Random character musings by Fox Lee - http://foxlee.arts-eclectic.com

ALL'REYNE - CRUCIBLE

All'Reyne is a Rogue/Paladin heavily inspired by Testament, from the Guilty Gear game series; when I was looking for a character concept, I was reminded of a character-matcher quiz which associated me with him - so I ran with it ^_^

All'Reyne is a NG human, though he has vague elven features for reasons unknown, and is the only scythe-wielding, Sneak-Attacking Paladin I've ever met. He's somewhat sombre and stoic, too serious for his own good, and has a bit of a self-estem problem. He was supposed to be sort of reckless and have poor judgement, having a low WIS score, but he's probably more perceptive and profound and zen-ish than a WIS-8 character should be ^^;

He was first raised by an aging thief who found him as a child, and decided that it would be advantageous to have a young tarinee to take all the risks for her; to keep him in check, his "mentor" constantly guilted him about how she had taken him in and raised him out of the goodness of her heart, that he was a worthless and ungrateful child, and so forth. All'Reyne was never comfortable with the idea of stealing (not because it was against the law, but because it was hurtful to other people), so he avoided actually taking anything for as long as possible; when he was finally forced to, he chose to take a small jewel from the resident Wizard, knowing that the man was rich and shouldn't miss a tiny thing like that. As it turned out, however, the item was a spell component; a peasant family had saved for months to afford it, so they could ask the Wizard to cast a spell that could dentify what was ailing their dying child. Naturally, All'Reyne sneaked in to return the item as soon as he was able; however, it was too late to save the peasant boy.

Not surprisingly, All'Reyne ran away at this point, feeling that the entire thing had been his fault (he is wise in some ways, but he has a rather large blind spot when it comes to blaming himself for the wrongs of the world). He wandered rather aimlessly for a while, not really caring what happened to him, until eventually he was pulled off the streets half-dead by a dutiful Paladin who took pity on him. Believing that the boy had a good soul despite his ragged appearance, the woman took him in as a squire of sorts; she gave him a measure of training, as well as numerous lectures on law, morality, protecting the innocent, punishing the guilty, and everything else you would expect.

They parted on more favourable terms than he had with his previous mentor, at least. It simply came down to the fact that All'Reyne could never persuade himself to value the laws and strictures of Paladinhood the way that she did. Mechanically speaking, he could never come to value Law as highly as Good. He spent a lot of time pondering himself, and what he believed, and eventually asked to be released from his mentor's care when he realised that it could never work out.

There's a bit of a blank spot in his backstory after that; I'm still trying to work out exactly what he's been doing since then. The game started with all of the characters being magically whisked away, so it's unimportant to the game's plot as to what he's been up to. My guess is that he's been wandering again, only this time with more of a purpose; simply going and finding people who are doing bad things, and stopping them.

As for why I like him... he's just incredibly fun to play. He's on a very, very fine line between humble and arrogant - he knows full well that he has the moral high ground, but he's so very unassuming about the whole matter, and still considers himself unworthy next to his companions. That, and I never thought I would enjoy playing an executioner, yet that's what he ended up doing; there's something really enjoyable about a characetr who makes no pretence that he is going to end an evil prisoner's life, then openly pleads with them to co-operate so that they might redeem themselves for the next life. And apologises - with sincerity - before he lops their head off.

Playing a believer in reincarnation is great fun, too. For starters, it means you don't have to feel guilty about executing somebody - even when they ping on your Detect-Evil radar so heavily that you're on the floor for a round, our GMs have a somewhat nasty tendency to give Inherently Evil creatures moral grey areas. Which is great from a story perspective, but it gets really depressing when you have to second-guess every random evil critter you come across. All'Reyne... he doesn't see a problem with it, because he believes that everybody gets what they deserve.