#arluk

[real-live-human]

event horizon: or, what happens when your wizard manages to speedrun past the defence system at the heart of the record of all of existence

[noctylumi]

[lu-tens-turtleduck]

Reposting some of the art on my main blog, here's Zhao and Arluk!!

[real-live-human]

they did it :')

[real-live-human]

fox to hyena communication

[real-live-human]

sweet dreams.

alternate caption: pov you didn't interrupt the lich's spell in time and now your fighter is looking at you like this

ok so i believe i've already at least mentioned on here arluk's whole thing about being trapped in roguelike hell and believing they're actually dead. send an ask if you want more clarification ig but the key thing here is that dreams have a lot of religious significance in their culture, and ever since the first death (a few months prior to this incident) they haven't been able to dream at all when they sleep. so needless to say that's been weighing on them a lot.

anyways, fast forward to taking on the floor 2 boss fight again, in what would turn out to be our first win against it. unfortunately, arluk got smacked with a dominate spell and due to a high spell dc on the lich's part and awful dice luck on mine, spent the entire rest of the fight as "the scariest enemy on the field" per the gm.

the additional context, though, is i was wondering what that actually felt like for them - dominate isn't like a charm effect where it just makes you want to act differently but you still basically have free will, it is literally "the controlling enemy gets to dictate exactly which actions you take." anyways the funniest (defined loosely) option i came up with is that it felt like a dream. you know how when you're dreaming (unless you become lucid) a bunch of weird shit happens but you aren't really capable of questioning or thinking about it too hard? dominate is a lot like that.

anyways this also means that after a couple rounds arluk recognises that feeling: it's been fucking months, but they're actually having a dream! this might mean they were wrong, that they aren't really dead, that they haven't lost their connection to their god! ... except even after realising that, they still can't seem to tell what's going on or why, unlike when you normally realise you're dreaming. before they can try to work out what the hell that means, the lich finally goes down, and they wake up to the taste of their allies' blood.

[real-live-human]

subtle thing we greatly enjoy doing with arluk in-game: whenever we run into a seemingly friendly npc, for the first or first few times, arluk will just quietly place themself so their protection aura is covering the rest of the party. just in case

[real-live-human]

sits up in a cold sweat. i Just remembered that citadel of glass started during my really intense isat fixation and that a not insignificant part of arluk's characterisation that has only just now come to fruition was to some degree based on odile