i made quite alot of revisions here, renaming all of the keys to make them fit the strategist theming a bit better.
the revised names are as follows:
Oak (I) – Key of the Caretaker
Belvedere (II) – Key of the Enemy
Yellow Acacia (III) – Key of Secrets
Anemone (IV) – Key of the Spinner
Dead Leaves (V) – Key of Deep Suffering
Split Reed (VI) – Key of Decadence
Pimpernel (VII) – Key of a Life Forever Changed
Harebell (VIII) – Key of the Caged Bird
Enchanter's Nightshade (IX) – Key of Scheming
Dogsbane (X) – Key of Mistaken Identity
Mandrake (XI) – Key of One Set Apart
Daisy (XII) – Key of Unbirth
Aspen Tree (XIII) – Key of Things Lost
Striped Carnation (XIV) – Key of False Hope
Persicaria (XV) – Key of Things Unchanged
Aconite (XVI) – Key of the Wanderer
let’s just pretend i had them that way in the first place, ok?
moving forward!
Foundations
Now that you've picked your Keys and worked out what's going on there, we're going to start thinking a bit about where your character came from, and what's going on with them. Look over the following options, starting with the option or options associated with your two Keys, and think about which one you'll want to start with. You can choose any of the options, with these general rules:
First, find the rows with your Keys in them.This is where you want to start in your thought process.
Usually you'll choose a row with one of your Keys in it. That strengthens the Purpose of the Key. Write a new bullet point in the Purpose of that Key. It should have something to do with the decision you just made about your character.
Sometimes though, neither of the options attached to your Keys work. You can pick something else, but you'll have to strengthen the Sickness of one of your Keys to do it. Write a new bullet point in the Sickness of that Key. It should have something to do with the decision you just made about your character.
You are...
DrivenÂ
 Anemone (IV), Harebell (VIII), Daisy (XII), Aspen Tree (XIII)
Your role as an Excrucian Strategist fills you with a strong sense of purpose. You have a war against the world to fight. It must pay for its crimes against the void, and you're going to be the one to make it pay. You suffer, but you suffer with purpose, because your suffering gives you power to fight back against the world that ruined you.
Examples: Sadako Hayashi believes that it is her destiny to destroy the world. She believes that it's what she has to do to help the people she cares about, and she'll stop at nothing to see it done.
Broken
Mandrake (XI), Dead Leaves (V), Striped Carnation (XIV) Pimpernel (VII)
Your lot in life has broken you. You can barely function, much less fight. It's a war every day to get out of bed and get going. Grand schemes aren't really your sort of thing at all. You're just trying to make it through. You want to fight, and maybe even you try to, but everything is just too difficult.
Examples: Elisabeth Montaigne can barely muster the energy to leave her bedroom most days. She wants to fight the world, but she doesn't even know where or how to start.
You're the sort of Strategist who gives the Strategists their name. You're always balancing dozens of schemes, with back-up plans and contingencies in case they fail. Most of them are probably even Xanatos Gambits, schemes that will benefit you and your cause even if they go wrong. Intellectually, no one can even come close to matching you, and you're probably extremely good at chess.
Examples: Lexiarchos Caducine always has a plan for any situation that arises, and it's always already in motion, even before it seems like it would be possible for her to know about what she's up against. An unstoppable strategy known as the Lexiarchos Strategem is named for her.
Corrupting
Oak (I), Yellow Acacia (III), Split Reed (VI), Persicaria (XIV)
You are a corrupting influence in people's lives. You try to change them, to make them like you. You try to make people see how wrong the world is, because they have to. The world is wrong, and anyone who can't see it isn't really even paying attention. Besides, you need pawns in the world, and what better way to gain some allies then making people believe you're on the right side of things?
Examples: Melanie Malakh tricked the famous glass-maker Hideo Hayashi into creating a glass dragon to help her fight the world. She seduced him and convinced him that fighting the world was the right thing to do.
Building Emmony (Part 1)
I draw the Avatar Diagram, then look over the list of Keys. While I'm doing this, I decide that my name is Emmony Leath. (This is something I could theoretically do later, but I decided to do it right now, while I'm thinking of it.) I pick Key I, the Oak, as my first Key – the Key of the Caretaker. I'm trying to protect or nurture something, but there's something complicated and painful behind it. I'm not just doing it for altruistic reasons. I pick Key III, the Yellow Acacia, as my first key – the Key of Secrets. I'm questioning my goals. I'm questioning my commitment to fighting the world. I can't let anyone know what I'm feeling, and it's got me all tangled up inside. I decide that Emmony has fallen in love with a mortal girl named Sadie. She reminds me of a younger version of myself. I want to protect her, because she's oh so frail and corruptible. She's such a kind and beautiful person, and she tells me that I could be good, even though I'm something wrong. I love her, but there's more to what's going on here. The Bleak Academy has sent me to corrupt her. I'm having a lot of doubts about that though. I'm starting to question the war, my goals, everything. Sadie is the only thing that makes sense, so for now, I'm trying to live for her, and hoping I can make sense of it all later. That's not a good answer for me, but it's what I have right now, so I have to make it work.
Building Emmony (Part 2)
My Keys are Key III (Yellow Acacia) and Key I (Oak). Both of these suggest that Emmony is a corrupting influence in people's lives, which isn't far off base at all for that I am imagining. I'm going to add a bullet point to the Purpose of Yellow Acacia, because that's the one that feels the most relevant here. I add a bullet point that says “She makes me want to do better.” Sadie makes her want to be a better person than she has been, and that keeps her going. Sadie is an inspirational force in her life. I realize that I haven't filled in the top bullet point of the Sickness of Yellow Acacia yet, and at this point, it's starting to take shape, so I write next to the top bullet point “I want to protect her.” Other people in her life want Emmony to corrupt Sadie, to hurt her, but she doesn't want to. She loves her too much. I could have theoretically picked a different option, perhaps Always a Step Ahead, and strengthened the Sickness of one of my Keys instead, but that didn't feel right here.
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some blurbs/excerpts from a big write-up i am working on of all my thoughts and headcanons on strategists
Sadako Hayashi
Sadako is the kindest Strategist you'll ever meet. Don't let that cloud your judgement when interacting with her, because she's just as dangerous as any other Strategist.
She runs a sort of half-way house for people in bad situations. She tells you she can wipe away your painful memories. She extracts them and binds them into a glass marble that she keeps in a cabinet in her bedroom, and she uses the glass beads to take control of people, to make them do her bidding.
She's a glass-maker. She makes incredible things, and binds her emptiness into them, empowering them to help her bring an end to things.
She can't walk, and she's constantly in pain. Some days it's better than others, but some days it's worse. Her injuries never truly heal. She is dying of detachment from the world. Her pain pulls her away from everything everything nearby. Her pain sets her apart from everyone else. They live in a world of beauty and wonder, and all that she knows when things get bad – and they're almost always bad for her – is pain and suffering. After a while, she feels so far away from everything, so disconnected from everything that her soul leaves her body and her body dies. Her soul flees to a soft and shadowed empty place, and there she rebuilds her body from glass threads woven of her own emptiness.
Her Vice is obsession. She fixates upon things obsessively, to the point of total distraction. She uses these things to cling to the world for a little while longer than she sometimes should be able to.
Key Game Traits:
Treasure 2 (The Rider's House)
The World-Breaker's Hand
Memory Extraction and Manipulation
Emmony Leath
This Strategist is above all things elegant. She hides her wrongness this way, or at least she tries to. Despite it all, it still shows.
She is dying of a hole through her stomach. Her internal organs are always fighting to get out. She holds them in with bandages, and for a while this works. Over time though, her organs start to rot and she starts to get sicker. Her body gets cold as death starts to set in over the course of a few months. Eventually, her pain and sickness become so overpowering that she requires assistance with even the simplest of tasks. And then, she dies. Her soul travels beyond the world, and she slowly claws her way back to her body, which heals itself in her absence. Without assistance, this can take her months. It's difficult and painful work.
Emmony knows things. There are few things in Creation that she cannot know, and even then, she's proven people wrong before when they claimed she couldn't know something.
She can see through things. She can see the sickness and rot inside of things. The first time she met Sadako Hayashi, she frightened her by killing a fish that she could see was dying of cancer. She used it as a lesson: Things are not always as they seem. Beautiful things too can be rotten inside. To kill something is not always an injustice.
Emmony will teach you, if you let her. She will teach you her way of seeing the world. She will teach you a fractured, broken, sickly way of looking at the world, but she will never tell you a lie, even when you wish she would.
Her vice is sentimentality. When she cares about something, she cares about it deeply, and she cannot do it harm. If something she cares about requires her to protect the world, she will do it. The things she care about change her.
However, Emmony's sentimentality is extremely rare. There is but one thing she truly loves in and out of the world, and her name is Sadako Hayashi.
Key Game Traits:
Treasure 5 (Sadako Hayashi)
The World-Breaker's Hand
Boundary-Breaking Knowledge
Elisabeth Montaigne
This Strategist is too broken to even fight the world. She was born of desire to end her life, and now she is cursed to fail again and again. It hurts her, and she wrestles with it. It distracts her so much that the war against the world is a far-off dream to her. She must expend most of her mental energy contending with the war inside her head.
She is dying of suicide. When things get too bad for her, she attempts to take her own life. Beyond the world, the emptiness weaves itself into her and forces her back to her body. When she wakes up each time, she cries at the realization that again she has failed.
She rarely leaves her place beyond the world. She rarely has the energy to even try to venture beyond its boundaries. When she manages it, she tries desperately to disprove her own wrongness. She acts as the leader of a group of vigilante-heroes. She believes that if she could only help people, she could rewrite her own wrongness into something right, and finally she could die. As one would think, this is impossible. Her vice is this false hope. She makes her own suffering worse through getting her hopes up time and time again instead of resigning herself to what she is, what her purpose is.
