Artist: Clint Cearley, Image: Wizards of the Coast
Sometimes, the Voice stops speaking and comes out of me. My eyes glow with a brilliant radiance—fuelled by all the hidden rage and fury pent up inside me—and some eldritch power leaps from my hands in arcing beams of bright energy. My power can scythe through flesh and burn bone. My power can set the world on fire.
Afterward, I try to forget the smouldering corpses, the stink of burning skin, the charred wounds across the walls, the terrified faces of those who have seen my power and lived. That’s how I came to change my face. When people see me it’s not the real Deleven they see. It’s only what their weak minds want to see. I am hidden. I am me.
— Deleven Darkfire
The character I am playing currently in our Curse of Strahd campaign for Dungeons & Dragons (5th Edition) is a maybe-eight-or-nine year old girl called Deleven Darkfire. Her age is nebulous for the same reason most things about her past are: she is an orphan who has lived a difficult life on the streets making use of her (considerable) power to overcome the hardships which have befallen her thus far. In truth, Deleven doesn’t even know if “Deleven” is her real name. It’s just what everyone calls her.
She has no knowledge of her early childhood or her parents, who are merely amorphic sensations rather than human beings she actually ever knew; her memory of that time is a muddy haze, almost as though she didn’t live it at all. I, as her player, also have no idea who her parents are or were, though I have conferred with our DM about a few vague possibilities. From her character’s point of view, the important thing about her parents is the emotional lack they have engendered in her, triggering an almost endless search for role models and security in her life, in order to fill the void of their early departure.
A street kid who has always lived in squalor with no real possessions or anything of value, Deleven has learned to live without most things. She is also quite happy to take what she needs at any given time from those who seem to have plenty; that’s not a moral decision for her: it’s a necessary one. She has learned to pass herself off as a street urchin with only one leg begging for change, a temple acolyte collecting tithes to one of the big churches, or the scion of a noble house who the other children give a wide berth to and who sometimes receives gifts from merchants and vendors seeking to attract her attention and coin with their flattery.
Her abilities though, from her earliest conception, were magical in nature. Proto-Deleven was always a mage of some sort. She calls the power inside her the Great Cold One because sometimes when it speaks, she shivers. Its voice is hard and chill, but has never lied to her.
Disciple of the ring
My primary inspiration for her was an image from a Magic: the Gathering card by Clint Cearley. The image itself is incredible, and is one of the most evocative images I’ve seen in Magic—and I’ve seen a lot of them. There is a visceral sense of the power that this character, called Disciple of the Ring, is channelling or about to unleash, from the tension and fury in her facial features and aggressive stance through to the way that the bright, flashing blue tendrils of magic are being drawn seemingly through her body into her hands, which are glowing bright white in anticipation of her unleashing this great power. Even her eyes are beginning to glow.
Disciple of the Ring, Deleven’s visual inspiration.
The actual Magic card is also very cool. I consider myself to be intermediately familiar with Magic, in that I have a good sense of its mechanics, I know how to build and play competent decks, and am never a push-over in a game. However, my understanding of the meta-game and ongoing narratives is very weak, and my interest is absolutely casual. I went through a phase of collecting a massive amount of cards in the 13-14 series era, but couldn’t financially sustain the habit—I mean, hobby.
Anyway, with that hedge out of the way, I have always liked how the Disciple of the Ring was so flexible. It’s expensive, but for the cost of one non-specific mana and the exile of an instant or sorcery from the graveyard, there are a lot of options here. And at 3/4 the actual form is solid, too. The ability is limited only by the combination of mana and graveyard cards of the appropriate type; the Disciple does not tap to use the ability, so it can potentially result in one of those infuriating moments when something might get blocked by her, and there’s a bit of mana and some instants in the graveyard, and just how high can that physical form be pumped if necessary to defeat a particularly strong attacker? It offers the kinds of conundrums I, personally, love presenting to my opponents when playing blue.
The point of this being that I found the card itself impressive, though it did not particularly inspire the character; the artwork did that all on its own. What I took away from it was the idea of a young person who perhaps is channelling more power than they can—or should—really handle. That with this awesome power comes a sense of it being overwhelming for the person in which it manifests. For some reason this image conjures a sense of youthfulness in the form of the Disciple, though to what extent that was intended is beyond my ability to surmise.
Regardless, the image began to build ideas of characters in my mind, and in fact it inspired one of the first Fate characters I ever created, too. That character was the genesis of what would later become Deleven. For me, ‘character’ creation and backstory always runs parallel with the actual process of mechanically building a character; I’m too keenly mechanically literate with D&D to do too much character development without looking at specific abilities, but conversely I’m also not interested in playing a bunch of statistics. While developing ideas, it seemed to me that the Warlock and Sorcerer were the two classes most suited to this concept of a young girl with amazing inherent powers that she can’t always control and certainly doesn’t fully understand.
Class
While considering both Warlock and Sorcerer as individual classes, I felt that Warlock was the closest in its key abilities, but the Sorcerer fulfilled a range of abilities I found more interesting. So, I decided to combine them both. The most important aspects to me were the origins of both; Deleven is in the interesting position of having some ancestral signs of dragon blood flowing through her veins, which makes her physically just a little bit alien: she has faint scales protruding slightly from beneath her epidermis, and she has an affinity for lightning power. This—though a feature of the Sorcerer class—was definitely something thematically linked to the image I had in my head, heavily inspired by Clint Cearley’s art.
And so her first level was born. However, particularly early on I wanted to give her a sense of where her actual powers had come from (I was less interested in a dragon heritage dictating this), and so I developed the concept of her patron (derived from the Great Old One patron, synonymous one could assume with Cthulhu or similar elder horror of some kind) who had gifted her great power and now whispered to her in this chilling voice. I liked the idea of her being someone a bit special already, with her dragon blood, but who had been abandoned by her parents (and whether that was actually true or not I left entirely up to the DM), but had one way or another been gifted with amazing powers.
Deleven’s mini, created with HeroForge.
The Great Cold One manifests to Deleven only as a voice, which has always spoken “truth” to her, and it protects her; tells her where to hide, how to act and when to strike or when to run. At first she thought it was her parents speaking to her; it was only later she realised such could not be the case, otherwise they would have come back for her. Insofar as she can tell, the Great Cold One is the ultimate authority in the world, and knows everything. She assumes that when other people talk about a “god”, they are talking about the voice in her head.
One of the additional spells offered by this particular patron is called Dissonant Whispers, and I loved the idea that sometimes when she was angry, her patron would whisper terrible secrets to her and she would occasionally let some of those “secrets” slip into the mind of the person drawing her ire. While she was used to, and conditioned to, the cacophonous near-insane babble of this hideous whispering, when she projected it at someone else they, invariably, were not. When she reveals the “secrets” of the voice to others, they find it painful because they do not want to learn the truth. In time, Deleven believes, they will understand. The spell, while it does allow a saving throw, deals considerable psychic damage and forces the target to flee. Perfect.
And, at the end of the day, what could possibly go wrong when a powerful young mage is beseeched and guided by the voice of some terrible monstrosity from another plane of existence? Almost certainly nothing.
A bit strange…
There is a (fairly obvious!) clue to a primary inspiration in Deleven’s name; the character of ‘11’ in Stranger Things. Originally, the proto-Deleven was likely going to be a character in her mid-teens, full of angst and hormonal instability and insecurity, but after watching the first season of the show, I was motivated to pull her age right back to a time when she was still genuinely innocent and naive about many of the world’s problems. I was quite taken by the idea, and could imagine the enjoyment to be had by a character who wielded considerable material power but absolutely did not possess the material wisdom to utilise it responsibly.
Originally, the name Deleven came about by pure accident—a joke, in fact, about apostrophes, European cliches and poorly hidden inspirations in fantasy—as D’eleven (and literally pronounced as d’11 rather than the DEL-e-ven it has since become). But I used it just a little too long and the name stuck. Now, it seems completely natural to me but it serves as a lesson in being careful with gag names in the first place.
In the game, her child-like demeanour has already manifest in amusing ways. The uppity, self-righteous elf of the party, Kairos, a character outwardly haughty but desperately keen to become a great hero and earn the respect of his peers, flippantly and disdainfully commented on a hangover that Gorbat, the party’s orc, was suffering one morning. Deleven said she could explain it to him if he would bend down closer to her. He did so, and she reached up and touched his forehead, unleashing her Shocking Grasp cantrip; he recoiled in pain, grasping his head, after which she cheerily added, “that’s what a hangover is like!” On a side note, Deleven is, disturbingly, a veteran drinker herself. More on that later.
One of the early conceptual ideas I had for Deleven was to weave in her Mask of Many Faces invocation (which she wouldn’t receive until level 3) into her backstory even though technically she didn’t start with it. Our DM is very keen to ensure that players are given every opportunity to explore what they want their characters feel like, and (especially because it had no ostensible mechanical effect) he was fine with that. And so, Deleven had learned to survive on the street by literally changing her face.
Furthermore, I chose a Feat called Actor which suggests that Deleven has spent a lot of time practising the art of mimicry, making it much more difficult for her false appearance to be detected. One of my goals for the game was to be quite creative with the use of these two abilities, which so far have been incredibly useful. A secondary goal was to use Mask of Many Faces and its illusory shenanigans for amusement’s sake as well. I cannot wait to get the Suggestion spell and some Sorcerous metamagic to have Deleven whisper some secrets of her own into everyday conversations.
Early in the campaign, the party met a character called Irena, a young woman whom the rest of the group seemed to consider young and fairly inexperienced, and perhaps not worth the trouble she had got them into. Deleven, however, saw a woman who was comparably older, mature and (most importantly of all) beautiful. Deleven would sit next to Irena and stroke her hair (something she obsessively does with the fur of the party’s tabaxi as well); Irena herself seemed to shift between mild amusement and mild irritation at this interest; but Deleven also began practising looking like her.
For some time afterward, I deliberately had her make certain mistakes, such as taking on the appearance of a version of Irena who was evidently much shorter, and appeared even younger than she actually was. I liked the idea that Deleven was incredibly skilled at the actual mimicry but was still just a child herself, so her interpretation of that mimicry was often flawed or did not take into consideration aspects which a child might not understand or, at least, could conceivably misinterpret.
Typically, when she uses Mask of Many Faces, which our group calls “Mystiquing”, after the shape-shifting mutant from the X-Men series, I work hard to make sure that she spends time at some point paying specific attention to certain people—which also flags to the DM in advance that she has been watching this person and remembering their mannerisms in order to effectively mimic them.
The nature of the unnatural
Insofar as Deleven is concerned, she has no idea that she is a “Warlock” or a “Sorcerer”. Her power seems to come entirely from within her own self, which she finds encouraging at times but alternatively frightening at other times. Despite the terrifying portents suggested by her patron, the Great Cold One, she finds the voice calming and reassuring because she is so used to it, and its arcane babbling has begun to make a strange kind of sense to her. She also suffers nightmares as a result of these voices, but has not yet connected the two; she frequently sees visions of strange imagery (presumably, as far as I as her player can tell, the icons of the death-god, for example, or allusions to suppressed memories of her very early youth which she could not recognise or process at the time, and still barely understands).
Most of Deleven’s abilities and spells are utilitarian; she has lived by her wits her whole life, and so trickery and deception are second nature to her. It’s only her fears and insecurities which drive her toward violence, and she avoids it precisely because of her own fear about what her power might do if she loses control of it. Her signature cantrip, Eldritch Blast, manifests as a fierce burning beam of blue light, which (again with the X-Men) I imagine manifesting just like Cyclops’ vision, a crackling ray beam that can sear through all sorts of material (in the game they are bolts of ‘force’). At several points she has sheared through a tent or smashed windows and destroyed all sorts of materials when she has unleashed her blasts either by mistake or through recklessness.
I liked the idea of quite dangerous beams she emits from her palms (perhaps analogous to Iron Man’s suit) that often does a whole lot of collateral damage and probably sets things on fire. The basic concept is a potentially super-precise weapon that she actually has no idea how to use properly, and it takes a long time to get right. She has already been stuck in melee during a fight in which her wild beams struck her own companions; they forgave her pretty quickly but she has not yet forgiven herself (though like most young people she has learned from her mistakes and selected Misty Step as her next spell specifically to avoid that very problem).
Big brother is watching
Deleven also has a pre-existing relationship with another character in the party—an orc eldritch knight called Gorbat the Arch-Bastard. Though big and ugly and violent, Deleven sees Gorbat pushing other people around and feels safe, because most of the people he pushes around have, or threaten to, hurt her. Many other people see Gorbat as just another angry, brutal orc, but Deleven recognises the kinship of a person just like her: an outcast in a bad situation just trying to make the best of it. Someone different, who can’t help how other people look at them.
“Uncle Gorbat”, as she calls him, encountered Deleven on the streets in a scuffle and was taken by her ferocity and spirit (ideals he attributed to the best of orcish culture and, therefore, worthy of nurture). Gorbat’s devotion to Gork and Mork, incidentally, results in his shield spell manifesting as a gigantic globule of gelatinous snot which surrounds him and protects him from harm. That didn’t go astray in the eyes of such a young person, either. So, he took her under his wing and they have travelled together ever since. Deleven looks up to Gorbat as her most significant role-model, and has learned to understand orcish (though she cannot speak it well), and cannot distinguish between the lessons Gorbat teaches her (such as “only pathetic weaklings eat with utensils”) and those of her native human culture.
Gorbat is incredibly protective of Deleven and on the odd occasion that she escapes his ever-watchful eye he is not above giving her a good walloping upon her return. In Deleven’s eyes, this merely reinforces (to her damaged mind) that Gorbat truly fears losing her and therefore cares about her welfare. “Tough love” is the orcish way, and Gorbat has saved her from great harm (if not her actual life) enough times for her to see what his true fury looks like.
Whether or not the vast array of orcish curse words Gorbat has taught her is necessarily the best cultural exchange or not is another matter. Similarly, consuming considerable amounts of alcohol is simply part of the regular relaxation she partakes with her “Uncle”, who sees such activity as a mark of maturity. Ever keen to prove her worth, she has taken to it with great eagerness, and has won some renown as the party’s second-heaviest drinker and, paradoxically, least hungover member.
Thanks to their time together, Deleven now sees many things as Gorbat does: in shades not of grey but the absolutes of black and white. She tends to gaze upon the world as a warrior does, and in her moments of solitude, Deleven is sometimes saddened by her lack of size and strength because it means she may not be able to live up to Gorbat’s ideals of a mighty orcish warrior. She consoles herself, however, with the disturbing assurances of the whispers which guide her vast reservoirs of inner power; the voice of the Great Cold One.