Of Morgraines and OHGODTHEPAIN!

So here we have, Garrick's backstory, enjoy...

Childhood...
As a child Garrick lived a pretty happy life, living in the refugee village of Estonth. Garrick's mother had aided in saving the village several years prior to his birth,  The Priestess Sereth had welcomed back the woman known as Lenna Morgraine back within the village walls even with the hardships the village was facing at the time out of gratitude and there Lenna settled down and finally started a family, her first and only son Garrick was welcomed into the world. Once Garrick was old enough to run, he was thrust into training to hone his skills as a fighter by his mother. As young Garrick got older, and more skilled with a blade he started to show an odd inking of talent in other aspects. This talent iniitially confused Lenna, as Garrick's father had not shown any ability with the magical arts and she herself had no ability with the magical arts, infact his father was a rather common man whose life was cut short by disease.

Magical ability....?
Garrick's Magical ability is a mystery to his mother, and most of the villagers whom he knew. His magical abilities spontaeniously manifested one day while sparring with a group of friends who had taken up the Morgraine Family Technique to defend their home. With that Garrick sought a way to combine these two abilities, his family's sword technique and this new magical manifestation. With the help of the Priestess Sereth, Garrick learned the secret language of the Drow  as she was a surrogate mother when Lenna was away on various forms of buisness. Sereth even lined up a teacher for Garrick to help him hone his magical abilities into something constructive and not random burts of wasted talent.

Journey out of Estonth...
Garrick soon made preparations to leave the village, with a guide to take him to his new master Airador Haemiel the Duskblade. While under the teachings of Airador, Garrick was brought up with more knowledge than his mother had been able to impart on him due to his long years. While training with Airador, Garrick had found out that Estonth was raided by an unknown group, inwhich his mother had fallen. Garrick pleaded with Airador to go, but his pleas fell on deaf ears. Garrick found himself unable to leave, and soon recommited himself to honing his skills at a furious rate. During his training with a faulty arrow had splintered shattering in Garrick's face, causing him some eye damage, thus he suffers a bit of vision loss in his right eye. It is nothing overly serious, but it has put him off of ranged combat, to make up for this he learned a spell that allows him to teleport to his enemies.

Leaving Airador...
Two years after the fall of his mother, and the raid on Estonth Garrick was finally set back into the world by Airador. But before he left, he was challenged to a fight by Airador in which he barely overcame his master. With his victory over Airador, he was deemed worthy of a gift from the Elf. Garrick found himself holding the first sword his mother had owned, Garrick felt a wash of emotion overcome him but refused to let it out, a time would come for tears but that was not now.  Garrick then set out to return to Estonth....

Return to Estonth....
Garrick returned home, and soon reunited with Sereth, while their meeting was bittersweet seeing her filled Garrick with happiness. Sereth gave Garrick the only possession that was found on Lenna, oddly enough the raiders had left only that with her body. This was the pendant she was given by the Kingdom of Larchent, the magic drained from it all that was left was the engravement of Morgraine. Garrick had the Pendant magically bonded to the pommel of the sword his mother first held. With this he was ready to set out to regain what was taken, the gemmed sword his mother once wielded so proudly. Where his quest would take him... Well that is a story for another time....

As always, feed back is not only loved, but is strongly encouraged... On the next episode of Cleaving Rampage Productions, the evolution of Garrick Morgraine.

Of Morgraines and Handgrenades...

The next character of mine that I will spotlight is the son of Lenna, I wanted to continue the family line since our Dungeon Master decided that he wanted to do a continuation of sorts of his last campaign set several years later. I found this to be the perfect reason to continue the family line, and give him something to work off of. Garrick took me quite a while to figure out what to do with, class wise until I finally settled on a Duskblade. Combining magic and raw power, the Duskblade is quite versatile at making things not live anymore, as well as support. So with this in mind, I had to figure out how a kid from non-magical parents had a penchant to cast magic. This is where the Duskblade's ability to spontaneous cast became an asset, it didn't really need to be explained thoroughly how he gained the ability as it tends to just "awaken" in people as with Sorcerers.

So with this in mind, I had the next generation of Morgraine set up class wise, I just needed to work on a backstory and a build for said class. I took the backstory aspect first, as this is generally the part that I enjoy doing more often than building up a class when I get serious. This character was my first serious one, as I didn't want to put a slapdash character into the mix for once (or one, that was essentially built for me by another player... But that is a different story).

So next time on Cleaving Rampage Productions, Garrick Morgraine's backstory.

Lenna Morgraine, the Evolution...

Lenna Morgraine

The character of Lenna, as I stated in the previous post was originally a throwaway, but nearly instantly she grew a character. She was a brash, hot-headed person who felt passionately about defending the downtrodden.  Pretty much, she was at first your typical hero you'd find in most media.

In the first session, she got instant character development (What? It counts, she didn't have one to start with!) when the party found a small village that had been absolutely destroyed, and any survivors were captured except for a small Elf girl. It was with this, that I thought up on the spot that Lenna should have a natural maternal instinct. With that she became rather protective of the girl after she and the party saved her. She kept rather close to the girl, and even took the time to help her adjust to not having anyone that she knew around her. Sadly we never resolved that plot thread on what happened to the survivors, as I wished that we had. After another attack on the village the party, fended them off and captured an female Orc. It took some time but Lenna eventually managed to get a few words of explanation from the prisoner and soon set her free.

They made it to the Kingdom, and the first thing that happens is that a guard attacks firing a bow at their feet, quite close to Lenna who snaps. She goes on a tirade against him, and intimidated him to the point he may have become sterile. She pretty much swears a blood feud against him, and that plays out with the said intimidation. Morale of the story? You don't screw with her.

Ridiculous things do indeed happen with Lenna, it was discovered she is not above using unconventional weapons to her advantage. In fact there was a point in which she and the Cleric of the party broke into the castle and kidnapped a false queen and when she could not wield her sword... Lenna used the queen as a rather large bludgeoning weapon, quite adeptly. While she was constantly reprimanded by the Cleric for her actions, she continued to do so until they had finally escaped. The queen was found to be a Drow agent posing as the true queen, and they quickly reinstated the proper Royal Family into power... Minus the king, Lenna did not like that manwhore.

By the end of the campaign, Lenna had helped save another town named Estonth which was the home to a cavalcade of refugees of various races. The party left the young Elf girl here, and traveled deep into a Drow city and defeated their commanders and managed to escape with Lenna bringing a Drow female with them, who later was rumored to be romantically linked to Lenna. After returning, Lenna decided to settle down in Estonth and work within the city to defend it.

Post Campaign she ended up having a child, with an unnamed man several years later and was sadly later killed during a raid. The circumstances behind her death still remain a mystery as to why the town of Estonth was raided.

So this is a very very condensed write up, and not very well done. I sadly kept really shoddy notes on Lenna though I wish I kept better notes.

Art provided by Mexrage

Lenna Morgraine, the namesake of this Blog....

Lenna Morgraine

This was my first character that I made, that I actually felt a connection to. At first she was a throw away character, that I had no backstory for. The cliched "Hero without a past" story that we've seen many times before. She originally was just there to hit stuff hard, and then hit it again even harder. For this article I am going to focus what I was doing with her, and had the campaign not ended when it did where I was going with her. I won't go into character, as that will be saved for a later article. 

We run off the system of "Roll 4d4s drop the lowest, re-roll any 1s", as a house rule. So our stat rolls can be either ridiculously high or more normal... Lenna was ridiculously high. At level 1 her stats were: 18, 16, 16, 16, 14, 16 in that order. This came in handy for smacking stuff, and when allowed, scaring the ever loving bejeebus out of people (more of this in a later article). But onto the character build!

Lenna's Skill Points were mostly vested into Intimidation, with a fighter not having many Class Skills that aren't made harder to invest in due to Armor Check Penalties, this was my bread and butter skill. With other points going into stuff like Sense Motive, Search, Spot, Bluff, Diplomacy. Intimidate was the main skill she used out of battle when she needed to do something face-of-the-partyish, we had a Sorcerer as our main face so his vastly superior Charisma came in handy.

As for fighting style, I built Lenna as a "Crowd Controller" for the most part, as we were running into big groups of enemies consistently. So often was the case in which you heard "Hey, it's cleave time!" followed up by DungeonMaster Sauvie muttering something about hating her as she hacked through his minions. While she could have used something like a Great Sword for incredibly crazy high damage I wanted something more elegant so I envisioned a Katana-like Bastard sword and went with that. It helped my image of her as when I considered a Great Sword, I just didn't see her going through crowds with one and being able to be graceful with it, so I took a happy medium (1d10 damage isn't something to scoff at with a fighter).

As she leveled up, I took the basic Focus/Specialization feats  as well as the Quick Draw feat that any Fighter should take, and then I started to get some more standard feats such as the ability to sunder better, to be better at bullrushing, as well as to perform more Attacks of Opportunities, and finally an expanded critical range on her sword.  Then I was starting to get creative, I had things at my disposal such as the ability to make enemies cower. I was going to go along the path of making her able to possibly one-shot enemies that she critical hits, but alas I did not get that far with her.

From her build, she was the typical average Fighter for the most part, you attack her and then she destroys your family line with her sword... If that doesn't work, she will do it again the next turn.

So this is an idea of how I built her, and on the next episode I will go over how she evolved as a character from a throw away, to my favorite character to date.

Art courtesy of Chris Ducharme.

An Introduction to Cleaving Rampage Productions.

So people generally either know me as Travis (my voice actor's name), or Debby (my online personality). With this Blog I intend to detail my Dungeons and Dragons characters, events from their existence, and just random things I've experienced within the Dungeons and Dragons mythios.

I will start off with my experiences with the game, while I have only been playing for a little over a year it has been a good experience. As much as I wish, I sadly do not play around a table with others but online over Skype. My group plays on the 3.5 system, and my forte so far has been characters that hit stuff really, really... really hard. For the most part my characters are front line melee based (sometimes by choice, others because I generally slot myself into a empty role). My experience with RPGs have given me a bit of a "Oh damn, this concept will be fun!" mindset. Sadly my biggest issue with characters is not falling into a pattern of being sarcastic even when it does not make sense for said character. Overall roleplaying wise I'd like to see myself as one of the better ones in our group (not to insult them or anything, or to toot my own horn), as I have a history of roleplaying over various forums, and I am a avid fan of RPG games.

So far I am doing this mainly for a personal archive of characters and not so much for fans, but if you happen to stumble upon this, feel free to leave a comment be it positive or negative.

A big thanks to Chris Larios (Rollo_T) for the ideas that I am blatantly ripping off, and just for his damn good write ups on his DnD characters, the creation steps he goes through when making his characters, and his awesome series called "Through Their Eyes". If you have not heard of him before, I suggest checking him out at the link I provided.

Another good link I will provide is to my DnD Group Member Sauvie, who is doing a series of his own. Unlike myself, he has a few articles done himself detailing his character Anette which is a good read.