Finalized Hael'diira's makeover and I'm pretty pleased with how she looks now.
Bladesinger wizard/Light cleric of Eilistraee, old ex-Lolthite matron, a bossy know-it-all ass but she's working on it (supposedly.) Feat. her familiar, Malag.
Was reminded about the concept of “actually posting my own stuff on tumblr” so here you go
Top half is my guy (sorta) Iimyl and @dastabby ‘s Ravion doing Eilistraeean bonding things (playing dress up and putting on makeup). Bottom two are my Vhaeraunite Mal and @the-timid-birb ‘s Miya being very normal cousins, with Iimyl having a crisis above them
Choose an OC and answer the following questions so we can learn a little more about them. Feel free to include all your OCs if you want.
I was tagged by @mogruith ! Thank you for tagging me as always I love love love love these games ^_^ Check out their fill of this with their guy Coranzan- he's so neat and Mogruith has the coolest digital photography of him on there. Him and Div'yrr have some things in common too... Div is shaking his hand on account of Entertainer to serving a matron before it all falls apart in an Eilistreaaean flavored manner. Sending our kids on a playdate or something.
I’m just gonna say open tag on this one because I know a lot of the moots circle here has been tagged already- if you see this and want to do it I Am Mentally Tagging You.
Div- dream, fantasy | yrr- protector, rival, wielder
I thought it was the perfect name for him. His mother was an Eilistraeean living as a commoner in Menzoberrenzan. She wasn’t a priestess or a cleric by any means, but she believed in Eilistraee’s word and tried to raise Div’yrr as such. This idea of protecting a dream, keeping it alive, felt right. Because that’s what she wanted for her son! She wanted him to be someone better, to strive for something better. She couldn’t change their lot in life overnight, but she could dream, and so could her baby boy.
(I only recently learned there was someone on here who ALSO has a drow with the same name albeit without the apostrophe… Divyrr Coincidence. Their little guy is so cute though. I love you drow ocs.)
Nervous ticks or tself soothing habits?
Div gets nervous about a lot of seemingly inconsequential things at the drop of a hat, because (like me) he has the ‘everything is suddenly overwhelming and wrong for no good reason’ disorder (ocd). He’s always got some sort of instrument on him though, and tuning it, cleaning it and playing it soothes him. He’s been known to ‘clean’ instruments that are like. Already clean. The motion just comforts him. He also fidgets with his necklace or the cover on his compass sometimes.
He also finds a lot of comfort in just watching his friends go about their day. He likes pulling open his tent flap in their shared camp, listening to them chat and watching them go about their mundane day to day business. Makes him feel grounded, a part of something bigger.
Let's say your OC got kidnapped, what would save them?
You see this is funny because it wasn’t exactly kidnapping, but his ex-weaponsmaster-eventually-boyfriend did try to hunt him down and kill him. He’s just… really, really fucking hard to catch, especially without magical means. That’s a Thing about his character. Trickster cleric. Disguise self. Pass without trace. Mirror image. Blink. Blessing of the Trickster. Channel divinity: invoke duplicity.
This isn’t to say he couldn’t be caught or kidnapped- just that it would be really hard to do so and keep him from escaping and I find it really funny. There’s not a lot of things he’s good at but that’s one of them. Drawing/painting, Music, and Getting Away From You. I do think if he got kidnapped his Eilistraeean buddies would be on finding him very quickly. He’s… kind of a pushover and is really bad at being his own mature person, and the leader of his little group babies him just a bit for it. Would be very concerned about him not being able to get out of the situation on his own, or that he’d cough up confidential information about their cause. If Nal’zt was there when this happened he’d stop at nothing to find him too. He didn’t spend 200 years guarding him and his wife in menzoberrenzan to let him get snatched up by some surfacers,
If your OC has a love interest, are they opposite or rather similar?
They're fairly opposite, but have been through a lot together so they Share A Vibe when they're together. if you will.
Div'yrr spent almost 200 years as patron to a rather immature and underqualified matron mother who scooped him up when he was like freshly 18, who then treated him like a pet. Nal'zt (my boyfriend’s guy) was her weaponsmaster who she in turn treated like her knight in shining armor. She was living her little princess fantasy. They were both like. little touys for her.
When said matron was killed by her sister, Div'yrr escaped to the surface... and 26 years later, Nal'zt was sent off to hunt him down and kill him. But he kind of like, fell in love with him a little bit? Decided he didn't want to kill him. His faith in Lolth wavered. He hated that it did.
Ways they are different:
Nal'zt is still going through Lolthite Deconditioning and is really uncomfortable around the Eilistreaans, whereas Div'yrr is very happy being an Eilistraeean.
Nal'zt is an expert swordsman, top of his class and his house. Div can't fight for shit.
Div'yrr is a creative with a ton of hobbies to pass the time! Nal'zt doesn't know what to do with himself now that he's not working in his house as weaponsmaster.
But..
They both miss their terrible matron mother so, so much lol. This is the biggest thing they have in common, and the weird trauma-bond they have from their time there colors their personal lives and their relationship a lot. Their matron did treat them far nicer than most in a lot of ways! She was very affectionate with them, said all the right things to make them feel secure and appreciated. Actually kept Div'yrr around instead of killing him and picking another guy every 10 years. He was utterly obsessed with her in turn.
But it was all very unhealthy and abusive at it's core still- she owned him in practice, as her patron. She was also like, very often locking Div'yrr away in their room to just. Do his little art and music. Make something interesting for her to come home to. Didn't let him have any interpersonal relationships or be his own person outside of his relationship to her and the house. He existed for her satisfaction, for entertaining her party guests- play your little music bard boy! Like I said. They were her Touys. Div does not have an identity of his own when he gets to the surface, and it’s really fucked up. Everything he was was for her, and now everyone expects him to be something different. Yeah. A big theme of Div’yrr and Nalzt’s stories independently and as a relationship is finding your identity.
Is there a story behind making your OC? What inspired you?
So it's funny. He exists because Runa needed a dad- the idea was "Eilistraeean guy from Menzoberrenzan who had a one-night stand with Runa's mom", because parts of Runa's story kind of relied on them not knowing their dad and not knowing he was a drow. My original direction was "Cool Eilistraeean adventurer guy Runa will bump into on their adventure and it will be cool". He was SUPPOSED to be a badass. But the more I rotated him in my head and ran him against Eilistraee’s church, the less put together he got, and I liked it so I ran it to the extreme. What if he not only didn’t have a strong identity and purpose, but had next to no identity? How does that happen to someone? How do you bounce back from that? Yeah. I like my clueless little guy.
Iimyl has technically gotten a short post before but I'm giving him a proper long intro now
Name: Iimyl Ar'bana
Age: ~350
Pronouns: he/him
Gender: If you ask he will say man. Is he sure about that answer? Not really
Race: Drow
Height: 5'6"
Class: Sword Dancer Cleric/ Wildfire Druid
Long backstory + more pictures under the cut
Born to a small family of traders in the surface, Iimyl left his home relatively young to join the nearest Eilistraeean temple (in the High Forest). His family were generally supportive of this, and they kept in contact until his parents died, even going so far as to address the letters they sent to the name he was going by while in the temple.
When Iimyl was trying to figure out whether or not he wanted to properly join the temple (having already been praying to Eilistraee privately), he realized that men in the temple (or women who had previously been men) were relegated to less important positions where they could not as directly aid in Eilistraees goals or worship her as wholly. He figured that his goal in joining the temple was to aid his goddess as much as he could, so he entered the temple as a woman.
Iimyl (although he was going by another name at the time) spent over 200 years in the temple, and was very well respected. He was very sociable, put his all into every task he was given, and eventually became relatively skilled at most of the things that came up in an Eilistraeean's day-to-day (dancing, fighting, singing, magic, politics, freeing other drow, sewing, washing, and cooking). He greatly enjoyed the work he was doing, and found it fulfilling, even if he couldn't open up to any of his fellow Eilistraeeans for fear of them exposing him as a man.
Unfortunately for him, eventually someone found out that he was a man and informed the priestesses (whom he had previously been relatively close friends with) in charge of the temple. They basically had no choice but to kick him out, especially given his refusal to undergo the changedance and him being a generally well-known member of a group only women were allowed to join (the sword dancers). He gets off relatively lightly, all things considered, with the priestesses publicly cutting his hair and telling him that he would likely be killed if he set foot in an Eilistraeean temple again, then kicking him out into the forest with what few posessions he had on him.
Although he had been given no food, water, or tools, Iimyl was relatively aquainted with the woods and managed to find a cave to settle in before winter hit. He didn't do well in the woods at first, especially due to his unwillingness to use his cleric-given powers for more than an occasional cantrip, in case Eilistraee had only not taken them away because she'd forgotten he had them (although he did take some comfort in the fact that they still worked at all). He eventually managed to come to "an understanding" with the woods after a large fire nearly killed him, and began learning druidic magic. After that, it was physically easier for him, but he was still mentally struggling with both his rather sudden ejection from the only life he'd really known, and his lack of other people to talk to (although he could use speak with animals, their company just wasn't cutting it).
When Iimyl eventually made his way to the nearest town, rather the worse for wear, he learned that it had been around ten years since he'd been kicked out. His hair had grown out, but was entirely uncared for, as he had avoided touching or dealing with it due to it reminding him of the situation in which it had been cut. He also realized he didn't know what to call himself anymore, because he felt no connection to the name he'd used before he joined the temple, but certainly couldn't use the female name he'd been using if he was going to return to being percieved as a man. For the first few years that he goes into town, he refuses to give a name, so the townsfolk pretty much just call him "the cleric" or "that guy who lives in the woods". He eventually gives in to letting the town hairdresser (someone's uncle who mostly did the sheep shearing but would cut non-sheep hair if you didn't mind that he'd move your head around to get whatever angle he needed) cut his hair, and even comes up with his new name before leaving.
Iimyl decided to move farther away from his previous temple so that he was less likely to run into anyone he'd known from there. He made his way to Waterdeep, figuring that because most of the members of the temple had been living in the middle of the woods because they didn't like the bustle of cities, he would be less likely to run into any of them. Both fortunately and unfortunately for him, he hadn't realized that the reason he remembered Waterdeep was because there was a fairly strong Eilistraeean presence there that had only grown in his absence. Although he wanted to avoid other Eilistraeeans at pretty much any cost, he was rather quickly swept back into socializing with them by an extremely friendly male member of the church named Ravion (and made by @dastabby) who didn't seem to understand that Iimyl was trying to avoid him at first.
Nowadays, Ravion and Iimyl are pretty close friends, and Ravi is very much helping Iimyl regain the confidence he had lost, especially by having introduced him to some other very chill Eilistraeeans (Dastarri, Aly'va, and Coran) and by convincing him that it is ok to do things like wearing makeup and dresses even if you're a man. Life for Iimyl is distinctly on the up and up.
