What's Seltyiel like?

[random.brown]

I was reading through Bastards of Erebus and saw Seltyiel in the sample characters; I'd not seen him before and was surprised to find his alignment was lawful evil!

I'm not familiar with his character other than the brief bio. How would he be working with Seelah, a Paladin?

I always thought of LE as the alignment for the cold-blooded killer who would never betray his friends; kind of a Doc Holliday maybe.

For anyone who has tried to play a LE character, how have you handled it?

 

[czak]

http://paizo.com/paizo/blog/tags/seltyiel

I believe this contains a longer bio than in the back of the book.

 

[random.brown]

Yikes, that's not a nice story.

Is there any info in the Second Darkness AP as to why he might be working with the other iconics?

 

[czak]

If you have the second darkness player's guide it has campaign traits that encourage or assume that the players are friends / working together / have a common goal. The character mix is also quite a bit more morally ambivalent than Bastards. LN monk, N druid, LE fighter/mage and CN barbarian.



http://paizo.com/paizo/blog/tags/seelah
As for the paladin, in her backstory she's an orphan who steals to survive and causes the death of a good woman. She is then redeemed and becomes a paladin. Perhaps she sees something of herself in the young half elf and hopes to redeem him. Bastards also uses campaign traits to at least get the players to the same place at the start of the adventure and have a common goal.
The paladin's code of conduct is also a little less strict in pathfinder.

 

[random.brown]

Great info, thank you!

 

[James Jacobs]

Yikes, that's not a nice story.

Is there any info in the Second Darkness AP as to why he might be working with the other iconics?

Yeah; since we loosened the paladin's code a little in Pathfinder (they can now work with evil allies as long as it's for a greater good and as long as they try to redeem the evil ally, etc.) we wanted to establish that fact right at the start by having our iconic paladin and the iconic multiclass character in the same party.

There's other reasons they're in the group, of course. Seltyiel is from Cheliax and worships Asmodeus, so flavor wise it makes sense for him to be in a group that's in a Cheliax-located adventure. Seelah worships Iomedae, and Iomedae's got a vested interest in Cheliax since her dead boss Aroden was supposed to reappear there before he died. Iomedae and Asmodeus are probably Cheliax's two most important deities, and we'll be doing articles about both before the Council of Thieves adventure path is over.

And also... we generally try to pick iconics for an adventure that aren't the same ones who we just did for the previous adventure path.

That said, while we do try to stick with those four iconic characters when providing illustrations for the adventures, we don't always stick to them. Sometimes the other iconics show up in illustrations. It's kind of fun to imagine each group is going on the campaign, but there's not really an implied story since we re-use the iconics all the time; unless they're getting drained back to 1st level after each campaign, it doesn't make logical sense that they're doing all of the adventures.

 

[random.brown]

but there's not really an implied story since we re-use the iconics all the time...

That's a really interesting point. Since the iconics are being reset to 1st level over and over in the various adventure paths, that would seem to make progressions in the "canon" of Golarion pretty flexible as time goes on.