#iooc

For some background on what I was thinking when I made this character: The DM described their undersea exploration campaign as a ‘meat grinder’ and ‘an excuse to throw the monster manual at [us]’. I knew out of game that whatever characters I made for this campaign would be up against deadly and double-deadly encounters regularly, and might not make it. And in game, any character who knew what this mission was knew that the last one 100 years ago never came back. So, with that in mind, I made a collection of characters with various motivations for being on a death ship - desperation, curiosity, faith, ignorance. The first character I picked out of a lot of like 4 or 5 was Tam. 

Tam is a minotaur fighter, a former pirate, and a character who’d be less sad (both less depressed himself and less depressing to think about for me) if he died sooner, like he was supposed to.

The idea behind his character is a retiree looking for a last hurrah. He’s 100 years of bad habits and unhealthy behaviors, all culminating into ‘well I’m getting old, might as well die in glorious combat to avoid a fate like watching myself get weaker in some home for the elderly.’ He was never meant to change as a person, in a ‘you can’t teach an old dog new tricks’ way. His goal in joining the expedition was completely 100% to die on the most dangerous and least understood sea in the world (this took some getting used to for me, so there would be some situations I’d pull back from and others I’d throw myself at and I’m honestly shocked and amazed he hasn’t died yet.)

Tam’s clan name translates to ‘free man’, and he spent his youth obsessing over how to properly honor a family name. In the end, he decided that a family name is useless to proliferate if you can’t say you represent it, so he put freedom as his pillar virtue and began shaping his life around achieving ‘perfect freedom’, whatever that means. When he found his love of sailing, he decided to take that to be the freedom he was trying to achieve and live up to. When a captain of his started talking about getting a crew together and driving out a large trading company threatening to put the smaller merchant sailors out of business, he hopped on board with the plan immediately. When he realized that he was close to living a quiet, contented, boring life with his fiance, he got himself shanghaied onto one of the most feared pirate vessels of the time. Tam hopped from boat to boat for decades, and when an invitation was extended to go on what was surely a suicide mission, he accepted it without a moment’s hesitation. 

In his effort to understand freedom and make it tangible, he decided that the fewer things you have to tie you down, the fewer and more transient your bonds are, the happier and freer you are. If you have no ties, there’s nothing to hold you back, to tug, to hurt when you try to move forward. Tam’s the last of his family name, and he was no where near home to hear about his sister and her children’s deaths when they happened. He doesn’t even know if the man he loved still lives in the town they’d made a life in. He’s never kept in touch with a crew after he steps off a ship for the last time. Tam’s entire philosophy is about avoiding personal attachments in order to maintain freedom, to the point where he’s afraid getting too attached to anyone will tie him down and trap him.

So, one of the defining features of Tam’s backstory, pillars of his character, and a main flaw that I wanted to focus on while I was writing and playing him, is an aversion to commitment and an unhealthy and impossible idea of what ‘freedom’ is.

One of the first sessions we had wasn’t really an assigned mission, it was just the party (at the time, a group of randomly-assigned cabin mates) deciding to do a good deed with their last night in civilization. We were searching for a lost girl, and the clues led us (too slow, too slow) to a sea hag in the process of finishing metamorphosing said lost child into her true form as a hag. I failed a wisdom save in like the first round of combat and instantly dropped to 0 hit points. Eventually, we were just too little too late throughout the fight, and the girl was transformed into a sea hag. The entire time, Tam kept talking to the new hag as though it still had the consciousness of the young girl. From the outside looking in, this is a very funny visual, getting barfed on by a sea hag and saying ‘ah, yes. Typical teen-ager stuff I went through a similar phase’, and swearing to the party that ‘we take this to our graves’ when the young hag was finally killed, but it’s actually a great example of the way Tam handles problems - he doesn’t. He pretends everything is fine, until he can’t, and then it’s white lies and running away. The party told the lost hag child’s parents that their daughter was dead and the party was unable to save her, but we never did tell them any details, and we certainly never told them we were seconds from bringing her back alive and well to them. Leave town that night, drink a little more than usual, don’t think about it again.

The fight with an aberration known as the Shimmering One (homebrewed) comes in as a one-two punch. The monster’s illusion makes it appear as someone in a person’s past that they’ve cared about. So, when Tam looks out and sees the man he ran away from, he runs again - by jumping off the boat. He has a short dilemma in the water about running away again while his friends are getting attacked on board the ship. To spare the details of that fight, Tam eventually does swim his way back to the ship and rejoin the fight with what the rest of the party now knows is a creepy holographic monster. I can’t remember which of the two fighters got the killing blow on it, but upon death it dealt a massive wave of psychic blowback - not only enough to drop Tam and our other fighter, but enough to outright kill our rogue. That was our first character death of the campaign.

Our next character death happened during our battle with a beholder. For some background: in game and out of game, the impending beholder fight was something we fretted over extensively - for literal months out of game. The hiatus between fight teased and the battle itself was about May or June to November or December of last year. Our expedition found civilization, had some fun around the city of Spider Path, explored some cool caves, and uncovered a conspiracy that this beholder had to take back the city. After some social not-so-niceties and working with the local government, the plan our party (in and out of game) came up with was to try to prevent a siege by challenging the beholder to combat in the Colosseum.

I’ll give you one guess who initiated that challenge.

In Tam’s mind, this fight was going to be brutal. It’s going to be deadly. They might not win, but they have to try, because the lives of the nice ‘trolley’ man and his weird cave goat named Billy and the circus man the paladin has a crush on and the overworked tavern waitress and the Colosseum sports fans and everyone else in this city are riding on it. This is fighting a tyrant for the people’s right to (relative, fantasy racist and classist under a different, less hardcore and more neutral authority) freedom.

This is how Tam wants to die.

Out of character, I’d prepped a backup for Tam’s death - a barbarian who I’ll talk about later, because while in the early stages I didn’t intend for it, he became a response to Tam. I was really, really excited to play him (still am), and I was sure that - based solely on the fact that I’m the only non-magic user in the party and would have to be up close and personal with this monster, likely out of a range that would allow for healing - Tam was going to die in this fight. Completely and wholeheartedly sure. Discussed at length with the DM, who was like ‘nah it’s not that hard of a fight you’ve got 6 party members and it’s just a beholder, 2 stone giants, and an otyugh.’ (we were 5 level 6s and 1 level 5). So I’m more than prepared for Tam’s death, especially when he’s knocked down to 12hp in two rounds and has yet to actually hit the beholder (because I have yet to roll above a 12). Eventually, the damn thing moves out of my range, and I have no better luck hitting the stone giant either, and it’s not long before I’m downed, our party is scattered to the wind, and it doesn’t look like anyone’s going to be getting to me any time soon. They take out a small squad of goblins, destroy the otyugh, kill the giants, whittle down the beholder, the druid gets turned into a rat, everyone is having a very bad time.

And while Tam is unconscious, the paladin gets turned to stone, the druid is hit by a disintegration beam, the ranger peaces out after watching the druid get dusted in front of him, and the bard is 2 and 2 on death saves before anyone can get a healing potion to her.

With the bard brought back up I’m finally healed, but our party is down to 2 fighters and a bard. While I fail to hit the damn beholder with my hand axes, the bard lands a choice dissonant whispers, and our eldritch knight eventually finishes it with his bonded hand axes. With the fight over, we assess our losses.

Now, this isn’t the first time Tam’s been too little too late to save someone in need during the course of the campaign, nor is it the first time he’s been downed in battle and wasted precious time being unconscious, or just not present for the fight. This is definitely not the first fight my dice have screwed me over and I’ve just been unable to hit an enemy. This isn’t the first combat that Tam has initiated. Also, remember that Tam not only has an unhealthy obsession with freedom and living up to a name, especially now that he’s the only one left to do so, but he also wants to die. 

Which brings us to where Tam is mentally after this fight - Tam firmly believes he is the only one in the party with nothing to live for. The bard has a girlfriend back on the ship. The eldritch knight is a well-adjusted person on a mission. The paladin is just a kid with an entire life ahead of him. The ranger has to get back from this expedition to save his brother. The druid had his parents and responsibilities waiting back at home. Tam is an old man with a handful of stories, an alcohol problem, and a mounting pile of regrets and guilt that he can’t run from anymore. He should have been the one to die, and somehow - despite doing pitifully in the fight, and barely contributing to taking down the beholder compared to the druid, the ranger, the bard, and the eldritch knight - he’s still alive, and he wasn’t even conscious to see our druid die.

And when you add all of this up, you get a very sad shaggy Scottish cow man with a downright heartsick death wish.

There’s been a lot of discussion about what’s going to happen to Tam now. I can technically retire his character - either by having him shanghai himself again, or having him commit suicide outside of combat. But I don’t think Tam would shanghai himself again - especially after seeing the illusion of his former lover. Suicide outside of a fight also feels unlikely - Tam wants to go down swinging, it’s all he’s ever wanted. But picking a fight he can’t win? Doing something reckless and stupid? Drinking himself to death accidentally? These are all very Tam things.

Tam’s spent his life letting opportunities pass by, afraid of being held back and trapped and weakened by commitment and staying in one place. Tam joined this expedition because he wanted to die in a poetic way, sailing an untamed sea. Now it’s almost like that opportunity has passed as well, and he’s no longer being picky.

I don’t think I ever intended for him to be a tragic character, so much as a flawed one. I expected him to do something reckless and die in a fight far sooner, and had envisioned it more like ‘crazy old bastard in the post-apocalyptic movie jumps into danger because he’s old and it beats sitting around and waiting to rot.’ What I got was someone who feels they watched their life go by, never able to find happiness, and maybe too late is figuring out it’s because their idea of happiness has been wrong all along.

And on the other hand, there’s Tallak Fannar, human barbarian, and I don’t know if I started doing it consciously, but I ended up building the anti-Tam.

Tallak is on the ship because the payment - both upfront and upon return - is simply an opportunity that he can’t afford to pass up. That kind of money could keep his family afloat, get his little sister the opportunity to study magic if she wants, help the village recover from a terrible winter, keep food on the table for his 7 younger siblings on days when the hunting isn’t so great. Tallak loves his family, loves his village, loves almost everyone he meets. His philosophy is that a hunting party is always stronger when everyone is close, when there is good communication and relationships at the foundation, and he believes that it’s his responsibility to extend that strong sense of family and connection to whoever he’s working with. Tallak is a 19 year old who’s been very sheltered in his little village for his entire life, and only in the past year or so began venturing out to take odd jobs. Tallak sees commitments and bonds as strength. Tallak has his life ahead of him, and a lot to learn about the world, and he came on this boat to live.