Aurelian Veyne and Ilyra Solenne

I didn't really have any ideas for the iconics that I needed to add to fill out the roster of a male and female (eventually) of every race, so I turned to ChatGPT, who gave me the image, and after multiple rounds of editing iterations, I got a decent backstory for Aurelian Veyne and Ilyra Solenne out of it. I'll probably keep tinkering with this off of AI, but AI can be a decent tool to give me something to start with.

Suck it, AI haters. I'm not interested.

Aurelian Veyne

Aurelian Veyne was born to a minor noblewoman in the northern marches. His metallic silver hair, luminous golden eyes, and unusual beauty marked him as a seraph, a rare mortal lineage believed to carry the blood of celestial beings. His family regarded this ancestry as a divine blessing, and he was raised with the expectation that he would serve the Church. He has recently been appointed a junior inquisitor, possessing a good education, a talent for investigation, and considerable skill with the sword.

His first assignment took him to the remote village of Wulfham, where reports of disappearances and strange religious gatherings had attracted the Church's attention. His investigation uncovered a small cult worshipping an entity known as the Sleeper Beneath the World. More disturbing were the ancient scriptures and ritual documents discovered beneath an abandoned chapel, suggesting that certain elements within the Church had long maintained secret dealings with the very powers they claimed to oppose. When his supervising inquisitor, Father Malrec, ordered the evidence destroyed and the surviving villagers executed, Aurelian refused and fled with several of the documents. Malrec denounced him as a heretic and has since been working to discredit him, recover the stolen writings, and ensure that his former pupil does not expose what happened at Wulfham.

Now separated from the Church, Aurelian travels in search of answers, uncertain how far the corruption extends or whom he can trust. He is courteous, well-spoken, and capable of genuine compassion, but also spoiled, vain, and accustomed to being treated as someone exceptional. He has a rather inflated sense of his own importance and can be condescending toward those he considers beneath him. Although he sincerely believes in justice and the protection of the innocent, he has little understanding of the hardships faced by ordinary people and sometimes mistakes his own good intentions for wisdom. His noble upbringing has left him with a great deal to learn about the world beyond the drawing rooms and ecclesiastical libraries in which he was raised.

Lately, he has suffered strange dreams of a black ocean beneath a starless sky, where immense shapes move beneath the water. Sometimes he awakens with unfamiliar words on his lips, or with the peculiar sensation that something has been watching him from just beyond the boundaries of his dreams. Certain occult symbols also seem strangely familiar, particularly those associated with the oldest and most forbidden religious texts. He has not yet connected these experiences to his ancestry, but some passages in the documents from Wulfham suggest that the origins of the seraphic bloodlines may be considerably less glorious than the Church teaches. Perhaps Father Malrec knows more about this than he has let on; Aurelian has begun to suspect that his former mentor's interest in him was never entirely religious.

Ilyra Solenne

Ilyra Solenne was born to an unremarkable family in a provincial town, but she was hardly an unremarkable child. Her birth as a seraph was an extraordinary occurrence, and her parents regarded her with a mixture of wonder, pride, and apprehension. Her unusual beauty and golden eyes made her the subject of considerable local fascination, while her father, an itinerant scholar of folklore and the supernatural, became convinced that she was destined for something extraordinary.

His suspicions seemed justified when Ilyra began hearing the voices of the dead. As a child, she spoke to invisible companions, described people buried decades before her birth, and occasionally recounted the final moments of strangers whose deaths had gone unexplained. Her father introduced her to spiritualism, teaching her to conduct séances and communicate with departed souls. Ilyra proved exceptionally gifted, but where her father sought to understand the dead, she wanted to know them. She eventually discovered that personal objects could serve as anchors for spirits, allowing them to remain in the world of the living. She began collecting such objects, each associated with a ghost she had persuaded to stay.

At nineteen, she followed her father to an abandoned monastery where he had been investigating a series of mysterious disappearances. Beneath its ruined chapel, he had encountered something that communicated through the dead, borrowing their faces and voices to lure the living. When Ilyra arrived, he begged her to flee. Instead, she attempted a great séance, calling the spirits in the monastery and binding them to herself to sever the entity's connection to the living. The ritual succeeded, but her father died and the monastery collapsed around them. Ilyra escaped with his books, her collection, and two spectral guardians who have remained at her side ever since. She never learned whether the thing beneath the monastery was destroyed or merely driven away.

Since then, Ilyra has wandered as a medium and ghost collector, offering her services to those troubled by hauntings and restless dead. She has also discovered that wealthy clients are considerably more profitable than poor villagers. An accomplished confidence woman, she embellishes her genuine abilities with theatrical séances, fabricated credentials, and carefully cultivated airs of refinement. Her natural beauty helps, as does her talent for making people believe they are in the presence of someone quite important. Her magnificent wardrobe and apparent wealth are largely financed by the credulous and the superstitious.

Her most treasured possession is an elaborate golden lantern whose subdued violet light reveals nearby spirits and facilitates communication with the departed. Her two silent guardians, pale and terrible apparitions, hover protectively behind her.

Outwardly, Ilyra is gracious, charming, and compassionate. Yet she has an unhealthy inability to accept death or relinquish those she loves. She considers the spirits in her keeping friends and companions, never possessions, and is genuinely distressed by the suggestion that they might wish to leave. She cannot always distinguish between protecting a soul and imprisoning it.

She does not consider herself cruel. She simply believes she knows what is best for them.

Aurelian and Ilyra know each other

Ilyra first encountered Aurelian Veyne in Mittermarkt where she had been engaged by a wealthy merchant family to investigate a series of hauntings. The family's recently deceased patriarch had apparently returned to disturb the household, appearing in locked rooms and leaving strange messages for the living. Ilyra, never one to turn down a lucrative commission, had begun investigating when Aurelian arrived pursuing an entirely separate inquiry involving the acquisition of old church records, baptismal registers, and genealogical documents.

Their first impressions of one another were less than flattering. Aurelian regarded Ilyra as an excessively theatrical charlatan, while she found him humorless, suspicious, and altogether too serious. Nevertheless, their investigations soon brought them together. During a séance, the spirit of the deceased merchant addressed them both as the returned children. A moment later, something appeared in the doorway: a tall, impossibly thin figure with a face obscured by a veil of golden light. Ilyra's two spectral guardians reacted with extraordinary violence, and the apparition vanished.

The encounter led them to discover that someone had been quietly searching for individuals of unusual ancestry. Their investigations uncovered scattered evidence of a clandestine organization known as the Household, whose members were gathering genealogical records and seeking out people born with peculiar characteristics. Neither understood the organization's ultimate purpose, but they suspected that its interest in them was more than coincidental.

Despite their initially awkward acquaintance, Aurelian and Ilyra discovered an unexpected kinship. Both were seraphs, an uncommon enough circumstance that meeting another of their kind was remarkable in itself. They developed a genuine affection, eventually coming to regard one another as something like brother and sister. Though their respective pursuits keep them traveling separately, they make an effort to maintain correspondence.

Neither yet knows the full truth: they share a distant fallen celestial ancestor, and the Household is attempting to gather that ancestor's scattered descendants and bring them back to a place its members call Home. Whatever awaits them there, it is not quite the reunion its followers imagine. Something ancient is calling its children back, and it has no intention of allowing them to remain what they are.

What it all means

This is all pretty good stuff, and certainly with a little bit of additional massaging, I can use it. However, I definitely don't want to keep all of my racial iconics together in little cliques. I like the fact that seraphs are unusual enough that there is actually a connection between these two, but that wouldn't be true for any other characters. And I definitely don't want them being part of the same "PC party" if you will, as I eventually construct additional backstories for additional iconics. The idea of different groups of iconics being connected to each other was always part of the fun, though; back when Dominic and Ragnar Clevenger were the effective "leaders" of two completely different 4-character groups, I still had them meant to always be brothers. I kind of like the idea of 2-3 character groups now, though, so Ragnar is with Cailin, his wife, and Dominic is with Kimnor, and they sometimes do stuff together, but are apt to split up frequently into their respective two person groups. I don't yet know who I'd pair these two with, but I can work that kind of stuff out after I've got a few more characters ready to roll.

I probably need to "unretire" some of my contacts who were formerly iconics, like Oisin Dughall and Shule at a minimum, and mix them up with some of these characters too. Not necessarily with either of these, but y'know. If I'm going to have ChatGPT work up some of the characters that I haven't thought of any ideas for yet, I probably also need to create a chat where I spell out the details of a lot of these other characters that I already have so that the AI can use that information without me having to correct it all the time.

The difference between iconics and contacts is a little bit fungible, and any of the contacts can be seen as an iconic of sorts, even if I don't intend to really use them as "PCs" as such. Then again, none of the iconics are really going to be used as a PC, they're just stand-ins as if they were sample PCs. I mean, is Drancent Hewe an iconic grisling scholar? If not, what's really the difference anyway? For example. I could do the same with most other contact NPCs, although some of them are more... stationary, I should say. While they're important and can be considered iconic NPCs, they don't really "adventure" like a PC would, for instance. Someone like Sir Liamond Wreldane or Brythe Armeld, for instance.