Name: Ambrosine the Necroqueen Canon: An original D&D canon my players have dubbed "Death's Buffet"; she's an NPC of the Nerthus campaign setting I made up OU/AU/CRAU/OC: OC
World info: There's A LOT to unpack here, so I'm gonna go with bullet points:
-Roughly 3000 years prior to the "present day" of this setting, the world was more or less modern or slightly into the future in terms of technology and culture, but with the addition of elves and other fantasy races making this world different from our own.
-In an event known to people in the present as "the Unchained Revelry", or just "the Revelry" for short, a mad god almost destroyed the world before being sealed away by every other god in existence, across all multiverses.
-This world survived, but at the cost of the planet undergoing an apocalypse of sorts. Society eventually rebuilt into the pseudo-medieval RPG world that's seen in its present, with me using this backstory to throw in anachronisms like modern slang, robots, and guns whenever I want.
History: Ambrosine was born as the firstborn child to the royal family of a kingdom known as Vanth. As the crown princess, she was expected to inherit the throne and conform to her strict father’s idea of what a proper ruler ought to be. Her father was also seriously shitty and regularly verbally and emotionally abused Ambrosine until she acquired a paralyzing fear of failure and an obsessive duty, so!
Her mother, an accomplished theologist and scholar of arcane lore, taught Ambrosine everything she knew before she died when Ambrosine was around 15, and she was sent to a prestigious boarding school for would-be arcanists. Despite this passion for the pursuit of magic, however, her father ruthlessly cultivated her to be the politician he wanted her to be. When Ambrosine was around 18 or so, she was assigned an appointed knight and personal bodyguard to keep an eye on her whenever she was away from her father and his influence. This guy was a young half-elven paladin by the name of Sir Terowyn.
They fell in love, which wasn’t exactly the most healthy relationship, but they were young and it was cute in a courtly love knight and lady sort of way. Ambrosine’s dad wasn’t too fond of this because of the difference in class/station and the general impropriety of it all, and he sent the young knight on a suicide mission by having Ambrosine abducted by a noblewoman who was also secretly a vampire.
She managed to have Sir Terowyn and her friends help her escape, because while she was also just one person and couldn’t take on a vampire and their minions herself, she was still a fucking wizard. The vampire noblewoman managed to take Sir Terowyn prisoner, but the rest of the group was forced to slink back and retreat, as they were badly beaten. When they came back for him, he had already been transformed into one of her thralls and seemingly was dealt with, as far as Ambrosine’s father cared.
They did manage to expose and kill the vampire noblewoman and most of her thralls, so there was at least that. After which...well, the thing about vampiric thralls is that they become free-willed full vampires after their sire dies, and since no one was willing to kill Terowyn…
After this, Terowyn went into hiding, and him and Ambrosine kept their relationship under wraps for as long as possible. Their relationship also became a lot more passionate and less cute after this, and also, Terowyn’s former repression about shit due to his position as Ambrosine’s bodyguard was put aside, since vampirism lowers your inhibitions a bit. On the plus side, this meant they finally started doing the do. On the minus side, vampirism has a lot of other unintended side effects.
Their relationship ultimately ended for two reasons. The first was that he had become increasingly possessive and creepy as his newfound vampirism started affecting his personality, and that was starting to take a toll on Ambrosine. The second was that she had found out she was pregnant with his half-vampire spawn, and decided he didn’t need to be around for that if the man she fell in love with was fading away.
Needless to say, her dad wasn’t too pleased with finding out about either of those. Not like it really mattered, because her younger brother, who had also suffered under his influence, poisoned the guy a couple of months later. He didn’t even want the throne (or was particularly excited about his sister ascending), he just wanted to be rid of a toxic family member after he had gotten way too controlling for anyone’s good. This led to a very eventful year for Ambrosine, who had been kidnapped, seen the love of her life die (but kinda get better, but not really), had him turn into a creepy vampire stalker, had her father die, saw her coronation and ascension to the throne of Vanth, had to deal with the politics of being queen, and, late in the year, gave birth to twin princesses Astra and Concordia.
After her coronation, Ambrosine knew that she didn’t know much about proper rulership, and sought an adviser. This came in the form of Lady Kieron, a priestess of Istus (the goddess of fate), and probably one of the most normal people in this entire court. Ambrosine worked to be known as a less shitty ruler than her father was. At around this time, the neighboring kingdom of Areth to the west was conquered by a hobgoblin named King Korzog the Clever, who frankly had several of the same ideas Ambrosine did (but not some of the weirder ones that involved magic shit.)
A quick bullet point list of things Ambrosine has done under her roughly 18 year rule:
-Established a better social safety net for people with a livable minimum wage and grants given to temples and herbalists/druids for healing people with. -Told her soldiers and government employed necromancers to yoink the bodies of the enemy off the battlefield during the war, for them to be zombified and used against the opponent as a means of psychological warfare. This ended the war, but she’s also considered a monster by a lot of people outside of Vanth. -Started public libraries to promote literacy. -Also, public schools and improvements to state run orphanages. -Did I mention that you can be a state employed necromancer? -Made an alliance with the goblin kingdom. -INFRASTRUCTURE! -Criminal justice reform, including banning the practice of public executions (and dramatically lessening the number of things that could get you executed to basically just intentional murder or treason.) -Made using magic to alter someone’s state of mind without their consent, outside of a few very limited circumstances, a crime. -Has a magic AS FUCK court, with one of her current lovers being a fucking dragon and her court mage being an arcanaloth (which, for the uninitiated, is a mercenary demon thing that is also an expert on magic), along with a shitton of magic items
She’s quite popular within the borders of her own kingdom (most of her subjects won’t die for her or anything, but a majority generally approve of how she’s handling things.) In the elven kingdom of Merillon and the nearby kingdom of Neksdur, she’s viewed as a monster.
Her health started failing her in the later years. It had always been delicate, but things were on the decline for a while. Afraid that her teenaged daughters were too young and impressionable to rule, that everything she had worked towards might crumble, of death itself, of dying without acquiring all the knowledge she had sought, she looked for the one solution she thought could help:
Lichdom.
After becoming a spooky lich, she spent a few more months in her home world before being pulled into the fourth round of 15 Strangers. There, she woke up in a dark and spider-filled castle with 14 other people, where, in typical murdergame fashion, they were told that they needed to murder each other (and given incentives for doing so.)
Oh, and they were also forced to either eat nothing but the regain prizes, or eat these mysterious eggs once a week that turned out to be people's souls. This murdergame also had a madness mechanic, where the more souls you consumed, the more hallucinations you started having. Surprisingly, Ambrosine only had a few fairly weird and non-traumatic hallucinations (like a door turning into charcuterie when she tried to unlock it), and remained one of the sanest people in the round. Also surprisingly, she even made it to the survivor pool, even while she was very nearly scapegoated.
This eventually led to her helping the rest of the survivor pool escape. Their captors had apparently brought them all there to help resurrect their leader and fight in some sort of conflict that Ambrosine doesn't know the exact details of, but after they learned more about the authoritarian nature of the other side, the survivor pool wasn't sure they wanted to stick around and wait to be rescued. They eventually decided to kill the murdergame runners and run away with the interdimensional/time travel artifact that was used to bring them there, where they then were able to return home (but everyone who died during the murdergame stayed dead.)
Some time after this, she got pulled into another murdergame, where she made some more friends and kicked some more ass, and then went home.
In the campaign I'm using her as an NPC for, he has mostly been chugging along in the background with the drudgery of running a country and shit, but has recently flexed her lichly might at a fancy party when one player character, who tried to betray the party and stage a huge battle in the middle of a crowded ballroom, got ice-touched by her before being escorted out.
Canon point: Some time after sending her daughters away to also be NPCs elsewhere, and the gala.
Age: Approximately 42-43 years old, looks to be in her mid to late twenties due to magic.
Personality: For the most part, her personality went unchanged from the murdergame, so here’s what I’ve got.
Perhaps Ambrosine’s greatest flaw is that she’s slow to trust easily. This isn’t nearly as bad if she’s talking to someone far younger than her (as in, literally under the age of 20), as she does have a soft spot for the very young. But otherwise, anyone interacting with her gets a polite amount of distance. Sucks, but after the shit she’s been through, she knows that letting her guard down can lead to horrible death. She does have a decent measure of concern for the well-being of others, but nine times out of ten, this is more out of a sense of duty and obligation than out of fondness.
Speaking of duty and obligation, Ambrosine is lawful to a rather unhealthy extreme. She’ll do questionable things to preserve her own interests along with the well-being of her family and kingdom, but she does have some standards that stop her short of being a true monster. Sacrifice a few people to attain lichdom, but make sure they’re criminals and not people considered to be innocents. Use those same death row criminals for magical experiments? If it benefits the greater good, sure. She can forgive someone for a few murders, but harm a child, and you’ve lost her trust forever.
Her stats say she’s Lawful Neutral, and that’s less because of a sense of apathy and more out of a sense of...shall we say, personal conflict. She deeply cares about the loved ones in her life and the well-being of her subjects, but she’s willing to do some pretty heinous things in order to ensure their safety (stopping a war by desecrating the bodies of her opponents, getting much-needed policies put into place by quietly having rivals at court killed or disgraced, etc.) She tries her best to make sure the targets of her wrath are those that “deserve” it, but it’s tough to really say whether or not her motives are pure...and if she’s ever driven to choose between the needs of the many vs. the needs of the few, she’ll usually choose the many. She’s pragmatic like that.
Her stint in 15 Strangers hasn’t changed her core personality much, but it has reinforced her tendency to always expect ulterior motives in people, as well as a certain dread at being trapped anywhere. More passionate, too, is the aversion to mind-altering abilities or magic that she already had. She’s very bothered by the idea that anyone would use magic to alter someone’s perception without their consent (out of a few very limited circumstances, like self-defense), and the madness mechanic of 15 Strangers hasn’t helped.
That’s by far the biggest aspect of her personality, and the second biggest, perhaps, is that Ambrosine is poised and vain to an also unhealthy degree. She’s far older than she looks (in her early 40s and looks maybe in her early 20s), and while she doesn’t actually hurt people to keep up this charade, she does go to extreme lengths through magic and careful makeup artistry. She’s absolutely terrified of failure, of appearing weak, of not living up to be the example that she believes her people need her to be.
However, this is just because the pursuit of beauty is one of Ambrosine’s interests, and she pursues her interests with utmost passion. By far her biggest interest is her pursuit in magic, which has led to a lifelong passion for finding new spells, collecting magic items, and the like. And if you’re interesting or important enough to hold her passion in personal matters, she’ll never let you go. Character changes:
Capabilities: Hopefully someone on the mod team knows 5e rules so they can read this hot mess.
If you don't want to go through that, here's a basic rundown of her capabilities
-Access to the ultimate treasure trove of arcane spells, thanks to being a nerd. Her particular specialty is necromancy
-The ability to regenerate a body so long as her phylactery is intact. If destroyed, she can be killed permanently
-The ability to supernaturally frighten people with a stare, subject to the other player's permission
-The ability to stun people with her really cold hands
-Also the ability to disrupt the life force of every living creature in the immediate vicinity for a couple of seconds, which hurts like hell
Without the influence of the moons that were in Prismatica, she's no longer subject to any of the transformations, so I'm treating her as if she's brought back to her normal self with no additional CRAU powers.
Which is still fucking powerful because she's an immortal undead abomination with hella magic.
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Player Information
Name: Indy
Age: 28
Contact details:
Other characters: Marla |
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Character Information
Name: Ambrosine
the NecroqueenCanon: An original D&D canon my players have dubbed "Death's Buffet"; she's an NPC of the Nerthus campaign setting I made up
OU/AU/CRAU/OC: OC
World info: There's A LOT to unpack here, so I'm gonna go with bullet points:
-Roughly 3000 years prior to the "present day" of this setting, the world was more or less modern or slightly into the future in terms of technology and culture, but with the addition of elves and other fantasy races making this world different from our own.
-In an event known to people in the present as "the Unchained Revelry", or just "the Revelry" for short, a mad god almost destroyed the world before being sealed away by every other god in existence, across all multiverses.
-This world survived, but at the cost of the planet undergoing an apocalypse of sorts. Society eventually rebuilt into the pseudo-medieval RPG world that's seen in its present, with me using this backstory to throw in anachronisms like modern slang, robots, and guns whenever I want.
History: Ambrosine was born as the firstborn child to the royal family of a kingdom known as Vanth. As the crown princess, she was expected to inherit the throne and conform to her strict father’s idea of what a proper ruler ought to be. Her father was also seriously shitty and regularly verbally and emotionally abused Ambrosine until she acquired a paralyzing fear of failure and an obsessive duty, so!
Her mother, an accomplished theologist and scholar of arcane lore, taught Ambrosine everything she knew before she died when Ambrosine was around 15, and she was sent to a prestigious boarding school for would-be arcanists. Despite this passion for the pursuit of magic, however, her father ruthlessly cultivated her to be the politician he wanted her to be. When Ambrosine was around 18 or so, she was assigned an appointed knight and personal bodyguard to keep an eye on her whenever she was away from her father and his influence. This guy was a young half-elven paladin by the name of Sir Terowyn.
They fell in love, which wasn’t exactly the most healthy relationship, but they were young and it was cute in a courtly love knight and lady sort of way. Ambrosine’s dad wasn’t too fond of this because of the difference in class/station and the general impropriety of it all, and he sent the young knight on a suicide mission by having Ambrosine abducted by a noblewoman who was also secretly a vampire.
She managed to have Sir Terowyn and her friends help her escape, because while she was also just one person and couldn’t take on a vampire and their minions herself, she was still a fucking wizard. The vampire noblewoman managed to take Sir Terowyn prisoner, but the rest of the group was forced to slink back and retreat, as they were badly beaten. When they came back for him, he had already been transformed into one of her thralls and seemingly was dealt with, as far as Ambrosine’s father cared.
They did manage to expose and kill the vampire noblewoman and most of her thralls, so there was at least that. After which...well, the thing about vampiric thralls is that they become free-willed full vampires after their sire dies, and since no one was willing to kill Terowyn…
After this, Terowyn went into hiding, and him and Ambrosine kept their relationship under wraps for as long as possible. Their relationship also became a lot more passionate and less cute after this, and also, Terowyn’s former repression about shit due to his position as Ambrosine’s bodyguard was put aside, since vampirism lowers your inhibitions a bit. On the plus side, this meant they finally started doing the do. On the minus side, vampirism has a lot of other unintended side effects.
Their relationship ultimately ended for two reasons. The first was that he had become increasingly possessive and creepy as his newfound vampirism started affecting his personality, and that was starting to take a toll on Ambrosine. The second was that she had found out she was pregnant with his half-vampire spawn, and decided he didn’t need to be around for that if the man she fell in love with was fading away.
Needless to say, her dad wasn’t too pleased with finding out about either of those. Not like it really mattered, because her younger brother, who had also suffered under his influence, poisoned the guy a couple of months later. He didn’t even want the throne (or was particularly excited about his sister ascending), he just wanted to be rid of a toxic family member after he had gotten way too controlling for anyone’s good. This led to a very eventful year for Ambrosine, who had been kidnapped, seen the love of her life die (but kinda get better, but not really), had him turn into a creepy vampire stalker, had her father die, saw her coronation and ascension to the throne of Vanth, had to deal with the politics of being queen, and, late in the year, gave birth to twin princesses Astra and Concordia.
After her coronation, Ambrosine knew that she didn’t know much about proper rulership, and sought an adviser. This came in the form of Lady Kieron, a priestess of Istus (the goddess of fate), and probably one of the most normal people in this entire court. Ambrosine worked to be known as a less shitty ruler than her father was. At around this time, the neighboring kingdom of Areth to the west was conquered by a hobgoblin named King Korzog the Clever, who frankly had several of the same ideas Ambrosine did (but not some of the weirder ones that involved magic shit.)
A quick bullet point list of things Ambrosine has done under her roughly 18 year rule:
-Established a better social safety net for people with a livable minimum wage and grants given to temples and herbalists/druids for healing people with.
-Told her soldiers and government employed necromancers to yoink the bodies of the enemy off the battlefield during the war, for them to be zombified and used against the opponent as a means of psychological warfare. This ended the war, but she’s also considered a monster by a lot of people outside of Vanth.
-Started public libraries to promote literacy.
-Also, public schools and improvements to state run orphanages.
-Did I mention that you can be a state employed necromancer?
-Made an alliance with the goblin kingdom.
-INFRASTRUCTURE!
-Criminal justice reform, including banning the practice of public executions (and dramatically lessening the number of things that could get you executed to basically just intentional murder or treason.)
-Made using magic to alter someone’s state of mind without their consent, outside of a few very limited circumstances, a crime.
-Has a magic AS FUCK court, with one of her current lovers being a fucking dragon and her court mage being an arcanaloth (which, for the uninitiated, is a mercenary demon thing that is also an expert on magic), along with a shitton of magic items
She’s quite popular within the borders of her own kingdom (most of her subjects won’t die for her or anything, but a majority generally approve of how she’s handling things.) In the elven kingdom of Merillon and the nearby kingdom of Neksdur, she’s viewed as a monster.
Her health started failing her in the later years. It had always been delicate, but things were on the decline for a while. Afraid that her teenaged daughters were too young and impressionable to rule, that everything she had worked towards might crumble, of death itself, of dying without acquiring all the knowledge she had sought, she looked for the one solution she thought could help:
Lichdom.
After becoming a spooky lich, she spent a few more months in her home world before being pulled into the fourth round of 15 Strangers. There, she woke up in a dark and spider-filled castle with 14 other people, where, in typical murdergame fashion, they were told that they needed to murder each other (and given incentives for doing so.)
Oh, and they were also forced to either eat nothing but the regain prizes, or eat these mysterious eggs once a week that turned out to be people's souls. This murdergame also had a madness mechanic, where the more souls you consumed, the more hallucinations you started having. Surprisingly, Ambrosine only had a few fairly weird and non-traumatic hallucinations (like a door turning into charcuterie when she tried to unlock it), and remained one of the sanest people in the round. Also surprisingly, she even made it to the survivor pool, even while she was very nearly scapegoated.
This eventually led to her helping the rest of the survivor pool escape. Their captors had apparently brought them all there to help resurrect their leader and fight in some sort of conflict that Ambrosine doesn't know the exact details of, but after they learned more about the authoritarian nature of the other side, the survivor pool wasn't sure they wanted to stick around and wait to be rescued. They eventually decided to kill the murdergame runners and run away with the interdimensional/time travel artifact that was used to bring them there, where they then were able to return home (but everyone who died during the murdergame stayed dead.)
Some time after this, she got pulled into another murdergame, where she made some more friends and kicked some more ass, and then went home.
In the campaign I'm using her as an NPC for, he has mostly been chugging along in the background with the drudgery of running a country and shit, but has recently flexed her lichly might at a fancy party when one player character, who tried to betray the party and stage a huge battle in the middle of a crowded ballroom, got ice-touched by her before being escorted out.
no subject
Age: Approximately 42-43 years old, looks to be in her mid to late twenties due to magic.
Personality: For the most part, her personality went unchanged from the murdergame, so here’s what I’ve got.
Perhaps Ambrosine’s greatest flaw is that she’s slow to trust easily. This isn’t nearly as bad if she’s talking to someone far younger than her (as in, literally under the age of 20), as she does have a soft spot for the very young. But otherwise, anyone interacting with her gets a polite amount of distance. Sucks, but after the shit she’s been through, she knows that letting her guard down can lead to horrible death. She does have a decent measure of concern for the well-being of others, but nine times out of ten, this is more out of a sense of duty and obligation than out of fondness.
Speaking of duty and obligation, Ambrosine is lawful to a rather unhealthy extreme. She’ll do questionable things to preserve her own interests along with the well-being of her family and kingdom, but she does have some standards that stop her short of being a true monster. Sacrifice a few people to attain lichdom, but make sure they’re criminals and not people considered to be innocents. Use those same death row criminals for magical experiments? If it benefits the greater good, sure. She can forgive someone for a few murders, but harm a child, and you’ve lost her trust forever.
Her stats say she’s Lawful Neutral, and that’s less because of a sense of apathy and more out of a sense of...shall we say, personal conflict. She deeply cares about the loved ones in her life and the well-being of her subjects, but she’s willing to do some pretty heinous things in order to ensure their safety (stopping a war by desecrating the bodies of her opponents, getting much-needed policies put into place by quietly having rivals at court killed or disgraced, etc.) She tries her best to make sure the targets of her wrath are those that “deserve” it, but it’s tough to really say whether or not her motives are pure...and if she’s ever driven to choose between the needs of the many vs. the needs of the few, she’ll usually choose the many. She’s pragmatic like that.
Her stint in 15 Strangers hasn’t changed her core personality much, but it has reinforced her tendency to always expect ulterior motives in people, as well as a certain dread at being trapped anywhere. More passionate, too, is the aversion to mind-altering abilities or magic that she already had. She’s very bothered by the idea that anyone would use magic to alter someone’s perception without their consent (out of a few very limited circumstances, like self-defense), and the madness mechanic of 15 Strangers hasn’t helped.
That’s by far the biggest aspect of her personality, and the second biggest, perhaps, is that Ambrosine is poised and vain to an also unhealthy degree. She’s far older than she looks (in her early 40s and looks maybe in her early 20s), and while she doesn’t actually hurt people to keep up this charade, she does go to extreme lengths through magic and careful makeup artistry. She’s absolutely terrified of failure, of appearing weak, of not living up to be the example that she believes her people need her to be.
However, this is just because the pursuit of beauty is one of Ambrosine’s interests, and she pursues her interests with utmost passion. By far her biggest interest is her pursuit in magic, which has led to a lifelong passion for finding new spells, collecting magic items, and the like. And if you’re interesting or important enough to hold her passion in personal matters, she’ll never let you go.
Character changes:
Capabilities: Hopefully someone on the mod team knows 5e rules so they can read this hot mess.
If you don't want to go through that, here's a basic rundown of her capabilities
-Access to the ultimate treasure trove of arcane spells, thanks to being a nerd. Her particular specialty is necromancy
-The ability to regenerate a body so long as her phylactery is intact. If destroyed, she can be killed permanently
-The ability to supernaturally frighten people with a stare, subject to the other player's permission
-The ability to stun people with her really cold hands
-Also the ability to disrupt the life force of every living creature in the immediate vicinity for a couple of seconds, which hurts like hell
Without the influence of the moons that were in Prismatica, she's no longer subject to any of the transformations, so I'm treating her as if she's brought back to her normal self with no additional CRAU powers.
Which is still fucking powerful because she's an immortal undead abomination with hella magic.
Sample:
you will regret your folly
in which Ambro discusses the Jack Harkness rule
Notes: oooooooh boy can we make endless liches a thing