Character 98 - Amaras Igneri

There were two hard parts to writing the background for this week’s random rolls. Writing this intro, which I typed and erased a dozen times, and deciding which class this character should be. There was a rich character to be built off of a Samsaran with a desire to live in the past. Dead parents and a god of accidental death seemed almost too good to be true. I had most of the history of this character figured out before I even managed to come up with what mechanical class her background would take her into.

The cult and high wisdom almost screamed for her to be a cleric but I felt there was something else that would fit my idea of a nihilistic character. In searching through the psychic classes from Occult Adventures  I came upon the geist channeler archetype and I knew I found what I was looking for. Further investigation into the spiritualist class netted me the scourge archetype from the Haunted Heroes Handbook – from which I took an archetype for last week’s character – and I knew I could link the emotionless nature of the giest channeler with this archetype’s pain aspect.

Amaras Igneri

Kaer Maga. It all comes back to Kaer Maga. In the flashes of her memory, every past life she’s lived has brought Amaras back to Kaer Maga. This life, however, started in a small village along the trade river between Magnimar and The City of Strangers. Her parents settled there to be at the center of things; to help trade flow in both directions. They wanted to raise their daughters outside of the major cities and away from what they thought was corruption.

But as Amaras often tells people, “Kaer Maga always calls me.” She found herself again in that ancient city when a great storm saw the river break its bounds in the middle of the night and wipe her village from the face of Golarion. Most of the population drowned except for a handful clutching to the floating debris of what remained of their homes. Amaras’ parents were washed away and only she and her sister remained.

When the refugees came people were waiting. Many looked to take advantage of the tragedy that befell the people of the flood for their own gain, others wanted to help those lost souls beset by this terrible accident. Some others would masquerade as the latter to do the former while still others were waiting as if they knew that this accident would happen. A couple showing concern for the children of the tragedy took in Amaras and her sister.

The girls were hurting. Keila, her sister, lashed out in anger at everything. Her adopted parents could never control her rage. When she got older, she fled the home and lived on the streets of Kaer Maga, leaving her sister alone. Little did she know she would be the lucky one.

Amaras internalized her pain, shutting off her feelings. Her adopted parents encouraged this in subtle ways. The only way the young Samsaran could feel was through pain, which her parents taught her to inflict on others. When she was a young adult she was brought into the fold of her guardian’s religion and became a full member of the cult of Zyphus, the god of accidental death.

The worship of a god who represented the pain of her early childhood seemed in some small way comforting to Amaras. As she grew in her faith, she learned how Zyphus’ chosen would arrange accidents to furnish him with more souls in his war against Pharasma. It seemed right to her, although she never once questioned the accident that brought her to her city. The truth might have broken her further, but cultists of the Grim Harvestman have never been big on truth.

Amaras was, for the most part, a nihilist. Nothing really mattered and everyone was going to die in the end anyway. However, she was a nihilist with a sense of style; an archaic style. Beyond her connection to her god she had a stronger connection to what she called her city and she lived in the city’s past. Like many Samsarans, she could remember her past lives. They only came in snippets, as if something were blocking them, but each and every one of them lived in Kaer Maga. From its earliest days as The City of Strangers, to its time as a major hub in the Thassilonian Empire, to even before Xin and his apprentices left Azlant to forge their own way.

Love is a fleeting thing, but in the moment it can feel like it will last forever. Love is also an emotion and in general Amaras did not feel those. When she caught the eye of a young mercenary attached to a local branch of the Children of Steel she actually felt something. The two bonded through their love of Kaer Maga’s past, and as much as they both loved her city, she was enamored of his tales of the outside world. When she went on her first mission with the fighter she saw that they both had a talent for causing pain.

The Samsaran had been finding her path through the cult of Zyphus and her own methods to cause pain and misery. Many thought she would grow to be a cleric of the Grim Harvestman, but her path came more from her own strength of will than in a connection to her deity. She could see the pain-wracked spirits sent to her god. Stripped of emotion in the torture, he had them endure before being absorbed by him. And when they tried to break his grasp, she could capture them and use them to her master’s ends in her own way.

Amaras reveled in the past and hated the future, so when it was her time to show her devotion by formulating an accident to send a soul to Zyphus’ realm she chose one of the troll augurs. Although many of them were charlatans she knew a few had the actual gift of foresight and she thought it the height of irony that a prognosticator could never see an accident coming. She planned for months – her lover assisting her with ideas – until the day it happened.

A cart carrying runoff from one of the many factories in the district of Bis overturned right onto the troll, washing him away, as her former home was, in a torrent of corrosive acid. One of the only two ways to stop a troll’s regeneration and a highly unlikely scenario. Yet with the subtle manipulations of the follower of a god of tragic accidents, the unlikely became not only possible but reality.

Soon after Amaras was reminded that life is pain, and that love is a trap. For a mercenary, money talks and you can’t change a tiger’s stripes. One of the trolls saw in a vision that the death of their number was engineered and through their vast web of contacts they set to finding out how. Her lover saw the gleam of coin in the clawed green hands of the augurs and set to make his own fortune.

The Trolls may be excellent information brokers, but in her years in Kaer Maga Amaras has made her own connection in “her” city. A warning from one of the vampire lords, who much appreciated the Samsarans attachment to the era of his mortal days, warned her of the meeting between her lover and the trolls. She set about circumventing this and found him before he could find his payday.

A battle in the dark alleys of The Bottoms was brief but bloody. She and the cultists’ tormented spirit left the swordsmen writing in pain. Amaras, however, stayed her hand and let him live. She wanted a reminder that all life his pain, and she knew he would cause misery for others if he still lived. She did warn him that she should never see him in her city again.

What class do you think this Samsaran’s background would have driven her toward? How did her parents die? What accident wiped out her village? Who was her one lover? Why would she take up the worship of Zyphus?

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