Running the Realms (3.5 D&D system)

[ff]

Hi Tagan,

Would an elven rogue or ranger be a suitable addition to the party? Those are two of my favorite archetypes, and the characters so far don't seem too heavy in that direction (one ranger-1 rogue-1 fighter-1, and I can try to choose complementing skills). She would probably have an archer emphasis. I might choose between ranger or rogue depending on whether it's a more outdoorsy or indoorsy exposition (I realize the point of a campaign is often not to know what's in store - but you know, whichever type of character would plausibly choose to join whatever the opening scenario is).

I would probably keep it fairly vanilla SRD, like a ranger-3 or rogue-3 with Point Blank Shot and Rapid Shot  and (if ranger) Precise Shot, and I might peruse other chars' skills to get a sense of what complements the party.

The backstory I have in mind is that she fought with the elves of the Ardeep in a prolonged set of skirmishes between them and the expanding human farmers/loggers/hunters on the outskirts of the big, rapidly growing city of Waterdeep. In one skirmish she found herself cut off behind enemy lines. She runs into a human ranger who thinks that *he* has been cut off behind enemy lines as well. It turns out they are between human and elven forces and probably going to get blitzed with arrows. They need to work together to slip out from between the lines and survive. It turns out that he's not a Waterdeep military regular at heart, but in the army b/c he's the son of a noble or commander and it's expected of him.

They briefly fall in love, but he goes back to a human noble girlfriend  - or there's some misunderstanding, like he's just making one trip back into Waterdeep to tell off his father, and to break off his arranged engagement to the girlfriend, but my character doesn't realize that. My character is upset and goes nuts, maybe scalping some humans, but the elves reject her for consorting with the enemy. She goes off alone towards some other elven pocket of civilization, maybe distant relatives, and will be crossing the Dalelands (are they on the way to Myth Drannor? If this is before the Spellplague, is this before it was destroyed?) when she runs into whatever scenario is the exposition of this RP.

[Cythieus]

Alrightie, my sheet is done, I got all the spells and everything figured out in it. I just need to do some more with my history, I have decided to brush up on my Forgotten Realms info and that Ashley will more than likely be from Neverwinter.

http://www.myth-weavers.com/sheetview.php?sheetid=197976

[Tagan]

ff, an Elven Ranger would probably work quite well.

[Tagan]

Well, that's three item familiars so far!  Three people with bits o their soul sticking out for me to steal!  (hehe)

Um. Did I say that out loud?

Anyway, facinating applications so far, all.  At this point I may start next Tuesday.

[Opheliac]

I only did it because I need the extra experiance points for crafting. :( Id be more than happy without it. Infact, Id rather have the feat slot. :(

[ff]

ff, an Elven Ranger would probably work quite well.

Great! I'll put together a char sheet and stat block.

[Cythieus]

I only did it because I need the extra experiance points for crafting. :( Id be more than happy without it. Infact, Id rather have the feat slot. :(

Ugh it does require a feat, doesn't it? I might be better off without it too

[RubySlippers]

Ok I have a character might as well focus on something and its inspired from the DnD Cartoon Series of the years of old and DnD 1st Edition a Thief-Acrobat Rogue build. Toss in Perform (dancing) sincea girl has to earn an jhonest living and some skills to skulk around should be very good if focused a great deal. Human. Anyway I don't think any character is taking what amounts to an athlete one can never be to sure when a master of balance, climbing, jumping, swimming, rope use and tumbling with hide and move silently will be handy. Think of her as a classic cat burglar if one has to make a rogue a category.

[Tagan]

Ugh it does require a feat, doesn't it? I might be better off without it too

Like anything, it has advantages and disadvantages.  Unlike many feats, this one increases in power as you increase in level.  A magic item that you can modify yourself, is a handy thing, and the extra spells, skills and exp you can gain from it are nothing to sneeze at.  The possible loss of the item does make it a semi dangerous feat, and I have known Wizards to decide against having a familar for simular reasons.

It's a trade off.

[Cythieus]

I have another idea I would like to take up, man I should stop watching these crazy shows.

[Opheliac]

Yeah. My intentions is that the item familiar is an heirloom forgehammer. Please note that im not even proficient in warhammer. After I finish this english homework, I'll go to work on the background and personality of Myrna.

[TheGlyphstone]

Meh. You guys are welcome to your item familiars. I've got my beloved Grandpa Jasper, rattling around like he wasn't a day over ninety. And just because he has a good metabolism and burns off weight really fast, it's not nice to call him a 'skeleton'.

[Cythieus]

Seeing this: Zack Kim - Miss You (Original)

And this:



Gave me wild ideas.

[Aiden]

This group still have room? I have an urge to pick up the role of a paladin or maybe a fighter...or a blackguard

[Tagan]

There is still plenty of time to apply, Aiden, though evil characters are unlikely to be chosen.

(Give me a really good reason why they'd work great with a party, and an evil character 'might' be accepted.)

[Cythieus]

I think I will be forgoing the um, intelligent item in light of not being like everyone else and going for something a little all original.

[Aiden]

I might roll with blackguard need to dig my books out.

Book if Vile Darkness fair game?

[Cythieus]

A Mithral Masterwork instrument would be 1,600 dollars, correct?

[Tagan]

A masterwork mythral instrument that weighs 3 lbs ordinarily would be 1,600 gp, yes.

[ff]

Name: Aurali'iya Hala'sien (usually 'Aurali' or 'Aura' to non-elves)
Race: Wood Elf
Class(es): Ranger (deity: Solonor Thelandira, elven god of archery, hunting, and survival)
Alignment: Chaotic Neutral (was Chaotic Good until recently)
Age: 134 (about 22 in 'elf years')
Sheet Link: link

Female Chaotic Neutral Wood Elf Ranger-3
Level 3, Init 4, HP 20/20, Speed 30
AC 19, Touch 14, Flat-footed 15, Fort +4, Ref +7, Will +3, Base Attack Bonus 3,   Action Points 6
Abilities Str 16, Dex 18, Con 12, Int 12, Wis 14, Cha 12
SQ: elf traits, favored enemy (humans +2), wild empathy +2
Feats: Endurance, Point Black Shot, Precise Shot, Rapid Shot, Track
Skills: Hide 10, Knowledge (nature) 7, Listen 10, Move Silently 10, Search 8, Spot 10, Survival 8, Use Rope 5
Skill synergies: +2 Knowledge(nature), +2 Survival aboveground natural, +2 on Survival for tracking
Elf traits: immunity to sleep spells and effects, low-light vision, auto Search check w/i 5 feet of a secret door
Attack: longbow +8 ranged (1d8+3/x3) or rapier +6 melee (1d6+3/18-20)
Full attack: longbow +6/+6 ranged (1d8+3/x3) or rapier +6 melee (1d6+3/18-20)
Items:
Mithril Chain Shirt +1
Masterwork composite longbow (Str rating +3), quiver, 120 arrows
Rapier, shortsword, six throwing daggers
Rope, grappling hook, forest-camoflage body paint,
forest-camoflage cloak (she's taken reverie in it many a night),
flint and steel, spyglass, 100 gp

Appearance:  5'2", 95 lbs, fair peach skin, dirty bronze blonde hair, crystal blue eyes, 28' bust, 18' waist, 24' hips



Background:

When Aurali'iya was born to the elves of the Ardeep Forest, almost six generations ago in the brief lives of Men, the industrious and entrepreneurial humans of the westward city of Waterdeep had not yet expanded so far as they later would. Yet expand they did over those next six generations, bulding Waterdeep into the greatest center of commerce Faerun had eve seen.

Aurali had always been a touch of a loner, given to long strolls and explorations of her forestest homeland, often to the worry of her parents. They steered her to productive use of this proclivity, and once their daughter had completed the customary initiations and martial training of elvendom, she joined the ranks of the scouts and guardians who patrolled the fringes of the Ardeep elves' domain.

Among this order of rangers, Aurali quietly fell in with a circle of young would-be commandos with their own predictions about the future and ideas on how to deal with it. Although the ever-eastward pushing human farmers, loggers, and trappers had not yet quite encroached on what the Ardeep elven council considered their domain, Aurali's new peers quietly engaged in a strategy of preemptive psychological warfare against the humans. Though rarely appearing to them or harming them physically, they took to pranks and intimidation - a dead goat on a doorstep here, an escaped corral of livestock there, lumberjacks' axes gone missing - designed to play on the fears and superstitions of the humans. Often they left feigns signs of werewolves or other bogeymen, such as lupine hair and bite and claw marks on the goat.

In spite of or goaded on by all this, eventually the humans and elves did come to hard dispute over land rights. Prolonged negotiations fell through, as human frontiersman came to small skirmishes against the elven rangers, and both sides then sent in military regulars, ostensibly to defend and extract their besieged fellows, who ended up in larger skirmishes against one another.

Aurali was engaged in the thick of these, her heart often troubled by whether her own circle's quiet efforts had been in vain, or perhaps had in fact ignited the outbreak of battle.

On one overcast and eerily windy day, in the bitterest sortie yet, Aura found herself cut off, the last survivor of a small squad of her fellows, cut off behind the human lines. She crept a wider and wider arc through the forest, seeking to get back around from her own side ,yet pushed further and further from home.

In an emerald glade, early quiet but for the military horns in the distance, she chanced upon a human man. Tall, broad-shouldered, and blonde-maned was he, with alert yet gentle emerald eyes. He carried the longbow and trappings of a ranger or scout-archer like herself, and moved with as much stealth as she. She might never have seen him had he remembered to cover that flowing blonde hair which glimmered in the few rays of sunlight breaking through the cover of clouds.

They drew their bows simultaneously, and then circled one another warily, taking the measure of each other over their drawn arrow shafts. They barked questions at one another, each hoping to learn of the other sides' movements  before slaying their immediate foe. The ranger man thought himself behind the elven lines, as much the same plight as she. They realized they were in fact between two armies who had passed one another, and were now spiraling back together for a clash.

Then the arrows rained through the tree boughs, elven arrow shafts from the northwest and human arbalest bolts from the southeast. 

The man carried two shields upon his back - though he himself wielded a great two-handed sword, he carried the shields of two fallen comrades who had been friends through childhood and training, as per a custom to carry the shields of the fallen back when the bodies absolutely could not be. He tossed one to Aura and suggested that if they wishes to escape the approaching rainstorm of arrows, they ought run side by side, each holding a shield upwards and away from the other.

In this way they escaped from between the converging battle lines. With night falling, they spent the night holed up in a ravine. Each too afraid of the other to take sleep or reverie, they had naught to do talk. By morning, perhaps it was just the post-adrenal fatigue, but they had very different feelings about the conflict, and about each other.

The handsome ranger led her to a druidic enclave in the Ardeep, of mixed humans, elves, and gnomes, united in the ideals of his patron deity Chauntea. They lingered there, not quite feeling the resolve or courage to go back into the battle, even at risk of being branded deserters whenever they finally did return home. With the dread of this reckoning, and the peace of the enclave, the longer they lingered, the harder it was to leave this place, or one another.

All too briefly, it might have been said that they fell in love, but Aurali woke one morning to find the ranger gone. She learned form a half-elven druid of enviable beauty that the man had traveled back to Waterdeep, if not to the military (which he had always been rather pushed into by his high-stationed father and paladinic elder brother, and not so passionate about himself), then to the human noble girl to whom he was already betrothed.

Aurali'iya ran away, bitterly. Stalking the Ardeep and the ongoing skirmishes, she fell to guerrilla warfare, hiding and then shooting men when they broke from their companies to relieve themselves, rarely being seen herself. Briefly she found and rejoined several of her former circle, who had now fallen back to old custom like grisly interrogation and taking scalps. Aura's own heart darkened some, falling from the apex of idealism she had achieved while in the company of the goodly and thoughtful ranger. She fell yet not so far that her patron god abandoned her, but it remained in limbo whether her heart might rise again or full yet further.

Restless with her actions one night, Aurali discovered in her sleeping bag a small note in the human ranger's hand, addressed to her, and probably intended to be found as soon as she woke to find him gone. He had, apparently, intended to return only briefly to Waterdeep, to deliver his fallen friends' shields to their families, to excuse himself from his parentally arranged engagement, and to face his father and proclaim that he would now live his own life beyond the arms of Waterdeep and within those of his elven love. In this letter he apologized for his cowardice in not saying so aloud, knowing that he would not have the heart to leave her side once they spoke face to face.

Aura left her fallen-to-savagery elven allies, and crept back to the druid camp. She found it deserted and burned, for a terrible meeting of the elven and human armies had happened there. She found only one of the gnomes, hiding out in a rocky hill crag. He confessed that when the ranger man had returned, the very same day, the half-elven druidess had told him that Aura had abandoned him, with a story like to the one she had told Aura, that Aura had gone back into the fold of elvendom and her own prior betrothal.

The druidess was, apparently, a former lover of the ranger's, and he had fallen into her arms for comfort just before the entire camp had been besieged and fled. Aura and the gnome had no way of finding the others again, and even if she found his human family in the city, it was not likely that he would return there soon.

Aura helped guide the gnome out of the Ardeep and on his way to his birth-land, then she herself went in shame back to elven society. There she was scorned and prosecuted. Her desertion was known and not excused. One of her former allies had beat her back from the wilderness (probably because she had detoured to help her gnomish friend), pinning all his own war atrocities upon her, and telling of her involvement with a human. 

She was shunned and exiled. Aura traveled east, toward the great inland forests of Cormanthor, with the dim hope that distant relatives, living in the shadow of Myth Drannor, would take her in. Taking the swift trade roads, she would pass on her journey through Cormyr and the Dalelands.

[Cythieus]

Jeeze you must know a lot about Forgotten Realms material.

[ff]

Jeeze you must know a lot about Forgotten Realms material.

lol thanks. I Googled for a map of Faerun (and there are these huge like 3000x4000 pixel maps out there) and sure enough Dalelands was between Ardeep and Myth Drannor.

[Cythieus]

I have never really played in the setting and I am reading up on it.

[Tagan]

I have never really played in the setting and I am reading up on it.

Don't worry TOO much about Faerun lore.  My own Realms knowledge is only moderate, and mostly gained through the novels, and old modules.  Some things may not be quite as listed in the source books. 

[RubySlippers]

I have a two questions one for my character, can I sacrifice the sneak attack ability for fighter bonus feat progression its an option in the on-line SRD 3.5 rules from the Unearthed Arcana? I'm bouncing off that as a character option trying to decide if sneak attack is worth taking.

And about the Artificer can they do the class skill Trapfinding if you read it unless you have that class skill ,Rogues get it, you can't even search for traps and can't hope to disable them such a skill means you have practical knowledge on dealing with the damned things. And why most character groups need a professional rogue no other class can normally deal with such threats. But I'm not sure what the Artificer class allows but it seems odd the GM would allow bypassing a core class with a clear game skill required (Rogue) to strip them of what amounts to a very core feature. Just asking I'm not a rules lawyer type this is up to the GM but just pointing out if they don't have Trapfinding then a professional rogue will be necessary at least according to the rules.

I'm still focusing on being an athlete and I'm thinking a flashy fighter sort of rogue over the cloak & dagger sort.