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necroyalty) wrote2019-09-21 02:27 pm
necroyalty) wrote2019-09-21 02:27 pm
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prismatica app
▶ PLAYER
HANDLE: Indy
CONTACT: @swirlix on Plurk; @snowpoff#4031 on Discord.
OVER 18? I’m 27, so yes!
CHARACTERS IN-GAME: Currently none.
▶ CHARACTER
NAME: Ambrosine
CANON: Original Character (originally an NPC/possible boss I made for a homebrew Dungeons and Dragons setting), 15 Strangers CRAU
CANON POINT: Post Round 4, 15 Strangers
AGE: 42. She looks to be in her mid to late twenties due to magic bullshit, but she’s still both physically and mentally an adult either way.
BACKGROUND: In a world that, in the distant past, may not have been too unlike our own except with more elves, an evil god sought to destroy everything, having tired of existence. This event, known as the Unchained Revelry, prompted all of the gods to seal him away, but not before he managed to almost destroy the world and leave it alone to rebuild itself.
TL;DR: This planet (known as Nerthus) used to be a lot more modern and even futuristic in terms of technology, until an apocalyptic event leveled it. Thousands of years later, things vaguely resemble an RPG fantasy world, but with hilarious anachronisms like indoor plumbing.
Anyway, that doesn’t directly relate to the plot, but in the shitty RPG fantasy present day, 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.
-SKELETON COPS! People can now sign consent forms for their corpses to be used by either the military or as a supplement to the civilian guard, in a process similar to real world organ donation.
-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.
-Gave clandestine aid to drow houses in the Underdark to mostly annoy the shit out of the elven kingodm she used to be at war with, since they’re slowly amassing resources for retaliation otherwise. It’s basically a cold war situation right now.
-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 Orth, 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.)
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.
POWERS/ABILITIES: BY THE SWEET FUCKING LIGHT OF PELOR, I AM SCREAMING IN ARCHMAGE RIGHT NOW.
Also, here is the stat block for your standard lich. Ambrosine isn’t too different other than that she usually has different spells prepared.
And this is a video explaining all the powers a lich in 5e has as opposed to a regular wizard, or creatures like vampires.
Because she’s outside of her lair, she doesn’t have access to her additional lair actions/powers, so we’ll ignore that.
Due to being undead, she also doesn’t require air, food, drink, or sleep. She can consume regular food and drink to fit in, but she often doesn’t bother.
As a lich, Ambrosine has her soul tucked away in a phylactery. As such, she’s a bit more resilient than a typical mortal; in her own world, if her body is destroyed, it regenerates 1-10 days later near her phylactery. I’m okay with nerfing this if needed, but if her phylactery is destroyed, she’s officially dead as per the game rules. I’m also nerfing her phylactery rules: there used to be a specific means of destroying it, but now it can be destroyed the same way you would any other music box.
She’s also immune to poison and while the official lich stat block has her immune to regular nonmagical weapons, I can also nerf this to just being more resistant if need be. She has truesight (able to see past illusions, glamors, etc.), and if you want me to put up a permissions post for this, I can.
Additionally, she's immune to any mind-altering effects that are induced by magic, and extremely resistant to any attempt to ward off undead with holy symbols and the like. Holy water still hurts her, though.
There's also three other powers of interest. Paralyzing Touch and Frightening Gaze are most likely going to be handled as player permissions.
Paralyzing Touch: Can paralyze people for 1 minute, unless they're resilient enough to resist.
Frightening Gaze: Can attempt to magically induce fear in someone for about a minute.
Disrupt Life: This is just an area-of-effect attack that works by sapping the life force of people without the fortitude to resist it.
A full list of Ambrosine’s spells can be found here. I assume that green spells should be okay to go, yellow will require player permissions, and any orange or red spells are never going to see the light of day. (Orange ones, however, might possibly still be allowed by you guys, but I’m leaning towards assuming they won’t be.)
Otherwise, I have a (very long) bullet point list of things Ambrosine can do using her spells. I understand that this is probably going to be very OP and will accept a high Chroma cost for most of these if need be, and I’m also enforcing the requirement that any spell that requires expensive components (or has its components consumed) is going to need them before I can cast it.
She also can’t cast all of them at any time she wishes; she needs to memorize the ones she believes she’s most likely to use for any given day. This is usually around the ballpark of 20ish spells.
Please bear with me here.
Weird Necromancy Shit
-Make corpses either unable to rot for 10 days and unable to become undead, or just unable to rot for a month (but still able to become undead)
-Animate dead bodies into mindless zombie or skeleton thralls
-Make even stronger ghoul thralls, but only at night
-It's marked in orange on the list, but do Freaky Friday necromancy body switch shenanigans with another person (Magic Jar). Of course, if this is ever used, it's going to be cleared with everyone involved.
Non-Necromancy Shit:
-Do harmless effects such as dressing herself up or make little sensory fanfares.
-Prevent people from healing for a few seconds or do basic elemental damage, along with some necrotic spells that sap life force. These are her main offensive spells.
-Basic defensive spells that can attempt to shield her from damage or create magical armor
-Summon her familiar, which I'm including in her inventory
-Create some aids in moving or carrying stuff, like an invisible servant-thing or a floating disk
-Make some basic visual illusions that can be analyzed by someone highly intelligent, and that don't hold up to touch.
-Make illusory objects that do hold up to touch, but only last about an hour tops.
-Alter her physical appearance briefly (1 hour)
-Turn people into other creatures for about an hour (with player permission)
-Make people dance uncontrollably for about a minute (with player permission)
-Put people in Gay Baby Jail for a half hour tops, with player permission (Forcecage)
-Briefly read surface thoughts
-Alter someone's state of mind so that they consider her a close friend, are inclined not to hurt her, see their worst fear in their mind, are wracked with fits of laughter, etc. These are always temporary (a few minutes tops) and will require player permission.
-Turn invisible
-See invisible people (with player permission)
-Use magic to create alarms, ward areas against intruders, or just lock a damn door.
-Teleport an area of up to 400 feet. (Dimension Door.)
-Scry on people if she has a very fancy and expensive focus of good enough clarity (with player permission.)
INVENTORY:
Ambrosine’s current outfit, minus her Robe of the Archmagi, is a very nice but nonmagical royal blue dress with black detailing, some shoes, a platinum signet ring, and a set of silver and diamond stud earrings.
-Her familiar, Gumdrop the almiraj. An almiraj is rabbit-like creature in the same way that a unicorn is a horse-like creature; picture a somewhat fey-looking rabbit with a small horn on its head and you've basically got the right idea. Can change its form to any other small critter (like a fish, spider, cat, etc.) if Ambrosine casts the Find Familiar spell again. Doesn't gain any additional powers by doing so, and Ambrosine prefers an almiraj or rabbit form. Cannot be used as a mount; I figure the largest it can be is the size of a medium-sized dog (like a corgi.)
-Ambrosine’s Robe of the Archmagi, which takes the form of a bolero/cardigan type garment that can change its superficial appearance (but not its basic shape.)
-Ambrosine’s spellbook. Other than some treatments to make it more resistant to wear and tear, the book itself is not magical. However, it contains all the spells Ambrosine knows, along with a few nuggets of other magical knowledge. The additional info doesn’t grant any other powers; it’s just fun arcane lore that I use for flavor.
-An apple-sized orb of clear crystal with swirls of red, which acts as Ambrosine’s arcane focus (the same way you’d use a wand, basically.)
- A small music box studded with rubies and black opal, inside of which sits an ivory unicorn that spins slowly when the box plays. Wind it up, and it plays a haunting melody. This is Ambrosine’s phylactery, so if this gets destroyed, she’s toast.
-A small silver ring engraved with runes, set with a simple onyx stone. It’s also a Ring of Protection.
MOONBLESSING: Iris
▶ SAMPLES
Here’s a thread sample.
I’m also going to do a narrative sample, since I got to work on this app fairly late into the cycle.
Well, this certainly wasn't the sort of attire that Ambrosine was used to, but she was hardly one to complain. The vibrating leggings were...intriguing, to say the least, but the iridescence and weird glowing shit everywhere was probably something she could do without.
"No, really, I..."
...okay, never mind. The last time she had been pressured to try things on like this, she was thirteen with an awkwardly developing body and a father who would rather eat his own crown than let her have her own sense of fashion. She stepped away from the overly enthusiastic salesperson and thought this over. She could simply leave, but there were some items that she'd like to check out more, and she was sure they were doing their best.
And besides, she was the queen. She would be held powerless by no one, especially not someone who wanted nothing more than to foist a sweater upon her. She killed a vampire. And a murdergame...runner? Conductor? She was unsure what to call them.
She entered the fitting room to collect herself, and...was immediately beset by the same salesperson, beaming with sweater in hand.
"Well, alright," she said, hand running down her face as she tried to suppress a laugh. "And you'll leave me be?"
After an affirmative nod, she disappeared into one of the stalls to change.
The next time her and the salesperson crossed paths, she had to turn away to hide her smile when they were met with a most unpleasant jolt.
HANDLE: Indy
CONTACT: @swirlix on Plurk; @snowpoff#4031 on Discord.
OVER 18? I’m 27, so yes!
CHARACTERS IN-GAME: Currently none.
▶ CHARACTER
NAME: Ambrosine
CANON: Original Character (originally an NPC/possible boss I made for a homebrew Dungeons and Dragons setting), 15 Strangers CRAU
CANON POINT: Post Round 4, 15 Strangers
AGE: 42. She looks to be in her mid to late twenties due to magic bullshit, but she’s still both physically and mentally an adult either way.
BACKGROUND: In a world that, in the distant past, may not have been too unlike our own except with more elves, an evil god sought to destroy everything, having tired of existence. This event, known as the Unchained Revelry, prompted all of the gods to seal him away, but not before he managed to almost destroy the world and leave it alone to rebuild itself.
TL;DR: This planet (known as Nerthus) used to be a lot more modern and even futuristic in terms of technology, until an apocalyptic event leveled it. Thousands of years later, things vaguely resemble an RPG fantasy world, but with hilarious anachronisms like indoor plumbing.
Anyway, that doesn’t directly relate to the plot, but in the shitty RPG fantasy present day, 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.
-SKELETON COPS! People can now sign consent forms for their corpses to be used by either the military or as a supplement to the civilian guard, in a process similar to real world organ donation.
-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.
-Gave clandestine aid to drow houses in the Underdark to mostly annoy the shit out of the elven kingodm she used to be at war with, since they’re slowly amassing resources for retaliation otherwise. It’s basically a cold war situation right now.
-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 Orth, 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.)
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.
POWERS/ABILITIES: BY THE SWEET FUCKING LIGHT OF PELOR, I AM SCREAMING IN ARCHMAGE RIGHT NOW.
Also, here is the stat block for your standard lich. Ambrosine isn’t too different other than that she usually has different spells prepared.
And this is a video explaining all the powers a lich in 5e has as opposed to a regular wizard, or creatures like vampires.
Because she’s outside of her lair, she doesn’t have access to her additional lair actions/powers, so we’ll ignore that.
Due to being undead, she also doesn’t require air, food, drink, or sleep. She can consume regular food and drink to fit in, but she often doesn’t bother.
As a lich, Ambrosine has her soul tucked away in a phylactery. As such, she’s a bit more resilient than a typical mortal; in her own world, if her body is destroyed, it regenerates 1-10 days later near her phylactery. I’m okay with nerfing this if needed, but if her phylactery is destroyed, she’s officially dead as per the game rules. I’m also nerfing her phylactery rules: there used to be a specific means of destroying it, but now it can be destroyed the same way you would any other music box.
She’s also immune to poison and while the official lich stat block has her immune to regular nonmagical weapons, I can also nerf this to just being more resistant if need be. She has truesight (able to see past illusions, glamors, etc.), and if you want me to put up a permissions post for this, I can.
Additionally, she's immune to any mind-altering effects that are induced by magic, and extremely resistant to any attempt to ward off undead with holy symbols and the like. Holy water still hurts her, though.
There's also three other powers of interest. Paralyzing Touch and Frightening Gaze are most likely going to be handled as player permissions.
Paralyzing Touch: Can paralyze people for 1 minute, unless they're resilient enough to resist.
Frightening Gaze: Can attempt to magically induce fear in someone for about a minute.
Disrupt Life: This is just an area-of-effect attack that works by sapping the life force of people without the fortitude to resist it.
A full list of Ambrosine’s spells can be found here. I assume that green spells should be okay to go, yellow will require player permissions, and any orange or red spells are never going to see the light of day. (Orange ones, however, might possibly still be allowed by you guys, but I’m leaning towards assuming they won’t be.)
Otherwise, I have a (very long) bullet point list of things Ambrosine can do using her spells. I understand that this is probably going to be very OP and will accept a high Chroma cost for most of these if need be, and I’m also enforcing the requirement that any spell that requires expensive components (or has its components consumed) is going to need them before I can cast it.
She also can’t cast all of them at any time she wishes; she needs to memorize the ones she believes she’s most likely to use for any given day. This is usually around the ballpark of 20ish spells.
Please bear with me here.
Weird Necromancy Shit
-Make corpses either unable to rot for 10 days and unable to become undead, or just unable to rot for a month (but still able to become undead)
-Animate dead bodies into mindless zombie or skeleton thralls
-Make even stronger ghoul thralls, but only at night
-It's marked in orange on the list, but do Freaky Friday necromancy body switch shenanigans with another person (Magic Jar). Of course, if this is ever used, it's going to be cleared with everyone involved.
Non-Necromancy Shit:
-Do harmless effects such as dressing herself up or make little sensory fanfares.
-Prevent people from healing for a few seconds or do basic elemental damage, along with some necrotic spells that sap life force. These are her main offensive spells.
-Basic defensive spells that can attempt to shield her from damage or create magical armor
-Summon her familiar, which I'm including in her inventory
-Create some aids in moving or carrying stuff, like an invisible servant-thing or a floating disk
-Make some basic visual illusions that can be analyzed by someone highly intelligent, and that don't hold up to touch.
-Make illusory objects that do hold up to touch, but only last about an hour tops.
-Alter her physical appearance briefly (1 hour)
-Turn people into other creatures for about an hour (with player permission)
-Make people dance uncontrollably for about a minute (with player permission)
-Put people in Gay Baby Jail for a half hour tops, with player permission (Forcecage)
-Briefly read surface thoughts
-Alter someone's state of mind so that they consider her a close friend, are inclined not to hurt her, see their worst fear in their mind, are wracked with fits of laughter, etc. These are always temporary (a few minutes tops) and will require player permission.
-Turn invisible
-See invisible people (with player permission)
-Use magic to create alarms, ward areas against intruders, or just lock a damn door.
-Teleport an area of up to 400 feet. (Dimension Door.)
-Scry on people if she has a very fancy and expensive focus of good enough clarity (with player permission.)
INVENTORY:
Ambrosine’s current outfit, minus her Robe of the Archmagi, is a very nice but nonmagical royal blue dress with black detailing, some shoes, a platinum signet ring, and a set of silver and diamond stud earrings.
-Her familiar, Gumdrop the almiraj. An almiraj is rabbit-like creature in the same way that a unicorn is a horse-like creature; picture a somewhat fey-looking rabbit with a small horn on its head and you've basically got the right idea. Can change its form to any other small critter (like a fish, spider, cat, etc.) if Ambrosine casts the Find Familiar spell again. Doesn't gain any additional powers by doing so, and Ambrosine prefers an almiraj or rabbit form. Cannot be used as a mount; I figure the largest it can be is the size of a medium-sized dog (like a corgi.)
-Ambrosine’s Robe of the Archmagi, which takes the form of a bolero/cardigan type garment that can change its superficial appearance (but not its basic shape.)
-Ambrosine’s spellbook. Other than some treatments to make it more resistant to wear and tear, the book itself is not magical. However, it contains all the spells Ambrosine knows, along with a few nuggets of other magical knowledge. The additional info doesn’t grant any other powers; it’s just fun arcane lore that I use for flavor.
-An apple-sized orb of clear crystal with swirls of red, which acts as Ambrosine’s arcane focus (the same way you’d use a wand, basically.)
- A small music box studded with rubies and black opal, inside of which sits an ivory unicorn that spins slowly when the box plays. Wind it up, and it plays a haunting melody. This is Ambrosine’s phylactery, so if this gets destroyed, she’s toast.
-A small silver ring engraved with runes, set with a simple onyx stone. It’s also a Ring of Protection.
MOONBLESSING: Iris
▶ SAMPLES
Here’s a thread sample.
I’m also going to do a narrative sample, since I got to work on this app fairly late into the cycle.
Well, this certainly wasn't the sort of attire that Ambrosine was used to, but she was hardly one to complain. The vibrating leggings were...intriguing, to say the least, but the iridescence and weird glowing shit everywhere was probably something she could do without.
"No, really, I..."
...okay, never mind. The last time she had been pressured to try things on like this, she was thirteen with an awkwardly developing body and a father who would rather eat his own crown than let her have her own sense of fashion. She stepped away from the overly enthusiastic salesperson and thought this over. She could simply leave, but there were some items that she'd like to check out more, and she was sure they were doing their best.
And besides, she was the queen. She would be held powerless by no one, especially not someone who wanted nothing more than to foist a sweater upon her. She killed a vampire. And a murdergame...runner? Conductor? She was unsure what to call them.
She entered the fitting room to collect herself, and...was immediately beset by the same salesperson, beaming with sweater in hand.
"Well, alright," she said, hand running down her face as she tried to suppress a laugh. "And you'll leave me be?"
After an affirmative nod, she disappeared into one of the stalls to change.
The next time her and the salesperson crossed paths, she had to turn away to hide her smile when they were met with a most unpleasant jolt.