#vanguards

Name: Xalke Syzon

Age: 47

Starting Statistics:

Strength 8 (-1), Dexterity 16 (+3), Constitution 16 (+3), Intelligence 10 (+0), Wisdom 13 (+1), Charisma 10 (+0)

I possibly should fix the racial flaw to Strength, but it’s not going to be used until 10th level, so … frankly, I’m not gonna. I’ll put some in with ability boosts as we level, but at the minute I like Wis more.

Starting Skills:

We’ve got 6 at level 1. Acrobatics, Athletics, Perception, Stealth are the main four I’m going to level continuously. I’ll also put a point in Survival and Sense Motive, just for theme here. Later on, might put some in Intimidation, Mysticism, Piloting and/or Engineering?

Race: Winterborn Ryphorian

I wanted a Vercite race, but verthani wasn’t really doing it for me. I did consider shirren and strix, but they’re both more commonly found on Fullbright, not the Darkside. But there is a note that there’s a decent population of ryphorians on Verces, because the tidally-locked divisions remind them of the years-long seasons of their own Triaxus. And if we want a character themed around ice and polar survival, winterborn ryphorians do nicely.

There’s also an interesting thing where ryphorians are culturally rather communal, which might make an interesting tension with a character that’s drawn to isolation out on the ice.

For our racial traits we get Keen Senses (+2 to Perception), Low-Light Vision, Cold Resistance 5 from Winterborn, and a bonus feat. Just because we’re a Darksider, I’m going to take Toughness. We’re just a real hard-bitten sort of a gal out here.

Description:

A lean, rangy, hardbitten woman, absolutely snow-pale from stem to stern, dusted in white fur, and with short, thick white hair that she’s never bothered to dye. Xalke’s never been one for fashion, and there was never any call for it out on the ice sheets and industrial platforms of the Darkside. Of course, that might have been more reason to go for a bit of colour and individuality, but Xalke’s always been one to settle into her environment, always been a still, watchful, slightly morbid sort of presence, blending blithely back into the snowfields.

Theme: Death-Touched

I was really flip-flopping between this and Void Nomad. Both give Con, both fit thematically with a Vanguard’s entropy, and near-death experiences and/or undead encounters are both likely easy to come by working out on the ice sheets of the Darkside. In the end, though, Death-Touched won, just because I might prefer a Perception bonus to a Survival one, and the eventual cold resistance just feels thematic?

(If I’m reading it right, the ryphorian cold resistance will stack with it, so long as we don’t have any other source of cold resistance. The racial resistance stacks with one other source)

So at first level, we get +1 Con, +1 bonus to Perception, and we can use Perception to ID and recall knowledge about undead and negative energy effects.

Class: Vanguard

It’s a melee martial class but it’s Constitution based, and the theming is fantastic. “To you, the inevitable decay of the galaxy is simply a force to shape, control, and even temporarily reverse.” Something happened in your life and you got tuned into the wavelength of inevitable change and decay, to the point that you can reach down through the grounding of your own body and manipulate it. This is basically damage manipulation, either to cause or prevent, but I love the way it’s framed. Definitely A+ theming on this class.

On Verces, and specifically the Darkside, there’s possibly an influence of philosophies like the Ascetics of Nar, the ice cult in Fastness of the Ordered Mind. A compare/contrast sort of deal, maybe. The Ascetics see ice as a blueprint for the frozen oneness of the universe, and some allow it to ravage their bodies to allow that blueprint to remake them. The vanguard channel their senses of the entropic universe through their bodies to allow them to manipulate their surroundings. There’s … not a link, nothing direct, there’s two different philosophies in action, but there’s certainly some calls for comparison there.

Not that Xalke has anything to do with the Ascetics of Nar, beyond having heard of them and vaguely considering them a bunch of masochistic nutters. But maybe the ice does have an effect, whether you plan to let it or not. Maybe if you do commune with the ice and the darkness, gradually over time, or intensely for a brief period (such as, say, going out to check a facility’s fuel lines for ice-damage and getting snowed out for a nearly lethal amount of time, even for a ryphorian), then … maybe it does wake something in you. A sensation of vastness. A physical understanding of it. A touch of something incomprehensibly vast that you can nonetheless feel in your bones.

Maybe you come out a vanguard. And you can pass that understanding, some glimpse of it, from your flesh to other people’s. Heh.

So, as a Level 1 Vanguard, we have the following features:

Entropic Pool, the pool of entropy points that fuel our abilities. We have 16 Con, so we can have a max of 3 EP currently. We only get them in combat (in various ways), they do a bunch of different things, and as long as we have at least 1 in the pool, we get a +1 to AC, we can spend 1 to get a +10 speed bonus, or boost an entropic strike by 1d4 per EP.

Entropic Strike. I love this thing. You channel your field of entropy into a(n advanced) melee weapon that you always have. Vanguards don’t ever have to buy weapons (as long as they’re happy in melee). ES scales, as far as I can tell, just fine by its lonesome. Also, it’s Con based, not Str. It’s entropy channelled through your body. I love that. It does either acid (to emulate entropic dissolution) or bludgeoning (for raw crushing force) damage, or a mix of both, and you can choose each time. And you can deliver it with any bit of your body. You can headbutt someone for entropic damage, if you want. Is that a good idea? I don’t know, but it’s a hell of an image. And maybe kind of fitting on our icefield industrial worker. Heh. Though it might be more fun to flavour it as a calmer, colder sort of attack. Maybe not even attack. Gesture. A gentle kiss of the ice. A seeping breakdown of your flesh, gifted gently …

Or maybe not. Xalke isn’t sadistic. Maybe we’ll just headbutt people, like a proper blue collar worker who had no philosophical pretensions, she just got locked out into the serene black-and-white void of the ice for too long, and came away a bit touched.

We also get shield proficiency at 1st level, our first feat (I think we’ll take either Fleet, to get into melee faster, or Weapon Focus: Advanced Melee, to help out our entropic strikes a little) and our Vanguard Aspect, sort of a subclass. I kind of feel like I need more scientific or philosophical background than I have to parse what these mean on a flavour/philosophical level, but I think …

Xalke’s always been rather solitary. Strikingly so, for a ryphorian. She’s always been at home out in the silent darkness of the icefields. She’s the one people do send to check fuel lines, and stand watches, and pull stuff down from remote corners of the mining rig. And she came into her abilities as a result of near-lethal isolation, and the vast understanding that came with it. So I think we’ll go for the Boundary aspect, which involves manipulating the isolation of a system to protect it from entropy. So we get a(nother) Perception boost, we get EP from avoiding damage as well as taking it, and we can use our abilities later to help allies mitigate damage. Which is … it feeds back into ryphorians as communal people, too. As isolated as she is, Xalke still understands and feels, on a physical level, what community is for. She’s on the edges of it, but she’s not rejecting it. She just likes her space, is all. But she’ll help out where she can.

Summary:

On the whole, Xalke is very much a tough, solitary, blue-collar sort of woman, someone who’s spent her life doing a hard job in a tough -but beautiful- environment, and who enjoys the isolation of it to a degree. But she’s not misanthropic, or sadistic. She has a sort of frontier helpfulness about her. If you need help she’ll do right by you.

How did she end up adventuring? Well, I’m thinking that after her little ‘incident’, the mining company wound up letting her go. For a couple of reasons, both wanting to distance themselves from her ‘incident’ and the possibility of having to pay injury benefit, but also because superstition is very much a thing out on the ice, and she came back tangibly changed enough that she unnerved her co-workers. If someone gets changed out on the ice, you don’t invite them back in. You don’t know what she is anymore. Not for sure. And maybe it was more than cold out there. She’s death-touched, too. Exposed to ‘strange radiation, dimensional rifts, or magic’. Maybe that wasn’t a normal storm that snowed her out. You can’t let something like that walk around the rig. No offense. You’re a good woman, and it’s not like we want to hurt you none. But you can’t let something like that on the rig. Even if she’s fine herself, you don’t know what else she’s inviting down.

So she wound up cut loose. And, yeah, she could’ve got another job, there’s enough rigs and smugglers operations and what have you out on the ice, but maybe she took it as a sign. She’d touched something vast. She’d come away with magic in her body, in her bones. She’s no ascetic, she’s not one of them nutters in the monastery, but she does need to go out and maybe explore what she is.

And, maybe, help some people along the way. Pay it forward. It might come back around.