Player Characters
Anjelika Cass (human female, Rog1/Sor2, CN)
Anjelika was born in Hollowfaust, to a very successful merchant prince. Unfortunately, he was a bit too successful, and the Guilds made it clear that his wealth gave him a social influence that simply wasn’t welcome in Hollowfaust. So, he moved his residence – keeping a small piece of property in the City of Necromancers – to the nation of Zathiske.
Anjelika grew up learning her father’s trade. She was always a bit strange, with a wandering gaze and a large birthmark in the shape of raven’s wings on her back. Unfortunately, when she was a young woman, her parents were killed by bandits; at nearly the same time, several rival merchant houses descended on poor Anjelika, brandishing legal documents that claimed that her parents were deeply in debt to them and seized much of what belonged to her parents. One of them, Jahanar, a swarthy, fat spice merchant always surrounded by the bitter smell of julka weed, intimated that if she joined his harem, she might continue to live in the splendor to which she was accustomed. She turned him down flatly.
That evening, masked men broke into her home, obviously with violent intent. She fled them and something in her mind seemed to snap. Something seemed to draw her on, and she fled to the cemetery, hiding in a mausoleum, hoping that the men wouldn’t dare to follow her there. She was wrong and they found her.
Suddenly, the strange susurrus in the back of her mind clarified into the whispers and wailing of the dead, and she snatched up a thigh bone. Black energy crackled and it transformed into a sword. She plunged it through the stomach of one man while the other fled from his single glimpse at her abyss-black eyes. She stumbled back out into the night of the cemetery, which seemed to be alive with speech, but she could see no one. She cried out for help, and a raven settled on her shoulder, its mind somehow touching and soothing hers.
Anjelika warily returned to her home and gathered up her things. Among her father’s old books, she found a deed to property in Hollowfaust, and she set out, fleeing into the Heteronomy of Virduk. From there, she traveled with a merchant caravan whose master was an old friend of her father’s into the City of Necromancers.
DM's Notes
This character is being played by Deird'Re Brooks.
The spell that she cast as part of her backstory above was bone weapon, a Sor1/Wiz1 Necromancy spell found in the Scarred Lands sourcebook Hollowfaust: City of Necromancers.
Effectively, Anjelika was tainted at birth by the necromantic energies around Hollowfaust. She constantly hears a susurrus of voices in her head, the voices of the dead. When she wishes to cast spells, she focuses in those voices that speak their arcane secrets to her and she casts the spells, in ancient Sumaran, the language of the civilization that existed on the site of Hollowfaust before the Divine War. She doesn’t actually speak this language and has no idea what she is saying.
Deird’Re wanted her raven familiar, Drendos, to have come to her in response to a mental call for help, rather than through the standard summoning methods. I decided I was okay by that, as long as she paid the money to do so from her starting funds.
