Rina
Member since: 2012Okay I'm gonna...put a thing here I guess. And try not to get carried away. Eep.
But! Yes! As it may be obvious, I play in the same game that Tusserk does (also with the little-seen SWAG member Klopan, who I happen to be dating). It's apparently the Legacy System, and I think it's a d20 thing as well? Putting all my cards on the table, I'd never played a tabletop RPG in my life before being invited to this one. Roleplaying, sure, but never with a rules sytem or dice rolling or a universe I did not completely come up with myself or create without any rules whatsoever. I'm still 100% convinced that when my boyfriend invited me to play with the current campaign, NONE OF THEM had any idea what they were inviting amoungst them...
Funnily enough, I also managed to pick character details that were the most vague of vague vagueness too. Our GM pretty much sat me down with a list of things that 'seemed good' and I pretty much ended up picking everything on the basis of 'I like cowboys' and 'oh yeah that sounds cool why not'. Thus 'magical cowboy space chicken' jokes.
I ended up picking a species that has only ONE canon example, and if there is anything I can say about Vegere, it is that nothing about her can truly be used as a solid example of the Fosh as a race. I ended up remaking/creating them for my own ends, and I will absolutely never claim that anything I come up with has any solid girth to it when held up to the lack of information there is in canon star wars information to begin with. Evi ended up growing up alone, being seperated from her family when Fosh colonies were under attack when she was about 5 and ended up adrift with orphans when she ended up seperated from all of her family and any member of her species through unknown but nonetheless tragic circumstances. Thus, I had a character that did not have to be dependant on the complete LACK of Fosh information.
Afterward Evi slowly discovered extremely minor Force abilities through gentle instruction, and was found by a travelling Shaper of Kro Var. The Shapers (while also having a title that easily confuses me when also referring to the Vong) are, according to the entry in the PDF and wookiepedia, very battle-orientated force users who are finely attuned to the elements. Apparently each Shaper also has a 'core' element, which made it easy for me since Evi would clearly be attuned to air. Because she's a bird alien. Get it? Yeah I am totally funny. I'd also created a Master for her who was fire attuned, but she does not play any role other than motivating Evi directly in the story. Being able to use Kro Var force powers is pretty much just a case of looking over the force powers list and just describing it like I am watching an episode of Avatar: the Last Airbender. One day I'd wanted to get away with having Evi do something like that fake battle scene in Twilight where there was a giant gaping hole in the earth with lava pooling around but...There is no guarantee of that anymore.
Her Master was a person of wild extremes, and eventually Evi reached a clash in philosophy with her Master and the understanding of the Force that Evi was sent off-planet (something the PDF also said was quite common for Shapers!) Adventures from then on included ending up trapped in a warzone-barricaded town and meeting a certain varactyl, burning tons and tons of supplies and slowly becoming a scoundrel.
A few years after leaving Kro Var, Evi comes to a Chiss trading port/planet (created purely for background/story reasons) named Yelle and meets someone who knows what she is. As in, knows that she is Fosh. Enter Dr. Neil Deschain, xeno-archeologist, biologist and in employ by the Chiss Empire for information on any alien species he can get his claws on. He is unfortunately deeply passionate about his work, and obsesses over Evi as much as the folks from Jurrasic Park did when they see living breathing dinosaurs walking around. Complications and unintentional manipulation occur and the Chiss decide they want to get their hands on this supposedly extinct species. Deschain is lied to and gives away Evis' location- however having the Force on her side allows Evi to get away by the skin of her teeth.
And thus, I got to add monumental xenophobia and paranoia toward Chiss to my characters list of faults.
Initially Evi was not as horrible of a person as she ended up becoming, but after enough time in-game of getting a feel for her and sticking with behavioural traits (and then backtracking from there to find roots and motivations for her actions and feelings) she ended up becoming very tragic but really frustrating. One day I decided that it would be cool to play with this 'force empathy' thing, and the idea ended up excecuted as such:
Through many, many, MANY years of neglecting her Force training and avoiding anything that would actually put strain on the empathic talents of a Force user, Evi ended up reducing her mental fortitude down to the point where she was completely unable to keep out the thoughts and emotions of those around her. This would get worse and worse depending on her personal attunement to an individual, or how in tune to the Force she was at the time. At the most extreme of these requirements, Evi would go through a white-out, and she would completely accept any feelings, thoughts or emotions happening around her as her own. No room for her own thought or reactions, except when she had the time to sit down and think very carefully on it later. Even then, it wasn't even a case of rejecting the reactions, but rather trying to force herself to dismiss it (as easy as rejecting a thouht that for all intents and purposes your mind accepts as one it generated itself is).
This proved to be very, very fun and was the solid peg in the level that I was setting Evi at. Completely dissmissive of her own problems and issues. Prone to flee and accepts running as the obvious solution nine times out of ten. This also led her to disbelieve anything that she did genuinly feel herself, telling herself it was simply bleedthrough from someone else no mater how true the feeling might be. Lots of emotional turmoil, for sure. This led to immense confusion on her part, a short drug problem, and then having to endure a 'solution' that has reduced even me to feeling SO SAD ABOUT ALL OF IT.
I am trying not to make this too long but aahhh for now I shall shut up. I've fleshed out so many small parts of Evis' story, down to the dynamics of the Shapers and Deschains process of discovery and I've gone crazy creating the Fosh (Empire? Race? Parliment? I'm not comletely sure what to label them.) At a different time, in a shorter entry, if anyone is perhaps interested, I can babble about those things as well.
Consider yourself encouraged to keep going :)
Oh hey-- does this mean that Ora was hangin' with Evi while the Deschain stuff was going on? And they got away together?
Ahaha yup- Ora was also the major reason Evi could make up excuses not to stay with him before all that crazy went down XD
(I'll chuck this into another comment page/post/thing, shall I?)
Starting as 'early' as I dare with Evis' overall timeline, I actually have gone quite in-depth with the Shapers of Kro Var and the dynamics of the students themselves.
Since I was such a brilliant person and picked a Force dicipline with a couple of paragraphs of information and that's it- I kinda went and fleshed it out a lot on my own. As said before, the PDF and the wookiepedia page describe Kro Var Shapers as dark-side oriented, but since the purpose of their training is actually as battle shamans and the fight is primarily against either other Shapers or any other elements that Force users would have to face on Kro Var, I left it as more of a 'MOST students are drawn to the dark side' kind of scenario. As in, it is typical and not unexpected, but not using the darkside is just as humdrum. If you went around talking like a Jedi, then people might start looking at you funny.
Evi trained with the Shapers from when she was about 6 years old, to about 18 ('about', because Evi has never actually been sure how old she is). Clearly, that was a HUGE chunk of time, and influenced her heavily as far as behavioural patterns and treating strangers. Being small, older than the rest of her 'class', and extremely alien to all the other training Shapers, Evi faced a lot of teasing and alienation as a child. Not to say she didn't make friends, or at least allies, but they were never very deep or lasted very long. Eventually, Evi became very violent and spiteful toward the other Shapers and started picking fights. This would not have been that big a deal, except after a time Evi began to hurt students rather extensively (on the basis that, because she started so many fights, clearly she needed to be knocked down a peg and every fight she ended up in got harder and harder and she would just get angrier and angrier). This just ended up pushing anyone who was even offhandly friendly toward her into avoiding her completely, lest they end up drawn into the fights as well.
Shapers are described as having a core element, and I like to think this affects the movement and execution of power and elements for an individual. The concept of the Shapers is pretty much ripped off really heavily from Avatar: The Last Airbender, but also has ideas about the Force that are covered in Traitor, and also ideas about the flow of energy and the 'mindset' of battle that I have taken from a type of martial arts I have studied myself for many years. Funnily enough, the 'dark side' kind of elements of it come mostly from my martial arts expirience, because you usually do a form really well if you just imagine that you're slicing someone you REALLY don't like in half XD it's actually quite motivating.
The Master Shapers, either unwilling or legitimetly unsure how to handle Evi, decided to send her away to train with one of the hermit Masters.
This Master (known only as that for the whole time Evi has ever known her) was the exceedingly impatient type. 'Training' was brutal, highly philosophical, and clearly beyond what Evi could actually handle. Enough time passed that Evi found herself at a complete clash with her Master about the understanding of the Force, and (for lack of a better word) her lack of 'faith'.
Shapers are described as commonly leaving Kro Var to travel for many reasons, and Evi was sent off to find her own understanding and balance of the Force and to 'find something to believe in'.
I will not bother to describe the Masters' Force Philosophy because I am not sure it makes sense to anyone other than me and the person that the...Master is actually based on- but it amounts to describing the Force as a drug, and the point is to find the perfect axis point between 'self' and the power of the Force. I am actually trying really hard not to type too much aaaahhhh my bad my bad my bad