My first OC that got any serious play that wasn’t a sort of furry wish-fulfillment kind was Kawheek. In 2004, on Avians.net IRC, one channel member wanted to start a D&D campaign. We got four people together, and everyone wanted to play birds. Instead of using the aarakocra, which at the time were wing-arm birds, Aubri instead created the Thordani and Asari, closely related eagle and hawk anthros with back wings, modeled off the Savage Species splatbook that had recently released.
The campaign ran for a few years, and honestly I won’t say much about my playing of Kawheek at the time, since it was…bad. And the campaign had issues from the source material; Savage Species is trash. But the concept behind Kawheek was an Asari who was a religious martial artist. He was Lawful Good in game terms, not that I always met that myself. I used cinematic monastic traditions, including the Jedi, as influence.
Later I ported Kawheek to Kaerwyn, and there I got a bit more feel, but he somewhat lagged in character development, as while he did attempt to do good, it wasn’t HARD for him. I had a heavy hand on the scale and would always make him choose the “Good” option.
Eventually at a later point, a friend suggested I make a new character from Kawheek, as a sort of student of his. His essential thrust was that Kawheek had experienced many things and that led to a novelty dearth. This was where I got Thenyr created.
Thenyr Nontdargo II (which is an anagram!) is a selected successor of Kawheek in some ways. He’s instead a Thordani priest, modeled somewhat on a Golden Eagle. While I had certain ideas for him, such as a more violent streak like his phenotype, these ended up not working out in play.
I used prophecy elements in him, and considering all details in hindsight, this was a mistake! As a roleplay character, the situation is not entirely under my control, and thus prophecy becomes harder to pull off effectively. Additionally, while Thenyr was a priest, I myself began struggling with my own religious beliefs, and overall fell away.
And past that, the narrative doesn’t work well since Thenyr doesn’t really come off as filling the role he’s supposedly chosen for. In some ways, he’s a victim of forces beyond his control; he was placed into a position he may not have chosen for himself, more because the people need a leader, not because he’s the one who should be it. That said, Thenyr also recognizes that if he were to reject his role, that itself would be very difficult for his people and could destabilize them at a critical moment, so he has resolved to bear the burden as best able. This may not have been the intent originally, but that’s the way it reads these days.
A few years ago I finally realized that Thenyr was in an unsalvageable spot regarding his prophecy status, and am planning to retire him from Kaerwyn RP. I want to continue the story of these people, though, so I went back to find something new.
Enter Aikine.
Aikine is a Eurasian Goshawk based Asari woman. I decided that this time I wanted to flip the script up; where Kawheek was almost a puppet I used to discuss things, and Thenyr was someone whose destiny was set out and choice stolen, Aikine has heavy “Unchosen One” vibes. She is the driven person who was dealt a bad hand in life, and told they’d amount to nothing, and her response to that was, “Well, maybe I wasn’t going to, but now that you told me I can’t, I’m going to go and do it ANYWAYS, just to prove you wrong!”
The current idea is for Thenyr to retire from active play and send Aikine to replace him, as a sort of diplomat/agent. I’m still working on the specifics of that. But for now, below is what I have of Aikine’s character history.
Aikine’s story begins before she was even alive, in some senses. Her egg was laid to two Asari parents who were part of a traveling caravan as traders or such. However, not long after that, the caravan was attacked and her parents were forced to flee for their own safety, leaving Aikine’s egg behind.
The remnants of the caravan were recovered later, within a few days, and the egg was found within; the people who found it had no way of locating Aikine’s parents, or even travelling to the nearest Asari/Thordani village. Faced with a complicated question and not a lot of time to solve it, they pass it off to the nearest tribe of avariel (winged elves) who are nearby, acknowledging that it’s not what they want to do, but it’s the best available solution.
The avariel, who worship the same goddess as the Asari, are able to hatch Aikine’s egg. She is then raised in their village; while the upbringing is not itself harsh or cruel, she’s always a bit of an outsider…not because of her shape, but because Asari grow to adulthood on a human timescale, and the time it takes elves to grow to adulthood is much longer. So AIkine is “perpetual new kid” as she continually outgrows her peers.
When she becomes adult, eventually she decides to find her own people, leaving the avariel. Somewhere around here she begins studying arcane magic. In game terms she’s a wizard, in that she studies magic and learns, rather than having innate natural spark like a sorcerer. (I do plan to use a spontaneous casting system for her though, since bookkeeping what spells she prepared each morning would be a nightmare in freeform).
The wizardess eventually did find her way back to the territory of her people. She arrives maybe not at the village Thenyr and Kawheek are in, but close enough that she’s within the general area; I want to avoid the Angel Grove problem.
However, when she arrives, she finds again, she’s an outsider. She’s a laity, and has some complex thoughts on Faenya, given her upbringing. She also is by that point someone who uses arcanism regularly, and the Thordani and Asari villages are somewhat distrustful of arcane magic, much preferring divinity from Faenya.
Aikine’s primary goals are to find her parents (or learn their fate), and to gain the respect of her own native people, even despite her issues. To prove that arcanism is a valid source of power, and that while it can be used for terrible things, that’s on the person using it, not on the arcanism itself.
Eventually, she volunteers when the call comes out to replace Thenyr, because it’s a chance to try and prove herself, and she’s selected, because he might view her as uniquely suited to the challenge. (This also works because there’s a certain “Reassigned to Antarctica” nature to the job, though Aikine may not realize that up front.)
The struggle now, is to figure out how Aikine works. She’s driven and ambitious. That’s clear. She doesn’t want to rule, she wants to be accepted, and being power mad will not work for that. She’s also somewhat less Super-Good than Kawheek. Ifthe baron in a faraway land is corrupted by the Artifact of Evil and being a tyrant locally to the few hundred people there, Aikine might not necessarily fly halfway across the world to handle it on first hearing it, assuming she probably would arrive too late to help.
But if the Army Of Darkness shows up where she is, (or is positioned such that it’s a matter of time), she might not necessarily want to go fight them on a personal level, but she WOULD do it, because at the end of the day, someone DOES have to do it, you know? She can’t get the villager’s acceptance if they’re all dead. And all her stuff is in the village, so while she might be annoyed about it, she would line up on the side of good with a bit of extra work.
I’m more than willing to hear any feedback you have on this, because how to play her is a sticky problem and I want to make this work well.
-Arrow
P.S. While I’ve received several messages from people about the contents of this blog over other channels, I notice there’s been no comments on the blog yet. Is the commenting system not set up properly? Anything I can do to fix it?