Whimsical
Explorer
My fellow PC, Trax the Ranger, has a brother who he thought died when Trax was a child. We have found him and he is a serious mess mentally. We are trying to help him.
Armbuster is a master ranger without an arm. He drinks every night, wandering the land in a stupor. He takes out ogres easily, but does it to loot them to pay for his drinking habits and lifestyle. He's a paranoid drunk jerk who hates elves (elves have a campaign role similar to cold war Soviets had with America). He considers himself to be a pathetic armless freak and feels disgraced.
It turns out that when Trax was a child, Armbuster learned through an old woman with prophecy that Trax would be hunted by the dreadords (powerful deadly elves.) Armbuster went with his fellow adventurers to take out the dreadlords, but they failed in a colossal manner. All of his companions were killed, but he was kept alive purposely. He was tortured, had his arm cut off, then released. After this, he never returned home and wandered around in his pathectic state ever since.
Talking with his brother, all we get is demands that Trax stop "playing with elves," and go home to their father. He regards himself as a freak and will not come home or come with us. After a lot of dialog and a fistfight between Trax and Armbuster, we have persuaded him to come with us to his father because the elves are harming him. We scryed his father and discovered that the elves are keeping him diseased. We determined that they are using their father as bait for us so that they can ambush us, but our plan is to ambush the ambushers. While we have Armbuster with us, we are trying to help him.
We are around 10th level. We have survived several encounters with murdering elves, but have yet to face off with a dreadlord. The elves are trying to kill us because we are anakah. Anakah are immune to fate and the gods cannot forsee what the effects of our lives are going to be. The elven god in particular is working to kill us. In fact, the campaign started by having the PCs striken from reality. But the universe insist that Anakah exists, and we appeared two weeks later. Ever since then, we have been on the run from the elves while we find clues about ourselves and our destiny. The humiliation of his brother is simply one part of their psychological attack upon us. They want us to give up hope.
This is my armchair psychoanalysis of Armbuster. He has been essentially raped by the dreadlords. His missing arm is a perpetually visible badge of shame of that highly tramautic event, symbolizing his colossal failure to help his brother and mocking the pride he had in himself, his personal ability, his physicallity, and his role as a protector and as a man. Unfortunately, they used a miracle to keep the arm from being regenerated, so we are going to have to do this the hard way.
I believe that he will reject any efforts to build him up because he feels responsible for what happened and he is trying to protect himself and people he cares about from himself because his overconfidence and pride led to the deaths of his companions. I believe that because the elves successfully broke him, and his primal brain is simply trying to keep him from doing anything that puts him in the place of confidence so that he will be as far away as possible from even possibly repeating that terrible experience. I also believe that this has also manifested a hatred toward his brother that he is not willing to admit at this time. We have indication from the old woman that he has misplaced anger.
As part of our attempts to help him, Trax will be working with him as a loving brother. I (social bard/rogue) will be using my decent Diplomacy and Sense Motive to help him reshape the events in a new context and help him find a new way to look at himself and his life. He is concentrating too much on what he is not, while ignoring what he is. The cleric of God (essentially fantasy Christiantiy) will be trying to bring him to God. I will be assisting them with continuous Inspire Competance and Diplomacy skill assists through a message spell.
I recommended to Trax that he should thank his brother for his bravery and sacrifice.
I will be having Armbuster tell us about each of his companions. Hopefully by properly honoring them in memorum and reframing their deaths as a result of a path that they have willingly chosen, he can put them to rest.
But I am looking for more insights, ideas, and suggestions. This is essentially a puzzle-solving scenario, and I don't know what the DM has in mind as the key to restoring this NPC, or if he even thinks that we can do anything at all. But I'm trying to come up with a very strong effort for us to do and hopefully we can pull it off.
Armbuster is a master ranger without an arm. He drinks every night, wandering the land in a stupor. He takes out ogres easily, but does it to loot them to pay for his drinking habits and lifestyle. He's a paranoid drunk jerk who hates elves (elves have a campaign role similar to cold war Soviets had with America). He considers himself to be a pathetic armless freak and feels disgraced.
It turns out that when Trax was a child, Armbuster learned through an old woman with prophecy that Trax would be hunted by the dreadords (powerful deadly elves.) Armbuster went with his fellow adventurers to take out the dreadlords, but they failed in a colossal manner. All of his companions were killed, but he was kept alive purposely. He was tortured, had his arm cut off, then released. After this, he never returned home and wandered around in his pathectic state ever since.
Talking with his brother, all we get is demands that Trax stop "playing with elves," and go home to their father. He regards himself as a freak and will not come home or come with us. After a lot of dialog and a fistfight between Trax and Armbuster, we have persuaded him to come with us to his father because the elves are harming him. We scryed his father and discovered that the elves are keeping him diseased. We determined that they are using their father as bait for us so that they can ambush us, but our plan is to ambush the ambushers. While we have Armbuster with us, we are trying to help him.
We are around 10th level. We have survived several encounters with murdering elves, but have yet to face off with a dreadlord. The elves are trying to kill us because we are anakah. Anakah are immune to fate and the gods cannot forsee what the effects of our lives are going to be. The elven god in particular is working to kill us. In fact, the campaign started by having the PCs striken from reality. But the universe insist that Anakah exists, and we appeared two weeks later. Ever since then, we have been on the run from the elves while we find clues about ourselves and our destiny. The humiliation of his brother is simply one part of their psychological attack upon us. They want us to give up hope.
This is my armchair psychoanalysis of Armbuster. He has been essentially raped by the dreadlords. His missing arm is a perpetually visible badge of shame of that highly tramautic event, symbolizing his colossal failure to help his brother and mocking the pride he had in himself, his personal ability, his physicallity, and his role as a protector and as a man. Unfortunately, they used a miracle to keep the arm from being regenerated, so we are going to have to do this the hard way.
I believe that he will reject any efforts to build him up because he feels responsible for what happened and he is trying to protect himself and people he cares about from himself because his overconfidence and pride led to the deaths of his companions. I believe that because the elves successfully broke him, and his primal brain is simply trying to keep him from doing anything that puts him in the place of confidence so that he will be as far away as possible from even possibly repeating that terrible experience. I also believe that this has also manifested a hatred toward his brother that he is not willing to admit at this time. We have indication from the old woman that he has misplaced anger.
As part of our attempts to help him, Trax will be working with him as a loving brother. I (social bard/rogue) will be using my decent Diplomacy and Sense Motive to help him reshape the events in a new context and help him find a new way to look at himself and his life. He is concentrating too much on what he is not, while ignoring what he is. The cleric of God (essentially fantasy Christiantiy) will be trying to bring him to God. I will be assisting them with continuous Inspire Competance and Diplomacy skill assists through a message spell.
I recommended to Trax that he should thank his brother for his bravery and sacrifice.
I will be having Armbuster tell us about each of his companions. Hopefully by properly honoring them in memorum and reframing their deaths as a result of a path that they have willingly chosen, he can put them to rest.
But I am looking for more insights, ideas, and suggestions. This is essentially a puzzle-solving scenario, and I don't know what the DM has in mind as the key to restoring this NPC, or if he even thinks that we can do anything at all. But I'm trying to come up with a very strong effort for us to do and hopefully we can pull it off.
