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.