Character Specific (Iconic Stand-ins) 5x5

In 2 Timothy chapter 3, the apostle Paul counseled:

This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come. For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, Without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good, Traitors, heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God; Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away.

I could go through that list and describe how the SJWs at WotC—and indeed at Paizo too, for that matter, as well as generally in pop culture (and general culture, and government, and corporate and academic institutions too) fit that descriptive warning perfectly. Lovers of their own selves? Covetous? Unthankful? Without natural affection? Anyway, I won't do so, but I easily could, and so can you without any coaching from me. This is why I say that its not just the "suits" who are the problem in this current D&D debacle. And why fleeing D&D to Pathfinder is only marginally better, but doesn't extricate you from the situation in the long run at all. The problem is deeply rooted and ubiquitous.  Entire big movements in our culture today, like DEI, can be summarized by most of those phrases. Frankly, the fact that large portions of the customer base don't see that and are only reacting to some of the details; specifically the part where Paul mentions covetousness, trucebreakeakers and traitors (in a narrow sense only) is disappointing.  Luckily, there are plenty of other people who are reacting to their wokeness as well, which incapsulates a large number of the rest of the bundle. But what I really want to highlight is the final clause: "from such turn away." 

Now, in different contexts this means different things. I wish I could turn completely away from wokeness in the corporate world, but I'm not independently wealthy, and can't, therefore, buy a ranch out in Wyoming where I practice complete self-sufficiency. Turning away means rejecting and avoiding as much as possible, and minimizing my interaction with it. Similarly, nobody is perfect. You, me, and everyone I know sometimes falls short of our expectations and displays some of those traits, especially because our  culture is so steeped in these "values" that they've become ubiquitous. So some mercy and forgiveness are necessary, as long as the people involved are not actively courting those "values", but rather only display them in their moments of weakness and imperfection. 

However, in my gaming and other hobby endeavors, I can completely and utterly excise my connection to such, and arguably, we've even been commanded as Christians to do so. This lends a new and somewhat spiritual (if it's not flippant to call it so) dimension to my rejection of the gaming industry and embrace of the original DIY aesthetic which was the original mode of the hobby anyway. I don't need WotC, I don't need Paizo, I don't need Kobold Press. I didn't need TSR, for that matter, back in the 80s. They have, over the years, produced some product that I've found value in, but their product over the last few years has been so infused with the "values" that Paul warns us to turn away from, that I now completely and utterly embrace turning away from anything that they're doing anymore.  

Anyway, enough about that. Too much about that, quite honestly. But maybe this is useful to some who may still feel like they need a little help breaking away from their addiction to trendy new content. My 5x5 projects are my documentation—painfully slowly rolled out, I'm afraid—of how I do DIY FRPGing. (Curiously, as I was typing this, WotC released an OGL 1.2—they haven't learned anything at all other than to be just a tiny bit more cautious. The scorpion's nature is still to sting the frog.)

The high level 5x5 for CHAOS IN WAYCHESTER has been done for a while, but that doesn't mean that I can start playing. Some finer level details need to be worked out. For instance, I spent some time the other night getting some of my GM screen inserts ready. I'm not done with that, but I have a nice big name list by ethnic category so my NPCs can be instantly named, at least, on the fly, if they were unplanned ones. I'm working on some other inserts, and I'll probably use the travel 1-pager cheat sheet as one of my four panels too. I'd like some encounter generation too; both in terms of people, animals, and monsters to encounter, but also distractions, small things on the road to investigate, etc. Luckily for me, my system (other than the travel system, which is admittedly a little bit more difficult without some practice and some resources) doesn't require much on the inside of a GMs screen, because it can be run and interpreted without it. 

I also need to print out and "bind" my rules in my report folders. This isn't as easy as it sounds; it is long enough that it might exhaust my store of black ink in my printer. I may need to run to Kinko's or the public library and pay a couple of bucks for printouts. And I need to draw a new map, an expanded selection from my earlier map, with more details and more locations on it. And finally, I'll need to give a little more thought to some details about the first session or two. It's great to suggest that I can start play with only a very high level view of where I expect the campaign to go, but the same is not true for only having a high level view of where I expect my next session to go.

And while I'm working on that in parallel, what I'd like to do is highlight that even with a complete 5x5, I prefer to have actually a 5x6, with one column entirely made up of character-specific plot hooks. However, since I'm doing this as an example without actually running it (at least not right now) I'll need to do it with my iconic characters and pretend, for the sake of this exercise, that the iconics are actually real player characters.

First, my lead iconic is Stefan Clevenger, a hillman ranger. He's in his mid to upper 20s; still young, but has been around enough to be skilled and experienced. He spent time not only as a Hillman Ranger, but as part of the infamous Shadow Division, which the Ranger Corps does not officially admit exists, and some people don't believe in. As such, his task was specifically to hunt down supernatural threats, as well as support the general Ranger Corps mission of blunting other threats to the people of the Hill Country. The Ranger Corps is an interesting organization, in that it ignores any of the political nonsense that goes on between the two largest rival city-states, Dunsbury and Waychester, as well as between the Northshire section and the West Marches (where Cayminster and Bucknerfeld are the most important city-states respectively, and which have tried to extricate themselves from the politics of Waychester, at least, as much as is reasonably possible.) The commission of the Ranger Corps is to the people of the Hill Country as a whole, and while various politicians and would-be tyrants have sometimes tried to lean on the Rangers for their own purposes, the Rangers have staunchly resisted being coopted as such, and the current crop of leaders of the various locations are loath to try again.

In any case, this post isn't meant to be about background on the Ranger Corps. Stefan is a former Shadow, but now is freelance. He is often supported by his old commander (Sir Liamond Wreldane) who appreciates having talented and trusted freelancers that he can work with "off the books." Stefan "retired" early after tussling with a corrupted ranger (Audrey Hardwicke). Hardwicke's corruption was exposed, but he fled from facing justice. He still has lots of supporters in the Ranger Corps (some of whom simply don't know the particulars) as he was a popular figure among them, and well respected before his corruption was outed to the leadership of the group. They decided, for better or for worse, not to make the cause of Hardwicke's fall public. What was Hardwicke involved in? Kidnapping women and children (mostly) for occult sacrifices. Hardwicke was no cultist; just a mercenary who was paid to not only look the other way, but even enable and assist with gathering "resources" for various cults. Now that he's been exposed, he's still doing the same thing, but he has to be more discrete, and he no longer has his wages from his Ranger Corps day job. He's gotten more involved with various crimes to pay the bills and has had to lay considerably lower than he's used to. In fact, he's mostly relocated out of the Hill Country entirely to Simashki. He's also consorted even more intimately with various shady characters, including taking as a lover the kemling witch Merra Kuzalash. (Who is actually another anti-iconic; I have one group of anti-PCs who are all bad guys, and she's in that group normally.)

Sir Liamond Wreldane

Since I never came up with an origin for the voodoo dolls from the second part of the 5x5, let's have Audrey and Merra be the source. Rangers, or former rangers, still loyal to Hardwicke keep him informed from time to time on the comings and goings of their organization and the Clevenger brothers specifically (older brother Ragnar appearing as an iconic in the next 5x5 Front). He'll have a few ambushes set up for Stefan and his gang of meddling kids, although they'll just be lackeys, not Hardwicke or Merra themselves. When the campaign gets closer to its endgame, Hardwicke will himself make an appearance in an urban setting—probably Waychester itself—for a cat and mouse hunt at the worst possible time. 

It'll be nice for Merra to at least get a nod, although I don't intend to feature her much, or probably even have her make an in-person appearance at all. I intend for whole entire group of "anti-PCs" to be one of the columns in the third MIND-WIZARDS 5x5 when I get there. Some foreshadowing through this vector is cool. 

As an aside, my original incarnation of Stefan was that he was blond and green-eyed, and wore leathers and a coonskin cap. However, I updated it with the drama about Henry Cavill and the Witcher show to make Stefan dark-haired and blue-eyed. Henry Cavill could play him. Or maybe he's getting too old, but a younger Henry Cavill would be a great stand-in. He still wears leathers and a fur-cap, and wields a longbow and a cavalry saber, as well as w wickedly curved dagger.

Stefan Clevenger

Audrey Hardwicke

Merra Kuzalash

Second, Stefan's best friend and blood-brother is Kimnor "Kim" Rugova, an expatriate shadow sword from Lomar. As described in the Hyperborean deep dive post, his people are cursed so that a small percentage of them fall victim to a cannibalism curse where they must eat the flesh of a human or demihuman or slowly turn in to a ghoul (damned if they do and damned if they don't, when the curse manifests.) A younger and more idealistic Kimnor was engaged to a pretty girl from his neighborhood, who later contracted this curse by pure blasted bad luck. Vowing to find a way to beat it, Kinnor tried to hide her in a Nyxian neighborhood. She was captured and lynched by a mob, and Kimnor fled in grief, disavowing his entire people and race and homeland in his despair. However... his fiancé (Bethan Arghavad) was actually not lynched, or at least not terminally, and was taken by a Nyxian cult and protected from the law which mandated her death. She was prevented from devolving into a ghoul by being transformed in to a dhampir—but she now gleefully hunts, kills, and eats her own people as per her curse, but does so with enhanced physical abilities and lucidity. Kim is going to have to discover and face this when circumstances bring him back to Lomar over the course of the game.

In the meantime, Kim has been hiding from both the terror of facing the supernatural, and his grief over Bethan (as well as his fear that it could come to him too) by being loud, boisterous, boastful—a hard partier, basically. But he also has a small pseudodragon as a pet. (Note that as an iconic, this is not an animal companion. It's just a color NPC animal that tends to hang around with the group and gives Kim something to do to humanize him more because he cares for it so much.) Kim's arc is rife with potential for really good character development as he faces his past and shows himself to be a much more serious person than he pretends to be.

Kim

Bethan

Thirdly, Shule is an itinerant goblin thief. One of the main reasons Shule is wandering around the Three Realms with Stefan and Kim is because he's looking for his brother, who disappeared mysteriously. He occasionally runs into an old orcling pal who claims to have seen him, but the clues are always vague, often second-hand, and they've pointed to little other than the fact that he's still alive somewhere. As the party gets closer and closer to Waychester, the sightings and rumors increase. Turns out, his brother (Kemish) was press-ganged by orcling pirates on the Darkling Sea, but has done well with them and embraced their lifestyle. He's now first mate to an orc pirate (Charakaz Rees) who runs a sloop associated with Captain Taurak (of earlier 5x5 column infamy). I'm not a huge fan of contrived moral dilemmas, but even I'm curious what happens when Shule's brother doesn't want or need to be "rescued." Or, at least he doesn't think that he does.

Shule and his pet rat

Charakaz and Kemish

Fourthly, we have Oisin Dughall, a woodwose outdoorsman. He spent some time in his youth running with a bad crowd, and was an enforcer for a Chersky Mafia-type in Simashki (the true wretched hive of scum and villainy in the Three Realms, if you haven't gathered that already.) Because Oisin was fundamentally too principled to be successful as a mafia tough guy, he bailed on an operation that was a bridge too far. The operation proceeded anyway, but was a total mess because Oisin wasn't there doing his part. The boss's (Vaspar Oksandros) brother was killed and others of his organization were snatched by the Watch, necessitating expensive bribes to free the most important ones. Assuming Oisin had betrayed him on behalf of one of his rivals, Vaspar put a death mark on his head. Vaspar's rivals would also like to get their hands on him to find out what he knows. Oisin fled to the Hill Country, hoping that beyond the Sabertooth Mountains he'd be free to the gangster turf wars of Simashki. For a few years, this was true, especially as Oisin stayed in the rural areas. Vaspar himself has fled east as Simashki started to get too hot for him, and now operates a "startup" in Lomar, although he's got agents and spies throughout the Hill Country looking for opportunities. Oisin's ability to hide from his past is likely to take a turn for the worst, since Vaspar still blames him for not only his brother's death, but now even his entire fall from his perch in Simashki.

Oisin

Vaspar

Finally, I've considered re-arranging some minor details from the original column of the 5x5. I feel like the original front establishes an urgency that would work against all of the other fronts; responsible PCs might ignore distractions that actually represent the other fronts, and focus on getting to Waychester and rescuing the Grand Duchess. And yes, I have consequences from fronts that are ignored, but honestly, I feel like it's just not structured very well. There's a difference between making hard choices and being stuck in a catch-22, but it feels a little bit too much like the latter instead of the former. The prompt or hook that sends the PCs on their way to Waychester needs to exist, but it needs to be toned down so that it isn't so urgent, and it needs periodic updates or amplifiers as they get closer to it. This way the PCs can pursue the other hooks too, but continue on track. One of the later amplifiers, but before they arrive in Waychester, is a request for help because of the locking up of the Queen; instead of that being the principle reason for the trip, it needs to happen as they've been taking their time traveling to Waychester solving other problems on the way. Representatives should petition the PCs for help, or maybe better yet, the PCs should petitions experts or occult sages for help themselves as rumors start to reach them of the goings-on. This request that they make for help might come with a bargain that they can't easily refuse; an expert consultant and advisor in the form of Alys. Alys is charming, beautiful, engaging, and most of all: helpful and useful. But all of this is a lie. She's actually a hideous undead wight-witch, and she's only helping the PCs because for now it serves her purpose and the purpose of her master who assigned her this role, to do so. I expect that unless the PCs are unremittingly suspicious or rude to her that she will develop some fondness and loyalty to them, however. What will she do when the moment for her sudden but inevitable betrayal comes up?

Alys as she appears

Alys as she actually is

As an aside, I don't know why I just put that reference in there. I couldn't even remember where it came from and had to look it up. I'm not a fan of Firefly or Joss Whedon. And although I do have the name Wash on my name list, it's not because of the character who said that. My great-great-grandfather was named George Washington MyLastName and went by Wash to his friends.