You don't know how important it is to me that Ren as a Trickery Cleric of Mask isn't cleric, but make it rogue. He's a cleric for rogues. He is a full support caster who has the spells to enable your bullshit on just about every level without slowing you down with shiny plate and no stealth skills and moral stances about not taking other people's stuff or stabbing them over perfectly reasonable grievances like being in the way. Healing, buffing, distraction, concealment, divination, teleporting right into restricted areas, crowd control and area denial while you get behind a single target to do 200d6 damage with a letter opener, he has you covered.
He also deals with you people every damned day of his life and can spot your bullshit.
A tiny drabble in which @d20forinitiative's Mutt gets more than he bargains for hanging out in Ren's rafters <3
The scuff of claws on wood in the rafters were soft enough to be rats, though rats didn't tend to have quite such a sense of timing, or of positioning. Scuttling shortly after the tone of the conversation changed, towards an area more directly above where even softened voices would drift up, then swiftly quieting again.
The second person in conversation showed no sign of noticing the eavesdropper, and that suited Renosos just fine. If he wanted Mutt gone, he would have made that clear in ways the two of them would understand. Sometimes he didn't have to, when the young Sparrow was fast or overly conservative in his judgement as to how far he could push it before his unannounced lurking privileges were decisively revoked. This was definitely not a conversation that he had any right to be overhearing, even as heavily couched in cant as it was. Not the usual, street level cant either, but the sort of subtle twists of coded language that even a practised guild thief would struggle to keep up with. Mutt would be following along the gist of things just fine. Ren was relying on it, in fact.
I can put you in contact with someone who might be of use was his conclusion to negotiations, before adding:
🛏️what’s their favorite position? ❤️🔥what’s their most erogenous zone? 💦what’s their immediate post-orgasm reaction? for Ren :3
𝐒𝐈𝐍𝐃𝐀𝐘 𝐇𝐄𝐀𝐃𝐂𝐀𝐍𝐎𝐍𝐒
🛏️what’s their favorite position?
Get him up against a wall. Or bent over the nearest surface. Or anything that lets him be a subby little bottom, like down on his knees for oral. He likes variety though, so don't think that leaning on one "favourite position" is going to cut it. He might not be capable of 20 dex level nonsense but he's still considerably more flexible than you might think, in multiple senses.
❤️🔥what’s their most erogenous zone?
E a r s.
He hates it, it's so cliche and obvious, unfortunately for him it works. Any light to medium stimulation of the tips is going to have him melting and/or making extremely filthy noises, and they win out over any other options to start with to get him in the mood.
💦what’s their immediate post-orgasm reaction?
Depends heavily on the circumstances, especially how good the orgasm actually is. If it's only a short time between it and him wanting to get cleaned up, do better. On the other end of the scale he can have a downright euphoric and relaxed afterglow if the sex was exceptionally good.
What controversies/drama would your character incite in fandom? For Ren
META ASKS:If Your OC Was Canon. || Accepting
So many wonderful (terrible) possibilities here, considering the huge potential for alternative character interpretation, and also all the stuff he's done. He's not supposed to be a character people should all think just one way about, and that's often drama fuel. Controversy over whether his motivations in any situation are selfish, fanatical, deep down altruistic or motivated by a sense of ruthless necessity is by design.
That he's a priest of a church that promotes an... unusual? Immoral? Frequently illegal? set of precepts shouldn't be drama, but how people feel about that and his position of influence over other characters could easily turn into it. Especially when some of those characters are or were minors.
(some non-explicit sex and sexuality talk under the cut)
Then there's that he's a queer character whose sexual habits fall outside the socially acceptable "monogamous committed relationship as the end goal" model. Some people are just going to be queerphobic and/or slut shaming, others are going to wring their hands about how that, on top of everything else, only plays into the worst stereotypes of gay men.
What would be the ‘incorrect but wildly popular’ interpretation of your character in fandom? for Ren
META ASKS:If Your OC Was Canon. || Accepting
If we remove the obvious answer of "something so wild I could never even guess it"...
I think it would be assuming that Renosos was a considerably more of a constant presence in Maledos' life than he actually was, confusing "reliable adult to go to if he really needed it" with "helicopter parent always ready to intervene". The flavour would depend on whether The Fandom(tm) came down on making him Mal's Dad (wholesome :3) or Mal's Dad (get away from him >:c).
The other expected outcome is that fanon just does things to parental and authority figures as people connect to characters and add their own baggage. Throw in the potential for it to hit religious trauma as well, and oof.
Is your character the subject of ‘imagines’ or ‘x reader’ style blogs? for ren
META ASKS:If Your OC Was Canon. || Accepting
I only see this side of tumblr when I am rawdogging tag searches for characters and let me tell you...
Fuck, probably? I can see it. He does hit certain archetypes that, from what I've seen, that scene seems to eat up. And he's getting the same treatment as I see as a pattern, which is: did you. Even look at this character beyond a surface glance that pinged a certain audience's thirst?
According to these blogs he's a romantic, he'll buy you a hundred roses on your first date, take you out to expensive restaurants, act like an aggressive asshole to everyone BUT you. He'll messily kill anyone who looks at you funny. He is never letting anyone else look at you because he cares so much. He's dominant in that dark authority way, in and out of the bedroom, but never in a way that doesn't land you with exactly what you want. He's 50 Shades of Grey levels of mid bdsm that vanilla folks think is dangerously kinky, or sex is transcendent cosmic expression of eternal love full of florid metaphors. There are so many cute little imagine scenarios of the two of you being domestic where he doesn't have to play up the jerk act for everyone else. Your eyes only things because you're special and he can relax around you.
If you're thinking "no, that's <insert character here>", that's because these same things come up nearly every time I have dared look at these blogs. And you know what it's fine, it's a common fantasy, I don't think people should be ashamed of it, but please stop picking in some cases wildly inappropriate characters to gut and re-stuff with that particular kind of fluff.
Trying to fit Ren into the mold of the average blog of that type doesn't work because you are never having a romance with him. Not even a date if he can help it. He's thoroughly aromantic.
I got lost in the autism and didn't write the post about what led to the autism, which is DISABILITY IN FANTASY SETTINGS
I didn't plan it but the ASD and possibly dyspraxia coding in Abd Al'Aysar can no longer be ignored. Social skills are hard, routine and Knowing The Rules is a comfort mechanism, there might be some sensory issues (a little hard to tell whether it's that or just being on alien plane where water falls from the sky amongst other things), and he would probably love a weighted blanket thanks. He's still closer to inconvenient but manageable ASD adjacency than the more intensely disabling effects it can have. The dyspraxia is much more impactful, especially on the fine motor level. In particular he has terrible difficulty with writing that doesn't come with the reading or language processing issues of dyslexia or dysgraphia.
Ren has multiple interrelated chronic conditions that span an entire spectrum of physical to magical to uh oof your soul shouldn't actually be doing that. On the physical level, he has the internal scarring from a serious lung injury - not enough to cause severe health concerns but enough to interfere with both endurance and more intense kinds of movement, either through tightness in the area, difficulty taking a full lungful of air, and (for a significant portion of his life) low level chronic pain. A good part of his ability to hide and compensate for that is through his monk training. On top of that the same incident left him with a nasty case of his soul not being as tethered to his body anything like as strongly as it should be, a connection to the Shadowfell, and the link leaking shadowstuff and his own life force back and forth. Tied in to the physical injury, this tends to manifest as the stuff manifesting in - then being violently coughed out of - his injured lung. Curiously to some people's assumptions this doesn't tend to happen as a result of him using his cleric or shadow monk abilities.
What is Ren's relationship with his parent's like?
Backstory Asks || Always Accepting
Nonexistent. He ran away from home at somewhere around 15, and never knew his father in the first place.
It is a complete, believable, unassailably true answer. One that does not come too unexepected, that explains much, that reveals enough of a picture that most people will choose to fill in the rest without prying too much further. The shape of what is left unspoken in the darkness is unlikely to be felt out. The possibilities simply do not occur to most people.
(content warnings beyond this point for child abandoment, emotional abuse, generally all the mess that comes with growing up with a severely cluster B personality disorder parent, familicide, psychological torture, and suicidal intent.)
His feelings towards his mother are deep, cold bitterness and distain, the dead embers of childhood confusion that grew into hot adolescent resentment.
Instability was a constant. Moving from expensive inn to expensive inn, never sure how long they would stay, rarely hearing the same details twice about her past, or his. Appearance was more important than availability of coin - when drinks and fine meals and lines of credit were something that just happens with the right words and looks, why should she bother to keep track at all unless it's to immediately indulge in something luxurious? Attention was all or nothing, and was never to be drawn from others unless she was to recieve the majority by proxy. Harm was not intentional - or when it was, it was an emotional outburt, an accident, a mistake, extravagant apologies and expressions of guilt a cue to reassure and soothe her feelings.
He learned quick and early to be unintrusive, to not draw attention. To watch for the slightest warning of changing mood. To speak in terms of what others wanted to hear. To snatch away food and money when it was available and keep it hidden, for times when there was none and she had been gone for a very, very long time.
The only mostly consistent fragments he could filter from his mother's many versions of events about his father was that he was an elf, and that he had left after she had told him she was bearing his child. And that he resembled his father far, far too much.
Why his hate should focus itself there is not something he chooses to rationalise any more. It has no grand justification, no meaning and no point, and nor does any vengeance he might take. It is not in the pursuit of gain or redress: being acknowledged means making himself known, and even had he cared for inheritance he would be dead long before it became a possibility. Nor is it a need for catharsis, a desire to remove a terrible weight from his existence so that he might finally move on from it. When it is done, he is done. He intends to be the one to eliminate his father's bloodline, and he is fully aware of everything that implies.
He has no intention of making it a quick and painless process, either. Not for his father, at least.
