#character wednesday

[kenkuarchive]

Character Wednesday #1: Udonta Karvan

My first ever D&D character, Udonta Karvan the human ranger. 

The full version is available on Patreon including background, spells and so on!

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[thiscatdoesthenanowrimo]

Character Wednesday Thursday!

The ninjas haven’t gotten me yet, but you can’t ever trust that they’re gone for good. Anyways, it seems they’ve left me alone for now, so let’s try this again.

Werohe. She’s somewhere in her early twenties, and lives either in a small cottage in the mountain range that crosses most of the continent or in a tiny appartment in the city depending on the season.

The cottage used to belong to her father. He was a cynical, untrusting man whose only wish in life was to live quietly. He knew damn near every path that existed through the mountains, and ran a very successful business guiding people along these, which was necessary simply because of the sheer number of people who perished while trying to cross.

At some point he met Werohe’s mother, who was a young, driven and idealistic woman. They fell in love, got married, and moved into his little cottage together. She started regretting this choice almost immediately.

She wanted more out of life. She wanted to make a difference. She definitely did not want to spend her life in a cottage in the middle of nowhere with a husband who was never home and who had no ambition, caring for a little girl she never even wanted. So, one day when Werohe was still very young, she up and got herself killed.

Well, she stole a clutch of dragon eggs and ran away, but everyone knows that’s synonymous with death.

So Werohe grew up with her father. In the summers, he taught her all the secrets of the mountains, and she accompanied him on his work guiding people. In the winters, when the mountains were all but uncrossable, she went to school in the city and learned the basics of reading, writing, history, theology and handling numbers. Eventually she started guiding people on her own.

Then, a year or two before the start of the plot, her father fell ill of something the medicine workers could find no way to fight, and passed away, leaving her alone.

Werohe doesn’t have a lot of friends. Like her father, she doesn’t trust people easily, she spends most of her time away from people, and has an internalized feeling of general abandonment.

Actually, it’s more accurate to say she doesn’t trust people unless they’re bound by contract, preferably backed by quite a bit of money. She spends rather a lot of time with the assorted working girls of Alafavi.

Less euphemistically, she hires prostitutes when she’s stressed. It’s a coping mechanism. It’s left as an exercise for the reader whether or not it’s a good one.

Either way, when a certain band of people need to cross the mountains for various reasons in late winter, she’s the only one with the skills and the disregard for death necessary to help them. For a giant pile of money, obviously.

And now comes the interesting part.

You know that thing that sometimes shows up in anime or video games where the protagonist meets a magical version of themselves with all their powers and a nasty personality, supposed to represent all their worst qualities? And then the protagonist is either supposed to beat them or accept them as a part of themselves?

Yeah, that. Werohe meets her evil twin, goes “this is actually a super practical way to work out my issues”, and promptly adopts her. Everyone is confused.

*dramatic voice*

And so, the stage is set, the players are ready, and we will- wait, what? Oh, right, I haven’t introduced you to Eris yet.

Eherm.

Next week! The stage is set, the players are ready, and the evildoers... don’t know shit. Yet.

[kenkuarchive]

Character Wednesday #2: Amelia

The full version is available on Patreon!

I have never played this character before, but I’d love to play a cleric once. Especially since it’s something entirely different from my usual characters.

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[thiscatdoesthenanowrimo]

Character Wednesday!

The last one, actually. Next Wednesday is in November. So let me introduce the last member of the quartet. Eris.

Eris is the youngest character in the story, with the exeption of a six-year-old who shows up in, like, two scenes. She’s a fifteen years old transgirl who lives in a small city apartment on her ‘own’ and makes a living mainly through theft.

She’s done proper jobs here and there, but she prefers being her own boss, and there are only so many ways you can do that when you’re fifteen and don’t really know a trade.

She grew up in a village out west that was built on resin plantation, which meant a lot of trees and not a lot of people. Having everyone know everyone can be nice, but when you’re anxious, not the gender you appear to be, and not great at making friends, it can a problem as well.

Now don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t perfect, but Eris didn’t have a horrible childhood. As a young child, she was mostly left to her own devices, and got up to everything small bored children in the woods do get up to. As she got older, she gained a few small responsibilities, and when she figured out, around the time she was nine, exactly why she didn’t fit in with the other boys, the biggest thing that happened was that her responsibilities changed.

She was still troubled by worsening anxiety, and spent a lot of time in the woods on her own.

Of course, children were taught to stay out of the woods on their own. There were things in there that could eat them. The adults probably thought about predators when they said that, not demons, but a demon is what Eris found.

Demons, of course, are just people. People who live on another plane of existence, underground, in a hypercapitalistic society, that is. Most demons humans meet are the top 1%, the richest bastards on the mountain of rich bastards. The demon Eris met in the woods was a poor moss farmer, exiled from their own home dimention and forced to possess woodland animals to survive.

Eris names them Oynmi, or ‘my little deer’, after the animal she first meets them inhabiting, and trades them a basket of apples for stories. They make friends quickly. Oynmi has not had anyone to talk to for a very long time, and Eris is lonely too, and they understand each other.

Unwilling possession, even of an animal, is hard both on the host and the demon. When yet another host is close to expiring, skin all but melted off, Eris offers an alternative. They accept.

And all of a sudden, Eris isn’t anxious anymore.

She’s thrown out of the village, of course. It’s one thing to be weird and antisocial. Demonic possession is quite another. She is twelve at this point.

They don’t mind it too much, or at least they don’t let it bring them down. Having Oynmi around in her head, to hold her and guide her and lend her confidence, completely removes Eris’s anxiety. It lets her be exactly who she wants to be, whether that is someone who pays her doctor’s bills dutifully every month for the treatment that makes her body what she wants it to, or someone who steals change from rich men’s pockets so she can go to the theatre and watch comedies whenever she wants. So she makes it both, of course.

And Oynmi loves her as deeply as anyone would, when they have had no kindness, and then meets someone who gives them anything.

They’re happy like that. More than content to live in their strange symbiosis for as long as the world will let them, but Eris has some issues.

Some day, she is going to die. She knows this. She also knows that Oynmi will probably not die when she does, and then what? She’s not about to let them go back to possessing random animals. So, the only thing she can do is to try to find te rich asshole demon who banished them in the first place, and make them reconsider.

Oynmi, for their part, would be perfectly content with dying when she does, doesn’t really know how to break this to her, and settles for supporting her on the quest, as they always do.

Of all my characters, this pair are the one I live the most, and the one I hope the hardest I can write properly. It’s one of the concepts for a character I think is the most interesting, and I sure hope you can enjoy her as well.

And that’s it for me. See you next update :)

[thiscatdoesthenanowrimo]

Character Wednesday

Today I want to introduce you to a woman named Mav. She’s the oldest main character in this story, both in in-universe age and in how old her character concept is.

Hers was one of those concepts I came up with for myself and no one else, because the story she went with was so dumb there was literally nothing to be gained from making it real. She was based on those stupid jokes about gingers not having souls, and was originally a teenager who stole souls for a living and sold them to a demon. She lived alone with her mother and somehow managed until the hierarchy of angels decided she was a vampire and wanted to get all up in her business. It was a long and self-indulgent story.

Surprisingly much of the original character has survived, though there are no angels, and definitely no pretty boys with guardian angels for her to rescue in this one. Look, it was middle school.

She’s also not a teenager anymore, and her mother hasn’t been around for a long time.

Mav was not born in the still unnamed empire, but in the neighbouring desert kingdom of the stu lords. Her mother was a rich merchant who lived alone, with no important men to know of. As she was rich, this was not really a problem.

The problem, of course, was that Mav was born without a soul.

Now, if you read Monday’s post on magic, you know that souls are the organ that generates magic. Of course, anything that’s alive generates magic, but without a soul, a human body just won’t make enough of it to make a difference.

Mv was technically alive when she was born, but she did not cry, she did not meet anyone’s gaze, and she barely moved. Even her breathing was slower than it should be.

The doctors present at the time told Mav’s mother to give up, that her daughter wasn’t really a person, only a shell. They told her that she should let Mav die quietly and try again for a real child. Mav’s mother, of course, refused.

Humans didn’t have anything close to the medical technology necessary to keep Mav alive. Demons, on the other hand, were a different matter altogether.

Contacting demons was also incredibly illegal in the desert kingdom, but Mav’s mother was rich enough and determined enough to figure out how to do it anyway, and so she contacted a demon.

The demon, through a series of deals that nearly bankrupted Mav’s mother, managed to create a series of spells that approximated a soul, given enough power, and which would let Mav find and gather resources for it herself, though she would need to stay in touch with the demon to maintain the spells.

So, Mav has the ability to see others’ souls, and to, with the right spells, steal them entirely from their bodies to either use for herself or trade with the demon for tutoring or goods.

She’s just a little girl when she and her mother emigrate to the neighbouring empire to escape the strict anti-demon laws. She’s still a teen when her mother dies due to being in close proximity to a person who can directly touch and injure souls, and who will do so instinctually.

Mav needs souls to live, but through her mother and her demon tutor’s tutoring, she quickly becomes an accomplished cross-planar merchant and can easily buy what she needs in trade with various demons.

Her problems are twofold: For one thing, she suffers from internalized self-hate as a result of having hurt so many people when she was young and less in control of her abilities, something which leads her to push other humas away and end up very lonely, even though she would naturally have been a very people-friendly person.

The other thing is that the spell she uses to approximate a soul isn’t all that stable, which causes her a lot of distress and makes her look closer to sixty than her actual fourty years of age, and the materials needed to stabilize the spell are almost impossible to bring across the veil from the demon plane.

Luckily, there is a certain time and place where the veil is so thin it should easily be possible to finalize that particular transaction. It’s a huge gathering of demons and those who trade with them known (for now) as the Market.

Unluckily, the Market only happens once every 21 years, is set to happen in two weeks, and is across a huge-ass impassable mountain range.

And so our quest begins.

[denn1s-lessing]

Specimen 14 - Character Wednesday - Strange Beings by Dennis Lessing

Name: Specimen 14 Surname: N/A D.O.B: June 5th, 2025 (06/05/25) Pronouns: he/him it/its Likes: Nothing in particular Dislikes: Nothing in pa

Here starts my character wednesday series!

You will not only follow Specimen's journey, but also someone else's... who it is, you will find out next character wednesday! :D

[thiscatdoesthenanowrimo]

Character Wednesday!

Like my Mondays, my Wednesdays are uncomfortable, and so I have scheduled for my Wednesdays to ramble about my characters.

Unlike Mondays, which will mostly consist of rhapsodies about random worldbuilding, the character introductions will contain spoilers. If you for whatever reason have enough faith in me to want to avoid spoilers for an as-of-yet unwritten story, well, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

The first character I want to introduce is... actually I haven’t named him yet.

I’m considering Aksym, but we’ll see. I’ll go with that for now.

Aksym, like all my characters, started life in two different ways. It’s the day he was born, and the day I first came up with his concept.

The first concept of him was actually pretty similar to what he is now.

This story started as me wanting to write something with every cool trope I could think of, without worrying about clichés or realism faults. Part of the initial idea was a stereotypical D&D adventuring party, and among them was a stereotypical lawful good paladin.

He’s still called ‘the paladin’ in my notes.

Because there’s lawful good, the way it’s usually portrayed, and then there’s actual lawful good. The usual portrayal is flat like cardboard, and I wanted to try making a three dimentional character of it, and there we have Aksym.

He’s lawful to a fault, and moral to a fault, which means he refuses to judge someone before he’s sure, because he doesn’t hold himself above the law. He’ll speak with the lowest members of society with just as much respect as the highest, because they are all equal under the law.

He’s a high-ranking peace guard officer, which means that he knows how to act in a battle, but mostly he’s acting as a police officer in the country’s capital.

but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s start at the beginning. The beginning of his story, that is.

If you read my post on Monday, you know that this country used to have a king, but that the kind disappeared some time ago and was replaced with a democracy.

Most people believe the king went off and died somewhere, because no one ever heard from him again. They are wrong.

In reality, the ex-king somehow managed to cross the mountain range that splits the continent in half and ended up in the eastern, very rural part of the country, where he settled in Egbynn, a small goat herder’s village.

(Did I mention the goats? Like, 90% of this world’s domestic animals are goats.)

There, he got work, got married, had some children, and eventually died. The children stayed in Egbynn and got children of their own, and eventually, Aksym was born. Yes, we’re talking a ‘lost prince’ narrative. It gets complicated.

Another thing you might remember from Monday is that people believe the old kings were literally incarnations of the sun god. Aksym, being fairly religious, believes this wholeheartedly. That is, he believes the old conquering kings were incarnations of the god, and he believes that the more recent kings were deemed unfit to rule, and were thrown out. He lives with the knowledge that his family was discarded by the gods, and it eats at him.

It doesn’t help either that he’s a big fan of the democracy and the current set of laws. He doesn’t believe in the slightest that he has the right to the throne, or any throne. He believes, if anything, that he has to make up for crimes that aren’t even his.

Aksym grew up hearding goats and keeping low-class dancing fowl, more for the eggs than the dancing. At a spring dance one year in his late teens, he got to know a girl who could lug a small goat over a fence if necessary, and who could outtalk him any day of the week, and she was the last person he ever courted, because they got married the next year.

He loved and was good with animals more than anything, and would be happy with staying on a small farm with his wife, a herd of goats, and their hopefully eventual flock of children for the rest of his life, but he was also a bright young man with a strong sense of duty.

One problem with the rural east side of the mountains is that there isn’t a lot of official presence. It is plagued by bandit hordes, and only one in twenty people ever get the chance to vote. When a recruiter from the national guard passed through looking for young men and women willing to serve, his wife punched him in the head and told him he’d regret it forever if he didn’t go to try to make a difference. So he went.

Over the next few years, he rose in the ranks of the peace guard, and he went home to see his wife once a year or so. They did have a child during this time. A little boy who is maybe six by the start of the story.

Aksym caught the eyes of certain high-ranking officers rather quickly, which is how he’s also granted a kid he names Nefki.

No, I’m not talking about a child this time. I’m talking about a goat kid. A war goat, to be precise. Something far more dangerous than the farm goats he was used to, which is why it was so important that he bond with it from the beginning. A proper war goat will only allow one or two people ever to ride it.

Aksym, of course, doesn’t believe he deserves it, but he accepts it with good grace. And he does like having part of his duties be in the stables again.

Then he’s promoted, because his immediate superior is felled in a battle with a dragon. Again he doesn’t believe he deserves it, but now he has the rank necessary to get access to and training with the newest in weapons tech. It’s basically a scary freaking magical gun. I won’t get into it here.

The point is that he has it, and can use it, and when his wife sends him a letter late one winter, saying that an actual bandit army is standing at Egbynn’s door, and they need a bigger stick, he begs for the righ tto take his goat and the gun to go back home and help, which is how he enters the story.

Trust me, it’s not a simple thing that every other main character is some sort of criminal.