#roisia

[janearts]

I'm still in a bit of an art funk, but I've also been mulling over what Roisia's non-adventurey life might have looked like in a Faerûn-But-Make-It-Modern-Magic setting. Wanted to get the clothing bit sorted out first.

[janearts]

I originally created Roisia in Divinity: Original Sin, which had some phenomenal (and/or phenomenally corny) combat barks, so I came up with some more for her to shout in Baldur's Gate 3 to keep with tradition. UwU

And thank you so much for these lil notes! ;o; They cheered me up.

[janearts]

I love those little cheek circles you draw. Gives my brain the happiness chemicals :)

Thank you! They also give me the happiness chemicals. C:

[janearts]

Roisia Lydgate: Character Overview

This is really more of a background introduction to her character, but I'm trying to put as much information in one place for future reference or for anyone who wants to get a better idea of her character. Details underneath the cut!

Meta-Knowledge

Roisia is my Source Hunter from Divinity: Original Sin, but I recreated her in Baldur’s Gate 3 as a way to continue her story albeit in a completely different universe. The story and events of DOS have since become part of her backstory, and tweaked to fit the world of Faerûn.

Name Pronunciation

I’m honestly none too fussed about pronunciation. Her name is an 11th century mediaeval name that would later become “Rose” in Middle English. Roisia is probably meant to be pronounced something like /ɹɔɪːsiːɑ/ (Roy-see-ah) based on other name variants found around the same time. Her nicknames, as given to her by her parents, include: Rose, Rosie, petal, pet, rosebud, bud, so on and so forth.

Personality

Roisia is charming, adventurous, with a voracious curiosity, and a deeply analytical mind. She believes that taking care of the dead and providing a voice for the dead is her life’s calling. She was formerly raised to be a Cleric of Kelemvor, but believes that her god has disowned her since she reanimated her father. She now believes herself to be deemed among the Faithless. She’s compassionate to those in need and is willing to break rules (and the law) to help others. While she is generally a law-abiding citizen, she is dogged in pursuing the whims of her curiosity and will likewise do whatever it takes to solve a puzzle, a mystery, or a murder… or simply answer a question that has occurred to her. She is sociable, prefers when everyone gets along, and will try to talk her way into and out of most situations. This includes charming, reasoning, intimidating, and/or deceiving others to get her desired outcome. Ultimately, she finds solace and comfort in the company of animals, the dead, and books. Her favourite animal is the noble spider, and she breeds and raises some species in her spare time.

Spells and Such

I tried as best I could to replicate Roisia’s DOS character. In DOS, she was classed as a Witch. Witchcraft spells in DOS are a mixture of Necromancy spells and Enchantment spells, and I chose my spells in BG3 to imitate the ones that you get in DOS. As a witch in DOS, Roisia also had the ability to talk to animals and summon a spider. (I cheesed this in BG3 with the Find Familiar spell—technically a Conjuration spell—and having her drink a potion after every long rest.) To be more in keeping with her backstory, I gave her a Guild Artisan background and invested skill points in skills like Medicine.

Backstory

Roisia grew up in Eastway of Baldur’s Gate. Her father worked in the Gray Harbor shipyard as a shipwright and her mother was a Mortarch, running the Eastway Cemetery & Lydgate Funeral Service. She was raised to follow in her mother’s footsteps as a Cleric of Kelemvor, and specifically as a Mortarch, from an early age. She assisted her mother in managing the burial customs and rites for the Lower City’s diverse community (from embalming to ritualistic cannibalism to poisonings), comforting grieving family members of the deceased, and tending to the dead buried in the cemetery.

Her life took an unexpected turn when her father drowned during a sea trial. Grieving for her father, Roisia made her first attempt at Necromancy. She unwittingly used a wish spell in the process and reanimated him as a skeleton. Because it was the wish spell, not her first attempt at a necromantic ritual, that bound the soul of her father to his bones, Roisia is determined to master the School of Necromancy and truly resurrect her father.

She is interrupted in her early studies by the appearance of Eustace, who recruited her into the Source Hunters, an organisation dedicated to eradicating dangerous magic users (like… Necromancers). “We need you,” he said. “… and you need us.” Roisia & Eustace (or Roy & Stacey as they became known to each other) investigated the mysterious murder of a town counsellor and uncovered a Necromantic cult in the process. As they adventured together, Roisia began to develop feelings for Eustace, but as their adventure concluded and they returned to the Source Hunter Academy, Eustace did not return those feelings. Dejected, Roisia left the Source Hunters and returned to her home in Baldur’s Gate.

To “cure” herself of her heartbreak, Roisia drew up a list of lifelong goals for herself. They are:

1. A cemetery or plot of land of her own to oversee. 2. “Tenants”/”Residents” (aka The Deceased) to house and tend to on this land. 3. To master Necromancy such that she can extend indefinitely her own life and the lives of her loved ones. 4. One (1) Spouse (*not of the squeamish variety) 5. Children (*ideally 3-5)

Refocused aggressively on her list, Roisia returned to her duties during the day and her studies during the night. She was abducted by the nautiloid one night while she was off to dig up a new test subject.

Playlist

[janearts]

The way you draw Roisia's body type makes me happy :)

I'm glad! The lack of meaningful body types in-game made me sad, but I will make up for it in my imagination and in my art. UwU

Also hopping on the Wavemother Robe dress-up train. Under a read-more for Tumblr's delicate sensibilities just in case.

[janearts]

I'm not super familiar with D&D lore, but how does Roisia's parents' relationship work? With her mother being a Kelemvorite and her father possessing his own skeleton? Or does her mother even know about his current state?

I adore Roisia and your work

Thank you! The short of it is: it's work but it works and she knows. Got into the weeds of it under the cut.

Yasmin couldn't bring herself to execute her duty as a Cleric of Kelemvor and former Necrobane and execute her (now undead) husband. In one fell swoop, Roisia ruined her mother's otherwise stellar track record as a Kelemvorite.

Logistically, if Yasmin wanted her husband to have freedom of movement, she could no longer offer room and board to the servants and staff in her employ. She allowed rumours that her business was suffering financially go unchallenged, since an undead husband in a funeral home is even worse for business. Generally speaking, Roisia's father, Jairus, keeps to the upstairs (the family's quarters) and attic during business hours and is free to roam the house and grounds at night. (This is of course on the condition that there are no funerary celebrations that evening.) He now puts his carpentry skills to work in the fashioning of coffins and caskets, but otherwise his time is his own.

Because they no longer have live-in servants, the family now has to take on more domestic labour (e.g., cleaning, laundering) to prevent their servants from discovering the lie. Jairus has commandeered cooking for his family, but will clean or launder clothes when bored. I should note here that both Jairus and Yasmin came from working-class backgrounds. They know how to do domestic labour; it was Roisia who grew up with servants and who had to learn to do without.

The relationships (between spouses, between child and parent) are loving, but not without strain. Jairus is fundamentally lonely. He feels like a ghost: he can't go back to work at the docks as a shipwright, he can't go out for a pint at the Maid with his mates, he can't go off to the countryside to visit with his side of the family, he can't even take a walk around the city at night for fear of discovery. So he grasps at any family time he can get, which is tough when he is functionally nocturnal and the rest of his small family is diurnal.

Yasmin, meanwhile, still deeply loves her husband even as a skeleton, but she also sees his pain. She is torn between keeping her daughter happy (father lives) and offering her husband a way out (father dies), and struggles with the guilt of whether or not a mercy killing would really be a mercy to Jairus... or to her. And then, some nights, she worries that perhaps she would not be able to kill him at all were she ever to try, and that would make everything all the worse.

Roisia, meanwhile, is largely ignorant of her parent's anxieties. She is still elated to have her father back in whatever capacity. She enjoys picking up the thread of their past lives: stargazing and charting with him, chatting to him from the kitchen table while he cooks, demanding that he retwist her locs even when he's certain she doesn't need a retwist, trying to outplay him at games, etc. She hides her studies in Necromancy as best as possible from her parents, but dreams of a day of restoring her father to the way he was, flesh and all.

TL;DR: "Works" is the operative word here. Everyone is doing their best with what they've got.

[janearts]

Has Roisia yet had those strange dreams from the use of the tadpole? Of the beautiful, elusive figure that whispers sweet nothings if only you would let it in? Of its soft touches as it promises a future where they both reach their potentials? What does her dream companion look like?

I can't remember my original intentions for her canon experience... I think it was that Roisia would be too suspicious and too wary to use the tadpole? In any case, Roisia would dream of Eustace, an unrequited love of hers. UwU

Additional details under the cut.

Roisia started out as my Source Hunter from Divinity: Original Sin—(another excellent Larian game that I would highly recommend, by the way)—and I'm continuing her story in BG3 even though it's a completely different universe.

The premise of D:OS is that you have two buddy cops who are trying to solve a murder, and everything spirals wildly out of control the moment they're shipwrecked on a beach. (If Roisia had a nickel for every time she's been shipwrecked on a beach, she would have two nickels. That's not a lot, but it's funny that it happened twice.) If you're playing the game on your lonesome like me, you actually create not one but two player characters.

Roisia and Eustace (aka Roy & Stacey) started as joke characters as a way for me to test out the game. For Eustace, the man was built like an ox—(the game has only one body type and that's MUSCLES)—and I gave him a high-pitched nasally voice because I found the contrast hilarious. In D:OS, you can choose to pilot both characters or you can assign them an AI personality. I assigned Eustace the “Judge” personality and let the AI do its thing. It was an incredible gaming experience because Eustace felt "real" and I enjoyed roleplaying with the AI as I piloted Roisia's character. Eustace, courtesy of the AI and the parameters I set for it, ended up becoming this cantankerous, stubborn, contrary academic with a heart of gold who wanted to do the right thing... so long as the right thing to do was also the lawful thing to do. (Following the law to its every letter is very much not Roisia's MO. I suppose that would make Eustace lawful good and Roisia chaotic good.)

Anyway, after completing the game, the epilogue mentioned an unrequited love between the two—(‘saviour the second merely clapped saviour the first on the back and rode away’)—and I have since made that epilogue a canon part of Roisia’s story. She had fallen in love with Eustace, Mr. Saviour the Second, over the course of their adventure and those feelings were not returned.

In BG3, I think that Roisia is not quite over Eustace. She drew up a list of lifelong goals for herself as a way to "cure" herself of heartbreak and is on the lookout for a spouse for herself, but I think she still misses the easy camaraderie of Eustace, his endless snark, and his steadfastness. He'd definitely be the one she'd dream about.

[janearts]

I have a deep fear that by the time the BG3 is released, I won't be able to stomach doing another round of Act I so I've been distracting myself from playing by fleshing out Roisia's backstory and designing her parents.