Paizo Iconics - Ezren

I kinda forgot I was doing this after only four entries. Let's add a few more. Ezren comes up next, the iconic wizard. He's from Absalom, which seems appropriate as it's kind of the center of the world of the setting. He's a bit older, which seems iconic given that he's a wizard. Although he's kind of bitter about it, and self-taught, because of backstory reasons. He's also got a Richard Dawkins bitterness about religion. Sigh. Freakin' Paizo. I can almost imagine Ezren quoting the "In this moment, I am euphoric. Not because of any phony god's blessing. But because, I am enlightened by my intelligence." meme. Luckily, in the radio plays, he doesn't rant about it much, although it does come up once or twice. There he's a bit of a stick-in-the-mud know-it-all, but not in an obnoxious way, just in a "this is what I imagine a fantasy intellectual would be like" way. He's not the worst character we've seen so far. In fact, he mostly kinda works. He's not terribly unlike what I would imagine a D&D wizard to be like. Especially one written by a woke Seattle hipster, although in an era where it was still important not to be too obviously woke if you wanted to be taken seriously. 

As I've said many times, I'm not a huge fan of wizardy archetypes, but given that Ezren does manage to be at least quite iconic in nature; much more so than the thief or cleric "icons", he's a much better character than either of them. As Paizo continued to make more and more iconic characters, they had to become, over time, less iconic, of course. More unique. Their backstory and biographies grew from just a couple of generic paragraphs to several printed pages worth of detailed story. 

While I'm not usually one of the guys to decry the influence of "theater kids" on the hobby, being perhaps a little bit "theater kid adjacent" myself, I can understand where that meme comes from and appreciate what it means. Ezren predates the rise of theater kid iconics, at least. 

He has two versions of his art. As one of the original iconics, he's been around a lot and has original 1e and revised 2e artwork versions. As always, I don't know for sure that the 2e upgrade is actually an improvement or not; you'll have to decide for yourself. He does look a little bit more "actiony" in the 2e artwork, as many of the character do, but given that he's supposed to be a staid intellectual with a great deal of dignity, his more posed picture from 1e seems more in character.

Like I said, I appreciated his inclusion in the Pathfinder Legends radio plays, even though he wasn't actually included in the Rise of the Runelords as one of the pregens. He is on the cover, however, of the fifth volume, "Sins of the Saviors."