I’m not entirely sure why, but the Fey Wanderer Ranger just feels like an excellent occultist to me. Rangers are already excellent if you want a lot of languages and skills, plus they’re a martial class, so there’s a good strong monster-hunter vibe from them. Add in the Fey Wanderer’s extra psychic damage and bonus to charisma skills, and they feel very versatile and oddly spooky, scholarly and well-spoken. Touched by something other. Make the race a half-elf and pick a background with two languages, and you can get eight languages and eight skill proficiencies with a fey ranger, giving them a bit of a Renaissance Man, Abraham Van Helsing sort of feel. The scholar in the woods who knows how to hunt otherworldly things. Heh.
Character Sheet: Adreana Haggard
Name: Adreana Haggard
Race: Half-Elf
Age: 43
Background: Sage
Class/Level: Ranger 3 (Fey Wanderer)
Statistics: Str 8, Dex 14, Con 14, Int 12, Wis 16, Cha 12
(Standard Array – I rolled for her and got a rather lovely 13,16,18,15,11,8, which I put into Str 8, Dex 17, Con 16, Int 14, Wis 18, Cha 12, but I also wanted a standard version to see what she looked like if I wasn’t so spectacularly lucky)
Ideal: The world should be protected from predatory outsiders and those who do their bidding
Bond: I’ve dedicated my life to searching out and destroying dark cults
Flaw: My crusade has gotten people around me killed in the past
Equipment: Chain shirt, common clothes, rapier, longbow, dagger, quiver with 20 arrows, druidic focus: mistletoe, writing kit, journal, letter from dead colleague, money pouch, explorer’s pack
Description: A slight half-elven woman with grey-streaked dark hair and intense brown eyes, and an oddly scholarly look for someone so well armed.
History:
The Haggards have always been fey-touched. The Old Forest is a gateway, and the Gentry have been coming through for centuries. We’ve always been part-elves, and part other things too. My own mother was some stripe of fey elf, though she didn’t exactly stay for long. A gift to my father, I was. Would that I’d been a better one.
The Haggards have always been fey-touched. Other. Which was why, when the cult of Asmodeus came to town, they targeted us first. It’s important to get rid of the dangerous ones. The ones with the books and the learning and the experience of the Other. To be fair to them, it does make perfect sense. They infiltrated the town. Slowly, carefully. They turned neighbours against us, too far into the forest, too far gone to the fey. They were slow. They were careful.
They murdered my father when I was 12 years old. Wearing the faces of neighbours. Friends. They killed my father, my aunt, my cousins. The whole family, save for myself and cousin Myrtle. We’d been in the woods. The Old Forest. Where our family had always been safe.
Myrtle was broken afterwards. Well, we both were, but Myrtle in a different way to me. We fled together. Salvaged what we could from the family home and left. Maybe we could have found the gateway, taken our chances among the fey, but Myrtle had friends in the city. So, to the city we went. We went to school. Myrtle learned a trade. Maybe I could have been content, like she was. Maybe I could have boxed up everything that had happened and put it away. But I doubt it.
I learned about Asmodeus. About cults. About fiends. Attended college in the city. That was useful. But the Old Forest always called to me. The old home. And I knew we couldn’t have been the only ones slaughtered out of hand by one of these cults. There were more. There <i>would be</i> more. And someone had to stop it. Somewhere along the line, someone had to stop it.
The Haggards are fey-touched. The Haggards are <i>dangerous</i>. And what magic won’t stop, steel can put manners on. And where steel fails, maybe words might do. It worked for them, after all, once upon a time. Words in the right ears. It can work for me too.
I do feel like a little cult-hunting now and then …
