It will be at least another week yet before I start playing in a new (to me) Dungeons and Dragons 5e campaign. I thought we might start last week (the day I wrote this), but one of the players wound up being busy and the fact that this game is specifically a campaign wrap-up means that we really can’t play without someone. I mean, they could probably play without me since my character is being introduced pretty late into the campaign (as part of the game’s revival and conclusion), but I don’t think they will. Not after inviting me to join them and everything. Luckily, thanks to an early pandemic game that didn’t last very long, I had a character who already existed in the game’s world so I could just level him up, kit him out, and then work with the Dungeon Master to figure out where he existed in this world a little bit further down the timeline. It even works out thematically because the campaign in which this character first appeared was about slaying a dragon that had its own cult and this campaign wrap-up is about a campaign of dragon slayers who accidentally let part of the soul of an evil undead dragon escape from the magic crystal they’d been trying to protect. As it turned out, not all natural twenties are good things, especially when it comes to the targeted application of a Dispel Magic spell. A natural twenty on that could do a lot more than you intended.

It’s been a lot of fun to dig this character out of the past. I didn’t get to play him long, but I started with a pretty solid concept and felt like things shaped up pretty well from there. “Gun Elf Who Hates Magic” turned into a pretty solid character that wound up drawing from more than a few inspirations. There is, of course, a little Percy De Rolo (of Critical Role fame) in him, given that I built him using the Gunslinger subclass for Fighter (also of Critical Role) and it’s difficult to use that class without a little bit of Percy leaking in. Most of my mental image for him, though, came from a favorite anime of mine–Trigun. While he wasn’t a copy of Vash the Stampede by any means, there was more of him in the character than of Percy. At least the character of Vash that I knew at the time. Since then, I’ve read all of Trigun Maximum and watched the first season of the new anime Trigun Stampede, so my Gun Elf (Lyskarhir Ilya’Tanka, aka The Dread Lord Ilyanka to the Dragon Cult he helped defeat thanks to a lucky handful of intimidation checks) is a little bit less Vash than before. Lyskarhir has no problem with violence and murder, but there’s still a decent amount of care within him that makes him more likely to act to help others than Percy ever really had. He’s maybe not a good person, but he’s definitely well-intentioned and I suppose we’ll see how much that counts for.

Back in the original game I’d made Lyskarhir for, he was incredibly dismissive and distrustful of magic, a stance that was a core aspect of his backstory. Lyskarhir was born to a family of Wizards in a magically-dependent Elven city, disliked how nonsensical magic seemed to him when his parents forced him to go to Wizard school (which he was, coincidentally, bad at), and then dropped out to work on smithing and alchemy before abandoning Elven society entirely to go live with Dwarves. There, while working his way up to achieving the top rank of Clan Crafter, he discovered explosive powders, invented gunpowder, and forged his first gun. His original goal, going into the beginning of that very first campaign, was to use gunpowder and science to show that he could wield just as much power as any spellcaster, which was reinforced because one of the two spellcasters in the party he eventually joined constantly got on his nerves and did things that made everyone else’s life more difficult without necessarily helping anyone. The game didn’t last much longer past that point, but I imagine that Lyskarhir’s journey eventually helped him realize that his power could only destroy and that magic could do a great deal more than that. With some limitations. I think he still believes that his science and guns will eventually prove more powerful (after all, its much easier to run out of spells than bullets), but he’s much less adversarial about it. He wants to see what he can create. He’ll still do his genuine best to avoid using magic or letting people use magic on him, but he’s less angry about it.

With all that figured out and some attachments to the campaign planned, I’m mostly ready to play. All I have to do is figure out some kind of art for his token and character sheet and I’ll be good to go. Which is going to be difficult, on account of being unable to find any kind of easy character creator tool that will make the muscle-y, fucked-up-looking elf guy I have in mind. Commissioning someone is entirely possible of course (I’ve commissioned a character portrait for a campaign I was much less excited about) and I’ve got the budget for it, but it feels a bit weird to spend the money on a character that is going to only be used for what seems like a few sessions. I might be wrong about the length, though. I really have no idea how much time this game is going to cover since I’m not entirely sure what the objectives even are. I’m sure once we have our Session 0: Revival meeting, it’ll become more clear, but that’s too longer to wait for commissioning an artist. I don’t want to rush someone and trying to get that turned around in time for the next session sounds like it would be nightmarish, especially if it winds up being the more (visually) complicated version of the character that’s been growing in my head lately. I’m sure I’ll figure something out eventually, probably by the time you’re reading this, but for now this is my second-to-last major to-do. My last major to-do item is to write all of this down in a way that creates a coherent narrative so I can dictate what my character has been up to and why he’s going to get involved in this game to whoever he winds up meeting. You know, just his motivations and reasons for participating at all. Small stuff.