerally murdered in front of Threnn when the two of them were alone.

And later Threnn turned into a bear and ate the body afterwards to hide it, much to the horror + disgust of the rest of the party (Save for @nataliesartprofile 's Kiera who helped give her pieces to eat lmfao)

It was a practical decision, and that means it was totally fine

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Threnn is coming back to our dnd campaign soon, and while she's been gone she's been hanging out with a group of pirates, so she gets a pirate look for now 👀

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A nefarious elf on your shelf for Christmas!

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Since I posted a bit about Threnn, here's what Zephrine has been up to since the 25 years post Campaign 1/Iron Hearts Campaign:

She helped the city of Nyx rebuild for a bit after the defeat of the Midnight Sun before heading back to Tiamyra to resume her duties as Hierarch

She got married to the Tiamyran Archmagister/Viseryn shortly after. It was kind of a political marriage but also they love each other so it's worked out rather nicely

She goes by Zephrine Shaxarn now

Her and Viseryn adopted Arrian, the young assassin who was reincarnated by Zephrine as a fire genasi after being tortured to death by a vampire and helped the party/the Iron Hearts during one of the later campaign arcs

She's enacted a number of reforms in Tiamyra along with the other members of the Triumverate, Sovereign Raishi and Archmagister Viseryn, including increasing social mobility, expanding education amongst the common folk, and adding a nice flower garden in the capital of Tia

The main thing she's been doing though is trying to improve relations with Tiamyra's neighbors. Between the country openly worshiping Tiamat(who is much more nuanced in the Caerllon setting but still considered to be evil) and a tumultuous history, she has her work cut out for her

She's actually had some success with this tho! She's made alliances with her nearest country and neighbor, Tara, and surprisingly a country in the north called Oswin.

She also has good relations with Cordeaux's current empress because she secretly helped put her into power, but that is more complicated bc Empress Josephine is beholden to the nobility which does NOT like Tiamyra

This is kind of interesting because Tiamyra, Oswin and Tara all have a history of being occupied by Cordeaux/ The Cordelais Empire at some point or other, so they've kind of made a bit of a bulwark against it. Cordeaux was also Zeph's homeland where she grew up, so I imagine her new relation to it feels a bit weird

She's most proud of the alliance with Oswin, which was mostly founded upon the idea of sharing magical knowledge. Both Tiamyra and Oswin have a very strong magical education system so they now have a bit of a student exchange program

Thanks to her relationship as a former party member with Encore, who is now Archon Encore, she had good relations with his homeland, the Ascendancy, but unfortunately that has changed recently due to politcal pressure (The Ascendancy is NOT well-liked, they have a rich magical history but recent history has been marked by isolationism and a system of slavery. Encore has legally abolished slavery but it's had unintended consequences as the slavers have moved outwards and now more openly target the Ascendancy's neighbors instead)

In between all of this political stuff and 9 years post-campaign, Zephrine had a SECRET CHILD with Florian, Marciel.

Marciel is only a secret to people outside of Zeph's immediate social circle. She was an oops baby and Zephrine initially didn't know who the father was, so she kept it quiet. When it became clear that Florian was the father and not Viseryn, she made the decision to keep Marciel's existence a secret, both for political reasons so as not to undermine Viseryn, but also for Marciel's safety.

As a result, Marciel has primarily grown up raised by her father and also Therila, who she kinda views as more of a mother than Zephrine. Zephrine visits Marci regularly, and loves her very much, but it's like... complicated.

Surprise! Zeph's actions have had consequences and now that Marciel is a rebellious teenager she's starting to think(somewhat rightfully so) that her mom kinda sucks!

Marci is currently living + training with one of Zeph's partners/close friend Duke Alberic du Raston, in Cordeaux, and has made fast friends with his daughter, Lady Clementine

She also has good relations with her grandfather, Zeph's dad, Marcel! Zeph found out her father was alive but in a fucked up form of stasis in the same campaign arc that she met Arrian, and while its been complicated she's kept in touch. Marciel is his spoiled and very beloved grandchild without question, however (She's even sort of named herself after him after having some Gender Realizations)

Circe, Zeph's second youngest and Viseryn's daughter, isn't born yet but will be in roughly 2 years, with her younger sister Kallista following a few years after that. I'm sure them being publicly known and being raised by their mother and such will have no emotional consequences with Marciel whatsoever

And I think that's roughly it for now! Zephrine's living her life in luxury as a powerful religious and political figure, and thanks to Campaign 2's location being on the opposite side of the continent, the events of said campaign will have little bearing on this

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Oh, yeah, since some stuff about Threnn has been revealed there is a bit of stuff I can talk about!

So far it's been revealed that:

Threnn is 224, and used to be much more powerful (~level 10, currently the party is level 4 and we started at level 2). She's still kinda young for an elf, though

She claims this was due to an accident with an artifact that she touched that sapped her strength. She's also very embarrassed about it

She has an old scar on her chest from being run through with a blade

Her wildfire spirit, Cinderis, is absorbed into Threnn when dismissed, and Threnn can physically feel when they go "unconscious". They're also just a little guy that's very curious about everything

She has a keen interest in history, ruins, ancient artifacts an magics. She has an interest in Moon Elf ruins in particular, and is currently looking for a group of rare ancient items called Moon Blossoms, which enhance the natural magic of areas where they are found if activated

She isn't part of a druid circle and works independently as a sort of treasure hunter when not doing her own personal projects

Our paladin, Radiant, saw that her alignment was evil when he was given essentially a Detect Evil and Good spell from some ambient wild magic and saw that her aura was like thick, choking black smoke

Threnn was told by a slightly omniscient being from the Ethereal Plane that herself and Gelta are fated for... something. Also, that Threnn's sins would one day catch up with her

I'm sure all that means nothing though, Wildfire druids are just misunderstood you guys

Also her staff has an inscription on it written in gnoll, the party have no idea what it says, but the inscription reads:

'Like a star she guides. 

Like the sun she shines

Like a candle, she offers hope in the darkness

Like a fire, she warms me through the night.'

She happens to have a positive rapport with several nomadic gnoll clans that live further north near the Walking Wood, where she lives and is quite protective of them. They sometimes call her the Wandering Flame

She likes wine but is an unpleasant drunk

She treats animals with kindness and compassion but hates most people by default

She hates willful ignorance more than anything in the world

Her most commonly used phrase is "For fuck's sake" :)

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Since Gelta got kidnapped and Threnn's gone to search for her, I'm temporarily playing my gnoll twilight cleric, Khara

She's a wee baby cleric who left her nomadic clan temporarily on a rite of passage where she's learning as much as she can about the world beyond her clan so she can figure out her peoples' place in the bigger picture of things. She worships Verguna, an original deity in the Caerllon setting who is the gnoll goddess of Discipline, Altruism, Dusk and dawn and serves as a good counterpart to the evil god Yeenoghu. (bc races being inherently evil is pretty lame)

She's currently helping the party wrap up some unfinished business while Threnn is gone and is a slightly socially awkward ray of sunshine

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also here's a Zephrine I'll probably never finish

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Thinking about Threnn and screaming crying throwing up b/c there's so much stuff I wanna show/draw/write but I can't because other players follow me on here and there's stuff I don't wanna reveal until it comes up in-game 😭

The Suffering

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I am still Suffering, moreso because Threnn has temporarily left the party for narrative reasons

I am chewing the bars of my enclosure I want to delve into my elf's narrative!!!!!

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wanted to draw my elf

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I'm curious, how did the poly part of the relationship between Therilla and Zeph start? Were there initial problems? Was there some hard negotiations between them? Or they always had the consensus of wanting an open deal?

Zeph brought up the prospect of opening their relationship when they were going to Tiamyra for the first time, and the reality of Zephrine being Hierarch was becoming more tangible.

Zephrine and Therila are both very duty-bound people, with Zephrine being Hierarch of Tiamyra and Therila being a committed member of her druid circle in a different country, Oswin, and the unfortunate side effect of this was that they were either going to have to find a way to make a long distance relationship work long term or break up as their lives went in different directions.

There was also an element of Zephrine realizing that she is a polyamorous person. Before the campaign and meeting Therila, she had very very many relationships, often rather short lived, that tended to fall out not necessarily because she stopped loving the person she was dating but because she would fall in love with someone else, and the idea of polyamory was never really something she'd grown up with so she'd felt she needed to break things off. In her homeland of Cordeaux, polyamory is fairly normalized among the nobility(with conditions), but monogamy is very much the norm amongst the peasantry, and she grew up as a peasant. It was, interestingly, her friend/party member Encore who kind of introduced the idea to her when he was discussing his own open relationship with her. And it just kind of clicked for her, I think, made things make sense in retrospect.

As for Therila 's perspective, when her and Zeph discussed things together, she was somewhat reluctant initially, voicing concerns that Zephrine wouldn't be able to make time for her, and despite being generally chill and a bit of a loner she had an (understandable) anxiety that she'd be forgotten. Zephrine assured her that wouldn't happen, and Therila trusted her intent and ultimately agreed to see how it worked out.

Thankfully for them, it has, though I don't imagine it's been perfect. I know on Zephrine's end she's had to learn what her limits are, and I think post campaign her relationships are more closed on her end of the polycule just due to her being such a generally busy person who can only make time for so many people. Therila for her part was perfectly content to just be with Zephrine but ended up pleasantly surprised by Florian, who's the only other partner of Zeph's that she's involved with romantically.

Thanks for the ask! It's fun to talk about these things and you've reminded me that I should probably finishing writing out how the dnd/Caerllon polycule actually functions, which I meant to do forever ago. 😅

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did a quick wee animation of Nereida's familiar, Conchita, who is very normal and fine