The People in My Head - Blaze Nightchaser
Blaze Nightchaser was another of my early D&D characters. His career was somewhat different from Lady Pen’s, though he wound up in more or less the same place.
Like Lady Pen, Blaze was created at a time when what you rolled was what you got. With a Strength and Dexterity of 13 each, I decided to make him a fighter, but a pint-sized one-about five-foot-four. To make up for his lack of inches I gave him an abundance of chutzpah and a large dollop of panache. Over the course of time he also acquired a flaming sword, which certainly fit his image, and incidentally matched his hair.
Blaze never made it into a long-running campaign. Instead, he was a character I tended to use in the episodic games run by my and my brother’s friends in the late 1970s and early 1980s. (There were a group of us who would take turns DM’ing depending on who happened to have something ready.) Therefore his adventures tended also to be episodic rather than falling into extended storylines. One of these episodes tickled my fancy enough that I turned it into a ballad called “Nightchaser and the Demon.” I won’t quote the whole thing here, but a few verses and a summary of the rest of the plot should give the general idea. [1]
Six jolly adventurers in deep-delven hall,
O, to the chase, to the chase!
And little Nightchaser the boldest of all,
And it’s O! to the chase,
The merry, merry chase,
Let darkness go fleeing away.
The adventurers discover an invisible ring and have one of their number, a young magic-user, try it on. The ring speaks to him, and there follows a dialogue with the voice from the ring, which proves to be a demon (Type Three, for those who remember the old Monster Manual). The demon wants the ring’s wearer to summon it, but the character in question is no fool:
“O no,” quoth the young mage, “that never shall be,”
O, to the chase, to the chase!
“Hot hell will freeze o’er ere you’re summoned by me!”
And it’s O! to the chase,
The merry, merry chase,
Let darkness go fleeing away.
The demon is angered by the mage’s refusal to summon it, and proposes to summon him instead. The young mage begins to fade out, but Nightchaser takes hold of him in order to be taken wherever he is going. The two of them end up at the gates of Hell, confronting the grinning demon.
But Nightchaser’s sword from its scabbard did fly,
O, to the chase, to the chase!
And the flame leaping from it would dazzle the eye,
And it’s O! to the chase,
The merry, merry chase,
Let darkness go fleeing away.
And straight at the monster young Nightchaser sprang,
O, to the chase, to the chase!
And at those grim portals his battle-cry rang:
“And it’s O! to the chase,
The merry, merry chase,
Let darkness go fleeing away!”
So fierce he set on, with the blade that he bore,
O, to the chase, to the chase!
That he dealt that foul demon some three wounds or four,
And it’s O! to the chase,
The merry, merry chase,
Let darkness go fleeing away.
That powerful fiend was so filled with dismay,
O, to the chase, to the chase!
That straight he turned tail and went fleeing away,
And it’s O! to the chase,
The merry, merry chase,
Let darkness go fleeing away.
The two adventurers are returned to their own plane, and the song ends with a moral of sorts:
Come all you adventurers, take heed from my tale:
O, to the chase, to the chase!
Sheer boldness may win where mere power might fail,
And it’s O! to the chase,
The merry, merry chase,
Let darkness go fleeing away.
I should mention that apart from embroidering the dialogue a bit-which I’m sure real-life minstrels did too, all the time-the incident is exactly as it happened in game!
Fond as I was of Blaze, his ballad, the personal info on his character sheet, and a few pieces of artwork [2] were about all that I did with him apart from D&D, for many years. Then the online freeform Regency RPG happened, the same one that I mentioned in Lady Pen’s writeup. Since we had at least one Napoleonic Wars/Richard Sharpe enthusiast among the players and the game was set in 1814, a number of returning soldiers started to emerge as characters. So I decided to find out what Blaze would be like as a Rifle officer. (I thought the green uniform would set off that red-gold hair nicely.)
The first thing that had to change was his name. You are not going to find someone running around Regency England with the name “Blaze Nightchaser.” So I changed the spelling of his first name to “Blaise,” [3] and since the original character’s father’s name had been Brand, I started with “Brandson” and consulted the handy-dandy index of the Ordnance Survey Atlas of Great Britain for a town name that was close. [4] I came up with “Brandiston”, so the character became Captain Blaise Brandiston of the 95th Rifles.
I’d been informed (perhaps by the aforementioned Napoleonic Wars enthusiast, I’m not sure) that it was customary to award a promotion to a lieutenant who successfully led a Forlorn Hope and survived. That seemed very much in character for Blaise, so I decided that’s how he became a Captain at a mere twenty-two years of age. So now he was returning to England after Napoleon’s (first) defeat, to spend some time in London and…
…oh yes, get back together with an old friend. You see, I found I had two characters for the price of one.
Back when he was a D&D character, I’d worked out a nice, angsty past for Blaze that would explain what he was doing as an adventurer and also what had started his crusade against the forces of darkness. I’d decided that he was the youngest son of the armsmaster to a noble household, and just happened to have been born on the same night as one of the lord’s sons, Darian. Darian’s mother died in childbirth, and Blaze’s mother agreed to foster the infant along with her own newborn son. The result was that the two boys grew up together and became fast friends.
The D&D backstory went on to relate how Darian acquired a wicked sorceress for a stepmother, who planned to have the young man possessed by a devil. Blaze interrupted the ceremony and slew the sorceress, thus preventing the possession. The devil spitefully slew Darian and would have done the same to Blaze were it not for the timely intervention of the family cleric, who was able to use a holy relic to banish the devil back to hell. Normally Blaze would have been put to death for killing a noblewoman, but Darian’s father knew enough about the circumstances to soften the sentence to banishment. And thus an adventurer was set loose upon the world with a ready-made chip on his shoulder when it came to supernatural evils.
When it came to the Regency setting, however, I realized I had no need to separate Blaise from his family (any more than I was already doing by sending him off to fight Boney), and therefore no reason to kill off Darian. So Darian got a slight name change too-“Dorian” seemed good enough for one of the Classical names popular in period-and emerged as Lord Dorian St. Quintin, a younger son of the Marquess of Sherborne. Blaise’s father became Sherborne’s estate manager, and the birth story that led to the close bonding of the two young men stayed pretty much the same. Dorian still had an inimical stepmother (Sherborne’s third wife, as it turned out), but she was angling to disinherit the poor fellow in favor of her own children, rather than anything literally diabolical.
The close friendship of Blaise and Dorian turned out to be an attraction of opposites. In contrast to his short, fiery, impulsive friend, Dorian was tall, thin, dark, intellectual, and a fine musician. By the time Blaise returned to England, Dorian was at Lincoln’s Inn, studying for the Bar. My introductory post for both characters detailed their reunion after three years apart.
Being the sort of game it was, Blaise eventually met and fell in love with a young woman named Lillian Willoughby, and schemed to elope with her under the nose of her abusive father. Part of the scheme involved Dorian pretending to be Lillian’s suitor instead, since his title and family connections made him a better catch. Meanwhile, Dorian himself met and became strongly attracted to a young opera singer with a mysterious past... I and some of the other players involved were plotting to turn Blaise and Lillian’s romance into a murder mystery-with Dorian in the role of detective-but unfortunately the game fizzled before we could pull this off.
Blaze/Blaise’s personality remains essentially the same in both incarnations: impulsive, warmhearted, intrepid, an economy-sized romantic hero. In the time span between his two versions, though, I’d realized how much stronger it made characters to give them existing relationships-not necessarily romantic, but bonds of family and friendship. It was a strategy I’d use for other characters … and in the meantime, I found I liked Dorian a lot, too.
[1] It is very easy to get me to sing this, in full (with or without guitar accompaniment), if you catch me in person. The Bardic Circle at next year’s Mythcon in Albuquerque would be a good place…
[2] For some reason, in his initial character picture and at least one of the other pictures I did of him, I drew Blaze bare-chested. When my elder son learned that I was adapting Blaze for a new milieu, he asked, “Does he get to wear a shirt?”
[3] There is a semi-obvious reason, however, why I will never run this character in an Amber game.
[4] Georgette Heyer herself seems to have taken most of her characters’ surnames from English town names, and I’ve always thought it worked well for the setting.