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Jan. 14th, 2014 11:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wizardsaregodtierPLAYER INFO
Name: Dragon
Age: ...over 30.
Time Zone: Eastern
Contact Information:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
dragonoflife; AIM: Dragon of Anger
Other Characters Played: N/A
CHARACTER INFO
Name: Aibghalien Marsai (It's pronounced uh-VAHL-ee-uhn.)
Canon: OC, Dungeons and Dragons, Birthright Campaign Setting. Wikipedia has an article about Birthright that gives some basics, while a fan wiki goes into much more detail on the world.
Age: 353
Appearance: Aibghalien is six feet tall, but thinner and more lithe than a human at only 139 pounds. He has long black hair, fair skin, and green eyes. He favors conventional wizard robes in dress, along with a cape that can billow dramatically, and usually supplements this with many-pocketed belts and wand holsters, along with several staves slung over his back for easy access. He also wears a longsword at his side, though it's pretty much for show.
History: Aibghalien was born a few hundred years ago in the elven kingdom of Tuarhieval, in the region of Cerilia known as Anuire. Cerilian elves are inherently intelligent, but even from a young age Aibghalien surpassed the majority of them in swiftness of thought and clarity of mind. Though sorcery is the gift of elvenkind, he had no patience for the art and proved utterly unteachable in almost any subject -- not because he was unable to learn, he certainly had the force of personality necessary to master the magic that flowed through his veins, but because he found the slow thoughts of others downright intolerable. For much of his youth Aibghalien was at loose ends, dabbling in this and that without any real patience or success.
Though most elves view humans with cold indifference if not open hostility, Tuarhieval had marginally more open relations with the outside world than most. This openness allowed Aibghalien to, one day, simply pack up and leave. Convinced that his calling lay elsewhere and determined to find it, the young elf set out into the human lands... without really being properly equipped for the task. His wanderings took him through human lands that held no real draw for him, until by a stroke of miserable fate he ended up in a lawless, monster-infested 'kingdom' barely governed by goblins. Aibghalien's story nearly came to a horrible, bloody end right there -- except that he ran headlong into the White Flag Mercenary Company, and its leader, Archmage Kytrann Tholosst.
The eclectic group, under the archmage, sought to suppress the lawless goblins, eliminate the monsters that could not be reasoned with or intimidated away, and bring peace to the lands by establishing a kingdom in which all peoples could live. Though an elf, Aibghalien was welcomed into the group -- he was not the only one -- and at last discovered his true calling. Not the clumsy, limited sorcerous arts, but the intellectual study and knowledge of a wizard. The Archmage judged Aibghalien's potential immediately and took him under his wing. In this, Aibghalien flourished almost immediately, mastering the basics of the art in the space of a short year -- phenomenal for anyone, but especially for the long-lived elves. During this time, the company enacted its goals swiftly and effectively, until at last Kytrann stood at the head of a reasonably powerful kingdom, monarch and ruler.
Then an assassin's bolt felled the Archmage, and rule of the kingdom fell to his heir.
As king, Aibghalien solidified his power and control over the realm just in time for the entire continent to be plunged into a war of extermination and conquest. In ages past, a seal laid by the gods of humanity had walled the continent of Cerilia, along with its magic and the divine power that ran through the bloodlines of its people, off from the rest of the world. That outside world had grown powerful in technology, but had strip-mined its magical energy in the creation of immense crystals which represented, in essence, solid magic batteries. No sooner did the seal drop than an invasion force descended on Cerilia, deploying advanced technology to annihilate the medieval-era armies of the Cerilian nations and raze the magic of the land for their own use.
Aibghalien and a group of friends and allies embarked on a campaign that would sound suspiciously like a couple of years' worth of a (strange) Dungeons and Dragons game -- what began as a small encounter with a mysterious force and their odd crystals quickly escalated into a continent-spanning war against the invading army. Where military might failed, arcane succeeded; using strike tactics, the group hit enemy bases and places of power with overwhelming force, sank navies, and directed armies in their march across the lands of Anuire. They also gathered, almost incidentally, six artifacts to recreate the seal at the behest of the gods.
At the same time, a being one step short of demigod known as the Gorgon made a sick pact with the invaders. With the aid of their crystals and his own magics, he ascended to the godhood himself, and bearing the artifact staff that was his weapon of the six, Aibghalien transported himself and his allies to the upper planes to do battle with the Gorgon; he matched the foul beast spell for spell, weaving his arcane might in a magical duel that reverberated through the very heavens themselves. At last, the mortal heroes succeeded in ripping away the Gorgon's defenses long enough for the remaining, weakened gods to surge forward and snuff his pretenses to divinity.
With this threat banished and the artifacts in hand, the gods reconstructed the seal and swept Cerilian clean of the invaders who had threatened it. For the first time in years, the continent knew peace.
Little surprise, then, that Aibghalien stepped aside to take a breather for a bit, supplying aid, magic, and manpower to the reconstruction, but not his own personal strength. It was time for quiet study, for a while.
Yeah, that worked out great. Luckily, mental stimulation is like a drug to him.
Canon Point: Soon after the defeat of the awnshegh-turned-god the Gorgon.
Personality: Aibghalien has the soul of a Scientist -- not the clinical, actual, functional scientific-method sort of modern-day science, but Middle-Ages scientific exploration without rhyme or reason, the sort that lead Bacon to stuff a chicken full of snow (and die), or Frankenstein to animate the dead (without actual plans). His chosen field, however, is magic, and he throws himself into the workings of arcana and thaumaturgy with a glee that would spell doom to the world if his alignment weren't solidly in the "good" category. Aibghalien is long-winded, rambling, egomaniacal, self-important -- and willing to lay his life on the line to defend his principles or the people who mean most to him.
He is supremely dismissive of 'inborn' magic, which he lumps under the general heading of 'sorcery'. To his mind, it is a cheap shortcut for power, a crutch for people who get by on natural talent without bothering to learn the rules. This disdain does not extend to supernatural creatures such as dragons; in them, he accepts such power as a natural extension of their being. This is somewhat hypocritical on the surface, but is simply the distance between a spell and a spell-like ability, after all.
With much, much lower Wisdom compared to Intelligence, Aibghalien tends to attempt to solve every problem with magic even if it shouldn't be solved with magic, resulting in some spectacular failures of common sense. Saying that he'd spend a month researching a way to create a permanent levitation circle instead of installing a staircase to get to the second floor is really not an exaggeration at all. His medieval mind has no concept of the scientific method. Although not at all dismissive of divine magic, he's supremely antitheist, viewing the very existence and even the concept of gods as a giant mistake on the cosmos's part.
Aibghalien also tends to rattle off anything he's discussing with any depth in a string of syllables that would make a vocabulary calendar catch fire from sheer disbelief. He has, at times, required a literal translator just to get what he's trying to say across. vcs
Beneath the mad-thaumaturgist facade is a surprisingly idealistic soul, one that willingly accepts responsibility and duty in the cause of "good", which is after all a very real force and concept in the universe (or else how would spells be able to act and react to it?). He is generally friendly (for those willing to get past his vocabulary), stubborn to a fault (because when you're as smart as he is, how can you be wrong?), adaptable (necessary when you're wrong as often as he is), and principled to a fault.
Abilities/Powers/Skills: Aibghalien is a 20th level D&D style wizard (who could potentially go epic at a time that doing so would be freaking awesome). As a wizard, he has no functional limit to the number of spells he can know, only the number of spells he can have prepared at any one time. Aibghalien is a fervent scholar with the resources of a kingdom, so his spellbook collection is substantial, containing access to almost any spell that exists in D&D terms. (The SRD is a good place to start for these).
For the purpose of average scenes and in the tradition of novelization efforts for decades, in standard scenes the spell mechanics will be handwaved and Aibghalien will just do cinematic magic for style. Exact spells will be cited and spell lists maintained in important situations such as plot scenes and meaningful encounters with other players.
Aibghalien can create magical items of all sorts, although anything that contains or duplicates arcane magic generally requires another D&D caster or the next best thing, or someone very good at faking it.
In addition, Aibghalien can create and utilize magical crystals which can power or modify arcane spells, and interact with other magical energies in unusual ways (depending on the nature. For example, divine magic will create a crystal which can cast that spell, and slowly recharge). The energy has to be entirely magical in nature, however.
Aibghalien is a scion, which means he has trace amounts of the divine in his blood. This divine heritage grants him heightened intelligence and protection against evil. He also has minor healing abilities and the ability to summon an illuminating light (which counts as sunlight). He rarely uses these, though, because it's inherent rather than studied.
Weaknesses: Aibghalien is comparatively physically frail.
Special Items: Bags of holding (extradimensional storage) and a portable hole holding his spellbooks and lab accoutrements that he was in the process of relocating. Several wands of common spells (fireball, magic missile, grease, scorching ray) and magical staves (Conjuration, Abjuration, Evocation, Transmutation). A lot of magical crystals as discussed above in his abilities.
RP Sample:
The substantial explosion didn't harm Aibghalien... as such. The flames and the shockwave hit his wards and splattered out. All they managed to do was hurl him out of the laboratory he'd constructed out of five permanent Walls of Force and a unenchanted wall for the purpose of blast channeling, leaving him collapsed in a heap on the floor of a hallway some twenty yards away.
Not bad for a first trial. The elf leaped to his feet, almost bounding back towards the lab in a flurry of robes and hair. "Clearly the technological construction resists the direct application of arcane force!" he said out loud, "but is that confined purely to evocative magic? Perhaps the introduction of the invoked forces itself rather than the fundamental arcane energy was at fault. An illusion would fail to penetrate to any meaningful depth, resulting in pure surface contact, which is in and of itself inadequate to cause a reaction as demonstrated by the lack of one during contact periods with enchanted items, so I can clearly surmise that energy of some sort in direct introduction to its form is to blame, but is it the evoked energy or the invoked? I'll have to repeat that with a different spell, work from Conjuration down the line... Where's a cleric when I need one?"
He was asking for the sake of access to divine magic, not the need for healing. On the other hand, if he kept this up, he'd probably need the latter function more.
Name: Dragon
Age: ...over 30.
Time Zone: Eastern
Contact Information:
Other Characters Played: N/A
CHARACTER INFO
Name: Aibghalien Marsai (It's pronounced uh-VAHL-ee-uhn.)
Canon: OC, Dungeons and Dragons, Birthright Campaign Setting. Wikipedia has an article about Birthright that gives some basics, while a fan wiki goes into much more detail on the world.
Age: 353
Appearance: Aibghalien is six feet tall, but thinner and more lithe than a human at only 139 pounds. He has long black hair, fair skin, and green eyes. He favors conventional wizard robes in dress, along with a cape that can billow dramatically, and usually supplements this with many-pocketed belts and wand holsters, along with several staves slung over his back for easy access. He also wears a longsword at his side, though it's pretty much for show.
History: Aibghalien was born a few hundred years ago in the elven kingdom of Tuarhieval, in the region of Cerilia known as Anuire. Cerilian elves are inherently intelligent, but even from a young age Aibghalien surpassed the majority of them in swiftness of thought and clarity of mind. Though sorcery is the gift of elvenkind, he had no patience for the art and proved utterly unteachable in almost any subject -- not because he was unable to learn, he certainly had the force of personality necessary to master the magic that flowed through his veins, but because he found the slow thoughts of others downright intolerable. For much of his youth Aibghalien was at loose ends, dabbling in this and that without any real patience or success.
Though most elves view humans with cold indifference if not open hostility, Tuarhieval had marginally more open relations with the outside world than most. This openness allowed Aibghalien to, one day, simply pack up and leave. Convinced that his calling lay elsewhere and determined to find it, the young elf set out into the human lands... without really being properly equipped for the task. His wanderings took him through human lands that held no real draw for him, until by a stroke of miserable fate he ended up in a lawless, monster-infested 'kingdom' barely governed by goblins. Aibghalien's story nearly came to a horrible, bloody end right there -- except that he ran headlong into the White Flag Mercenary Company, and its leader, Archmage Kytrann Tholosst.
The eclectic group, under the archmage, sought to suppress the lawless goblins, eliminate the monsters that could not be reasoned with or intimidated away, and bring peace to the lands by establishing a kingdom in which all peoples could live. Though an elf, Aibghalien was welcomed into the group -- he was not the only one -- and at last discovered his true calling. Not the clumsy, limited sorcerous arts, but the intellectual study and knowledge of a wizard. The Archmage judged Aibghalien's potential immediately and took him under his wing. In this, Aibghalien flourished almost immediately, mastering the basics of the art in the space of a short year -- phenomenal for anyone, but especially for the long-lived elves. During this time, the company enacted its goals swiftly and effectively, until at last Kytrann stood at the head of a reasonably powerful kingdom, monarch and ruler.
Then an assassin's bolt felled the Archmage, and rule of the kingdom fell to his heir.
As king, Aibghalien solidified his power and control over the realm just in time for the entire continent to be plunged into a war of extermination and conquest. In ages past, a seal laid by the gods of humanity had walled the continent of Cerilia, along with its magic and the divine power that ran through the bloodlines of its people, off from the rest of the world. That outside world had grown powerful in technology, but had strip-mined its magical energy in the creation of immense crystals which represented, in essence, solid magic batteries. No sooner did the seal drop than an invasion force descended on Cerilia, deploying advanced technology to annihilate the medieval-era armies of the Cerilian nations and raze the magic of the land for their own use.
Aibghalien and a group of friends and allies embarked on a campaign that would sound suspiciously like a couple of years' worth of a (strange) Dungeons and Dragons game -- what began as a small encounter with a mysterious force and their odd crystals quickly escalated into a continent-spanning war against the invading army. Where military might failed, arcane succeeded; using strike tactics, the group hit enemy bases and places of power with overwhelming force, sank navies, and directed armies in their march across the lands of Anuire. They also gathered, almost incidentally, six artifacts to recreate the seal at the behest of the gods.
At the same time, a being one step short of demigod known as the Gorgon made a sick pact with the invaders. With the aid of their crystals and his own magics, he ascended to the godhood himself, and bearing the artifact staff that was his weapon of the six, Aibghalien transported himself and his allies to the upper planes to do battle with the Gorgon; he matched the foul beast spell for spell, weaving his arcane might in a magical duel that reverberated through the very heavens themselves. At last, the mortal heroes succeeded in ripping away the Gorgon's defenses long enough for the remaining, weakened gods to surge forward and snuff his pretenses to divinity.
With this threat banished and the artifacts in hand, the gods reconstructed the seal and swept Cerilian clean of the invaders who had threatened it. For the first time in years, the continent knew peace.
Little surprise, then, that Aibghalien stepped aside to take a breather for a bit, supplying aid, magic, and manpower to the reconstruction, but not his own personal strength. It was time for quiet study, for a while.
Yeah, that worked out great. Luckily, mental stimulation is like a drug to him.
Canon Point: Soon after the defeat of the awnshegh-turned-god the Gorgon.
Personality: Aibghalien has the soul of a Scientist -- not the clinical, actual, functional scientific-method sort of modern-day science, but Middle-Ages scientific exploration without rhyme or reason, the sort that lead Bacon to stuff a chicken full of snow (and die), or Frankenstein to animate the dead (without actual plans). His chosen field, however, is magic, and he throws himself into the workings of arcana and thaumaturgy with a glee that would spell doom to the world if his alignment weren't solidly in the "good" category. Aibghalien is long-winded, rambling, egomaniacal, self-important -- and willing to lay his life on the line to defend his principles or the people who mean most to him.
He is supremely dismissive of 'inborn' magic, which he lumps under the general heading of 'sorcery'. To his mind, it is a cheap shortcut for power, a crutch for people who get by on natural talent without bothering to learn the rules. This disdain does not extend to supernatural creatures such as dragons; in them, he accepts such power as a natural extension of their being. This is somewhat hypocritical on the surface, but is simply the distance between a spell and a spell-like ability, after all.
With much, much lower Wisdom compared to Intelligence, Aibghalien tends to attempt to solve every problem with magic even if it shouldn't be solved with magic, resulting in some spectacular failures of common sense. Saying that he'd spend a month researching a way to create a permanent levitation circle instead of installing a staircase to get to the second floor is really not an exaggeration at all. His medieval mind has no concept of the scientific method. Although not at all dismissive of divine magic, he's supremely antitheist, viewing the very existence and even the concept of gods as a giant mistake on the cosmos's part.
Aibghalien also tends to rattle off anything he's discussing with any depth in a string of syllables that would make a vocabulary calendar catch fire from sheer disbelief. He has, at times, required a literal translator just to get what he's trying to say across. vcs
Beneath the mad-thaumaturgist facade is a surprisingly idealistic soul, one that willingly accepts responsibility and duty in the cause of "good", which is after all a very real force and concept in the universe (or else how would spells be able to act and react to it?). He is generally friendly (for those willing to get past his vocabulary), stubborn to a fault (because when you're as smart as he is, how can you be wrong?), adaptable (necessary when you're wrong as often as he is), and principled to a fault.
Abilities/Powers/Skills: Aibghalien is a 20th level D&D style wizard (who could potentially go epic at a time that doing so would be freaking awesome). As a wizard, he has no functional limit to the number of spells he can know, only the number of spells he can have prepared at any one time. Aibghalien is a fervent scholar with the resources of a kingdom, so his spellbook collection is substantial, containing access to almost any spell that exists in D&D terms. (The SRD is a good place to start for these).
For the purpose of average scenes and in the tradition of novelization efforts for decades, in standard scenes the spell mechanics will be handwaved and Aibghalien will just do cinematic magic for style. Exact spells will be cited and spell lists maintained in important situations such as plot scenes and meaningful encounters with other players.
Aibghalien can create magical items of all sorts, although anything that contains or duplicates arcane magic generally requires another D&D caster or the next best thing, or someone very good at faking it.
In addition, Aibghalien can create and utilize magical crystals which can power or modify arcane spells, and interact with other magical energies in unusual ways (depending on the nature. For example, divine magic will create a crystal which can cast that spell, and slowly recharge). The energy has to be entirely magical in nature, however.
Aibghalien is a scion, which means he has trace amounts of the divine in his blood. This divine heritage grants him heightened intelligence and protection against evil. He also has minor healing abilities and the ability to summon an illuminating light (which counts as sunlight). He rarely uses these, though, because it's inherent rather than studied.
Weaknesses: Aibghalien is comparatively physically frail.
Special Items: Bags of holding (extradimensional storage) and a portable hole holding his spellbooks and lab accoutrements that he was in the process of relocating. Several wands of common spells (fireball, magic missile, grease, scorching ray) and magical staves (Conjuration, Abjuration, Evocation, Transmutation). A lot of magical crystals as discussed above in his abilities.
RP Sample:
The substantial explosion didn't harm Aibghalien... as such. The flames and the shockwave hit his wards and splattered out. All they managed to do was hurl him out of the laboratory he'd constructed out of five permanent Walls of Force and a unenchanted wall for the purpose of blast channeling, leaving him collapsed in a heap on the floor of a hallway some twenty yards away.
Not bad for a first trial. The elf leaped to his feet, almost bounding back towards the lab in a flurry of robes and hair. "Clearly the technological construction resists the direct application of arcane force!" he said out loud, "but is that confined purely to evocative magic? Perhaps the introduction of the invoked forces itself rather than the fundamental arcane energy was at fault. An illusion would fail to penetrate to any meaningful depth, resulting in pure surface contact, which is in and of itself inadequate to cause a reaction as demonstrated by the lack of one during contact periods with enchanted items, so I can clearly surmise that energy of some sort in direct introduction to its form is to blame, but is it the evoked energy or the invoked? I'll have to repeat that with a different spell, work from Conjuration down the line... Where's a cleric when I need one?"
He was asking for the sake of access to divine magic, not the need for healing. On the other hand, if he kept this up, he'd probably need the latter function more.
