Jump to content

Emmelyn, Half-Elf Witch from Bridgefront

Angelic Crux

By Angelic Crux
in Applications

 Share

Recommended Posts

Angelic Crux

Angelic Crux

Posted
Posted (edited)

 

Emmelyn the Jeweler
Theme: Aurora - Believer (Imagine Dragons Cover)

%5Bcenter%5D%5Burl%3Dhttps%3A%2F%2Fibb.co%2F2t9mLP8%5D%5Bimg%5Dhttps%3A%2F%2Fi.ibb.co%2Fpz7GsZW%2FDALL-E-2024-04-21-04-18-43-Portrait-of-Emmelyn-a-fantasy-character-featuring-a-more-naturalistic-pos.jpg%5B%2Fimg%5D%5B%2Furl%5D%5B%2Fcenter%5D
DALL-E-2024-04-21-04-18-43-Portrait-of-Emmelyn-a-fantasy-character-featuring-a-more-naturalistic-pos.jpg
Emmelyn
Female Half-Elf Witch (Bonded Witch & Vellemancer) 1
NG medium humanoid (human & elf)
Init +3; Senses Low-Light Vision; Perception +6
Defense
AC 13 , touch 13, flat-footed 10
HP 8
Fort +1, Ref +3, Will +2; Immune to magic sleep effects; +2 racial bonus vs enchantment spells and effects
Defensive abilities
Resist
Weaknesses 
Offense
Speed 30 ft.
Melee Dagger +0 (1d4, 19-20/x2)
Ranged Ranged attack? We don't need no stinkin' ranged attacks...
Special Attacks Fortune (Hex), Cackle (Hex)A witch can cackle madly as a move action. Any creature that is within 30 feet that is under the effects of an agony hex, charm hex, evil eye hex, fortune hex, or misfortune hex caused by the witch has the duration of that hex extended by 1 round. The creature must be able to hear the witch to be affected by the cackle.

A witch can only use cackle once per round.
Statistics
Str 10, Dex 16, Con 12, Int 20, Wis 10, Cha 7
Base Atk +0; CMB +0; CMD 12
Feats Skill Focus (Craft)Choose a skill. You are particularly adept at that skill.

Benefit: You get a +3 bonus on all checks involving the chosen skill. If you have 10 or more ranks in that skill, this bonus increases to +6., Extra Hex (Cackle)
Adventuring Skills Knowledge (Arcana) +9, Knowledge (History) +9, Knowledge (Planes) +9, Knowledge (Religion) +61 rank
+5 int, Perception (Wis) +6+1 rank
+0 wis
+3 class
+2 racial trait, Spellcraft +91 rank
+5 int
+3 class, Stealth (Dex) +71 rank
+3 dex
+3 class,
Background Skills Craft (jewelry) +12, Perform (oratory) +9
Languages Common (Taldan), Elven, Varisian, Shoanti, Vudrani, Infernal, Dwarven
SQ 
Traits Clever Wordplay: Perform (social), Inner Beauty (religion), Guiding Spirit (Magic)Few understand the medium’s willingness to harbor powerful spirits, but even if you aren’t one of these talented few, you’ve always identified with their abilities. You’ve always felt that you were not alone in this world and that a mysterious guiding spirit watches over you with singular focus. You may have briefly glimpsed this strange spirit—or maybe you simply feel its presence in times of need. Once per day as a swift action, you can look to your guiding spirit for advice. The next time you roll a d20 in that same round, roll twice and pick the better result. If one of these two rolls is a natural 20, you can use this ability again that same day., Unhappy Childhood: Religious (campaign): Attached (drawback)
Half-elf
+2 to Intelligence: Half-elf characters get a +2 bonus to one ability score of their choice at creation to represent their varied nature.
Medium: Half-elves are Medium creatures and have no bonuses or penalties due to their size.
Normal Speed: Half-elves have a base speed of 30 feet.
Low-Light Vision: Half-elves can see twice as far as humans in conditions of dim light.
Adaptability: Half-elves receive Skill Focus as a bonus feat at 1st level.
Elf Blood: Half-elves count as both elves and humans for any effect related to race.
Elven Immunities: Half-elves are immune to magic sleep effects and get a +2 racial bonus on saving throws against enchantment spells and effects.
Keen Senses: Half-elves receive a +2 racial bonus on Perception checks.
Fey Thoughts: The character sees the world more like a native of the First World. Perception and Stealth are always class skills for the character.
Languages: Common (Taldan), Elven, Varisian, Shoanti, Vudrani, Infernal, Dwarven
Spells
CL 1, DC: 15+spell level
 
Equipment
Armor: 
Weapons: dagger (2 gp, 1 lb)
Item Slots:
  • Belt:
  • Body:
  • Chest:
  • Crown:
  • Eyes:
  • Feet:
  • Hands:
  • Head:
  • Headband:
  • Neck:
  • Phylactery:
  • Left Right:
  • Right Ring: Bonded Object
  • Shield:
  • Shoulders:
 
Clothing: Artisan's Outfit (1 gp, 4 lbs),
Standard equipment:
masterwork backpack (50 gp, 4 lbs)
artisan's tools, common (5 gp, 5 lbs)
Witch's Kit (19 gp, 19 lbs)
bedroll
belt pouch
candles (10)
chalk (10)
flint and steel
ink
inkpen
an iron pot
a mess kit
soap
a spell component pouch
torches (10)
trail rations (5 days)
a waterskin
 
Wealth: 29 GP105 (start)
103 (dagger 2gp)
53 (masterwork backpack 50gp)
48 (artisan's tools, common 5gp)
29 (Witch's Kit 19 gp)
 
Encumbrance: 33 lbs (light)
Light 38, Medium 76, Heavy 115

Build thoughts

Really Funky Mechanically:

- Total buff-spam witch (wait until she's 2nd level!)
- MASSIVE crafter (deific obedience -> craft wondrous item -> ??? -> PROFIT!!!)
- At 6th level, lateral shift into Evangelist (best prestige class ever).

 

Background

 

Early Childhood

Emmelyn always found pretty things.  Partly because they spoke to her, but partly because a mudlark had to pluck something valuable from the refuse and mire of the Bridgefront strait.  Dimly, somehow, even in her earliest years, she knew she had to have had a mother and a father.  Keenly, however, she could tell the revolving door of older girls, graduated to pick-pocketing and you’ll-learn-somedaying, and Ol’ Lamm, the stiff-necked master of her mudlarking gang, weren’t them.  Couldn’t be them.

On account of her ears, if nothing else.

Ears that, to the ones too young to know anything but how to be sharp with a dredge-stick, were a curiosity and little more.  Something like a lazy eye or, or golden hair.  But the older ones knew.  And even if Emmelyn wasn’t given to airs, or anything but just being scared and agreeable, they let her know.

“Got muck on you princess…”

“Some Heighty whore di’n want you and we don’t neither.”

“Why ‘oncha go run off to the forest with your own kind?”

It wasn’t unrelenting.  Mudlarks were a hungry, hardworked bunch, and hate takes a certain energy.  But on frustrating days, or slow days, high-tides or simple bad weather… there was Emmelyn.  Emmelyn who, with her keen eye, and ability to work by moonlight, learned early that the fire gets stomped until it’s out, but people tire of hitting river water.  Except Ol’ Lamm.  He just got bored of it.

She grew.  And she graduated from merely finding what trinkets could wash up on the banks to crafting little baubles herself.  A pigeon’s feather, hung with a bit of string from a half-pinch carved like a moon.  Fragments of oyster shell, smoothed of their roughness, strung into a necklace.  It wasn’t just a way to move from a shared bowl of gruel to a pottage all her own, from a studio floor to a tenement on the side of Bridgefront that bled into Old Dock.  It was the first time she had anything, anything at all, to give back at the Sanctuary of Shelyn.

First Inklings of Faith

She’d gone, here and there, now and then, shame-faced and self-conscious, to pray.  First led by a rare worshipful older mudlark who’d promised that praying, with all one’s heart, would bring in a bright little thing when you most needed it, but later going on her own.  In Bridgefront, beauty was a rare, fleeting thing.  A waft of fiddling, across the din of life packed in like sardines.  The moon, peeking down through the holes in the thatch.  A smile you didn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t ask for.

But the sanctuary was different.

Beautiful bricks upon the road outside it.
Exquisitely, caringly wrought stonework that seemed to yearn skyward.
Flowering vines, here and there, never too much, each with its own space, and water, and light, to bloom, healthy and vibrant.

When she was young, she never felt like she ought to enter, even when invited.  As if some invisible wall separated, and would always separate her from the sanctuary’s devotees.  Until, one day, she saw an offering that wasn’t like the coins, or small delicately painted locket-sized miniatures, or even the pressed petals that the poor might pay a pinch to donate.

It was a crafted little thing.  Of bits of useless scrap, a little iron-filing, a twist of copper… and yet together, it made a pretty little “brush”.  Something beautiful, from what others just threw away.

She was deft enough to make a living of it, by the time she was young enough to still be a girl, but old enough she might be unlucky enough to be a mother.  A studio, to herself.  A little hammer, to tap out what she found, and fingers good at prying.  It was enough.  She couldn’t imagine asking for more.

That’s when one of the disciples of Shellyn, at a visit like all the others, asked if she might wish to be an apprentice.  She cried, and said yes, and yes, and yes, to the point it felt she couldn’t breathe.  As if, finally, despite the ears that would never be beaten round, or her skinniness that would always make her think she looked sickly, as if, finally, she might be an offering, too.

She didn’t realize the sister had merely meant to help a journeyman at the Gemshare Jewelers.  That she had meant an apprentice and not a disciple.  And Emmelyn felt chastened, in her pride, and hardly spoke at all at her new work.

Apprenticeship in Midland

Her hands, though, spoke for her.  Deft.  Quick.  Tireless.  It hardly seemed like work at all, to have a roof, and a bench, instead of cold rivermurk and the constant worry of broken glass or other lurking sharpness underfoot.  Her mentor had little good to say, but little ill.  And she was content with this.  Be content with this, Emmelyn told herself.  And she was.

Even when there came a day.

“A little something for you, Emelyn.”
“…sir?”
“Just a copper thing.  Must’ve fallen in with the jewelry.  Not fit for our customers, but well-made.”
She put it on with a tremble in her fingers.  Beheld its burnished, ruddy gleam against her skin, improbably pale despite the toil of her hands.  To wear it, to wear jewelry… it made her feel pretty. 

And she couldn’t stop thinking about it.

It nagged at her as she carefully worked at a silver foil, its only purpose to make blood ruby shine brighter.  It lingered with her, as she listened, silently, to one of their most frequent customers describing precisely what she wanted for that season.  The others?  She realized she’d never seen them more than once.  Perhaps tossed aside, rubbish to end up, rock torn and current thrashed, in Bridgefront.  And, even if she remained ever meek of manner, she could no longer be awestruck by mink, or velvet, or gold’s luster.  She could see brass from gold.

A Prayer Answered

The moon cast its silvery light down on her warm, safe, comfortable room.  It made that hand, lifted up, a foil to the gleam of her ring.  A face, distorted and yet half-familiar, framed in fiery red, gazing back at her.

…am I just a pair of hands, to make beauty for ugly people?

The ring gleamed, silently, before her.  Glowing in the dark.

…oh Shelyn… I know shouldn’t think such thoughts and yet…

Her eyes lingered on the face in the polished copper, a perfect, beautiful crimson mirror.

…couldn’t I be?  Would you ever… choose… me?
 

I chose you from the moment I knew you.

And she saw herself in the ring, thought it was not herself.

Poor little trinket.  Poor precious trinket.  Look at you…

Smiling, confident, worthy.

Look at what you could be, with only a little love… 

Gazing into her, her very depths, her soul.

I love you, trinket.  I always have.  Do you love me, too?

She, perfect, talented, all she could desire, smiling.

Her, trembling, forgotten, pitiful, nodding.

Promise you will love me, as I love you.  Forever.

I promise.  I promise, oh Shelyn, I promise…

…

Your works shall be the envy of every eye and more, trinket.

Oh, thank you… thank you, Shelyn, thank you…

…

Promises Kept

It didn’t happen overnight.  But Emmelyn never expected it would.  Just like the ring, whispering nightly, showing her what would be, it was a slow process.  The whole of her earnings, but what she needed to pay her fare, was spent on silver leaf, on tools to etch, on all she could to honor the Shelyn of the Ring.  Shelyn who had so many names: Silken-Grasp, Whisper-of-Wealth, Glimmer-in-the-Dark.  And Emmelyn added these to her nightly prayers.  Shelyn of the Ring grew in beauty as her hand grew in its art.  But the ring remained a ring, even as Emmelyn slowly, inexorably, became a woman.  Unremarkable, but for what her deft hands wrought.

Of course, the other apprentices felt a mix of envy and disbelief.  Of course, she soon was made a journeywoman in her own right.  Of course, whispers of her talents, and her sweetness, if not her unnerving zealotry, spread.  She… had eyes only for Shelyn.

 

Oh trinket, what fine craft you make, what fine craft you are…

And she saw, in the reflection on the silver-decorated, flower-patterned ring, something fleetingly beautiful.

But trinket, dearest trinket… there is something impure there…

And she saw that, too.  And it made her aghast.  A mark, an indelible mark.  A stain.

How can your art honor Us when him, his memory, bruises it?  Ruins it.  Lamm.

She flinched to think of him.  To hear his name.  Her hands trembled.

He’s an ugly thing.  He spreads ugliness, trinket.  And the world is made for beauty…

---

“Thank you for all you’ve done for me, sir.  I’m very sorry, sir, I am.  I… I can’t dally, sir.  I really can’t.  I’m sorry I can’t help with the orders but… I’m being called.  Yes… my lady calls me.”

Appearance

Emmelyn bears herself with all the warmth and seriousness of one saved by faith and good works. Though clearly not of the clergy, there is a slowness and care in her demeanor that is only found amongst those who have a deep, personal connection to a deity, with the sense that they are always walking with their deity: raised up and cherished in their moments of dedication, judged in their moments of weakness.

A half-elf, and a bit on the short end given the meagre nourishment she was able to scrounge as a child, Emmelyn whatever beauty her Mierani heritage may have granted her pales before her... eccentricities. Half-lost in herself. Mumbling prayers that come, unbidden. The kinder, her fellow faithful, might speak of one who sees True Beauty, beyond the surfaces of things. The less charitable, perhaps, of jeweler's mercury and the miasmal fumes of the workshop.

She tends to be unresponsive, or to speak inopportunely, in her distraction. But her saintly sweetness, perhaps, softens what would, in a less kind soul, be an utterly irritating quality. Those less acquainted with her, of course, are no doubt liable to merely take her as her manner would suggest: an intelligence perhaps nimble, but woefully ill-made.

Personality

"Me? Oh... no. No, I'm no one special." A smile came to her, though not in response to the guard. No, she seemed as if in conversation with one not there, and yet not so responsive as if it were some single, unseen individual. The saints were with her, in their whispers. "Oh? Oh. Oh... I'm just delivering a package to the commander here. From Gemshare, yes. I... you wish to inspect the package?" A hesitation. And in that hesitation, her fingers, oddly delicate despite her work, worried, tenderly, at the ring upon her finger. Copper overlaid with silver. Silver accented in gold. Fine, etched work, winding vines and blooming flowers, twisting in upon themselves, a beautiful ouroboros. She opened the box, to reveal her handiwork. An exquisite thing which seemed to beggar her own mere ring, with its gems and moonbeam platinum. "Is everything in order? I... I'd like to finish the delivery, if I may. It's almost time for the afternoon service at the sanctuary..." Hesitant, she watched, her eyes shifting, attended by heavenly whispers until, satisfied, the guard allowed her entry.

 

A Prayer

Perfect be thy names, Shelyn of the Ring,
Eternal Rose
Silken-Grasp
Whisper-of-Wealth
Glimmer-in-the-Dark
Beautiful thy work
and deft thy craft.

Thank you, Shelyn of the Ring,
for taking this driftwood,
this copper dross,
this cast-off.

Thank you, Shelyn of the Ring,
for making beauty
of nothing
for making whole
the broken.

Thank you, Shelyn of the Ring,
Heart's Sculptor
Hope's Painter
Despair's Dream.

I am yours.
I will ever be yours.
Goodness, eternal and unblemished, is yours.
Evil is Never Born of Love.
 

Role

Socially - A Neutral Good party-member who's a little more interesting than just "Fraaaaands~"
Mechanically - Buff/Debuff Witch (when she gets dem Hexes). Cackle can do fun things.

 

Edited by Angelic Crux
Cackle is a "special attack", I guess... (see edit history)
Name
Gold Roll!
50
3d6*10 2,1,2
Link to comment
Share on other sites
bloodsprite

bloodsprite

Posted
Posted

Looks good, So mostly heal and buff at low level?

I don't see if you selected any Patron, May I suggest one that gets you the Sanctuary Spell (Peace or Protection), since you are very non-combat?

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Angelic Crux

Angelic Crux

Posted
  • Author
Posted

Say, is it too late for me to tweak my spell list? I've been looking back over Vellemancer and it's really an archetype that seems to work with a certain kind of spell. Feel like I might need to rejigger what exact "gifts" I'm getting from Shelyn over here.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
 Share
Go to topic listing
×
×
  • Create New...