Character creation for upcoming arc's

So, we have this arc wrapping up and will move on to the ‘war’ arc the emperor mentioned after a small break for more normal exploring and delving.

WHAT DOES THAT MEAN FOR YOU? The Tier 15Patrons can make characters, so this is a great time to get them in for some good old PVP.

Also note that there will be a time skip (Maybe one big one or smaller little ones) and the arc after the 'war one' will be them at Tier 10 and in the last Path only Tournament to show off the promising youths before the pace gets a little too quick and a lot of them fall off.

YOU CAN HAVE THEM IN BOTH IF YOU WANT just make a note that they are on the path and what skills they would use at the Tier 5-6 for the war and what they would use at Tier 10 with a full set of lower lever skills.

Speaking of skills, you can make up nearly anything you want. Just note I'll change and modify skills if they are stronger than what I feel is Tier 8 material. [Fireball] is Tier 8, something like [Flamethrower] or [Meteor] would be much higher. I don't have firm rules for what would fall where so go wild.

TALENTS!!!! Talents can do anything really just not bring back the dead and time travel. Those are my only two hard no's.

FINAL NOTE. You can have the info as simple or as complex as you want it. Someone gave me a 6 page google document that is full of background and skills and their personality. It's great and amazing so they are going to stick around for quite a while as they seem really fun. If you give me a simple bob who uses wind magic, they probably won't get as much screen time as a fully fleshed out character.

WHAT DO I NEED? AND WHERE DO I NEED IT?

NAME:

AGE:

GENDER:

APPEARANCE:

PATH OR NOT (If not can’t be tourney):

TALENTS:

SKILLS USED:

BACKGROUND:

If not in tourney they can be in the "WAR" but you need to pick a side of which vassal kingdom you want them on. The Alliance of Allied Queens (the attackers) or Seven Suns (defender and the kingdom we are in now).

The tourney will be Tier 10 War is Tier 5-6.

PM ME ON DISCORD (preferred), OR PATREON. If you chose discord please have you discord account linked with patron so I can see you Tier. Or at least let me know 

How to link discord and discord link: 

https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/212052266-Get-my-Discord-role  

Discord link: https://discord.gg/6ukhCjayC5

No rush for the tourney but I need the chars in the next few weeks for the war arc.

Look here for a super well done character sheet.

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NAME: Alexi Smerk

AGE: 20+

GENDER: Attack helicopter. (Or female will do)

PATH OR NOT (If not can’t be tourney): Path, could work together with other characters or solo

TALENTS:

T1: If at first you don’t succeed...

Any failed use of a skill refunds half its mana cost. (This includes attempts at crafting but only the mana part, not any materials and obviously if their mana cap is full the refund goes to waste). A failed use is any use that does not hit its intended target or includes said target in its area of effect or if the target resists the effect to the point of nothing happening. Note that the mana-refund happens even if she uses a mana stone to power an item to use an item-based skill and the 'refund' doesn’t have to go back to the original vessel, she could use her own mana and direct the refund into a mana stone to achieve a charge-efficiency of 50%, which is usually quite a bit better than what mana stones have. Or she could fire off an item-skill powered by a mana stone and direct the refund into her personal mana pool without ill consequences. This makes her able to use/exploit mana-storage devices in ways others would find prohibitive, but she still has to pay like a normal person to acquire those mana stones and can still only at best get 50% of the mana she spends back.

T3: Try, try again!

Each time you successfully use a skill on the same target past the first time, the effects double in potency. This makes them arguably the king of spamming the same move multiple times, but unlike Matt they don’t have infinite mana to make it too Op. This would work with crafting except that you usually cannot craft the same item, from the exact same raw materials, twice, let alone more times. She did try once to assemble an item from raw materials, break it back down into base components and re-building it again... Sadly to her disappointment this did not result in her obtaining two items though the one item she got did wind up with a bump in quality. However most crafting projects aren’t exactly reversible like this, so it is not really a practical way for her to 'hax' her way to overgeared status.

SKILLS USED:

· Hidden snare: sets up a small invisible loop of force that lasts for an hour, triggered or not. When a living creature or part thereof steps inside the loop it constricts and tries to anchor the prey in place. It does no damage on its own but Alexi will often build trap-items that incorporate a use of this skill and link it to something else like an audible alarm signal or an explosive charge. The snare itself is relatively weak, the skill meant more for snaring small prey for food than as a combat tool but with her talent, a single target that manages to set off multiple snares should find themselves eventually unable to break free. It remains vulnerable to dispelling efforts, however.

· Charged bolt: Or another basic, common as dirt type attack spell. Not fancy but helps her dish out some damage if her real gear is unavailable. Would go for electricity over other elements because it can be used to start fires and the like for utility but can also stun targets if she can build up uses with her talent.

·  (re)Active barrier: spend mana to conjure a short-lived barrier around the user for 5 seconds or so. If the barrier is struck during this time the barrier explodes outwards, deflecting or at least blunting the triggering attack and potentially harming the attacker (or anyone else nearby). Downside is that even with her talent mana is refunded only if the shield explodes but fails to hit the one who triggered it. Also, the shield must be activated before an attack lands and is short lived so can’t simply be kept up. Furthermore, while it is up moving too fast risks triggering the shield when her feet impact on the ground or other surfaces. This last part she could potentially use to her advantage by triggering the shield herself to create noise or a visible blast of energy for distraction or signaling purposes? Ultimately the blast is limited in reach and is meant Mostly to stop incoming attacks and dissuade attackers though of course with her talent a repeat offender may quickly find that hitting her hurts them more than it harms her.

· Healing touch: some basic healing skill that allows her to heal others or herself for modest mana cost. Thanks to her talent using this skill on herself will be stupid efficient in terms of mana to flesh healed. However, she lacks the overhealing trait on the skill to spare her from potentially exhausting herself when healing severe injuries, still better than nothing.

· Harvester: This utility skill lets the user extract desirable materials from a raw source. It can be used to harvest monster parts, herbs etc. but Alexis favors using it on ore veins because these are usually large enough where she can’t harvest the entire thing with a single skill use. For this skill her talent does not increase the total available materials harvested, no getting 10 pounds of iron out of a 5-pound ore vein. However subsequent uses of the skill will improve the purity of the ore extracted. Say a vein's purity is 2% at base, pretty shit in other words. First use yields about 200 grams of ore mixed with impurities, about 2% of it being iron. Second use yields 200 grams of material, but this time 4% of it is iron then 8% and so on. This trick lets her extract relatively high-quality ore chunks from not so pure ore veins which she can then sell for money or use for her crafting. Abusing this skill to hunt for useful metals in places most people don’t consider worthwhile digging in is how she makes money to acquire funds to help her progress along the path. She still has to find actual ore veins to harvest from, so this isn’t actually a way to print money, she's just able to get usable/sellable yields from veins that most people would consider a waste of time.

o Crafting: Not a Skill per say, Alexis has an active interest in crafting. Alexi as an adventurer on the path however, she doesn’t have time to truly immerse herself into the art of making stuff but she is interested in getting further into that field for that kind of thing if/when she falls off of the path. Until then she specializes in creating her own designs plans and blueprints, often for small disposable items she can pay a local crafter to whip up for her in a few days to use on her adventures (non-standard format flash grenades and other throwables are a favorite. An extendable pole/rod that can be used as a more portable staff for poking or to brace against the walls of a pit so she can potentially use two rods to climb up/down said pit, for whacking someone over the head in a pinch etc. One of those things she came up with or ran across and keeps finding new uses for. Trip-mines or snares with more oomph than her skill-based one are also favored investments for her. Her reactive barrier skill makes her relatively fearless of setting off grenades in enclosed environments as well.

BACKGROUND:

Alexi was a child of the streets, not quite in the sense of being homeless and starving and having to fight for a taste of moldy bread. But kids in her city either joined a gang, got used by a gang or had a family and/or key resources to leverage with the local gangs to allow them a certain degree of independence. For Alexis her parents had the trade skills to build and repair common appliances and machinery as well as do maintenance work on tools and facilities, it made them a cornerstone of the local community where everyone eventually has something they need fixed and only so much money they can afford to spend in the process. As a result, Alexis was relatively welcome to 'hang' or get along with most gangs and could even travel between them in exchange for helping to hook a gang crib into the city grid for 'free cable' or patching something that either broke down or someone broke while drunk. This is not to say that she didn’t have people try to mess with her at times, either in a foolish attempt to get her to make weapons for someone or even the occasional asshole who wanted a less than professional interaction and wasn’t taking no for an answer. Between having friends in low places and learning a thing or two from them (and the flash-stick which was her first actual weaponized creation of sorts) she never suffered a setback where the other party wasn’t notably worse off or at least one she could not walk away from (or at least limp stoically). By the time she wound up getting sponsored for the path (a story I would write out if she was the mc for a side story or something but suffice to say it probably involves a fateful encounter with a tier 5+ Pather who saw something in her and gave her the opportunity.) Alexis has a robust spread of skills (not the kind in shards) angled at situational awareness, preparing for trouble before it comes her way (and quick legs for when something surprises her), and some pretty decent social skills for making good first impressions and blending into various groups which serves her well on the path for gathering information and avoiding too-troublesome parts of a new town or region rather than trying to figure this stuff out the hard way.

Personality wise, Alexis is friendly, outgoing and happy to help people, she is not a sucker however and should know a scam when she smells one. Likewise while she will try to help people in need she will also be firm that they need to pay her back in an appropriate way if at all possible. Her one exception to this are kids too young to fend for themselves or who she doesn’t think should suffer for the shortcomings or poor fortune of their parents who she’ll usually try to help for a token reward or even no reward if she thinks she can get away with it.
When dealing with people trying to bother her, she’ll change her approach to suit what seems to be the local culture… If that means she’s got to pretend to be meek and humble. If better results and respect is to be had by verbally roasting the other party until they cant even be mad anymore she’ll hold nothing back in terms of eloquence and she’s fairly good at getting a read on people and how to best get herself heard and cooperated with.

Combat wise, Alexis prefers to fight at range like a mage or archer type over hand to hand mostly because she lacks skills specialized for or truly noteworthy talents for doing things up close, not that she wont or cant hand someone their ass with her fists or a kick to the shins, but she knows her strengths lay in laying in multiple uses of a skill into a target and this is naturally a bit easier to do reliably at a distance. To the same extent of giving herself time she enjoys using traps or crowd-control type devices to impair or pin enemies down, be it a glue-bomb or flashbangs, a target that cant get to her is a target she knows she can bring down eventually.
Like with how she navigates crowds of different culture, she’s fairly adept at quickly taking the measure of her opponent be it monster or especially if it is another person and picking a tactic most suited to leveraging whatever advantages she seems to have over them. (if there are none apparent her default choice is to make an expeditious retreat).

Cultivation wise Alexis goes in for the 50/50 split, preferring to have the physique to go where she needs to with a slight emphasis on agility and reaction times and a decent cache of stamina. Magically she prefers having a larger mana supply over trying to concentrate the stuff since being able to fire off more skill uses will quickly have more of an effect than any incremental boost of having fewer skill uses with a higher mana concentration. She doesn’t skimp on regen though since downtime is bad time.

Tools of her trade: Her favored weapon is the Maul-caster, a hefty, oversized rod that could arguably be a staff due to its mass, resembling a heavy mace with a Morningstar-style head, though in lieu of spikes the rounded head has a total of 25 apertures for discharging basic attack spells, since the apertures do not all face the same direction the only way to make all 25 casts hit the same target is to build the tool with a self-guiding attack spell incorporated. The tool has a compartment fit for storing a mana stone to supplement the user's mana for using the tool and the shard can be quickly replaced if needed in battle. This feature was more necessary for Alexis at her lower tiers, when casting 25 of such a basic spell would constitute a more significant chunk of her total mana, but it still has proven useful enough that she keeps a number of mana shards in her belt/pack for reloading for those days when the trouble keeps trying to get her into it. Her current model of Maul-caster comes with 2 attack skills built in. One is a magic missile type which fires an energy bolt that will self-guide towards the intended target and strike them for damage, overall damage is reduced to accommodate the guiding feature but with so many simultaneous casts and Alexis's talent, even targets her current tier cant typically handle more than a few barrages if caught in the open. Projectiles can be blocked using barriers or held shields or objects and are pretty 'dumb', though they will go for small openings in any obstruction if the target can be seen through said openings. Also any object used in this fashion Does count as a target affected by the skill and so will be subject to escalating damage as well. The second attack skill is based on a cracked version of a homing icicle type skill, Snowblast. Instead of firing a homing, piercing icicle this skill instead fires a homing snowball that saps target endurance in a non-lethal way and chills them slightly which can slow targets down if used in numbers, much as the Maul-caster is made to do. It is a non-lethal option she will use when sparring or fighting a match that isn’t supposed to be to the death as the missile swarm mode is very hard to regulate... She has no way to only fire 2-5 bolts, all 25 fire off with each mental triggering of the tool and given the compounding effect it’s much easier for her to kill than to merely disable someone with the lethal mode. She also finds good utility with using the snowball mode to incapacitate monster or animal prey so she can then slit their throat or execute them safely in a way that doesn’t damage the corpse.

For secondary weapons she has two: vibro-gauntlets, these knuckle guarding gloves will discharge harmful vibrations into anyone struck, repeated applications trigger increasingly harmful resonance which is made even more potent by her talent multiplying the potency of the effect. While sub-par tools for handling a crowd of assailants and not good for an instant-takedown, if a hostile brawler cant take her down quickly or avoid her strikes she can build up some serious damage fast despite not having exceptional physical strength for someone her tier. The second tool is based on the first weapon-like device she ever made, calling it a flash-stick or flasher, its essentially a baton-sized flashlight where the light-projector has been tweaked to produce brief but blindingly intense bursts of light in one direction while the other end of the tube has metal prongs that can be charged to tazze someone with. The rod itself is also sturdy enough to be used as a non-lethal bludgeon in a pinch (it would Not, for example, be sturdy enough to break golems, armor or like hard targets for very long but will hold up just fine for bruising flesh or breaking bones that aren’t abnormally durable for their tier) She generally makes sure to get a craftsman to plate or rebuild her flash stick with higher tier materials anytime she can find some and/or afford to, considering it a good luck charm for herself.

Beyond the fancy stuff mentioned above, Alexis will generally not be caught without a knife or two utility or emergency/combat usage, she's also proficient at making herself a staff-sling out of whatever she can find to let her launch grenades, home-made explosives or other throwable ordinance further than she could with her bare hands and is fairly accurate this way to boot. She's also very well practiced with throwing things, whether they explode or not, with said bare hands and is not above cracking someone's head open with a well placed tier 6 rock, piece of pipe or wood or even glass shards.

On her personal Wishlist is a skill she can use to augment her throwing talents, again hoping to exploit her T3 talent but she hasn’t had the fortune to find something that'll work well for her yet. Likewise she would love a skill that lets her mend or repair magical equipment (repairing or modifying mundane stuff she's quite capable of doing herself usually).

The above is written for having her show up during the war.. in which case she'd probably be fighting on the empire/Matt's side rather than against him, his ability to recharge mana stones + her maul-caster could make for some absolutely Stupid magic missile spam or the mother of all snowball barrages, though I don’t imagine she'll get to learn his secret.

If introduced for the tournament, a tier 10 version of her would probably have a melee gadget consisting of an enchanted handle/grip with a disposable mace-like shaft and striking head. The purpose of the enchantment is to 'store' the kinetic energy from an impact in the weapon head, because the skill applies its effects to the mace head, not the target struck, the effect compounds exponentially due to her talent but has the downside that when the trapped kinetic energy is discharged, the backlash tends to destroy the mace head, thankfully she should bring a good dozen spares to an arena fight. Also maybe add some devious quick-deployment type trap items make parts of the arena hazardous to her enemy and give her more time to stack up skill usages with either her maul-caster or the stick-maker (named so because after the head explodes, the remaining shaft does technically qualify as a stick).

If not in tourney they can be in the "WAR"

tourney will be Tier 10 War is Tier 5-6.