#vaapi

Say hello to Ferrous, my warforged Fighter/Rogue who is actually a former human soldier whose soul was ripped out and stuffed into a shell of Infernal origin and didn’t ask for ANY of this shit~

This is one of the more unusual characters I’ve rolled up, a collaboration with the DM wherein I essentially placed most of the backstory in his hands and let him feed my amnesiac scattered memories over the course of many sessions to reveal more and more about who the hell they had once been and who had done this to them (all I knew was the elevator pitch of “former human, now warforged, have escaped control”). It’s been wild going from waking up in a box in Session 0 as an almost mindless war machine, to a robot-like being with a limited vocabulary describing their flashbacks/memories as “head-pictures”, to growing protective of and attached to the deep gnome crime family that took them in, to understanding that their sister was dead but not fully processing why they should mourn her, to learning they once had a wife that they held and kissed but could not presently attach any love to her memory, to having enough insight to ask our artificer if she could look inside their body to figure out why the connection between their fragmented memories and emotions felt so muddled.

After a little cranial exploration from the artificer (who did technically receive consent from Ferrous to do this), we learned that Ferrous’ BRAIN(!) was preserved inside their head, and a piece had been cut out of it(!!). The artificer decided to galvanize the damaged region with an electric shock, and a BIG chunk of Ferrous’ human memories and emotions were restored. At this point they discovered that between the day they were ripped from their human body and the current time, EIGHTEEN YEARS have passed, during which they have no idea what the empire forced them to do. So here they are, no longer just a big, agreeable, almost childish automaton for the artificer to tinker around with, but a full-ass grown adult with a shit-ton of trauma. This is where the RP has been difficult but so fascinating, since essentially at this turning point I started playing a new character. NEAT.

The latest development has been the artificer drumming up an item that allows Ferrous to use Alter Self, which is a HUGE step up from the Goggles of Disguise they’d been using before having their personality restored. Being able to take a real human form again means the world to poor Ferrous, and beyond that, it apparently disrupts the empire’s ability to track them when they are human instead of warforged (yeah, they are being actively tracked, EVERYTHING IS FINE). Needless to say, it’s a lot of fun to RP Ferrous relishing mundane human activities, and just as exciting to realize the spell has more value than merely a way to help them feel better about their circumstances!