Currently Played Characters Volume 1: DND
Admiral Vittorio Malaki (Rogue/Monk - DnD custom game):
Vittorio was born in squalor, raised an orphan in the crime ridden streets of New Braum, a city that itself grew from the stillborn afterbirth of Old Braum's crime syndicates. Strangely the adversity didn't weaken his resolve that the gods paid attention to the mortals beneath them. It did, however, thoroughly convince him that only the Lord of Oblivion and Murder, Othar, was worthy of any faith whatsoever. Seeking profit, his early years were marked as a cutpurse, but that seemed an empty goal to the young and comely thief. His habits became markedly nocturnal by his 15th birthday, and his career choice became even more obvious the first time he took a bone thrown at him by the Braum Syndicate.
A month and a half before his 16th birthday, a fat black market merchant who paid his dues regularly to Braum named Bartholomue Rogarten hired Vittorio to slit the throat of a rival. Vittorio did him one better and killed the rival, flayed him open, and marked him with Othar's device painted in the victim's own blood. The merchant paid the second half of the contract with a shivering hand and Vittorio became a professional merchant of death.
Seeking some perspective and an end to the political posturing of New Braum he booked passage with the Crimson Witch, a beautiful red sailed caravel. As soon as the young rogue laid eyes on the three masts of the Witch, he fell in love. He took to sailing quickly, and before long became crew to the angelic captain. As suddenly as his tour of duty on the Witch began, it was altered forever. The winged captain suddenly abandoned his ship, leaving it with a terse clipped muttering to Vittorio.
Time passed uneasily, jerkily. Vittorio was only a passable sailor, certainly not the first rate captain he should have been. However, Captain Malaki had never balked in the face of opportunity knocking.
Several raids later, Vittorio had renamed the ship Othar's Requiem, and completed a contract with New Braum legally creating the beginnings of a privateer fleet devoted to profit and oblivion. Soon he counted a slave galley - Othar's Manacles - among his fleet, along with a war galley renamed Othar's Black Death. Quickly he is becoming a renowned pirate to some, Braumian Claimsmen to others.
Along the way his crew had become more varied, and either by fame or fortune he had acquired some interesting personalities as well.
The Requiem has no First Mate, as the Orcish descendent who took the position hated such a title. Its Ur-Chief is Var Coldbone Ur Skrogg of the northern wastes. The near psychotic brute has never been seen without his ebon shining mask, and all the crew prefer it that way.
The Ship's Wizard is Deani Kark, a twitchy absent minded man who stays clean shaven when he remembers. His red robes and strange belt that always brims over with alchemical weeds and powders have made several overtaken ships underestimate the vacant looking arcanist.
The Ship's Treasurer is a sylph. The entire crew found that although most fey are never to be trusted with loot, this aerie fey creature's enticing wings and curves do not detract from an uncanny eye for detail. Leilandra Windchaser has also, it is rumored, somehow seduced Var Coldbone. The rumors are usually whispered very quietly. The few whisperers who have been heard have ended up as a cannibal feast on the table of the ship's galley.
In liu of a medical physician, Admiral Vittorio has installed a physician-confessor. The lovely Corinthia Highhill, a hobbit who has devoted her life to the worship of Othar and wears his ebon vestments as a cleric also acts as a harsh healing mistress, chiding the foolishness that enables all the injuries aboard the ship even as she binds their wounds. It is no rumor as to her connection with the Admiral. They were married less than one year ago, and through the power of dark ritual concieved a child that was born to term. Othar's blessing are upon us.
The Master of Arms as well as Cook is a bent and green skinned creature who answers only to Cookie. This wizened ship hash slinger is the cleanest troll ever met by most men. Yet, he still keeps a fair eye out for new recipes for man-flesh.
Vathek Noctechilde (Warlock/Fighter - Ravenloft/Forgotten Realms game):
Invidia, like most lands within the realm of dread, is an unpleasant place to grow up. Knowing that your lineage bears a powerful curse can make that more difficult. The invidian people are known for two things: infidelity, and passionate emotion. So it was that young Vathek of the Noctechilde royal family raged against his demonic heritage and set out to search for all the truth of the arcane mysteries to end the taint on his soul.
He spent years searching, and gobbled up any tidbit of lore passed on by wandering mendicants and sages alike. In his travels he discovered many outsiders, sometimes in groups and sometimes alone, who spoke of distant lands that no map nor native could name. These places - Toril, Oerth, Krynn, Athas - they all spoke of wonders undreamed of by Invidians, Barovians, Sithicans... However, they also spoke of the difficulty in escaping whatever plane the local lands resided within. With their promise of hope these stories also carried a promise of immense struggle and tribulation for any who tried to escape the mists.
Fortune would have it that the Vathek discovered in his travels a pack of outsiders searching for a way back to their home realm of Abeir-Toril. The blood magus Jackolyn Sparota wandered the wilds of Barovia, where Vathek had traveled, in the company of a lady Cleric of Lathander Morninglord, and a lady Knight of Silverymoon. After a brief adventure in which they enountered Telindra, a rogue of elven lineage and wielder of an arcane gift sometimes thought to be a curse called spellfire, the newly forged group traveled into the wilds of Barovia and across its border. They came to a land unknown by Vathek and shrouded in mist. The house contained a cursed mirror, and after a great deal of painful experiences, the fellow adventurers confronted this strangely alien dread lord. In a freak occurence of arcane energies, the spellfire of lady Telindra reacted with the powerful curses and eldritch energies of the Nym, the Mirror of Eternity, vaulting them back in time before the mirror took her manse to Ravenloft. The warped stream of time spit out the traveling party miles away from the mansion and again on the soil of the Forgotten Realms.
Since that time, Vathek has struck out to learn what such a bright land could hold for him in the way of a future. The possibilities are pleasantly endless.
Dorna Hammerheart (Cleric of Moradin - Forgotten Realms):
The young Dorna had a hammer in her pudgy little hand before she had learned to drink...which for Dwarves is a very early age. By the age of 10, the little one had a reputation of honesty amongst a people known for their honesty. Still, she endeavored never to let the easy growth of Dwarven pride overcome her. She apprenticed as a metalsmith at age 15, but felt the calling of the Soul Forger and All-Father Moradin and was excused to enrich herself in the Grand Hall of the All-Father, where she learned the Etchings of Truth, and the Mithral Legacies. Never one to shirk an obsession, Dorna continued working on her metal arts in all the hours she had free, and her talent for it grew immensely. On her 35th birthday, the golden haired Dwarven beauty (as such things go), awoke from a dream knowing that in order to appreciate the gift of craft that Moradin had given to the dwarven people, she would have to make pilgrimage out into the surface world to see the metalwork of Dwarves among the other races. She also knew that by forging weapons and armor of power for the goodly folk of Faerun she would war against the evil that tainted so many hearts. She would, with the gifts of the All-Father, forge tools to purify the world. Quietly she told her father who gripped her in a tight hug and announced her journey at the feast table that night.
Little Dorna was no longer little, the crowded extended families of the Hammerheart clan declared. And it was with their blessings and their ancestral traveling metalsmith tools that she began her journey the morning after. The only other gift? A dwarven hangover.