Home of the Soul Cookie

Last night Jay wrapped up his Wednesday night D&D campaign, which he started running 20 or 21 months ago as a sequel to his long-running game from when D&D 3rd Edition came out.

Thus, I shall be retiring my character from that game, the abrasive, dimension-hopping, know-it-all wizard-cum-planeshifter Jenya Elise Terym, also known to the world-at-large as “Lady Jet.”

From the beginning of the campaign, when the PCs (player characters) were enlisted in the civil defense force of a small city called Roseton, Jenya never quite fit in with her comrades. She had theories for just about every circumstance the group encountered, and wasn’t shy about sharing them. It didn’t help matters much that the fledgling mage, with her genius-level intellect, was so often amazingly accurate in her analyses.

Jet encounted friction with Ceylon Vareska (played by Kris), the nimble elf who juggled a laundry list of paranoid conspiracy theories; and felt a mixture of contempt, pity, and comaraderie for Kaulri Oinsdotter (played by Troll), the errant heir to the mantle of “queen of the barbarian hordes” to the north, whose many tribes had fallen under the malevolent dominion of a dark god named Krad’bok’tel.

Despite all that, Jenya grew to be the de facto leader of the party, a role that she happily accepted. After all, who better to lead than the smartest one among them? And that’s what got her in trouble early in her career:

The party had recovered a mace of blood from an evil cultist, and Jenya had volunteered to carry the magic item as they made their way back to their home base. Unfortunately, she didn’t know all the details of the mace’s curse…

Mace of Blood: This +3 heavy mace must be coated in blood every day, or its bonus fades away (until the mace is coated again). The character using this mace must make a DC 13 Will save every day it is within his possession or become chaotic evil.

Moderate abjuration; CL 8th; Craft Magic Arms and Armor, creator must be at least 9th level and chaotic evil; Price 16,000 gp.

Guess what happened? Yep: Jenya fell victim to the item’s fell influence, sliding quite easily into evil. Instead of treating her like a cackling proponent of “bwah-ha-HA!” evil, I had her succumb to new heights (and depths) of hubris.

Gone was the begruding acknowledgment that her fellow party members, while nowhere near as smart as she, had sometimes given valuable input; instead, she came to believe that she was the one who saw the way things really were, the way the world really worked. Indeed, to her, she was the only one who could move in and out of circumstances without repercussion. Concerns of right and wrong became, in her mind, labels that the less capable bandied about for their own self-preservation, crutches for her lessers.

And so that led to an alliance with a vile necromancer named “Lady Twilight,” who promised Jenya power without restraint, and to a dalliance with Twilight’s vampiric lieutenant, who offered Jet trysts with restraints. It was the best time of Jenya’s life…

…until Jenya decided that she didn’t really need to be beholden to her necromantic benefactor, and earned a long-standing nemesis.

It was some time later, after the party had won the respect and favor of a fledgling goddess (“Always good to have a god in your pocket” was my character’s take on the matter), Jenya was restored to her previous moral outlook via divine intervention. The mage was sent reeling, but not out of some newfound need for atonement:

Mostly, she was pissed at the hole she’d dug for herself.

(Only Ceylon was privy to the full details of her activities, the elf having secretly spied on the mage during one of her “interviews” with the vampire, and Jet managed to keep secret for several years of in-game time.)

Still, she recovered nicely, and aside from a few disagreements along the way¹, Jenya remained the decisive voice of reason in the group, parlaying her wizarding abilities into those of a planeshifter, one who walks among the infinite worlds of the multiverse as easily as others cross the room.

The campaign culminated last night with the final defeat of Lady Twilight, the voluntary exile to “other realms” of the entire pantheon of gods (good, evil, and otherwise), and Jenya’s voluntary self-sacrifice, in which she gave her life to become the guiding intelligence for a demiplane (a pocket dimension, if you will) designed to seal the world off from and to ward it against incursions from other, more hellish planes.

So Jenya is gone, but her spirit lives on.

Literally.

It’s strange… Reaching the campaign’s conclusion (the timing of which was catalyzed in no small part by my impending departure) has driven home what I’m leaving behind far more starkly than a lot of other things.

I’m leaving my job? Okay.

I won’t have to live through triple-digit temperatures half the year? Hallelujah.

I’m not going to be gaming with these folks almost every day of the week? Ouch.

So this is a tip o’ the hat to Jason to running yet another fantastic game, and to the players that shared the table with me (there were ten of us in total over the life of the campaign), especially Kris and Troll, with whom I was part of the core triumvirate of players. It was fun, guys, and I’ll miss it more than I’ll likely be able to explain to the others that read this post.

1. One time, we encounted some of Kaulri’s tribal kinsmen who were still marginally under the yoke of Krad’bok’tel. The meeting was a bloody fight in which our party killed most of their number. Kaulri, who was actively pursuing the whole “I am your rightful queen” thing at the time, decided to let them go, despite their loud warnings that they would rally the people to oppose her.

Kaulri never truly forgave Jenya for her actions that day. Jenya, for her part, never forgave the gods to choosing that moment to get involved. (“Where were you when Krad’bok’tel took over?”)