The first character that comes to mind I'll be saving for the ninth day because I love that character but was not able to play him to his full potential. So instead I'm going to talk about my bird-brained, intimidating, half-crazed, mana-spewing Kenku Tobias Fanuilh.
While the edition I played in him felt pretty suffocating at times, curious at others and occasionally exciting the game was run by a good friend of mine and it was the first time we had been playing in a while. He had enjoyed the concept of the 'Spell Plague' and happened to love Post Apocalyptic settings so he took one of his old campaigns, let magic ravage the world and took his old players and a few others, myself included, along for the ride. Save for two of us the players were all in a suspended animation for eons and had completely missed the spellplague, they were waking up to a world already ravaged. Tobias on the other hand had been born in this age, where food was scarce, water was corrupted, towns were few and far between and crazy bird men walked the planet.
Tobias was an outcast from his feathered clan, also a lawyer, he worked as a part time historian, and only wore a toga, for the local township and explored ruins in his off time trying to put together a decent recollection of the events that leveled the world to its current state. He encountered the other players in their stasis and went on many merry adventures. Determined to play up the exotic and out of this world bit, Tobias the mutant bird man had very peculiar tendencies. He would feast on slain monsters (provided they were not spell scarred) he would build nests at every campsite, he would flap his wings and intimidate everyone he could and most importantly his facial expressions were bizarre and not the slightest bit insane. His home had walls built of books, various nick-nacks and paraphernalia from another age scattered about and a stove with a permanently burning pan on it. Tobias was a Sorcerer, and a Wild Mage at that; there were quite a few bats in the belfry. At one point he called the shape shifting druid an abomination, in contrast to the lovely thunder spewing boars they encountered; she retorted by telling him his stove was on fire. Fully off guard Tobias cried and fled the scene. He was strange, he was crazy and I loved playing in him.
At one point a fellow party member was imprisoned in a well armed city, the party went through a maze as a test to win her freedom but at the end came a terrible cost. The party member was cast in bronze, much like Han Solo in carbonite and the only way to release her was for a sacrifice of a pound of flesh. None of the other PC's were willing to do so. Tobias, mostly a guest character and far from ever serious had one brief moment of lucidity. He lost his leg that day, and rode a floating desk for most of the rest of the campaign.
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| Leg crafted by Skinz-N-Hydez |
On their travels Tobias encountered a halfling and a gnome who were looting caravans. The gnome, Tuck, was wearing a Kenku mask (conveniently in the book supplied picture the picture eludes me at the moment), Tuck and Tobias were mortal enemies for quite some time; most of their duels to the death were quite benign. Later when they went to the floating city of the gnomes Tobias learned that Tuck's mother was killed by a marauding band of rabid Kenkus. Tobias turned over a new leaf and together pledged to walk a new path along with Tuck; they became close friends and later on Tuck would build Tobias a mechanical leg.
Tobias was content to play second fiddle to the destined stasis-PC's but his personality took on such a larger than life infamy that he became pretty integral to the plot. It turns out he was the only spellcaster left on the planet because the goddess of mana inhabited his body when the weave of magic was torn asunder. Tobias, reckless as he was crazed, managed to survive to the end and restored magic to the spellplagued world. It was an epic campaign that I was glad to be part of, and Tobias will live on in memory for quite some time.
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