76th Character - Timrek Mahal

We come to the end of another week my loyal followers, and we get to see what becomes of Monday’s random rolls. To be honest I had no clue what I was going to be doing with this particular character. At first glance the incredibly high wisdom pushed the character toward a divine caster and the blessed at birth background tidbit lent more credence to this. But I just didn’t see it, so I was at a loss.

So what class did I finally go with? The wisdom-based occult class spiritualist. The original idea was that his own loved one was murdered, separating them, and that lover would be his phantom spirit. But then I remembered that he had a twin brother. That realization and the memory of last week’s article about the possessed hand feat really cemented where I was going with this character, so let’s meet him.

Timrek Mahal

There are a number of small villages in and around the Segang Jungle in Jalmeray. Although these small towns are mostly human, some boast citizens who are denizens of the jungle and the surrounding swampland.  The Mahal family of grippli are such denizens who live in the idyllic village of Karapatsu.

Timrek was born a twin with a very auspicious birth. One of the garuda representatives of the Vadruni pantheon made an appearance at the twins birth to proclaim their approval. This would be a mark that the twins would never live down.

Throughout their childhood Timrek and his brother Nibor were always looked upon as chosen. So much was expected of them and neither knew if they could deliver. Nibor would always try his hardest but come up short while Timrek opted not to try at all. Although the two took different tacks, they were still as close as close could be.

Timrek fell in early with a bad crowd. It started with just the local toughs. Although he was small he was quite strong and would provide muscle to the young hoodlums. Later he would work with one of the smugglers that would occasionally use Karpatsu as a hideout and a means to move their product through the jungle to one of the smugglers ports on coast on the west.

The leader of one of these organizations made a longer stay in the village and took a liking to Timrek. He would teach the young grippli all the tools of the trade, much to the chagrin of the boy’s family. Lying, cheating, and stealing became a way of life for Timrek, thanks to his mentor.

Nibor, for his part, fell in love. But love between a human and grippli was all but unheard of. Beyond the racial differences -- even in a small town such as Karapatsu, much like the rest of Jalmeray and Vudra -- there is also the problem of the caste system. The Mahal family, although tradesfolk, were not on level with the village elders whose daughter Nibor was in love with.

One of the reasons Timrek’s mentor used Karapatsu as his base of operations was that he was related to the same village elder whose daughter Nibor was in love with. When the father his brother’s beloved came to his smuggler cousin, no matter how he felt about Timrek, there was no way he was allowing his niece to be with a frog. Race and caste would keep the two separated forever.

Nibor vanished and the Mahal family was distraught. But Timrek, his parents, and his siblings weren’t the only ones to feel the devastating blow of Nibor’s disappearance. The daughter of the elder didn’t take her love’s loss well and she took her own life. The passing of the lovers was a blow to both families, but it was just a beginning for Timrek.

The connection to his twin brother had always been intense, but when the grippli started hearing his twin’s voice again it frightened him. It turned out that Nibor didn’t just disappear, he was dead. The murder of Nibor at the hands of Timrek’s mentor was a trauma that cause the grippli’s spirit to tie himself to the material plane, and in this case to his brother. Timrek’s hand was possessed by the soul of his twin to protect his love, although he was unaware that she had killed herself.

When Nibor’s beloved made her way to the river of souls she could not find him. She went into a rage which drew the attention of the minor goddess Naderi. The Lost Maiden used her divine power to push the tragic lover back to the material plane, where she too attached herself to Timrek, bringing a measure of spiritual power to her lover’s brother with her.

The lovers, reunited in the body and mind of Timrek, left the young grippli with a problem. What to do with two spirits he couldn’t get rid of? The one thing all three wanted was some small amount of revenge, but Timrek was himself no killer. What he could to however, was turn his back when the authorities from Niswan came to find his mentor. The man was arrested and his family implicated in his actions.

With his immediate problems dealt with Timrek and his two passengers left Karapatsu to find their own way. But where does one ridden by two spirits go? None of them really know, but the will of Naderi will see them through. They hope.

Is this how you envisioned this character? What class did your grippli choose? Who were his siblings? What caused his hatred of a leader figure? Why did he get caught up with the criminal element? How was he blessed at birth?

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Getting a Hand Up

The Possessed Hand Feat and You

I don’t talk about mechanics a lot of the time; that gets covered on a lot of other blogs. Sometimes, however, a little bit of mechanics really catches your eye so much so that you just have to build a character around it. This week I want to talk about an amazing feat that I’ve only just recently become aware of. I’m talking about the Possessed Hand feat, and of course, the later tiers in the feat tree here and here.

I first learned of the feat when one of my players asked to use it. I only really looked over the first one in the line of feats so I didn’t realize all the possibilities. What this player did, though, was show me the role-playing possibilities of this feat. His hand was possessed by the ghost of friend and former occult hunting party member who he was unable to save during a particularly bad hunt.

There are tons of other ways to get some good roleplay opportunities out of this feat; you could go full on Idle Hands and have the hand possessed by an evil force. This would make a most interesting story for a paladin. Perhaps he couldn’t destroy or banish and evil, so to stop its rampage he had the evil entity bound to his hand.

Not every entity that is bound to the hand has to be malign. The spirit could be there to protect the person it’s attached to. A parent, sibling, or friend who swore to protect the character on their deathbed may very well possess the hand to look over them.  Or maybe a class like the witch, which uses a patron entity, could send a spirit to look over the conduit of its will. The possibilities are truly endless.

But what really gets me – where I find something truly fun – is the final feat in the line. As if the name of the feat wasn’t cool enough “Hand’s Detachment” the fact that the hand becomes your familiar is just icing on the cake. If you don’t have a familiar class feature it’s a little underwhelming, lacking many of the core familiar abilities, but if you have a class that does get a familiar, you gain all the abilities. This includes speak with animals of its type even if it doesn’t have animals of its type, and this is a key ability because you can then take archetypes for your familiar hand.

This of course spawned a great idea, or at least I thought so. I’d like to make a Halfling fighter with the eldritch guardian archetype. Then you give the familiar the mauler achetype, which at 3rd level allows the familiar to grow to medium size. Your familiar also shares all of your combat feats. With your hand now being medium sized, your small sized Halfling can now ride it into battle.

And there you have it, some fun with one of the new mechanics from Haunted Heroes Handbook. Have you ever made a character with a possessed hand? What entity would you have possessing your hand? Would the hand be possessed against the characters will? Or would he have purposefully bound a spirit to it?

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The CRB has been growing as a community on social media. Please join us on Facebook, Google+, Tumblr, and Twitter. My inbox is open on all forums for questions, comments, and discussion. If you don’t want to miss a beat make sure you sign up to have the CRB pushed directly to your e-reading device with Kindle Subscriptions through Amazon.