Quick portrait I busted out for a new character for an upcoming DnD game I’ll be doing (online, in this case) – giving another go at playing a tiefling. He’s such a tiny, fragile boy, I’m honestly a bit afraid for him, but such is the way of playing a caster, I suppose. XD Also, fun fact – when creating his look, deciding his color and such, I actually took some inspiration from a randomly-picked d20 of mine (a red and blue swirly one). For now, I have him named “Grail,” but feel free to suggest or vote for other names – I’ve got until next week to solidify it. Kinda leaning towards tiefling names that are words with a more antiquated sound, like Bliss, Anon, Errantry, that sort of thing.



Grail’s basic story is that he spent most of his life at a monastic archive, having been sent away when he was still just a tiny thing – reason being he was an obviously illegitimate child, and there was a desire to avoid a scandal. He was a fairly typical little scamp, though he still did passably well in his studies and apprenticeship (even if he did have the attention span of a squirrel). While he was certainly curious about his parentage (including who his blood-parent was), he never did learn much from the scholars.

The archive itself not only amassed and transcribed books, but it also had ties to an organization that specialized in the collection of arcane (and potentially dangerous) tomes, such as those belonging to renegade mages, cults, or other dark forces. Their job was to keep them away from the general populace, and in some cases, to carefully study and interpret them. This particular aspect was only known to the higher scholars, for safety’s sake, but nevertheless this little tiefling somehow discovered one of the repositories.

The book he opened burned his eyes, and his mind was flung into some distant, empty space. Thoughts and memories were picked apart, and he’d later describe the experience as being, “Like the corpse of a mouse, crawling with ants – flensed and picked clean, piece by piece, little bones left on display to observing eyes it would never see.” When he eventually came back to consciousness, it was in the archive’s clinic, and his mind was still scattered. It took several months for him to become more or less functional again, though he wasn’t the same after the experience. His eyes, once yellow, remained the same luminous blue as they’d become while staring into the book. Similarly, red skin was now marbled with bluish, ink-like stains. He’d forgotten large portions of his own past, but some of his missing knowledge was replaced by that which wasn’t his. As for the book, it was quietly relocated to another archive, and treated as a high-risk object.

The scholars allowed Grail to remain at the archive, as some of his newly acquired skills proved useful in their work (though he was initially kept under tight supervision). However, he began to grow restless – there was a hunger in his mind that demanded a greater acquisition of knowledge than the slow process of transcription could provide. This hunger gradually solidified into a “presence,” an extension of that which had previously dissected his mind. Grail’s natural curiosity had perhaps played a factor in why he had such a reaction to the book, as well as why he survived the process. Now, it had become a means by which this presence could obtain new information for itself, regularly harvesting the knowledge that Grail consumed. As such, despite being a voracious reader and collector of all manner of information, he can actually be quite forgetful – his knowledge “goes elsewhere,” feeding the ever-hungry dark.

The scholars eventually (if somewhat reluctantly) allowed Grail to leave, as he would be both happier and more useful out in the world, searching for esoterica, rather than confined as a scribe. He is always on the lookout for particularly interesting or unusual tomes for them, though he is still frequently side-tracked. However, there is another he has started actively collecting for – the one he has started to simply call “the Archivist.” And perhaps one day, he’ll find where the scholars hid its book, and give it a proper read.



So yes, we shall see if this little fool is somehow able to survive in the big world. ^_^