But many warlocks serve patrons that are not fiendish… sometimes, while poring over tomes of forbidden lore, a brilliant but crazed student’s mind is opened to realities beyond the material world and to the alien beings that dwell in the outer void. Stories of warlocks binding themselves to fiends are widely known. This thirst drives warlocks into their pacts and shapes their later careers as well. Warlocks are driven by an insatiable need for knowledge and power, which compels them into their pacts and shapes their lives.
The Player’s Handbook talks a little about how a pact with a non-fiend patron might happen on page 105: It follows that books of maps are very rare and precious things, sometimes part of the most secret treasure of a guild or a temple, perhaps part of a royal collection and kept in a closely guarded inner vault. A fair number of maps are also owned by temples, guildmasters, and the families of mapmakers, explorers, and adventurers… LArge, detailed, good maps are usually owned by rulers, from mayors of cities who have sewer and street maps, up to kings who own large and varied collections of old and fanciful maps from everywhere. Maps in the Realms are expensive works, being rare, easily damaged or destroyed, and more often inaccurate than not. (Seriously, couldn’t Wizards of the Coast have chosen a name that was less of a mouthful?) On pages 19 and 20: Delicious villainy abounds.Īnother option occurs to me, however, from Ed Greenwood Presents Elminster’s Forgotten Realms. This would fit the Zhentarim quite nicely, actually, and give me a chance to play an anti-hero as opposed to my usual heroic characters (with the exception of one smuggler I played in SWG for a long time). Drawing on this darkness and their own latent talent, they manipulates people slightly for their benefit or that of their faction. I imagine that, at some point, they discovered a bit of telepathic ability which led to a mercifully brief glimpse of the terrifying reality of the cosmos. In one, the character has a Criminal (Blackmailer) background. The choice for this character’s background has challenged me a little more because I can think of two interesting concepts. Bonus, it does not appear to have an actual meaning that Google knows about.
Some time with a name generator yields one that I like: Omonac (from the Lovecraftian generator in this case). I already know I want “The Great Old One” choice for my Otherworldly Patron.
I like to flesh out the character before ability scores, personally, because I need the full character concept in mind before moving onto the crunch. Tieflings would also make a great choice here but that requires more research than I want to do right now. The Half-Elf race provides a +2 bonus to Charisma for min-maxing and a very different in-character perspective than my usual halflings and dwarves. For this particular case, then, I chose the Warlock because, well, Cthulhu. I haven’t had the opportunity to roleplay a “dark” or “evil” character in years. I’ve wanted to play a “pure” caster for a bit, too (where my cleric can do a fair bit of damage with his hammer).
So the rest of this article just demonstrates my process and ends up with a character I’ll hopefully get to play in Expeditions or something. That would also give me the chance to play around with other classes and races. What if I find another campaign to join, though? while the AL rules let me bring Bedek, it just doesn’t feel right to me from an in-character roleplay perspective. I mean, he doesn’t love yelling in a terrible Scottish accent, pointing a hammer at someone, and setting them on fire? He’s fun in that peculiarly dwarven fashion. I have Bedek Hammerflame, a war cleric serving Moradin, as sort of an angry smiter of evil, bashing those into the ground with a war hammer when he must and purifying them with his god’s Sacred Flame when he can. In the D&D Adventurers League, I’ve been playing a dwarven cleric at my local game store.