The Maelstrom And The Depths Beyond

Ceres Fortemar and Caustus

Ceres Fortemar is my Shifter Drakewarden Ranger in a campaign known as ‘To the Beyond’ or ‘The Beyond.’ Caustus is her color changing dragon familiar/partner. She travels with her party, the Zew Crew, on their way to reach the expedition ship ‘The Empress of Dawn’ on its way to the lands unexplored to west of the Clessian Empire, which extends across the islands west of the continent of Xiomar. The game is run by one of the players I got into dnd back in 2019!

Ceres is mechanically a sniper/gunslinger. She uses a long rifle at long range with Caustus as her front line, or fights at close range with a pair of pistols. Shes a character whose mechanics I thought a lot about when thinking about her character arcs and motivations. She intentionally has a constitution score of 6, which is accounted for as having an autoimmune disease that affects her lungs- a disease that is slowly revealing itself to be a curse.

She is the child of famed adventurers and researchers and travelled with them from a young age as they went around the world doing research into the lost divinities. Given her frailty she was often kept indoors or away from anything that might excite her condition. She read voraciously and eventually started joining her parents at dig sites. As she got older she began to chafe under their doting an overbearing concern for her safety and well being. After making a grand discovery of an old and forgotten draconic deity, with hints as to draconic civilization potentially lost in the beyond- she had a massive fight with her parents and left home, stumbling across Caustus’ petrified egg on the way. Somehow Caustus was born from the stone and now the pair are indelibly linked as they search for the truth in a dangerous world.

Ceres is joined by the Zew Crew! Kermarius Auraelius Frogerius the 3rd (Kermy) a grung bombardier seeking a great pirate fortune. He and Ceres are best friends and get into way too much trouble together. Luanna the Moontouched. A fairy sorcerer with lost memories travelling to find out why she was kicked out of the Feywild. Otto the autognome rogue, a pile of scrap with sentience and murderous impulses traveling to find purpose, and recently joined by Isshin and Sasha, a kinder monk and a aarakockra paladin seeking vengeance against an amoral trading company.

You can follow or check out these tags to follow along their journey: #Ceres Fortemar #the Zew Crew #campaign: the beyond

Frisk Foundlin

Frisk is possibly my longest running OC. She is a tiefling Way of Mercy Monk/Grave Cleric multiclass. She is the DM PC I run in the Eldritch Soul Campaign which takes place on my homebrew world of Asterta, where all the campaigns I write happen. She travels with her party, The Wildlings- made up primarily of kids she grew up with in her small town and then grew estranged from after a tragedy in their youth. I have run her from level one in 2021 to level 18, soon to be 20, now.

Mechanically Frisk serves as a small buffer to the deadly nature of adventure. With only 6 levels in cleric, she can’t do any crazy healing but she is great at getting people back in the fight. Similarly, she is there to support the front liners in attacking, taking flanking position, dealing out debuffs and making a nuisance of herself to help her friends shine.

Frisk and her party have been through the wringer. In the prologue of the campaign, which happened during their childhood, the kids fused with the souls of a forgotten eldritch group of past heroes, which showed them visions of calamity and genocide and in the resulting chaos of that event, Frisks twin sister- Denna, was killed. Her body lost and unrecoverable. Frisk and her friends scattered across Asterta over the next 15 years, with Frisk herself getting kicked out of a monastery, going on to become a caravan guard, get mixed up with drugs in her depression and suicidal ideation, and ultimately going to rehab at a temple where she fell in love with another pair of acolytes: the orc Uthien, and the Oread Micah.

Frisks connection to the Eldritch soul was always strong and the visions ultimately caused her to relapse and eventually run away from the temple. Eventually showing up in her hometown during the retirement party of her past mentor and father figure- the silver dragon Feng. It was there the events of the campaign began, she met up with the party and they soon began to be chased by all kinds of eldritch and horrible aberrations and forces intent on using the powers of the souls they were bonded to. In the past year of travel they have uncovered a grand censure, a lost war, the genocide of the progenitors of arcane magic and the truth of ascension. The hidden sins of the world are rearing their head and these children have been unwittingly put in the center of it.

Frisk is joined by the Widlings:

Akylla: the dhampir gloomstalker ranger/phantom rogue battling her own hungers to keep her loved ones safe, Zagähk Thulanthi: an oath of the Ancients Paladin spurned by one god and championed by a new one- the party’s conscience , Louva Shortgurgle: a Dread Frenzy Monk caught between the glory of power and the responsibility of one burdened by truth. Nyx’Alia Veriandi, a warlock turned Archfey sorcerer finding confidence in her own power, and Squawk: a Kenku artificer turned Warforged seeking to follow the paths of ascension.

You can follow their journey here: #the eldritch soul campaign #Frisk Foundlin #eldritch soul campaign

Pent

Pent is the newest of my main OC’s. She’s a bard rogue gestalt character in the Patjfinder game I play in once a month (run by the guy who got me into tabletop all the way back in highschool) She and her trio of comrades form the house of the docks in the city of Ungren in Rofleim on the world of Aikhar.

Pent is a punk singer songwriter from a band called the Lights of Ill Omen that got a little too popular and too loud in their calls for reform for the establishments liking, and they conspired to cause a fire at one of their shows which resulted in an audience member dying and the band breaking up. Soon after in a fit of rage she tried to vandalize the courthouses and nearly was thrown in prison.

She was instead directed to join the fickle family, a secret organization in the thieves guild seeking to break the secret peace the guild has with the nobility. It is a game of heists, intrigue, plots, and the slow work of uprooting and dismantling power systems choking a city and its people to death. It’s very stressful, fun, and cathartic given the times we live in.

Along the way she has ended up pacted to a devil named Mephalia, whom she has started writing self insert fanfiction about- changing her patrons named to Mephisto instead. The pact has been a boon but remains very dangerous and as it drives her to greater violence in an organization that abhors that she has had to make some rough choices.

She is joined by Tevildo the catfolk pugilist, Ikavod the human cleric running from a past of banditry and debt, and Rain a changeling orphan tied up in all the cities sins.