I need you all to know I am alive and well, that I defended my phd at the end of February and it all went excellently, and now I am moving on to fulfilling other big personal goals, such as

becoming a pikmin

It’s been ages since I posted anything about this, so. I’ve actually accumulated a pretty damn full set of gear for all my swords-related activities.

Including a second, longer and way chonkier jacket/gambeson (and some upper arm and shoulder protection, not shown here) so I’m not as bruised up as often. Yes, yes, git gud, I know, I know.

Anyway I wish I could just wear pants like these all the time. Obviously what is really important in life is that this is a comfy pose to hang out in.

NOT AS LATE AS I AM

13. what are some motifs you associate with them? did you intentionally bring in those motifs, or did it happen over time?

Initially it was feathers, light, kind of standard aasimar stuff. Both deliberate and involuntary glowing - not sparkling, though! Super important distinction.

Very pure clean water, caustics. Then bathing, especially spa/onsen hot healing mineral spring stuff - those were unintentional, arose from the setting/lore I discussed before and from the pure author appeal fact that I Love Baths.

Thin, slender, precise piercing weapons.

Gold and silver as different “flavours” of radiance.

Blood/scars - happened over time, as it turned out she both got hurt an awful lot and was constantly involved with healing. Also, tying into this, kintsugi.

36. how do they fidget?

Sword polishing/sharpening/whatever. This kind of arose during play because at any given even slightly chill or downtimey moment she was doing some kind of unnecessary sword maintenance. Became a bit of a running joke at some point.

55. they’re seeing their greatest wish come true—what’s happening?

She's spreading her actual real tangible feathery wings (for more than one minute a day!) as the gates of Irian open to her, the face of her angelic patron revealed to her, welcoming, ready to sit down for a long and enlightening talk. Full of validation, and a nice, clear overview of the point of it all and instructions on how to continue making the world a better place, doing uncomplicated, straightforward Good without any horrible sacrifices and “lesser evil” dilemmas and whatnot (Barovia was……… tough). Telling her it was and is all worthwhile, and it Mattered, that there is a great plan and purpose for her and she's doing great so far.

(Also she's probably effortlessly ferrying her favourite people along with her, somehow.)

All of this is of course normal to want and possible to achieve.

63. what’s a meme or tiktok or vine (or whatever) that you associate with them?

A Ramiel video would just be the Chumbawamba Tubthumping chorus looped.

We’ve accumulated a ton of memes, let’s see... a couple Ramiel-related ones...

As a matter of fact it did not! I thought ask-eating days were behind us, but I guess some things never change.

17. they’re crying—what did it take to make them cry?

Failure, especially if related to something she promised someone. Frustrated, angry tears at being unable or in some way powerless to help someone she cares about are a good bet.

A particular in-game incident? This one time, Ez failed some checks and got possessed by a vengeful spirit during a particularly unpleasant series of encounters towards the end of the campaign when we made Strahd Fucking Pissed. So she started attacking the already pretty run down party and, of course, she went for Ramiel first because that's peak drama, right? And of course she rolled a crit with her rapier (to add insult to grievous injury, Ez usually rolled like garbage whenever we had her with us). So Ramiel, adamantly refusing to actually fight her and being a wee bit Utena-stabbed just then, held onto her and cried on her a bit. It was great, a deadly reflection of previous fun bonding sparring sessions they’d had, thematically resonant, all of that. I love playing these games, man.

I did write her having a good post-back-from-the-dead cry here.

Another specific incident that comes to mind is something that happened while we were playing out our little epilogue in Barovia, tying up loose ends and such. In the catacombs of the big bad evil castle there’s a whole maze of crypts, a lot of which are traps, or cool items for adventurers to find, or just awful puns - or all of the above. In particular, there is one haunted by the ghost of a person with a horribly punny name obsessed with flying and making some sort of winged contraption. I believe the idea is a player character opens that specific crypt, fails a save, then gets controlled by this ghost and tries to leap into the chasm below the castle in an attempt to fly. So while clearing out the castle after its master’s defeat, we came upon this crypt, and Ramiel deliberately failed the save, used her once-per-day one-minute glowy aasimar wings ability, took the ghost on a little spin around the castle towers in the bright glorious newly-restored sunlight, finally letting them find peace. Was it her or the ghost shedding a few tears as this happened? Probably both of them. I realise this is a joke/trap, but it actually turned out really touching and genuine and post-big bad defeat cathartic.

30. how do they handle confrontation?

Oh, that’s an easy one. 100% RIGHTEOUS ANGER. Was managed down to a fuming, angry simmer during extra touchy incidents later on, but only with great effort.

32. which of your decisions led to their voice being the way it is?

Hm, we don't really do voices too much. Funny NPCs sometimes, PCs not really. We did have little hype sounds for our VTT for when your turn would pop up in combat! Hers was a snippet of some angelic choir or other overlaid with a shinkkkk of a sword being drawn. It was pretty fun to make.

Speech-wise, were Ramiel to give some sort of inspiring, rousing speech bolstered by her super high charisma score, it wouldn't be based on fancy wordplay, or refined, thought-through oratory or trained speechcraft (our artificer is into all that and also high-stakes international diplomacy, hah). It would just be clear, straightforward, no-nonsense, and absolutely agonisingly earnest. The kind of… you just want to believe it, right?

My favourite thing about the way paladins and the whole "holy knight" concept were done in 5e was that it wasn't tied to a patron deity or similar. The oaths are essentially… believe in your beliefs and stick to your convictions so hard it literally gives you supernatural powers. Probably my favourite take on paladins and the one with the most personal appeal is Pathfinder’s Virtuous Bravo (the swash! the panache!), but Oath of Devotion is absolutely up there.

After finishing the actual Curse of Strahd adventure, we moved from 5e to Ironsworn/Starforged and let me tell you, this gal is all Heart.

21. do they have an idea about how they’ll die? do you?

Ahahah, I love you being on brand. Never change.

She has in fact died died twice (so far). Once when refusing to give up the location of Strahd's much sought-after vampire hunter nemesis - being a stubborn righteous ass, she got pretty beat up and blood-sucked, then dropped off one of the towers of Castle Ravenloft to her death. She got brought back a few in-game days later thanks to said vampire hunter having a scroll of Raise Dead and being convinced by the party that, if nothing else, a glowy smitey paladin was pretty useful in the fight against a vampire, so it was worth it. Recovering from that is... well, still ongoing.

The second one happened when facing some extremely pissed off Strahd harassment just before the endgame, engaging him in melee and trying to keep his attention away from the rest of her exhausted companions as well as the Martikov family - great allies of the party who were at the moment providing desperately needed sanctuary in their winery (and also I love them). Strahd had a magical fire shield up which meant each attack on him was… costly, to say the least. This one was very brief, as one of the family's three precious magical gems was sacrificed to bring her back almost as soon as Strahd, that absolute bastard, left after a brief gloat and threat or twenty. This was also very costly for the artificer in our party, as the backlash of tinkering with the gem to unleash its magical properties ultimately led to him losing his arm. It was a very, very grim time and a real “darkest before the dawn” moment nearing the end of the whole Barovian misadventure.

I know player character death gets handled wildly differently depending on the table. Some folks love permadeath and going through a dozen characters and just rolling (haha) with whatever the dice decide, while some lean fully into playing in worlds where bringing someone back from the dead is just a couple of diamonds and a brief cleric visit away. I feel like I’ve played in games that fell all throughout the spectrum, but in this particular case we went more narrative focused than probably ever before. In our discussions with the DM about how we'd even handle character death in the campaign we all agreed bringing in new outsider characters would be kind of a pain and would ring pretty hollow, so we agreed we'd use the scarce and often very costly possibilities given in the adventure itself, and, if all else failed, we'd go the Revenant route - i.e. whoever dies can be some brand of Too Angry To Die, swear to do one last thing (probably defeating Strahd and freeing the land in this particular case), and come back as an extremely driven undead version of themselves, a sad kind of semi-existence, that, bittersweetly, is guaranteed to end when the task is accomplished. It never actually came to this, as it happens, though each member of the 3-strong party had a brush with it. But it was certainly a rather grim (and appropriate) possibility.

The Silver Flame, which Ramiel formally belongs to via her knightly order, believes that the souls of the worthy and faithful are supposed to join the flame after death and strengthen it in protecting the world from demons/fiends/all manner of evil - so essentially she expects the fight to never really end. Barovia, however, is a prison for a specific evil lord - which also happens to be a prison for the souls of anyone who dies within it. So not only was that hanging over her, but she experienced a small, brief taste of it (twice!) - the revenant option doesn’t seem so bad anymore, suddenly.

All of this is to say, the possibilities were and are many and varied, but I am absolutely certain this is not a person who is going to die peacefully in her sleep at a venerable age, and so is she.

14. what keeps them up at night?

Way, way too many things to list at this point - the Strahd module is extremely unkind to characters, to put it mildly. I don’t think anyone in the party has had a decent night’s sleep in a while and they’ve all been through several (often highly personalised) varieties of hell.

Most specifically and most recently, game-timeline-wise, I’d say it’s the guilt of skirting responsibility and duty, in a sense, by choosing not to return to her homeland in Eberron from the Domains of Dread for now, but rather throw her lot in with the Dysfunctional Monster Hunting Duo (TM). 

15. is there something that never fails to make them laugh?

This is interesting and actually made me realise I could think of a thousand things that have and will make her smile, but not that many to make her laugh. In general she probably takes everything way, way too earnestly.

So yeah. Smile? A ton of things. But laugh? I think the number one thing so far has been a really good friendly fight - as in, sparring or the like. Just a nice, uncomplicated test of a set of skills she holds in high regard, can be a chill time, or an exhilarating fun time - in any case, highly likely to spark joy and a good, honest laugh, no matter whether it's a win or a loss. On a sort of similar but less blatantly self-inserty note (I would never), she actually really enjoys dancing.

2 answered here!

28. do they collect anything?

Animal pals with ridiculous... aspirational names, if anything. So far there has been a cat named Valour and a dog named Courage, a horse named Honour, and a chicken named Justice (thanks Ez).

45. what lies do they tell themselves?

That she is actually perfectly fine with how her life panned out, including initially being carted off to formal training on a not-entirely-voluntary basis, because it's certainly for some righteous higher purpose and forging her into a stronger blade to fight evil with and all that. That she is absolutely 100000% fine with being an instrument, or weapon, or tool, if it's for a good and noble cause, and that this is all she ever needs to be.

This is already showing a bunch of cracks, and other people are discouraging this kind of thinking (or actively working to dismantle it, thanks Ez), so I personally can't wait for this to come to a head.

69. what’s one secret they don’t want getting out?

Hm, that's a tough one! She’s not a very secretive person, a pretty open book to most, actively refuses to lie even when it’s really fucking inconvenient for me, the player, and would be terrible at it if she tried anyway.

I think she generally doesn’t want people to notice that she's developed a very clear (and tbh probably fairly obvious) weakness, in that she, in all her righteous stubbornness, would be prepared to compromise a whole lot more if someone threatened Ez specifically.

Threaten Ramiel herself with death if she refuses to give out the location of Strahd’s public enemy number one, a certain Doctor Rudolph van Richten, Vampire Hunter? No big deal. Strahd went through with it and straight up killed her, that's all fine, we can deal with that. But you see, other people were there too, and Strahd rolled Insight before deciding who to threaten/attack, and rolled really, really badly. And if he hadn't? I think, ultimately, yeah, it's the fact that she probably would have sold out van Richten if it meant saving Ez, breaking a promise and an honourable oath, and probably making both the people involved hate her in the process. Or just deeply disappointing them, which, you know, is probably worse.

Also - and this is something that’s yet to really come into play - there’s the fact that she seems to have the attention of someone or something from the Amber Temple, a vault full of various strange ancient malevolent entities... which makes me as a player very /eye emoji.

DnD character ask meme replies! @fuleao and an anon both asked for 2, so here it is first:

2. what was your original concept for this character? how did playing them change that concept?

Here my very very first concept was: haven't played DnD in ages, let's make an honourable oathkeeping paladin, absolute Oath stock character, easy mode, check. I then like taking silly things, in-jokes and memes, as well as core DnD/mechanical stuff, and using it all as prompts for serious character expansion and flavour. 

The rest is under the cut because I ramble quite a bit.

@tymp3st replied to your post:

Honestly, fondness/exasperation was exactly a good chunk of the growing relationship there, it was very fun. And thanks, I’m both super unsure about posting art AND at the moment still like... super weird about talking to people, hah.

@zombee replied to your post:

Picture me as a stock vaguely ominous old man in the village inn narrowing his eyes to ask if aye, ye been down that road ye’self, then? Basically.

@quendis​ replied to your post The d’Avenir Treatise on the Essentials of Monster Hunting (Vol I) - Preface and Introduction:

Wow! Thank you so so much! It’s super flattering to hear I’m even close to influencing someone’s actual game, and I’m really glad it all felt right! It seems like in every playthrough of CoS I see floating around someone latches onto and throws in super hard with the dysfunctional father-daughter vampire hunting duo, and in our game back in the day it was absolutely 10000% me. I love them.

(Also: I actually have a lot of feelings on what they did with RvR in that adventure, after he’d been around for ages. Dude is a blatant Van Helsing expy - everyone Dracula Dailying knows what that means now, which is great. He’s, even after everything he’s been through, supposed to have a very... fundamental kindness to him, and he cares very deeply. Which is in part why his curse is so awful (and the story of how and with whom he once broke it so good, even if not... currently mainline “canon”). And for me the point of (and appeal of) a lot of his story was that he easily could have gone down a very, very, very dark path -- almost did! -- but ultimately absolutely didn’t, and in fact does not have some kind of really edgy He Who Fights Monsters as his main deal. /puts away soapbox)

@aspencrown replied:

Thank you! I needed to vent a lot of feelings there myself. Glad it worked for you too!

The methods we employ...

The quote is from Dracula - it felt appropriate. Also I decided that vampire hunters are really cool, actually.

I love many things about this character, in case it wasn’t obvious, but here’s a couple. I love how (barring player interference) she decides to straight up solo the final dungeon in the middle of the module as written, barely escapes with her life, and lies low for all of 5 seconds before coming up with a new approach. I love her actually pretty cool trap idea featuring a magic circle in an abbey on the other side of the map from the evil vampire lord castle HQ. I love how they choose to phrase her flaw every time she’s featured in a book, as she is a fascinating combo of brash and reckless and hyper-prepared and ridiculously competent.

I love who she chooses to be and what she chooses to do in the face of living in a setting/plane of existence which is ultimately doomed and damned and damning and dark in a very particular way (but this is a trope I’m a sucker for generally, see: my url). Could all her efforts be considered futile? The answer is a resounding no, never.

I love how in a module absolutely overflowing with wizard-y statblocks for some reason (including the big bad himself), Ez stands out as the only one who doesn’t go for the default fireball spam but instead zaps people with lightning bolts. Absolutely iconic.

The way you get good at art is drawing the same character over and over again, right? These things take forever for me, but I do have one more WIP, very zappy, still early super rough days, under the cut.

Me, emerging from my miserable PhD exile: Welp, time to slowly relearn how to interact with people, try to catch up a bit, reconnect, shitpost about blorbos because honestly turns out it is quite relevant to my general well-being--

Tumblr: GONCHAROV

The Four Long Rests Of Ramiel

This is a cleaned up and expanded version of a piece I wrote quite a while ago, because if I don’t write and edit something that isn’t a work email or academic text I am going to quite literally die.

Anyway, this is some more Blorbos From My DnD Homegame and I’m not expecting anyone but me to be really invested in this, but they’ve been on here before and I’ve done my best to hopefully make this all not too obscure and unintelligible to an outside observer. Any thoughts and comments will, as always, be appreciated to bits and put in that collection I keep to gaze upon on bad days (yes, it’s an actual thing I have).

Commemorating how a little over a year ago in our Curse of Strahd campaign my character got caught by the land’s vampire lord while trying to heist an ancient dragon skull from his spooky castle in order to bring back a fallen order of noble knights (long story), stubbornly refused to give up the whereabouts of a legendary vampire hunter upon capture, and was subsequently brutally murdered despite her friends’ and dashing love interest’s very impressive efforts to save her. It was very peak DnD dramatic and great and the aftermath was wild, and then I wrote some of it up while processing it all and shared it with my fellow players and DM, the absolute champs.

The original comically long title of this was “The Four (But Actually Three So Far) Long Rests Of Ramiel The As-Of-Yet-Untitled, Recently Deceased”, alluding to the fact that the Raise Dead spell states: Coming back from the dead is an ordeal. The target takes a −4 penalty to all attack rolls, saving throws, and ability checks. Every time the target finishes a long rest, the penalty is reduced by 1 until it disappears. Yes, it was a fun stretch of sessions.

Spoilers for the Curse of Strahd adventure abound, as well as bits and pieces from the Eberron setting. A warning for (temporary) character death and related recovery, and some vampire-typical bloody violence, but nothing beyond an AO3 T rating.

In brief, Ramiel, the POV character, is an Aasimar Paladin, Lava is a Vedalken Artificer, Elgath is a Goliath Fighter. Rudolph van Richten and Ezmerelda d’Avenir are NPCs from the module and Ravenloft setting who ended up playing pretty big roles in our story, and also… I just think they’re neat.

Length: ~7700 words.

—

The Four Long Rests Of Ramiel

Fingers curled around her throat, the grip utterly merciless and unflinching, claws catching on already torn skin and flesh. The heavy rain, richly mixed with dark red, trailed freely down to her collarbone, painting the fabric of her shirt.

“One last chance,” ground out of a fanged snarl stained with her own stolen blood, an undercurrent of impatient rage tainting the cool, cultured voice from before. “Where is Rudolph van Richten?”

She couldn’t turn her throbbing, spinning, definitely concussed head to look towards her companions, try to see how they were doing. Her legs kicked out feebly and her feet could find no purchase. Her fingers tingled with the last remnants of (useless, useless) magic and slipped harmlessly off the clawed hands that were closed like a vice around her. When she forced out words, her voice was barely above a rasp, but the (futile, futile) determination in it was clear: “You’re never getting that from me.”

A burst of incredible, overwhelming pain, and then, for a little while, nothing.

-

Her eyes flutter open, barely.

Every part of her hurts, every breath a hard-won, costly victory. She can barely stand to tilt her head, the slightest of movements stretching and pulling at her ravaged neck and resounding like a drum within her skull. Her eyes burn and her eyesight blurs, and her shoulders, back, and ribs feel as if someone smashed them to bits then pieced them back together without much thought or care.

But she is alive.