Open Legend RPG character build: Lucelia Heliotrope
You might be familiar with our Friday Open Legend game, Aether Skies. Doug, Dr. Bill and Ty have already done character builds for the game, and those articles were fascinating reads, so now I’m stepping up to the plate to shed some light on my contribution to the party.
Like Ty, I’ve got spoilers ahead. You guys know the drill.
The Concept
When we first started talking about the Aether Skies setting, I was immediately drawn in by the concept of how magic works in this world. It’s not exactly arcane, not like it used to be, and using aether has this way of really slipping into a person, damaging their sanity and even driving them mad at times. Given this is a steampunk setting, my mind immediately flooded with images of tragic but brilliant figures like Faust and Dr. Jekyll.
I wanted a character who knows there is a price to be paid for progress and is willing to pay that price with her sanity if she must. That’s a recurring theme in a lot of Victorian literature, after all, losing yourself in the pursuit of knowledge. Piecing together bits of this, Lucelia came to mind. I wanted her to be quiet, withdrawn, and a little bit vulnerable, but packing deeply unsettling power on the inside.
Open Legend mechanics
I saw Lucy as a physically fragile figure, a glass canon if you will, and as a result I completely bypassed the physical attributes altogether.
To reflect her background in the classroom (after all, she did get her doctorate in her chosen field), I gave her Learning 5, and a relatively strong will to justify her more recent field of study, aethermancy. The thing is, deep down inside Lucy is a scholar, and like so many, she’s not great at social situations most of the time. Her one social score above zero is presence, and it started at just one.
And then I got to the extraordinary attributes. I cannot stress how much there is to do with this system. I had the whole world in front of me in terms of powers and motifs, but in the end I went with entropy and protection at a score of 3 each.
Then I took the battle trance feat. My idea at the time was very Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Lucelia was to be quiet and withdrawn, awkward, until crunch time when the darker side of her would take over and she would become formidable. Also, it mitigated her complete lack of any physical abilities somewhat.
Now, the really fun part is a mechanic Dave introduced just for this game. As an aethermancer, Lucelia is able to tap into the raw aether. Aetherficers can’t do that. They always use it with something in between themselves and the aether itself, but in Lucy’s case she can draw on that energy to augment herself, raising any of her stats to the equivalent of her aether score in a short burst or giving herself advantage up to her aether score on a roll. This gift, however, comes with a terrifying price.
Whenever she opts to do that, whatever roll she is making she is making against her own sanity. If she rolls over her resolve score, she takes the difference in damage to her sanity pool. So far she’s been lucky, but the temptation is always there to push it a little farther, to go a little deeper, and eventually she knows she won’t be able to come back from it.
Role Play
My character’s two defining traits are her curiosity and her ambition. Lucelia wants to know everything she can about the world and the things that make it run, and often that means taking samples of dead and dangerous things.
Lucy has changed in the sessions that I’ve played her. She’s still the scholar I designed to begin with, and she’s still quiet with most people, but she’s also far more ruthless than I imagined she would be to her enemies. And more willing, it seems, to entertain the notion of a deal with the devil. She wants power, but she is also fiercely loyal to her friends. Whatever she does, she does to the hilt.
She has accepted the darkness within herself and she is willing to be quite cruel if she believes a situation calls for it, but that does not mean she’s a stranger to compassion for others. Lucy has a special blind spot regarding people she believes to be less confident than she is. If you’ve ever been in a situation where you were nervous, but someone else was more nervous than you were so you were able to get over it to help them, you know what I’m talking about.
She’s protective of Bunny, who she recognizes is brilliant but used to being treated as a second class citizen and is always willing to extend a hand if needed, and she’s made the decision not to kill people in front of Kryzikk if it can be avoided out of respect to his pacifism. Roz has earned her unwavering respect for her bravery, though Lucy does carry more than a little concern for her brashness. She’s also wary of Israel, but willing to acknowledge that what he does she believes he’s ultimately doing for the greater good.
Secrets
(You know, where the spoilers are.)
Not-That-Kind-of-Doctor Lucelia Heliotrope spent her younger years studying theoretical arcana in Falcress, but the world of Academia can be cutthroat and people can smile at you to your face and still have a hand ready to steal your research at any moment. She was young and nervous and all too trusting, and of course people took advantage of that.
One person took it a little bit too far. He was a trusted colleague, Henriathe, at least until he took the opportunity to sabotage an important presentation and humiliate her in front of several of their teachers. It was at that moment that she first accessed the aether, completely on accident. Henriathe did not survive the process.
It stripped the dark color from Lucy’s hair, leaving it gossamer white, and it was also around this time the black tendrils started appearing on her skin. It didn’t take long for her fellow scholars to realize what was happening, and that she was at risk of pushing it too far if she didn’t get some proper training and quickly. She was processed through in a rush and given to Sefine Zanderiff as an apprentice.
On the subject of Henriathe’s death, Lucelia was quiet. People took her silence for deep mourning, and she never really got much more than a slap on the wrist for it. After all, it was a reflex, she had no idea what she was doing at the time. Something very different was going on inside, however, and what Lucelia will never admit is that there was a part of her that relished that moment.
There was fear on Henriathe’s face, after all. Fear on the face of a person who had been coercing her into taking on more than her fair share of projects and taking credit for her research for years. Fear on the face of someone who had once frightened her.
For once in her life, Lucelia had the power, and she did not want to let it go. And once she had accepted her shadow, not the one cast from her body but the one inside herself, she knew she had the keys to becoming someone worth being instead of the quiet library mouse she’d been her entire life.
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