The Adventurer's Successor

[Avaday Daydream]

So a while back I was thinking about one of my old ideas, a campaign where the first crop of adventurers would retire and pass down their knowledge and gear to a second party, who would then pass their stuff down to a third party, and so forth.

I dunno if I could run such an adventure, but, what about a brainstorming exercise? Starting from the premise of 'who comes after this adventurer' and seeing what we come up with?

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The rules are basically, come up with an adventurer, hero or villain who is the successor of the one in the previous post.

Posts should include:

• The adventurer's name and their relationship to the previous one.
• Their class (in a D&D/Pathfinder sense) and/or their greatest talent.
• Their most noteworthy triumph in their adventuring.
• What they retired to or otherwise what their ultimate fate was.

For example:

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Sir Frederick of the village of Glimmervale, the eldest son of the aged village blacksmith Wilbert. An archetypical paladin and knight in homemade shining armor, his faithful and faith-infused shield can turn even the most meteoric of blows.

He gained renown through all the land when he stood up to and slew the terrible dragon that threatened the kingdom of Everlight, and rescued the lovely princess Gracidia from the dragon's lair, just like a fable of old; this legendary deed saw Frederick raised to knighthood and granted a substantial parcel of land adjacent to his home village of Glimmervale. Now Lord Glimmervale, the knight has retired from heroics and now governs his lands like a miniature king, well respected for being kind and just to his subjects.

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Princess Gracidia, daughter of the good king Solon of Everlight. Inspired by the example that Sir Frederick set, the knight whom saved her from the dragon, she now aspires to be a travelling heroine in her own right. Though she lacks mastery of arms, her voice holds unmatched power, and so she tours the kingdom, using her oratory to drive courage, confidence and virtue into the heart of every man and woman, every noble and every beggar in every settlement she passes through.

Her most prestigious occasion was mediating between the Runefang and Jugrud, getting the two belligerent city-states on the border of Everlight to not only bury their hatchet with each other, but form an alliance with each other and the Everlight kingdom as well as triggering a romance between the two city-states' respective heirs. Ultimately, having built her reputation, she ended up returning to the capital to resume studying governing a country, in preparation for when her parents abdicate or pass away.

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'Whiskers' Felix, a not-entirely-honest cat-burglar who was barely out of his teens when Princesss Gracidia came to visit his town. Her oratory (some would say preaching) led him to seriously reconsider his ways, and though he ended up stealing again from a few rich snobs, for the most part he turned to the noble profession of dungeon delving, turning his acrobatics, appraisal skills and eye for alarms towards the navigation of ancient dungeons and ruined fortresses.

Though he didn't quite attain any extraordinary fame, Felix left the adventuring life with a healthy hoard of treasure, including a mysterious old magical artifact which he retired to study. He has since joined the Guild of Grimores, using their extensive libraries to help in his research of his last discovery, and teaching his old rogue tricks to those of the guild who seek a more active approach to knowledge-seeking.

You get the idea, right? I hope so, those took a little while to come up with.

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So, let's see...to start...hmm, how about:

Rowan the Elephant, so named for his combination of strength, size, and smarts. Born to the jungle-dwelling Greenwalker tribe and growing up with their spiritual traditions, his desire to better understand the world led him to leave the rainforest and travel to the city of Lorekeep. There, he developed a degree of celebrity for his seeming paradoxical nature, a barbarian yet a scholar, merging druidic wisdom with wizarding spellcraft, approaching both from perspectives no-one had ever imagined before.

Rowan often travelled between his home Greenwalker village and Lorekeep, bringing rare and valuable herbs and fungi from one direction and arcane knowledge from the other, and occasionally partnered up with adventurers, wielding his ferocity as a tribal warrior against defilers of nature and nourishing the land once his foes were destroyed. After a few such adventures, he withdrew to invest his time and resources into researching and implementing powerful warding magic to protect his home jungle, Lorekeep, and other usual haunts from evil outsiders; an investment that paid off during an attempted demonic invasion a couple of years later.

Now a master rather than a student, Rowan teaches his unique brand of wizarding-druidic ecological magic to apprentices at Lorekeep, but continues to make regular trips to his old home in the rainforest to share his knowledge and reconnect with family.

[Anthr4xus]

Yew the Magpie was familiar with Rowan from the time he was old enough to be familiar with anyone, as were everyone else in the village.  Rowan the Elephant had even been there at the naming of Yew's older brother Birch the Tiger.  Yew was always a slight and gangly youth, and quickly became recognized in the village for both his skills as a natural tracker and climber as well as his penchant for grabbing anything and everything he found interesting in his explorations. Unfortunately many of these explorations included other people's huts and spaces.

This proclivity is part of what led to Yew's relationship with Rowan.  On one of the great scholar's visits to the village, Yew happened to find himself digging through a collection of keepsakes and artifacts that Rowan had brought to share with the Greenwalker elders.  One of them was a disk covered in a looping, maze-like pattern that covered the entire surface of the palm-sized disk of carved sapphire.  Almost before he even knew what he was doing, he began tracing the lines of the pattern.  Rowan returned to his yurt just as Yew reached the center of the pattern and vanished in the brilliant flash of blue light, the disk falling to the ground where he had been standing.  Rowan swore and quickly made arrangements to follow the impertinent boy.

It was more than two years before Rowan and Yew returned to the village again.  The disk had sent him far, far to the south, to the nearly legendary Land of Lotus-Lepers. During their adventures returning home Yew developed new and useful skills as both a warrior, rogue and scout.  While he was unable to manipulate magic as Rowan did, Yew developed his own form of magic with bow, bough and hewing blood from flesh.  Once they finally made it back to the village, Yew and Rowan were welcomed as heroes and champions.  Rowan did not stay for long, urging to return to Lorekeep to check on his possessions and relations there.  Yew stayed in the village, eager to offer up the wisdom and experience of his travels to the younglings, particularly those that he recognized as likely to follow in his footsteps of perhaps foolish exploration.

[Avaday Daydream]

When Yew landed in the land of the Lotus-Lepers, it was someone called Lira Song who took the Magpie in to teach him about the land he had found himself in. It was an extraordinary learning experience for Lira, filling her with wonder and curiosity about the lands beyond her legendary home.

Shortly after Rowan appeared to retrieve Yew and the two jungle-dwellers started on their way home, Lira set out on her own journey to see and understand the wide and beautiful world, with her enchanted spellbook-slash-diary as a companion, using her talent for shapeshifting to both fly and swim vast distances and blend in wherever she wanted.

Lira Song travelled far and wide for over two decades, across land and ocean, telling tales of her travels to every scholar and explorer she crossed paths with and sending home borderline novel-length letters recording her adventures on a regular basis. However, one day, she seemingly vanished without a trace while exploring some deep undersea ruins near the merfolk settlement of Orakoralo; though her enchanted spellbook found its way to a new master, no sign of Lira (or a body, or foul play) was ever seen again, at least in her original form...

[Anthr4xus]

Warm Current Flowing Through the Kelp Beds was a young merfolk that had the privilege of seeing some of the great traveling bard Lira Song's many performances around Orakoralo.  Her parents ran a kelp bar that hosted Lira Song upon her first arrival.  Warm Current was awestruck by the power and wonder demonstrated in both her stories and her magic.  Warm Current was aware enough of herself to realize that she had no bent for the arcane magic used by Song and similarly had not gift for performance.  She could spin a good story though, and her story carved shells were a popular item for travelers and locals alike.  

Taking inspiration from Song's story titled "Mistress of Lyric and Lyre", a detailed story of a bacchanalian cult that she had discovered in the steamy, sultry jungles of Seqwumpus Quall,  Warm Current began to pray to the Goddess of storytelling in earnest.  It was with some surprise that she found her prayers quickly answered by the Mistress herself.  The Mistress found Warm Current to be an ardent acolyte, and it is around this time that Warm Current story shells began to take a decidedly religious bent, although few of them referenced the Mistress directly.  It was not long before Warm Current manifested her first miracle, healing the grievous wounds of some of the warriors of Orakoralo after an attack by savage Octonekranes.  After this miracle she was given a vision, directing her to retrace Lira Song's travels to go back to Seqwumpus Quall and her main body of followers there.  Warm Current left her family and friends behind and made a journey few of Orakoralo besides the rare merchant to travel up onto dry land.  She found the experience interesting for the first ten minutes or so as he scales dried and warmed in the air, but tiresome for the rest of her time on the surface.  She often prayed to the Mistress for rain as the traveled, these inadvertent miracles providing a respite from a years long drought in many of the areas she traveled through.

It took her a couple years of circuitous traveling, swimming when and where she could, to find the route into the twisted vines and swampish jungle of the Quall.  Therein she eventually found the home of the cult, known as the Grove of Groove.  She spent many years in the Grove as the new chosen high priestess of the Mistress of Stories.  After nearly thirty years of peace and harmony and joy in their jungle home, the Crusaders of the Bloody Glaive found them and set to extinguish what they saw as a sinful blight in the eyes of their Glaivelorde, fit only to quench the thirst of the blooddrinker blades.  The cult broke and fled into the jungle.  Qarm Current was guided by her goddess to regather her scattered flock and led them back towards her homeland.  

Their travels became stories themselves, written and told and performed for the masses as they worked their way along the Tumultuous Sholes and south along the Pearl Coast.  While some of the cult members could travel with Warm Current back or Orakoralo, many survivors of the Grove founded a new home on the shores nearest Orakoralo, founding a new city called Lyrecry under the blessing and auspices of the Mistress of Lyric and Lyre.  This city would grow to become a strong trading partner with Orakoralo, as Warm Current and her followers were welcomed by the merfolk with open arms.  Having assured that the chosen of the Mistress would have a secure future, bolstered and supporting in turn her people under the waves, Warm Current chose to end her own story by following the old trail left by her original inspiration, Lira Song, and similarly vanished while exploring the Octonekrane ruins.