Ozadius Devries, Champion to the Lord of the Hells
“Something you may be interested in, what with all the hierarchical debacle occurring in the Hells. I’ve clapped eyes on the new Lord’s little pet paladin, running around the Sword Coast with a tadpole in his head and a gang of ragtag do-gooders at his heel.
How I found him? Pure chance, I suppose, on some backwater country road, I could practically smell the stench of Stygia on him, a burning cold for miles. He seems competent enough but naïve from what I’ve gathered, gallivanting around a druid grove, desperately looking for a cure.
I see opportunity, one with immense potential for you to rise far and above what a cambion could have ever dreamed. The champion seems to be at his wits end, if you swoop in, granting an offer he could hardly refuse we could have a proper coup on our hands. Merely a suggestion, take it or leave it, no skin off my ass.”
- A note, singed, smelling of sulfur and brimstone, found in the Toll House on the Risen Road.
uhh so i’ve seen a couple other people do this and i rlly wanted to lay out oz’s lore/backstory in a post so that it’s clearer lol, especially considering i allude to it in my fics a lot
general info:
Ozadius Devries (He/They), 27 years old. Levistus Tiefling, formerly Dispater Tiefling. Gay boything, he’s trans but likes to be funky with his gender sometimes
Class: Oath of Conquest Paladin lvl. 12, Champion to the Lord of the Hells
Stats: STR 20. DEX 8. CON 16. INT 14. WIS 10. CHA 18
Alignment & Background: Neutral good with neutral evil tendencies. Charlatan
Proficiencies: Athletics (+9), Insight (+4), Deception (+8), Intimidation (+8), Persuasion (+8)
Notable Features: Legacy of The Ash King (Resistance to both fire and cold damage), Boon of The Abyss (In place of radiant damage, your Divine Smites now do force damage)
Weapons used:
• Act One - Maul of Brutal Justice (Invoke Duel. Whispering a target’s name into the mace, if the target comes within 30 feet of you, you and the target are stuck within 30 feet of each other. You may not stray 30 feet from one another until one of you is dead. You gain advantage on attack rolls.)
• Act Two - Halberd of Vigilance (Sentinel Weapon. Gain a +1 bonus to initiative rolls and Advantage on Perception Ability Checks. Adroit Reflexes. When you make an Attack Roll as a reaction, you make it with Advantage.)
• Act Three - Obsidian Sword (Devour Soul. Whenever you use it to reduce a creature to 0 hit points, the sword slays the creature and devours its soul, sending it directly to the Lord of the Hells, unless it is a construct or an undead. A creature whose soul has been devoured by the Obsidian Sword can be restored to life only by a Wish spell.)
Background
Ozadius Devries grew up on the Amber Peninsula of the Exhalian Empire in a large port city, Vetalonia. He was born to a pair of tieflings, Lev (his mother) and Carrion (his father) Devries, however his parents were not eager to abandon their lives as pirates and gave Oz away to the first couple that wanted him at the ripe age of 5. Luckily for Oz, his adoptive parents, a firbolg by the name of Beric (father) and a seldarine drow, Triss (mother) truly wanted him as their son and cherished and loved him.
Growing up as a tiefling in a densely human populated city was difficult for him as the children around him would tease and bully him for his appearance.
Needless to say, Oz did not have many friends when he was a child, except for one other boy, a half-orc the same age as Oz named Astolfo. Whenever Oz was in trouble Astolfo seemed to always be there, defending Oz and beating up the older kids who picked on him until their late teens. Oz had feelings for Astolfo but never had the courage to vocalize them, though the two boys had kissed they never mentioned it as anything other than fun. But when they turned 18, Astolfo had told Oz he was leaving Vetalonia to study the arcane, chasing after this one specific warlock pact Oz knew he had been obsessed with for the past year; Oz took this as abandonment and a personal slight.
For the next four years, Oz worked at the local brothel, honing his abilities in understanding people and their wants and needs; this led to Oz becoming quite adept in manipulating people and robbing rich nobles blind with little effort. In those years of Oz trying to forget Astolfo, trying to move on, he simply couldn’t and dropped everything in his life to go find his best friend; this took Oz on an arduous journey, retracing Astolfo’s footsteps into finding access to the patron he became a part of. Through a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, Oz found out that Astolfo had died but not truly, he was in some sort of timeless pocket dimension where the warlock “patron” existed but it was not a singular patron but thousands of minds of previous warlocks who had usurped the original patrons power and now shares it with those who desire to dole out the will of the warlocks within the pocket dimension.
Oz joined this pact of innumerable minds in order to speak with Astolfo and convince him that resurrection and living a normal life with Oz was worth more than his obsession with this convoluted warlock patron.
In his travels, Oz came across a group of adventurer’s: Penny, a monster hunter in debt to local lords, Zuul, a goliath barbarian dedicated to the god of war, Akla, an orc barbarian whose sole purpose for adventuring was to gather items for a girl she had a crush on, and Sippa, a kobold tinkerer who wanted nothing but to explore the surface for the first time in his life. Oz threw his lot in with this band, seeing as his chances of survival with a group were higher than on his own. He grew, over a few weeks, to appreciate all of the weirdos that surrounded him but one thing led to another and several bad decisions were made that led to the entire group becoming wanted by the Exhalian Empire for treason; Akla had gotten physical with guards that were trying to arrest them for suspicions that they had stolen military property (to which they had), a domino effect occurred, Oz nearly died if it were not for the demon contract scroll he had swiped off of Penny the night before and so Ozadius Devries, warlock to The Legion was now oathbound to a sloth demon vying for the Throne of the Hells. A misfortunate side effect of Oz’s newfound allegiance was that Astolfo was now alive, entirely against his will, and Oz wanted nothing more than to right his wrong, to make up for what he had done to Astolfo.
After several weeks, nearly a month, of travel the group had not realized they were being followed by a vengeful group of guards from the previous city, hellbent on killing the treasonous adventurers. In the dead of night, while both Oz and Sippa were on watch, a volley of gunfire sprang upon them from the treeline, waking the rest of the camp with a start. A paladin, in his holy wroth, went after Penny, to which Oz tried his best to protect her but as a paladin himself he knew the strength of which his and this other man’s swings of the sword held. She was struck down in front of him, mercury armor of little use to her as radiant energy slashed right through it and he turned to Oz next. He fought, bloody and trading equal blows but with the help of the paladin’s friends, their whole camp was slain on that moonlit night in the wilderness. Monacco was the only reason Oz survived as he was bleeding out in the dirt, the demon stitched his wounds together, alongside the help of Sippa who had hid within the brush the entire fight. Both the tiefling and the terrified kobold ran, leaving behind their friends mangled corpses.
A day or two after their escape, Zuul was resurrected by his god and Akla was resurrected by the Fey heart she had been carrying. Penny was less fortunate but they did gain a new companion, one they had known since meeting Penny, her sentient mercury armor had consumed her corpse and grown to be able to shift into a human visage with most if not all of Penny’s memories; they called themselves Merc. Oz and Merc would go on to become quite good friends, while the rest of the group still treated Merc as if they were a tool to be used rather than someone sentient and living.
The general attitude of the group toward Merc culminated one day as they visited Sippa’s home city in hopes of resurrecting Penny via the manmade god that Sippa’s home worshiped. Once there, things went downhill, fast as Merc had run off into the city while the rest of the group went to visit the tower containing the god, Deus. Upon talking to Deus, it offered Oz the chance to ask it a question alongside the resurrection of their friend and he had been wondering something for some time at that point. “Am I Oz?” So much had changed about him: his appearance, his attitude, his morality, his goals. Was he who he had always been or was that Oz truly dead and gone. Deus answered him honestly, telling him that it is natural for people to have changed through traumatic experiences. However, Oz did not contain a soul but rather it was in the hells and he was merely puppetting his own body. This was, obviously, incredibly disconcerting to Oz and he sort of shut down, thinking of himself as a puppet all this time and that he was just the embodiment of his contract with Monacco; he didn’t possess his body, it wasn’t his nor had it been since he took that icy hand in the darkness.
In the time that Oz was having an existential crisis, Penny was resurrected and Merc had broken into the tower and attempted to consume Deus, having grown larger than the companions had ever seen them; they had been wandering all over the city eating every magic item they could find. All of the companions except for Oz began attacking Merc and Oz touched Merc - the only way to communicate with them now - and begged Merc to not consume Deus but Merc just asked Oz “why?” he had been selfish in the past many times, why couldn’t Merc, who had done so much to help the group, be selfish this one time. Oz was dumbfounded and abstained in the fight, simply holding his hand onto his friend's mercury ooze body. But hearing his friends cries of help as Merc fought back, acid and bile from their own body burning and singing his companions as they continued to consume a god, Oz stood, ripping his hand away from Merc and bringing up his maul and whispering to the magic within the weapon, “I’m sorry, Merc.” Swinging down with his hellish-backed fury, he fought a monster he called friend.
They were losing, as Merc had grown stronger and was draining Deus of its magical divinity; Oz saw this and prodded at Monacco within his mind, begging to teleport just him and Merc to the nearest portal to the hells that had been popping up since a war was waging between the surrounding empires. His patron granted this wish and soon it was just Oz and Merc, surrounded by the heat of Avernus as Oz, running low on energy continued to pummel the ooze as Merc began to consume the nearest magical artifact, Oz. He felt mercury begin to enter every orifice of his face, sliding down his throat as he gripped onto his maul, hoping against hope that each blow would be the last. The heat and brimstone stink of Avernus overwhelmed Oz as the ooze began to sink into the corners of his eyes, into his ears, and up his nose; he began to cry, welling tears pushing past wet metal as he thought of all his wrongs, all the people he had hurt. Perhaps this was deserved, this death on the edge of the material plane and the hells, alone, with only a friend to guide him back to his soul.
But the aching jaws of death had never been for Oz as he was yanked away from Merc’s grasp and shunted somewhere, somewhere foreign and sticky and smelling of thick iron.
