Hadriel App
Jul. 2nd, 2016 03:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fearlessherosheartPLAYER
Player name: Stareyes
Contact: beccastareyes @ plurk
Characters currently in-game: N/a
CHARACTER
Character Name: Tazendra
Character Age: around 1000; this is about 1/3 of a normal lifespan and well into adulthood (childhood and adolescence seems to last less than 100 years).
Canon: Dragaera
Canon Point: After Sethra Lavode
World Description: N/a
History: http://dragaera.wikia.com/wiki/Tazendra
Personality: Tazendra’s motivations are very much living in the moment, with an underlying core of honor and respect for her home Empire. She’s not a long-term planner, and is the sort to announce to her friends that she’s riding off on a quest, and then turn up years later having learned elder sorcery and working for the Enchantress of Dzur Mountain. This is a persistent theme for her, as she intended to go to the capital to learn more about her parents, but then spends the entire first book being a member of the Phoenix Guard before getting back to the problem (and then having her friend Aerich reveal that he had the answer all along, and had been waiting to figure out why she hadn’t mentioned it).
That being said, this is more of an artifact of how Tazendra finds projects, not how she acts during them. She is a loyal Guard until Aerich tells her that her parents were not cowards, but heroes who chose to appear as cowards to protect him, and Tazendra chose to reclaim her parents’ land; in between that and Adron’s Disaster, the study of sorcery seems to be Tazendra’s main pursuit, and she only gives it up when sorcery stops working… and then we infer she showed up on Sethra Lavode’s doorstep as part of her ‘find something else interesting’ process. (Sethra once said that every apprentice she’s had besides Sethra the Younger has tried to kill her; I choose to believe this meant Tazendra originally challenged Sethra and Sethra decided that killing her was a waste after she beat Tazendra.)
Tazendra’s caste, the House of the Dzur, has a reputation for being so keen for battle that they are impossible to get along with because they take contrary positions just to provoke fights; this is not true of Tazendra. She has several close friends, and seems to be remarkably gregarious. While she would never turn down a fight, and still has plenty of ways to get her to fight you, she values her friends, and non-combat activities like drinking and losing money at cards/dice. (Tazendra likes gambling, but she’s got no talent for it.) Tazendra also values her friends skills; she is a very straightforward person who takes things on face value and sometimes acts like that means she is stupid. (There have been times when, say, Pel or Aerich or Khaavren have done some Holmesian leap of deduction, and Tazendra just nods and trusts them, because she doesn’t make a habit of working out that the would-be assassin was, say, a habitual dreamgrass user.) Tazendra’s friends have different focuses for their intellect and she is glad to rely on that, just like they rely on her true heart and her sorcery. Given that she is a sorceress and that this is not a safe art (Tazendra has blown herself up at least twice), the fact she has survived learning combat sorcery indicates she is a lot smarter and more careful and detail-oriented than she appears. She just won’t engage it unless it’s necessary because no one around her has the skills.
If you do want to get Tazendra’s attention (by which I mean, her wish to fight you), it helps to be a bully. Tazendra loves fighting, especially if the odds are ridiculously against her, and she hates bullies. Tazendra sees herself as a Hero, and that means her blade is only for people who are causing problems (or just want to fight her: Dragaeran castes often are distinctive enough that Tazendra can rely on others knowing her caste’s reputation and acting appropriately). Have a battle that is a gang of people on one, and she’ll jump in to help the one unless she’s got a good reason not to. This is literally how she meets her long-time personal servant, Mica -- her enemies knew her reputation, and hired a gang to beat up the peasant who helped out at the local inn a few times a week, hoping that this would kill or wound Tazendra and her friends when she jumped in. (After this, Tazendra decided to offer Mica a job as her attendant, having been impressed that a peasant kept his head during the whole thing, and realizing that he only ate about every other day due to shitty circumstances.)
Notice the elephant in the room. Dragaeran society is both feudal (though by Tazendra’s death, it might be shifting away from that in the cities) and has a strict caste system. Tazendra is landed nobility, which means she owes service to Duke Arylle (aka her friend Aerich) and the Emperor (or Empress; Dragaeran titles are non-gendered and they have very few distinctions between the sexes in terms of profession). She also is responsible for protecting the peasants on her land, in return for their work. While Tazendra does uphold the social contract and her distaste for bullying extends to corporal punishment, she also takes the system for granted. Teckla (the caste of peasants, though urban members can sometimes use wealth to trade for a tiny amount of respectability) are not seen as natural leaders or soldiers: Mica doesn’t go armed (despite following Tazendra on her adventures) and is expected to be doing the cooking, cleaning, etc. Add in that normal humans (or close enough) are considered ignorant barbarians that can only join the Empire as peasants (at least, in Tazendra’s time) and Tazendra’s expectations are going to make her a difficult person to get along with.
I expect Hadriel will be an experience. Tazendra won’t have her sorcery, and may have to learn that some of the people she’d underestimate or see as weak might be stronger than her. Tazendra prides herself on her bravery, and being killed or maimed doesn’t scare her: she’s bantered with people who want to send her back in pieces to her friends, and when confronted with an invading army, was excited by the chance to fight an army with only six people (and disappointed when Khaavren then negotiated a peace treaty, even as she accepted that it was better for the Empire to not be invaded). What does scare her is being helpless. When Grita and Illista attempted to pursue revenge on Tazendra and her friends for the various things they had done, Tazendra was captured as bait and the plan had been to make her watch (immobilized by spells) as the two women murdered whoever tried to rescue her, including her friends. Tazendra can be overawed by power (it has only happened twice: on meeting Sethra Lavode and on seeing the backfiring spell that caused Adron’s Disaster), but again, these are circumstances when Tazendra can’t fight back. If there’s something she can stab (usually literally), she’s not afraid of it.
Inventory: Tazendra was captured at this point, so she has the clothing on her back and that’s about it.
Abilities: Tazendra is a sorceress, but will be without the vast majority of her power here, given that Dragaeran sorcery is powered by a substance known as amorphia which is not naturally occurring and difficult to stabilize. As this does not exist in Hadriel, she will have to find a substitute or live without it.
Should a source be found, Tazendra would be limited to what is known as Elder Sorcery. This is a powerful, but risky art, as it involves directly channeling the energy from amorphia through one’s brain (traditional sorcery uses the Imperial Orb as an intermediary; as that orbits the emperor’s head, it is unlikely to be present). Tazendra is comfortable with using it to attack others, create fire, and other ‘apply raw energy to person/object’ but even something as simple as a ward to keep watch over a campsite requires a good fifteen minutes of chanting and focus.
Barring that, Tazendra is a member of a warrior aristocracy. She is very good with a sword, both in terms of one-on-one dueling and in small group skirmishes; she’s never been part of a large army (at least, as a foot soldier). She’s used both one handed and two handed blades, depending on how much sorcery she uses. She also can ride (horses), including fighting while mounted.
Tazendra has had some education in the various things one needs to know to run a barony, but she doesn’t have interest or talent for it. She has shown some research and experimental skills, mostly when it comes to sorcery. She’s also interested in fashion and art, and is decent enough at painting.
Flaws: Tazendra loves to fight, and prefers to do it to the death to make sure it’s as challenging as possible. She really doesn’t mind killing people who challenge her (or who she challenges) and for what seem to outsiders trivial reasons. Her first scene involves her trying to angle for a duel to the death with another noble for cheating her at cards, and ‘first blood’ in the duel involves her puncturing his lung. She loses her first guard partner as she tries to defend a stranger’s reputation, provokes him into charging her, and kills him via sorcery, and she causes her friends to have to leave the city for a few months because she didn’t bother with formal dueling rules when she and the Warlord’s brother got into a fight that ended with him dead. (To be fair, some of that was because the Warlord was up to shady political stuff, and her brother was in on it and wanted to avoid explaining why he and Tazendra were fighting.) All of this happened in the first half of the first book. (It seems like Dragaeran nobility society partially consists of rules to keep violent nobles from disrupting things by focusing them on each other.)
This can seem weirdly detached: Tazendra fights hard not because of a bad temper, but because she finds risking her life in battle gives her an adrenaline high. She’s also been known to accidentally insult people by indicating she doesn’t find them a challenge to fight.
Add in that if you harm Tazendra’s friends, she can go into a berserker rage which the narration informs us means she can’t tell friend from foe, and only stops once she dies or her target dies. It’s probably the only time fighting doesn’t make her happy; because she actually cares if the target dies, rather than it being an entertaining fight. (Her companions have the sense to not get in the way when this happens; it only happened once, after an enemy murdered her personal servant, after he’d traveled over half the country to free her after their enemies had murdered his wife and kidnapped Tazendra.)
Other flaws are that she’s arrogant when it comes to her abilities and status, and is classist and species-ist. Tazendra is going to assume she’s better at things than most normal humans.
SAMPLES
Action Log Sample: http://dankmemes.dreamwidth.org/6204.html?thread=2567996#cmt2567996
Player name: Stareyes
Contact: beccastareyes @ plurk
Characters currently in-game: N/a
CHARACTER
Character Name: Tazendra
Character Age: around 1000; this is about 1/3 of a normal lifespan and well into adulthood (childhood and adolescence seems to last less than 100 years).
Canon: Dragaera
Canon Point: After Sethra Lavode
World Description: N/a
History: http://dragaera.wikia.com/wiki/Tazendra
Personality: Tazendra’s motivations are very much living in the moment, with an underlying core of honor and respect for her home Empire. She’s not a long-term planner, and is the sort to announce to her friends that she’s riding off on a quest, and then turn up years later having learned elder sorcery and working for the Enchantress of Dzur Mountain. This is a persistent theme for her, as she intended to go to the capital to learn more about her parents, but then spends the entire first book being a member of the Phoenix Guard before getting back to the problem (and then having her friend Aerich reveal that he had the answer all along, and had been waiting to figure out why she hadn’t mentioned it).
That being said, this is more of an artifact of how Tazendra finds projects, not how she acts during them. She is a loyal Guard until Aerich tells her that her parents were not cowards, but heroes who chose to appear as cowards to protect him, and Tazendra chose to reclaim her parents’ land; in between that and Adron’s Disaster, the study of sorcery seems to be Tazendra’s main pursuit, and she only gives it up when sorcery stops working… and then we infer she showed up on Sethra Lavode’s doorstep as part of her ‘find something else interesting’ process. (Sethra once said that every apprentice she’s had besides Sethra the Younger has tried to kill her; I choose to believe this meant Tazendra originally challenged Sethra and Sethra decided that killing her was a waste after she beat Tazendra.)
Tazendra’s caste, the House of the Dzur, has a reputation for being so keen for battle that they are impossible to get along with because they take contrary positions just to provoke fights; this is not true of Tazendra. She has several close friends, and seems to be remarkably gregarious. While she would never turn down a fight, and still has plenty of ways to get her to fight you, she values her friends, and non-combat activities like drinking and losing money at cards/dice. (Tazendra likes gambling, but she’s got no talent for it.) Tazendra also values her friends skills; she is a very straightforward person who takes things on face value and sometimes acts like that means she is stupid. (There have been times when, say, Pel or Aerich or Khaavren have done some Holmesian leap of deduction, and Tazendra just nods and trusts them, because she doesn’t make a habit of working out that the would-be assassin was, say, a habitual dreamgrass user.) Tazendra’s friends have different focuses for their intellect and she is glad to rely on that, just like they rely on her true heart and her sorcery. Given that she is a sorceress and that this is not a safe art (Tazendra has blown herself up at least twice), the fact she has survived learning combat sorcery indicates she is a lot smarter and more careful and detail-oriented than she appears. She just won’t engage it unless it’s necessary because no one around her has the skills.
If you do want to get Tazendra’s attention (by which I mean, her wish to fight you), it helps to be a bully. Tazendra loves fighting, especially if the odds are ridiculously against her, and she hates bullies. Tazendra sees herself as a Hero, and that means her blade is only for people who are causing problems (or just want to fight her: Dragaeran castes often are distinctive enough that Tazendra can rely on others knowing her caste’s reputation and acting appropriately). Have a battle that is a gang of people on one, and she’ll jump in to help the one unless she’s got a good reason not to. This is literally how she meets her long-time personal servant, Mica -- her enemies knew her reputation, and hired a gang to beat up the peasant who helped out at the local inn a few times a week, hoping that this would kill or wound Tazendra and her friends when she jumped in. (After this, Tazendra decided to offer Mica a job as her attendant, having been impressed that a peasant kept his head during the whole thing, and realizing that he only ate about every other day due to shitty circumstances.)
Notice the elephant in the room. Dragaeran society is both feudal (though by Tazendra’s death, it might be shifting away from that in the cities) and has a strict caste system. Tazendra is landed nobility, which means she owes service to Duke Arylle (aka her friend Aerich) and the Emperor (or Empress; Dragaeran titles are non-gendered and they have very few distinctions between the sexes in terms of profession). She also is responsible for protecting the peasants on her land, in return for their work. While Tazendra does uphold the social contract and her distaste for bullying extends to corporal punishment, she also takes the system for granted. Teckla (the caste of peasants, though urban members can sometimes use wealth to trade for a tiny amount of respectability) are not seen as natural leaders or soldiers: Mica doesn’t go armed (despite following Tazendra on her adventures) and is expected to be doing the cooking, cleaning, etc. Add in that normal humans (or close enough) are considered ignorant barbarians that can only join the Empire as peasants (at least, in Tazendra’s time) and Tazendra’s expectations are going to make her a difficult person to get along with.
I expect Hadriel will be an experience. Tazendra won’t have her sorcery, and may have to learn that some of the people she’d underestimate or see as weak might be stronger than her. Tazendra prides herself on her bravery, and being killed or maimed doesn’t scare her: she’s bantered with people who want to send her back in pieces to her friends, and when confronted with an invading army, was excited by the chance to fight an army with only six people (and disappointed when Khaavren then negotiated a peace treaty, even as she accepted that it was better for the Empire to not be invaded). What does scare her is being helpless. When Grita and Illista attempted to pursue revenge on Tazendra and her friends for the various things they had done, Tazendra was captured as bait and the plan had been to make her watch (immobilized by spells) as the two women murdered whoever tried to rescue her, including her friends. Tazendra can be overawed by power (it has only happened twice: on meeting Sethra Lavode and on seeing the backfiring spell that caused Adron’s Disaster), but again, these are circumstances when Tazendra can’t fight back. If there’s something she can stab (usually literally), she’s not afraid of it.
Inventory: Tazendra was captured at this point, so she has the clothing on her back and that’s about it.
Abilities: Tazendra is a sorceress, but will be without the vast majority of her power here, given that Dragaeran sorcery is powered by a substance known as amorphia which is not naturally occurring and difficult to stabilize. As this does not exist in Hadriel, she will have to find a substitute or live without it.
Should a source be found, Tazendra would be limited to what is known as Elder Sorcery. This is a powerful, but risky art, as it involves directly channeling the energy from amorphia through one’s brain (traditional sorcery uses the Imperial Orb as an intermediary; as that orbits the emperor’s head, it is unlikely to be present). Tazendra is comfortable with using it to attack others, create fire, and other ‘apply raw energy to person/object’ but even something as simple as a ward to keep watch over a campsite requires a good fifteen minutes of chanting and focus.
Barring that, Tazendra is a member of a warrior aristocracy. She is very good with a sword, both in terms of one-on-one dueling and in small group skirmishes; she’s never been part of a large army (at least, as a foot soldier). She’s used both one handed and two handed blades, depending on how much sorcery she uses. She also can ride (horses), including fighting while mounted.
Tazendra has had some education in the various things one needs to know to run a barony, but she doesn’t have interest or talent for it. She has shown some research and experimental skills, mostly when it comes to sorcery. She’s also interested in fashion and art, and is decent enough at painting.
Flaws: Tazendra loves to fight, and prefers to do it to the death to make sure it’s as challenging as possible. She really doesn’t mind killing people who challenge her (or who she challenges) and for what seem to outsiders trivial reasons. Her first scene involves her trying to angle for a duel to the death with another noble for cheating her at cards, and ‘first blood’ in the duel involves her puncturing his lung. She loses her first guard partner as she tries to defend a stranger’s reputation, provokes him into charging her, and kills him via sorcery, and she causes her friends to have to leave the city for a few months because she didn’t bother with formal dueling rules when she and the Warlord’s brother got into a fight that ended with him dead. (To be fair, some of that was because the Warlord was up to shady political stuff, and her brother was in on it and wanted to avoid explaining why he and Tazendra were fighting.) All of this happened in the first half of the first book. (It seems like Dragaeran nobility society partially consists of rules to keep violent nobles from disrupting things by focusing them on each other.)
This can seem weirdly detached: Tazendra fights hard not because of a bad temper, but because she finds risking her life in battle gives her an adrenaline high. She’s also been known to accidentally insult people by indicating she doesn’t find them a challenge to fight.
Add in that if you harm Tazendra’s friends, she can go into a berserker rage which the narration informs us means she can’t tell friend from foe, and only stops once she dies or her target dies. It’s probably the only time fighting doesn’t make her happy; because she actually cares if the target dies, rather than it being an entertaining fight. (Her companions have the sense to not get in the way when this happens; it only happened once, after an enemy murdered her personal servant, after he’d traveled over half the country to free her after their enemies had murdered his wife and kidnapped Tazendra.)
Other flaws are that she’s arrogant when it comes to her abilities and status, and is classist and species-ist. Tazendra is going to assume she’s better at things than most normal humans.
SAMPLES
Action Log Sample: http://dankmemes.dreamwidth.org/6204.html?thread=2567996#cmt2567996