about the Callas journals...
Oct. 27th, 2003 10:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aithneI realized tonight that I'd gone ahead and started posting Callas journals without anything even resembling context. I will fix this now.
If you feel like looking at the Callas journals, they're all in my Memories section under "gaming journals".
Callas de Navarre is my character in the latest Storm campaign. I've been gaming with Storm for, uh, ten-ish years now, I beleive. Storm tends a lot towards epic fantasy, which is right up my alley, and we get along just fine.
I started writing the journals for a few reasons. First off, I needed a way of better remembering what happens from week to week, and making notes of the thnigs my character was involved in and what she would have seen from her point of view. Second, I was suspecting that most of the character development for this particular character was going to have to occur off-stage, as it were. While adolescent angst makes for interesting reading, it does *not* make for interesting role-playing, for the most part. Plus, I like giving Storm character hooks as much as possible
And the third reason is that I was having difficulty connecting with the character well enough to play her consistently. I have comitted the prime sin of adulthood--I have forgotten what it was like to be an adolescent, for the most part. I remember the hormones, and the taking things way too seriously, but most of it I've very cleverly shoved under the giant rug in my brain where i keep all the weird and embarrassing stuff about my life.
So, I needed a way to really feel out her character, write about things from her perspective. It's actually been marveoulsly helpful, as well as entertaining. I've enjoyed the exercise of getting into character.
And, yes, i finally have a grip on her character. She's an adolescent with "everyone important abandons me eventually" issues, which she's attempting to keep down to a dull roar as she works very hard at attempting to make sure that nasty people don't steal all the magic in the world. She's aware that she and her compatriots are wandering through moral grey areas (to the point where the sole lawful-good member of the party is starting to wonder aloud if we aybe aren't on the wrong side) , but considers what they're doing to be the only even slightly consciable course of action.
She's also grappling with the frightening amount of responsibility that's suddenly been placed on her shoulders. She's more than equal to her task, but up until two months ago her main goal in life was to settle down somewhere quiet and basically be a veternarian for the rest of her life, so the shift in her future seems very large and scary at the moment.
She is basically good-natured and easygoing, though occasionally quite random. (Though she hasn't been doing much randomness lately...I should remedy this.)
Physically, she's about 5'8", strongly built, with the kind of shoulders one gets when one tosses around horse feed every day for years. She has a fine tracery of scars on her forearms and hands, a legacy of learning swordwork. She has a number of newer scars, as well, since the last few months have been rough-and-tumble. She has long black hair and dark green eyes, and her skin would be pale if she ever spent a few months out of the sun. She looks a bit like her father, but didn't inherit his coloring--that came from her mother. People tend to find her attractive, but that's more about the force of her personality than how she looks.
If you catch a glimpse of her at exactly the right time, she seems to glow with a weird sort of light. Nobody has yet pointed this out to her, so she has no idea she does this.
She shares with every other mid-to-high-level cleric of Epona the ability to do just about anything on horseback--eat, sleep, fight, dance, repack saddlebags, etc, without even thinking about it. She hasn't tried having sex on horseback yet, but that's mostly due to lack of opportunity than anything else.
She often gives the impression that she hasn't quite coalesced yet. She's getting there, but there are parts of her that aren't really fully formed yet.
The other people she references in her journals are:
Gavaio (played by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
zaratyst): human paladin. Gavaio was assigned to protect Callas, and officially he works for her, but there's much more give and take there than that. He's about ten years older than Callas, and she regards him as a father figure. She trusts him implicitly, and fears getting on his nerves.
Galvin (NPC): human cleric of Epona, Callas' lover and her second-in-command. Callas and Galvin were in cleric trainnig together, and evidently he had a thing for her for ages and simply never said anything. Callas, being Callas, was oblivious until recently. Galvin's quiet and extremely stubborn, making him a bad person to try to force into anything. I actually don't know a whole lot about Galvin other than that and the fact that he's from France, but i'm assuming his character will come clearer over time. He was tortured at the hands of Malik the insane werewolf, seemingly for no other reason than that he had the bad luck to get captured. He's the other person Callas trusts without reservation, and he knows things about her that even Gavio doesn't, simply because he's known her for nine years.
Riyor (played bynurf): elven rogue. He appears to be cursed with Luck--good, bad, indifferent, extremely unlikely, he's got it all in large amounts. He's the party's element of complete randomness. He's been like this all his life, it seems, and accepts it with cheerful good humor--and seems to sometimes go out of his way to throw himself upon the bosom of Lady Luck, as it were. His horse, Nigel, is exceptionally well-trained.
Gaius (played by3smallishmagi ): human monk/mage. Gaius is a taicturn Roman, and he's the keeper of the cloak that gives us quite a bit of ability to fiddle with the stone circles that we use for transportation. (The cloak falls into the category of Entirely Too Useful and Somewhat Dangerous; i think we may lose it sometime soon.) We actually don't know very much about his past, as far as I remember, but he doesn't forgive betrayal at all, and he's exceptionally stubborn. Very fond of stunning opponents and then killing them while stunned.
Arnie/Aiden (played bymholmesiv ): Arnie is a dwarven psionicist. Aiden is/was a drow psioniscist. They used to share Arnie's body, until the last session, when Aiden got made into an artifact. Callas likes both Arnie and Aiden quite a bit--Arnie because he's pragmatic without being dour, Aiden because he's charmingly nuts. Aiden is impressively powerful, and can speak to all of the artifacts in the world--evidently, the cloak that Gaius is in charge of drives psioniscists completely crazy, and Aiden wore it briefly. The reason Aiden and Arnie were living in the same body is a bit too long to get into here, and i'm not sure I could relate it correctly, anyway. Callas got to the point where she could tell immediately who was "home", so to speak, until it got to the point where both were present much of the time, which was confusing for everyone.
Contessa (NPC): Galvin's second in command, third in the line of high priestess succession. An old friend of Galvin and Callas', she may play a larger role later.
Endraya (NPC): the woman who took Callas under her wing when she was first in temple training. She's basically Callas' second mother. Currently acting as Callas' regent in Madrid.
I think that gives a little more context for the Callas journals. I hope, at least. I think The Story So Far is probably covered adequately in the journals, at least enough to make them comprehensible.
If you feel like looking at the Callas journals, they're all in my Memories section under "gaming journals".
Callas de Navarre is my character in the latest Storm campaign. I've been gaming with Storm for, uh, ten-ish years now, I beleive. Storm tends a lot towards epic fantasy, which is right up my alley, and we get along just fine.
I started writing the journals for a few reasons. First off, I needed a way of better remembering what happens from week to week, and making notes of the thnigs my character was involved in and what she would have seen from her point of view. Second, I was suspecting that most of the character development for this particular character was going to have to occur off-stage, as it were. While adolescent angst makes for interesting reading, it does *not* make for interesting role-playing, for the most part. Plus, I like giving Storm character hooks as much as possible
And the third reason is that I was having difficulty connecting with the character well enough to play her consistently. I have comitted the prime sin of adulthood--I have forgotten what it was like to be an adolescent, for the most part. I remember the hormones, and the taking things way too seriously, but most of it I've very cleverly shoved under the giant rug in my brain where i keep all the weird and embarrassing stuff about my life.
So, I needed a way to really feel out her character, write about things from her perspective. It's actually been marveoulsly helpful, as well as entertaining. I've enjoyed the exercise of getting into character.
And, yes, i finally have a grip on her character. She's an adolescent with "everyone important abandons me eventually" issues, which she's attempting to keep down to a dull roar as she works very hard at attempting to make sure that nasty people don't steal all the magic in the world. She's aware that she and her compatriots are wandering through moral grey areas (to the point where the sole lawful-good member of the party is starting to wonder aloud if we aybe aren't on the wrong side) , but considers what they're doing to be the only even slightly consciable course of action.
She's also grappling with the frightening amount of responsibility that's suddenly been placed on her shoulders. She's more than equal to her task, but up until two months ago her main goal in life was to settle down somewhere quiet and basically be a veternarian for the rest of her life, so the shift in her future seems very large and scary at the moment.
She is basically good-natured and easygoing, though occasionally quite random. (Though she hasn't been doing much randomness lately...I should remedy this.)
Physically, she's about 5'8", strongly built, with the kind of shoulders one gets when one tosses around horse feed every day for years. She has a fine tracery of scars on her forearms and hands, a legacy of learning swordwork. She has a number of newer scars, as well, since the last few months have been rough-and-tumble. She has long black hair and dark green eyes, and her skin would be pale if she ever spent a few months out of the sun. She looks a bit like her father, but didn't inherit his coloring--that came from her mother. People tend to find her attractive, but that's more about the force of her personality than how she looks.
If you catch a glimpse of her at exactly the right time, she seems to glow with a weird sort of light. Nobody has yet pointed this out to her, so she has no idea she does this.
She shares with every other mid-to-high-level cleric of Epona the ability to do just about anything on horseback--eat, sleep, fight, dance, repack saddlebags, etc, without even thinking about it. She hasn't tried having sex on horseback yet, but that's mostly due to lack of opportunity than anything else.
She often gives the impression that she hasn't quite coalesced yet. She's getting there, but there are parts of her that aren't really fully formed yet.
The other people she references in her journals are:
Gavaio (played by
zaratyst): human paladin. Gavaio was assigned to protect Callas, and officially he works for her, but there's much more give and take there than that. He's about ten years older than Callas, and she regards him as a father figure. She trusts him implicitly, and fears getting on his nerves.Galvin (NPC): human cleric of Epona, Callas' lover and her second-in-command. Callas and Galvin were in cleric trainnig together, and evidently he had a thing for her for ages and simply never said anything. Callas, being Callas, was oblivious until recently. Galvin's quiet and extremely stubborn, making him a bad person to try to force into anything. I actually don't know a whole lot about Galvin other than that and the fact that he's from France, but i'm assuming his character will come clearer over time. He was tortured at the hands of Malik the insane werewolf, seemingly for no other reason than that he had the bad luck to get captured. He's the other person Callas trusts without reservation, and he knows things about her that even Gavio doesn't, simply because he's known her for nine years.
Riyor (played by
nurf): elven rogue. He appears to be cursed with Luck--good, bad, indifferent, extremely unlikely, he's got it all in large amounts. He's the party's element of complete randomness. He's been like this all his life, it seems, and accepts it with cheerful good humor--and seems to sometimes go out of his way to throw himself upon the bosom of Lady Luck, as it were. His horse, Nigel, is exceptionally well-trained.Gaius (played by
3smallishmagi ): human monk/mage. Gaius is a taicturn Roman, and he's the keeper of the cloak that gives us quite a bit of ability to fiddle with the stone circles that we use for transportation. (The cloak falls into the category of Entirely Too Useful and Somewhat Dangerous; i think we may lose it sometime soon.) We actually don't know very much about his past, as far as I remember, but he doesn't forgive betrayal at all, and he's exceptionally stubborn. Very fond of stunning opponents and then killing them while stunned.Arnie/Aiden (played by
mholmesiv ): Arnie is a dwarven psionicist. Aiden is/was a drow psioniscist. They used to share Arnie's body, until the last session, when Aiden got made into an artifact. Callas likes both Arnie and Aiden quite a bit--Arnie because he's pragmatic without being dour, Aiden because he's charmingly nuts. Aiden is impressively powerful, and can speak to all of the artifacts in the world--evidently, the cloak that Gaius is in charge of drives psioniscists completely crazy, and Aiden wore it briefly. The reason Aiden and Arnie were living in the same body is a bit too long to get into here, and i'm not sure I could relate it correctly, anyway. Callas got to the point where she could tell immediately who was "home", so to speak, until it got to the point where both were present much of the time, which was confusing for everyone.Contessa (NPC): Galvin's second in command, third in the line of high priestess succession. An old friend of Galvin and Callas', she may play a larger role later.
Endraya (NPC): the woman who took Callas under her wing when she was first in temple training. She's basically Callas' second mother. Currently acting as Callas' regent in Madrid.
I think that gives a little more context for the Callas journals. I hope, at least. I think The Story So Far is probably covered adequately in the journals, at least enough to make them comprehensible.
