"if it's about survival, isn't a little agony worth it?" <-- great track


Bit of Tabletop art featuring my Saturday game character, Barnaby Briggs

Fighters are far from the most buoyant class, so naturally our DM flooded one of the dungeon rooms. I've never been so glad to have a high CON.

Briggs is terrified of being submerged in water. He can swim, but certain experiences have left him incredibly traumatized.
Following the mysterious, violent death of Lord Lachdanan, the man he was sworn to protect and had spent his whole life serving, Briggs was detained and interrogated. Tortured, by people who claimed to be representing the Lachdannan House, thinking that perhaps Briggs had betrayed his oaths, or was otherwise complicit.

They couldn't scar his face too badly, if he really was innocent such the scandal that would be. He wears gloves, gauntlets, long sleeves for a reason: to hide the scars from the torturers' knives and pins on his upper arms and torso, just short of flaying the skin. He has a brand scar on his lower back and a few swipes of the lash. The whipping wasn't bad, all things considered -- they didn't want to kill him, just enough to cause considerable pain when they hung him up by his wrists. When the physical pain didn't loosen his tongue, his captors turned to more creative methods.

Briggs was waterboarded several times up to the brink of death. It was unlike anything he had ever experienced, brought to the edge of death repeatedly, feeling the chill and the blackness settle in through the gray cloth over his eyes. It turned an indifference to the water into a soul-wrenching terror. He bears scars on his wrists and ankles where he struggled against the rough-woven sisal rope. They beat him again, pure blunt trauma, bruising, internal injuries, reopening the wounds on his back to bleed again as they trussed him up and left him to suffer awhile. But their methods failed: they couldn't break him.

That was where the good Lady Lachdannan found him: her husband's most trusted guard and friend bloodied and beaten within an inch of death, suffering to protect his men. Suffering for something she is confident he didn't do. It was she who cut him down and gave him the chance to escape.

All of these memories come flooding back as he started to succumb to the freezing cold water in the dungeon's puzzle chamber. As it turns out, the water was more meant to suspend the beings in place while a divine purifying spell resonated through the water. It was designed to prevent fiends and the impure of heart from entering the ritual room within. But it uhhh...broke my sweet cinnamon roll lol.

Briggs had honestly been too okay, dealing with monsters and protecting his friends, confronting magical things that haven't been seen in the world for 50ish years. DM and I agreed they needed to see their tank's breaking point. >3