The Empty Throne - Dramatis Personae
Players come and go, but their stories remain. To those who have gone on before their characters' time, and to those who shall, I write this in hopes that some essence of their fragments left in these fictional figures will remain carved upon the face of this world.
Borakhai
Played by the Ukrainian. Class is full on Warrior. A Kharakid whose tribe has traveled far from home, Borakhai lost her people while they were traversing through the forests of the Southern Reach, assailed by unknown, highly organised combatants. She still remembers the night her world fell apart, in bits and pieces, vivid colours, the screams.
Memory is treacherous. It accentuates some things, discards the rest. She does not remember the names of her tribespeople - beautiful names, sing-song Kharak-words, each laden heavy with sound-meanings carried from faraway plains where the sky is always blue and the land as flat than the sea. She remembers the moment her father lept into the yurt, pulled her to her feet and threw her on her horse, shouting for her to ride, escape, away from here, and then the sudden blood-choked silence. She remembers looking back and seeing nothing, her vision blurred with tears. A final glimpse of another kinsman, her niece, riding with her baby brother between her arms, and then the branches clawing at her eyes, her cheeks. Arrows from behind. Shouts, ugly harsh words forbidding escape. Look forward. Focus. Run. Live.
So she lives on.
Her Memento is a small ivory owl amulet. It reminds her, time and again, when she has nearly forgot, that her tribe was that of the Owl - though what the Kharakid word was, she cannot remember. It also reminds her that her kinsmen still live. Her baby brother lives. And one day, she will find him.
Gurin
Played by the Indonesian. Class is full on Warrior. She has green skin, for some reason (the player positively insisted, though she didn't want to be a goblin) so we decided on her having some forest spirit ancestry somewhere up her family tree (heh).
Her life, like many girl-childs in this world and ours, is a tragedy. Born to an affluent merchant caste, she lived better lives than you or I, perhaps. But when her ancestry manifested, turning her skin woodland green, sprouting antler-horns on the head, she found her parents full of horror at their child instead of consolation. Her father brought in priests in secret at great cost, seeking to undo the unnatural wyrd-craft that must be afflicting their daughter. They chanted their curses and blessings, muttered protective wards, submerged her in sacred oils and fresh-bled animal blood. They beat her, starved her, forced her to make prayers she did not believe in, sawed off the horns time and again, accused her of harbouring evil in her child-heart. And whenever she was let out, it was with a heavy cloth over her head, a deep shawl extending far below her eyes, so that her unnatural deviation would not be revealed.
So she ran.
Aurelia
Played by the Turkmenistani. Class is half Elementalist, half Blood Priest. A Viridian, she has a particularly fiery red-gold hair uncommon even to her people, a fact that subtly uplifts her among the priesthood which adores such colourations of the flame.
Brought to the hagiopolis in the deep desert of Samarya known as Mansuriya, the slave-girl was brought up to strict regimens of the priestly caste. In the Samaryan Rite, only women are allowed priesthood; they are seen as virginal brides for Kyros, the Solar God-Emperor, whose masculine eminence suffers no rival. There she learned to love the flame and fear the dark, reciting scriptures, practicing the fifteen flames, and to adore and love Kyros above all.
She is one of many teams sent to the Imperium's heartlands of Viridia by the Samaryan Rite, the blessed lands where water falls from the sky and the land is awash with green things. There she was to report on the goings-on of the Viridian sect of the Church, and to gather sacred artefacts of Kyros - fragments of his shattered blade, said to be manifesting in places of power. Unfortunately, the fledgling priestess would find herself alone after her male bodyguard-companion died protecting her from runaway deserters, forcing her to approach the nearest lord's holding for protection. There, she met the other adventurers.
Rozier
Played by the Sudanese. A Samaryan healer-necromancer demented with trauma. They care little for the lives of others, having lost a close friend.
Growing up in a small estate as the child of a landed knightly house, Rozier was thought too weak and wimpy to follow the path of the sword, and was sent off to a monastery for education. There, they found their calling in medicine, and after coming to manhood, returned to their family's estate to practice their healing arts to the members and servants of the house.
In their return, they found their childhood friend to be a strapping young mage - a necromancer, in truth, though one that did not torture souls nor force the dead to cause more deaths, but sought instead to free the serfs of the estate from their menial labour, replacing the living workers with the dead. The respite given to the commons from surplus labour - untiring, unfeeling undead - would thus reduce any need for class distinctions, affording the serfs time and resources to better themselves as fully individuated human beings; reading, thinking, creating art, and being themselves. The young Rozier, impressionable and unwise in the ways of the world from their monastic hermitage, found the idea to be faultless, and relayed it to their father.
Who promptly burned their friend.
Shattered and disillusioned, Rozier killed their family a few months later, using their father as the first live test subject to initiate themselves into necromancy - a warped heir to their childhood friend's necromantic skills. No longer tied to the estate, Rozier now travels the world with the skull of their dead friend, seeking greater knowledge in the healing and killing arts, with hopes to someday raise their friend in full; not as slavish skeletons, but a true and total restoration into life.
Brams
Played by the other Indonesian player, who has since left us to follow his dream of going on a road trip with a random French hunk he met in Istanbul, destination: Hong Kong. I am not joking. Class is Partial Warrior/Partial Elementalist.
Brams is a sociopathic sellsword who did not do much, because his player left after like two sessions. His background was that he was found as a babe in swaddling cloth by two kindhearted woodsmen couple who raised him like their own. Brams, being bored, wandered off to the world after learning from the now elderly pair that he was a foundling, deeming that he had no real obligations to remain at their side. The old couple likely died of lack of resource-gathering capacity, since children tend to be the retirement fund for pre-social welfare state societies.
His sword was his Memento - I run solo episodes called a prologue with each player to give them a chance to practice their character, as well as play out facets of their background - and it is proving to be a bit of a cursed object, IRL. Every player who has touched it has had various events that made them unable to attend or attend less. It is also definitely magical (though not in the +1 damage way) and almost certainly the reason the PCs are having not-Nazguls chase them, so you could say it is cursed -in-game as well.