Player: Eric Contact:overbringer Age: 33 Current Characters: None, but I used to play Marisa ages ago
⌈ CHARACTER SECTION ⌉
Character: Samata Mahto Age: 26 OC Type: Pure OC Point Taken: After all the listed events in her backstory
World Building: Millennia ago, a swarm of nature spirits created the world together. They didn't have a reason to do it, or need one. A water spirit doesn't need a reason to create water. That's just what it does. They filled the world with oceans and mountains, then with forests and animals, and finally with people. Humans, elves, orcs, and others. It would be an exaggeration to say that everyone lived together in harmony, but life was simple, at least. Some people gave thanks to the spirits for creating the world, but they didn't expect anything in return.
And then one day organized religion fucked everything up.
The god Istavan, master of law and order and magic, found this young and untamed world, and found no other gods here, so he moved in. He inspired prophets to spread his message, and gained an ever increasing following on this world. It wasn't enough for him, though. Unsatisfied with the rate of new converts joining, Istavan inspired the Great Crusade. His followers took up arms and spread his message by force. This wasn't very popular, and the various tribes and nations of the world banded against the Istavanites. He was in danger of losing his foothold here.
So Istavan intervened directly. He gave the commanders of his armies the gift of sorcery, turning them and all their descendents into powerful magic users. When that also wasn't enough, Istavan grew desparate and unleashed armies of monsters upon the world. Backed by swarms of skeletons and dragons and shit, and armed with deadly arcane magic, the Istavanites crushed all opposition.
Firmly in control, Istavan remade the world the way he liked it. He separated all the races. The orcs lived over HERE on the plains. The elves lived over THERE in the forest. Everyone lived in their place. Separate, but equal. Between each nation, hordes of monsters roamed, patrolling the borders and making the mixing of cultures essentially impossible. Occasionally, a small band or lone individual might slip through, but they were not encouraged to stay.
Skip ahead a few hundred years. Everyone knows the story of how the scared and jealous spirits tried to stop the noble Istavan by unleashing monsters upon the world. Everyone knows how Istavan banished them to the badlands, saving them all. A few people still follow the old ways, but they keep it strictly to themselves for fear of reprisal and discrimination. The sorcerers, descendents of the commanders Istavan blessed with arcane power, form the ruling class of any nation they are in, for Istavan himself picked them out and placed them above normal people with their amazing powers.
This is the world that Samata was born into. A world of unchanging social structure, with the sorcerers and priests of Istavan ruling society and everyone else doing what they said.
Backstory: Samata is the daughter of a pair of rich wine merchants. They weren't sorcerers, but for commoners they were very well off. Her parents did their best to be supportive, so when Samata showed an interest in being a scholar, they sent her off to the capital, which had the best university in the land. Money, supportive parents, and a good education, aside from her lack of magic she had every advantage she could have in life.
Her life at the university was like any young student's. She learned a lot, made friends, went to parties, made stupid mistakes, bounced back from them all too quickly, found a boyfriend, and generally had a good time. Her degree was in natural philosophy (physics, basically) and her thesis was on the difference between magic and the animate force of life itself, which previously had been considered to just be the same thing. She called this new force Odic Force.
It all went wrong at her graduation party. Samata and some friends were at a tavern popular among students, laughing, drinking, and generally having a good time. One table over was another student. Walter Eberhart, a sorcerer, and the son of the University's headmaster. His magic manifested as blades of magical force that he could shoot out as projectiles, and in the hands of someone more courageous this would have made him a mighty warrior. Walter was a spoiled brat. He used his amazing gifts to show off at parties.
In this case, he was drunk, and trying to show off to his friends by slicing the top off of a bottle of wine with his mind. It took him three tries, because of the drunk, but he did it. Unfortunately, the other three shots went out further than he expected. Besides the bottle, Walter also cut down the front wall of the building, dropping debris on people walking by, blinded one of Samata's friends, and chopped Samata's left arm off at the shoulder. She got medical attention quickly, but there was no known way to reattach the arm. Walter used his connections with the aristocracy to get out of trouble for grievously maiming two fellow students and got out of it all with a slap on the wrist. They were just commoners, after all.
Samata was furious. She sought justice, but every person she talked to told her to let it go, even professors who she considered her friend. She did research and found that she was hardly the first person who had a story like this, but that it was always just swept up under the rug. Sorcerers could get away with whatever they wanted, because they held all the power. Even if they weren't all abusing the system like this, they were all complicit because none of them stepped forwards to try and stop this kind of behavior. As the world conspired against her, she slid into depression. Until one day, a few weeks later, while half heartedly poking at her thesis paper. Samata got an idea for a new project. She called for the aid of a medical student who was a friend of hers and enrolled for post-graduate work. The two of them spent many long hours working together, and eventually came up with a new treatment. A way to harness the magical energy in the air to power a prosthetic limb that would respond to nerve impulses.
However, while working on this project, Samata realized something. Magic reacted to odic force in everyone, not just in sorcerers. With the right preparations, you could manipulate magic and get it to work for you without a drop of magical talent in your body. She'd been less social since the accident, but now she basically just vanished from the world, spending all her time at the library or in her room, reading esoteric books and writing strange diagrams. She was developing an entirely new form of magic.
She emerged from her self imposed exile months later, with a functional mechanical arm to replace the one she lost, and the title of "Wizard". It was a word she made up from an old word meaning "Learned Scholar", since wizards gained their power from research and practice, as opposed to sorcerers who gained it from intuition and genetics. Wizard magic wasn't very powerful, and it was awkward to use at best, but as she kept practicing and researching, she kept getting better at it and realizing that there weren't any limits to what this new kind of magic could do. Potentially, at least. For the moment, she was still fumbling around with the basics.
She went on to start teaching this to other people, because if everyone could do magic, sorcerers wouldn't be special anymore. When the church of Istavan realized what she was doing, they outlawed wizardry. Samata didn't stop. Instead she hired a bodyguard and doubled down, searching for students all the harder. And so began Samata's true adventure, with the unlikely allies of an elderly berserker working on his anger issues, an outcast sorcerer on a quest for revenge, an elf trying to get home and disguising herself as a human, and a sympathetic religious scholar on one side, and an entire civilization backed up by a zealous god on the other.
Poor Istavan didn't stand a chance.
Aesthetically, think 3 parts Dungeons & Dragons, 2 part Les Miserables, and 1 part Fullmetal Alchemist.
Samata Mahto | "Class Warfare"
Player: Eric
Contact:
Age: 33
Current Characters: None, but I used to play Marisa ages ago
Character: Samata Mahto
Age: 26
OC Type: Pure OC
Point Taken: After all the listed events in her backstory
World Building: Millennia ago, a swarm of nature spirits created the world together. They didn't have a reason to do it, or need one. A water spirit doesn't need a reason to create water. That's just what it does. They filled the world with oceans and mountains, then with forests and animals, and finally with people. Humans, elves, orcs, and others. It would be an exaggeration to say that everyone lived together in harmony, but life was simple, at least. Some people gave thanks to the spirits for creating the world, but they didn't expect anything in return.
And then one day organized religion fucked everything up.
The god Istavan, master of law and order and magic, found this young and untamed world, and found no other gods here, so he moved in. He inspired prophets to spread his message, and gained an ever increasing following on this world. It wasn't enough for him, though. Unsatisfied with the rate of new converts joining, Istavan inspired the Great Crusade. His followers took up arms and spread his message by force. This wasn't very popular, and the various tribes and nations of the world banded against the Istavanites. He was in danger of losing his foothold here.
So Istavan intervened directly. He gave the commanders of his armies the gift of sorcery, turning them and all their descendents into powerful magic users. When that also wasn't enough, Istavan grew desparate and unleashed armies of monsters upon the world. Backed by swarms of skeletons and dragons and shit, and armed with deadly arcane magic, the Istavanites crushed all opposition.
Firmly in control, Istavan remade the world the way he liked it. He separated all the races. The orcs lived over HERE on the plains. The elves lived over THERE in the forest. Everyone lived in their place. Separate, but equal. Between each nation, hordes of monsters roamed, patrolling the borders and making the mixing of cultures essentially impossible. Occasionally, a small band or lone individual might slip through, but they were not encouraged to stay.
Skip ahead a few hundred years. Everyone knows the story of how the scared and jealous spirits tried to stop the noble Istavan by unleashing monsters upon the world. Everyone knows how Istavan banished them to the badlands, saving them all. A few people still follow the old ways, but they keep it strictly to themselves for fear of reprisal and discrimination. The sorcerers, descendents of the commanders Istavan blessed with arcane power, form the ruling class of any nation they are in, for Istavan himself picked them out and placed them above normal people with their amazing powers.
This is the world that Samata was born into. A world of unchanging social structure, with the sorcerers and priests of Istavan ruling society and everyone else doing what they said.
Backstory: Samata is the daughter of a pair of rich wine merchants. They weren't sorcerers, but for commoners they were very well off. Her parents did their best to be supportive, so when Samata showed an interest in being a scholar, they sent her off to the capital, which had the best university in the land. Money, supportive parents, and a good education, aside from her lack of magic she had every advantage she could have in life.
Her life at the university was like any young student's. She learned a lot, made friends, went to parties, made stupid mistakes, bounced back from them all too quickly, found a boyfriend, and generally had a good time. Her degree was in natural philosophy (physics, basically) and her thesis was on the difference between magic and the animate force of life itself, which previously had been considered to just be the same thing. She called this new force Odic Force.
It all went wrong at her graduation party. Samata and some friends were at a tavern popular among students, laughing, drinking, and generally having a good time. One table over was another student. Walter Eberhart, a sorcerer, and the son of the University's headmaster. His magic manifested as blades of magical force that he could shoot out as projectiles, and in the hands of someone more courageous this would have made him a mighty warrior. Walter was a spoiled brat. He used his amazing gifts to show off at parties.
In this case, he was drunk, and trying to show off to his friends by slicing the top off of a bottle of wine with his mind. It took him three tries, because of the drunk, but he did it. Unfortunately, the other three shots went out further than he expected. Besides the bottle, Walter also cut down the front wall of the building, dropping debris on people walking by, blinded one of Samata's friends, and chopped Samata's left arm off at the shoulder. She got medical attention quickly, but there was no known way to reattach the arm. Walter used his connections with the aristocracy to get out of trouble for grievously maiming two fellow students and got out of it all with a slap on the wrist. They were just commoners, after all.
Samata was furious. She sought justice, but every person she talked to told her to let it go, even professors who she considered her friend. She did research and found that she was hardly the first person who had a story like this, but that it was always just swept up under the rug. Sorcerers could get away with whatever they wanted, because they held all the power. Even if they weren't all abusing the system like this, they were all complicit because none of them stepped forwards to try and stop this kind of behavior. As the world conspired against her, she slid into depression. Until one day, a few weeks later, while half heartedly poking at her thesis paper. Samata got an idea for a new project. She called for the aid of a medical student who was a friend of hers and enrolled for post-graduate work. The two of them spent many long hours working together, and eventually came up with a new treatment. A way to harness the magical energy in the air to power a prosthetic limb that would respond to nerve impulses.
However, while working on this project, Samata realized something. Magic reacted to odic force in everyone, not just in sorcerers. With the right preparations, you could manipulate magic and get it to work for you without a drop of magical talent in your body. She'd been less social since the accident, but now she basically just vanished from the world, spending all her time at the library or in her room, reading esoteric books and writing strange diagrams. She was developing an entirely new form of magic.
She emerged from her self imposed exile months later, with a functional mechanical arm to replace the one she lost, and the title of "Wizard". It was a word she made up from an old word meaning "Learned Scholar", since wizards gained their power from research and practice, as opposed to sorcerers who gained it from intuition and genetics. Wizard magic wasn't very powerful, and it was awkward to use at best, but as she kept practicing and researching, she kept getting better at it and realizing that there weren't any limits to what this new kind of magic could do. Potentially, at least. For the moment, she was still fumbling around with the basics.
She went on to start teaching this to other people, because if everyone could do magic, sorcerers wouldn't be special anymore. When the church of Istavan realized what she was doing, they outlawed wizardry. Samata didn't stop. Instead she hired a bodyguard and doubled down, searching for students all the harder. And so began Samata's true adventure, with the unlikely allies of an elderly berserker working on his anger issues, an outcast sorcerer on a quest for revenge, an elf trying to get home and disguising herself as a human, and a sympathetic religious scholar on one side, and an entire civilization backed up by a zealous god on the other.
Poor Istavan didn't stand a chance.
Aesthetically, think 3 parts Dungeons & Dragons, 2 part Les Miserables, and 1 part Fullmetal Alchemist.