Okay, I'm going to start this with a warning: Should members of my adventuring party come across this, they might want to pass by if they have difficulty separating player knowledge from character knowledge. For everyone else … this is long--and I haven't yet written down everything that I had in mind. It's also written with enthusiasm, but not a great deal of form or polish.
You've been warned.
As I’ve been developing my new D&D character’s backstory, I realize that I am heavily stealing from a variety of sources. When I realized that our party might be in need of a tank, I immediately felt drawn to playing a barbarian as I had not done so before. Initially, I was thinking along the lines of Conan the Barbarian who holds an odd, but fond, place in my memories as I somehow ended up with a comic book adaptation of the Schwarzenegger movie as a child, decades before I ever saw the film. As I thought about how Conan grew strong working the mill (which I now know is a Biblical allusion to Samson), the image from the comic merged with my mental image of the Scouring of the Shire. Suddenly, I had the idea of a halfling barbarian who grew strong as his village was abused under the brutal rule of a Saruman-like wizard.
While a gimmick-character like a halfling barbarian already has a certain appeal to me, the horrific backstory actually became more compelling (and more horrifying) as I thought about it. Instead of being saved by a group of returning heroic hobbits as happened at the end of The Lord of the Rings, this village stayed under the wizard’s control for decades. Initially, the wizard beguiled them into giving him more and more control, but his brutality was quickly revealed. Not only did he have them toiling in mines and at his mills and forges, he also began to experiment on them.
Here things got particularly dark. A barbarian subclass is called “The Path of the Beast.” At third level, the character gains (by changing form) either a bite, claw, or tail attack every time the barbarian rages. For example, if the bite attack is chosen, the character either grows fangs or mandibles. After the rage, the character returns to normal, and on subsequent rages, the character can take the same form or one of the other forms. Then, at tenth level, the character gains the ability to either breathe and swim underwater, jump exceptionally high and far, or climb any surface at the character's normal movement speed. Mandibles and wall crawling? I immediately thought of insects.
I decided that the wizard was experimenting on the halflings perhaps in a misguided attempt to make them stronger. In my character’s case, he added insect-like features, twisting and mutilating this halfling time and again, forcing my character into brutal labor while waiting for the experiments to integrate (and while experimenting on other villagers). While some of the changes only come out during rages, I think I want my character to continually have insect-like multi-faceted eyes where his normal eyeballs would be (thus, not domed out). Thus my character can no longer read books which had been a favorite pastime of his as a child—before the wizard arrived--because he literally sees the world differently now.
His body is also covered in patterns of chitin that look like strange (and disturbing) tattoos on casual examination. These “tattoos” are what form into his claws, tail, or mandibles during his rages. What appears to be dreadlocks on his head is actually more of a carapace—the deadlocks idea I got from Ronin from SG: Atlantis, but then the bug aspect made me think of Kerrigan from StarCraft, so I combined the two.
Basically, especially when the eyes are taken into account, he looks like a freak even before he rages and insect-like talons grow out of his fingers, or his jaw splits and extends into serrated mandibles (which normally look like two very long and think sideburns that meet at his chin), or a thin-but-scorpion-like tail that’s over three times his height (ten foot reach) appears. It’s because of the last aspect that he prefers to wear a kilt. In fact, his preferred dress style is similar to that of the Outlander’s Scottish outfits. Remember, he’s tall for his kind at an absolutely gigantic (and magically crafted) three foot six.
He even thinks of himself as a freak and thus shuns both society and his own reflection. This is ironic because his home village considers him a hero (if a tragic one). He helped break out some of the other experiments who were able to escape the village and gain the aid of a powerful group of adventurers. He was publicly tortured for his role in the escape (perhaps this is when the wizard gave him the orange insect eyes) and was near death when the adventurers managed to save the village; although the wizard managed to disappear. Because of his folk hero background (although, I’m going to try and swap acrobatics instead of animal handling), I decided to give him the name of the village hero from the movie Willow: Vohnkar (Brookgreen).
As he was saved by adventurers, and because he felt too freakish to remain in the village, he left his parents and many siblings, and now tries to right wrongs as he travels from place to place, listening for rumors of the wizard who corrupted him.
I can hardly wait to find out what happens to him.
You've been warned.
As I’ve been developing my new D&D character’s backstory, I realize that I am heavily stealing from a variety of sources. When I realized that our party might be in need of a tank, I immediately felt drawn to playing a barbarian as I had not done so before. Initially, I was thinking along the lines of Conan the Barbarian who holds an odd, but fond, place in my memories as I somehow ended up with a comic book adaptation of the Schwarzenegger movie as a child, decades before I ever saw the film. As I thought about how Conan grew strong working the mill (which I now know is a Biblical allusion to Samson), the image from the comic merged with my mental image of the Scouring of the Shire. Suddenly, I had the idea of a halfling barbarian who grew strong as his village was abused under the brutal rule of a Saruman-like wizard.
While a gimmick-character like a halfling barbarian already has a certain appeal to me, the horrific backstory actually became more compelling (and more horrifying) as I thought about it. Instead of being saved by a group of returning heroic hobbits as happened at the end of The Lord of the Rings, this village stayed under the wizard’s control for decades. Initially, the wizard beguiled them into giving him more and more control, but his brutality was quickly revealed. Not only did he have them toiling in mines and at his mills and forges, he also began to experiment on them.
Here things got particularly dark. A barbarian subclass is called “The Path of the Beast.” At third level, the character gains (by changing form) either a bite, claw, or tail attack every time the barbarian rages. For example, if the bite attack is chosen, the character either grows fangs or mandibles. After the rage, the character returns to normal, and on subsequent rages, the character can take the same form or one of the other forms. Then, at tenth level, the character gains the ability to either breathe and swim underwater, jump exceptionally high and far, or climb any surface at the character's normal movement speed. Mandibles and wall crawling? I immediately thought of insects.
I decided that the wizard was experimenting on the halflings perhaps in a misguided attempt to make them stronger. In my character’s case, he added insect-like features, twisting and mutilating this halfling time and again, forcing my character into brutal labor while waiting for the experiments to integrate (and while experimenting on other villagers). While some of the changes only come out during rages, I think I want my character to continually have insect-like multi-faceted eyes where his normal eyeballs would be (thus, not domed out). Thus my character can no longer read books which had been a favorite pastime of his as a child—before the wizard arrived--because he literally sees the world differently now.
His body is also covered in patterns of chitin that look like strange (and disturbing) tattoos on casual examination. These “tattoos” are what form into his claws, tail, or mandibles during his rages. What appears to be dreadlocks on his head is actually more of a carapace—the deadlocks idea I got from Ronin from SG: Atlantis, but then the bug aspect made me think of Kerrigan from StarCraft, so I combined the two.
Basically, especially when the eyes are taken into account, he looks like a freak even before he rages and insect-like talons grow out of his fingers, or his jaw splits and extends into serrated mandibles (which normally look like two very long and think sideburns that meet at his chin), or a thin-but-scorpion-like tail that’s over three times his height (ten foot reach) appears. It’s because of the last aspect that he prefers to wear a kilt. In fact, his preferred dress style is similar to that of the Outlander’s Scottish outfits. Remember, he’s tall for his kind at an absolutely gigantic (and magically crafted) three foot six.
He even thinks of himself as a freak and thus shuns both society and his own reflection. This is ironic because his home village considers him a hero (if a tragic one). He helped break out some of the other experiments who were able to escape the village and gain the aid of a powerful group of adventurers. He was publicly tortured for his role in the escape (perhaps this is when the wizard gave him the orange insect eyes) and was near death when the adventurers managed to save the village; although the wizard managed to disappear. Because of his folk hero background (although, I’m going to try and swap acrobatics instead of animal handling), I decided to give him the name of the village hero from the movie Willow: Vohnkar (Brookgreen).
As he was saved by adventurers, and because he felt too freakish to remain in the village, he left his parents and many siblings, and now tries to right wrongs as he travels from place to place, listening for rumors of the wizard who corrupted him.
I can hardly wait to find out what happens to him.
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