will you perhaps bless us with a nh'ara lore drop 🙏
GLADLY!
Ok so all of this is subject to change, me and Dave’s player are only just getting to Moonrise tower and don’t know a lot about the game’s lore (or if there’s much lore for Tav) so things will change as we progress further. However, for the most part her backstory is mostly finalised.
Also, bare in mind I’m not a dnd player. I know what the game is, I know the classes and races but that’s about it. I have no clue what lore, gods or goddesses are in the world and what does/doesn’t work. So, Nh’ara’s lore is based purely on my own desires for her character and less “does it work in dnd?”
So obviously there’s the basic info of Nh’ara being a Mephistopheles Tiefling hailing from Baldur’s gate. She’s a bard who whilst performing in the streets was swept up into the Nautiloid and yada yada the plot of the game and what not.
But! That’s not what you’re here for now is it?
Nh’ara was originally a tavern keep, she owned a small establishment somewhere near the edge of Baldur’s gate. Known enough by regulars to stay in business but quiet enough not to attract the wrong crowds. She would spend her time talking to her patrons, filling tankards and exchanging coin.
Quite the mundane life honestly.
Until it wasn’t. After an arduous day at the tavern left the place trashed from a bar fight (the group hadn’t been too fond of “her kind” so she could do little to stop the incident) she took a saunter down by the river. She had planned to go to a carpenter friend who owed her a favour -one of the few quality salesmen willing to sell to her- and had a purse with just enough coin to barter her way into new furniture, and just enough coin to be target.
As was proved when she was Merced by a group of wannabe rouges. When she couldn’t produce enough coin to quell their demands they gutted her and dumped her body in the riverside to rot.
She’s not sure when it happened. If it was hours or months, if she was already dead or if life was just about to let her rest.
All she knows is it happened.
She washed up on a bank not too far from the outer city, coughing and heaving. Eyes stinging from the torment her body had just endured. Except, she couldn’t feel anything. At all. Nothing that she should have felt at least. There was nothing but a sore throat, now covered in an ebony picture, a series of tattoos she never had before. They pulsed a light teal, their glow seemingly timed with her beating heart.
Nh’ara hardly even remembered what had happened. It’s like everything she’d known, heard, seen, felt in her entire life was suddenly scrubbed clean from her mind. Her skin had grown a ghastlier colour; her hair seemed paler than what she thought it should have been but she had no memory to back up her mind.
After that she hung up the mantle of bartender (though it was a mantle she scarcely knew now) and played songs for the masses in the streets, never quite settling down in one sector of the city for long and never once stepping foot near the banks again. Not for knowledge of what had happened but a nagging.
The waters called to her and she didn’t know why.
What did happen? Simple. An undead patron used their own vengeance to give her a new lease at life and to part their own soul from the watery grave they themselves had endured. As for the strings attached? Well, you’ll get to find that out later ;)
It’s not even entirely clear if Nh’ara still has her own soul or if the two traded places (for lack of a better term). She has fragments of who she was but overall is entirely different, a brand new devil.
So in short: Nh’ara lived a perfectly normal life, was brutally murdered, got revived by a vengeful spirit and now has no memory of her life before 36 and worse yet: no memory that she even had memories she might have lost. She just kind of avoids questions about what she did before. She isn’t too fond the gnawing dread that comes with her inability to answer.
