it's all sketchbook now

Age: Late 20s appearance, mid 80s reality

Race: Wood Elf (more stat block than story relevant, think more “fantasy mixed” with a slight elf majority I guess lol. A good way to canonically get very little sleep)

Class: Barbarian (Path of the Beast)

Background: Haunted One

Alignment: A true neutral PC forced into violence by a chaotic evil entity creates ??? Chaotic Neutral?

Appearance: (IMG 1 below) Medium skin, dark hair, yellow irises/blue pupils, 6 '0, abundance of scars and body hair, slightly darkened appearance to nails/tips of fingers and slightly elongated canines.

Appearance during a Rage: (IMG 2 below) Very elongated canines/fingers/nails, black/blue veins spreading outward from the dagger, wound noticeably larger and darker/pulsating/alive, nose/eye/general orifice bleeding, no whites of eyes showing.

Backstory:

From Jericho’s POV:

As a child, she found a forgotten shrine to ??? (Morander maybe?) deep in a forest cave where jagged rocks jutted from the earth like teeth. At the center of the shrine was a dagger embedded in a cracked altar. Thinking it treasure, she pulled it free and proudly brought it home.

In the weeks that followed, her household changed. Her parents became paranoid, distant. They whispered when they were alone, and fell silent when she came close. One night she woke to them standing over her, the dagger in their hands. They drove it into her chest.

When she awoke, the dagger had fused into her sternum, buried and melted so that flesh, bone, and metal intermixed. Her family lay dead around her, torn apart by something powerful. She remembers nothing of her past before the dagger, not even her given name. The voices in her head grant her a new one: Jericho.

Now the wound burns when danger is near, and sometimes her body erupts into violent strength she cannot control. Priests sense something deeply wrong in her soul. She believes the dagger was once sealing something beneath the earth, and that removing it bound that darkness to her.

The likely reality:

Her parents discovered the truth first. Whatever had been bound beneath the altar had attached itself to her. They tried to stop it, driving the dagger through her heart to bind the entity again; what a painful task to kill their beloved only daughter.

She died.

But she woke again hours later to the carnage. Not from an outside force, but of her own creation.

The dagger is now part of her, keeping the thing inside her soul contained. When rage overtakes her, its power spills into her body, granting terrible strength and violent instincts.

Timeline: 

From birth to around age 20-25 is extremely hazy for her, aside from visions of terror and the bloodied faces of two people she assumes were her parents. In reality, her past life was wonderfully calm and peaceful: an idyllic cottage positioned on a creek with a tiny farm, just enough to sustain the half-elf man, elven woman, and bright, cheerful daughter that lived there. The daughter loved to fish, catch frogs, and explore the surrounding wood.

After merging with the entity, Jericho stumbles her way through early adulthood in a haze of fear and alcohol, feeding mainly on hunted game and sleeping in alleys or makeshift shelters. She believes killing animals will be enough to satiate the entity for the rest of their life.

Around age 30, Jericho accidentally, brutally, kills a woman at a Waterdeep brothel (IMG 3 below). This is her third time killing another person, after her parents, and the experience rattles her to the core. She flees the scene, and has yet to return to Waterdeep, despite knowing no one there is actually searching for a perpetrator.

Immediately after the murder, she tries to kill herself by ascending into the Sword Mountains. Too much of a coward to take direct action, she lays down in the snow and tries to freeze to death in her sleep. She opens her eyes to find herself alive, covered in the blood of an elk that she unconsciously hunted down, both to eat and to use as shelter, as she had found herself half inside the animal’s body. This is the first time Jericho realizes the entity won’t let her die if it can help it. Miserable, cold, and filthy, she gives up and descends the mountain. 

She spends years brooding over her failure and getting into trouble, allowing the entity to kill people whenever it gets too loud in her head. Together, they mainly target single travelers and drunks late at night. Jericho’s guilt turns crushing after a point.

Around age 45, she tries shifting her targets to people that society deems as “bad”: mainly folks on wanted posters. This method allows her the violence the entity craves, while also earning them a bit of money. The guilt is still present, but lesser. She’s good enough at her job: sometimes she kills when a target should have been left alive, sometimes she lets the target escape entirely (by her own failure, or by her own mercy), but she manages to scrape out a meager living like this, as well as by taking odd jobs as a guide or guard.

At her present age of 87 (Aragorn reference, she doesn’t know her own exact age), at the start of our game, Jericho is on autopilot, but her life is hollow. She can manage as she is, and she does, but every day is exhausting, painful, and her life stretches before her as an endless, dark abyss. With no other choice, she moves forward. 

Personality: Jericho has managed to carve out a section of society for herself, mainly working as a merc in underground markets, nothing fancy. She tends to be crass, although not unkind, and will likely be shirtless more often than the party wants. Rather than brooding over her situation, she covers any discomfort with humor, and will likely not complain of her affliction to the others right away. She will probably volunteer to take first watch a lot to avoid sleeping (IMG 4 below). She doesn’t have a home base, and considers herself a wanderer. She enjoys the company of others, but tends not to seek consistent companionship out of fear of what she could do to that person/people. Being with the current party will be her first real experience staying with people for an extended amount of time since she killed her parents.

Goals: To separate herself from the creature that has mixed its soul with hers, ideally in a way that won’t destroy herself (despite her attempt in the mountains, she doesn’t want to die at all, deep down). Also ties in with a Fear: that she and the creature are too mingled and she’s stuck this way forever.

To hear something other than the voices constantly pushing her to violence and corruption.

To get screamin’ drunk and climb the tallest tree she can find to howl at the moon.

Enjoys: Drinking, music, quiet clear mornings, hunting small game, bathing in hot springs

Dislikes: Large crowds, big cities, restrictive clothing, vegetables, rich folk, dreaming

The Entity: Jericho’s memories from childhood are notoriously patchy, and what the entity lets her remember is only painful: the core memory it returns to, of course, being her parents’ murder. Jericho and the entity do not get along, but after 60 or so years of coexistence, she has learned to deal with it for the most part. She refers to it conversationally in a few ways: if she’s talking to someone without wanting to reveal much, she may refer to it as “my old friend” or “my shadow”. If she isn’t worried about being vague, she will call it things like “splinter”, “pest”, “nightmare”, or the classic favorite: “asshole”.

Fake Backstories: Being that she ignores her shirt buttons often, she will occasionally get stares and questions about her dagger scar, so she tends to invent fun alternatives to tell people:

“This? I fought a warlock, but the spell rebounded off some magic mirror and boom, right in the tit. Now I have to go see a cleric twice a season or I’ll start breaking out in dance uncontrollably.”

“Yeah, I went swimming in an Abyssal tidepool and some squishy thing that was all mouth got right up on me. All mouth, I tell you, not a single eye on that thing.”

“I caught a fella with my girl, so I kicked his ass. Turns out they were both weretoads and this? This is the bite scar. Watch out around me during the full moon, I may croak.”

“Yeah, got this from a dragon. Skewered me on its claw like a kebab and meant to roast me alive. Luckily once it tried to add some butter, I slid right off.”

“An ogre put her cigar out on me, just like I asked her to.”

“A goblin laid her eggs there.”

“It started out as a mole, but I picked the shit out of it.”

IMG 1: Portrait

IMG 2: Rage

IMG 3: Waterdeep Murder

IMG 4: Average night’s sleep :) (credit to @haaarpb)