Maehadros

Maehadros was the first DnD character I created, and I built him with what I thought was a relatively interesting backstory. He was a human fighter, probably the most generic option I could have built mechanically.

Backstory: Maehadros was the son of a nobleman in one of the city-states of a particular unnamed continent. His father wanted him to apprentice to become a cleric, but Maehadros rebelled and ran off to a different city-state, and enlisted in the city guard there. Eventually the city he was working for came into conflict with his hometown, and Maehadros deserted the town guard. He found work as a mercenary, and was hired by what turned out to be a pro-human organization. While he didn't agree with their pro-human sentiments, he considered it a job, and helped them anyway. Eventually he became aware that they were a fairly radical cult, but continued to work for them until they gave him orders to kill the children of some local dwarves they had lynched. He then abandoned his job and fled on a ship away from the continent to avoid repercussions with the cult. This is how he wound up on the ship with the other Player Characters.

Character traits: The essence of Maehadros, or Mae, as he is generally known, is that he is a good person at heart, but lacks the courage to follow his heart. Instead he follows orders over his own judgement. By this point in his life, he is fully aware of the painful repercussions of not standing up for what he believes in, but has not implemented that in his life. Instead, he still follows the moral judgement of his new commanding officer (Tucker's warlord). His opinions mostly go in his journal, as always.

Other traits of the character include a town-guard sense of ethics, rather than the sense of an adventurer. He would rather bring his defeated foes to justice than to kill them, even if (as pointed out by other characters) bringing them to justice would doubtlessly lead to their execution. Again, he looks to authority other than his own, rather than making judgments on the lives of the defeated.

Character growth: Maehadros never had much opportunity to act upon his beliefs, partly due to me, the player, being pressured into not... complicating things. The party goes places, it kills things, it gets experience and loot, and I apparently wasn't supposed to call into question the ethics of all the things we were doing, let alone rebel against the judgement of the other players. Maehadros himself suffered a good deal of bullying by other players, mostly in terms of who was leading the party in the absence of Tucker and his character. (I was also somewhat disappointed to find that most of the party was neutral, and the paladin was of the "I'm a paladin, this gives me justification to kill things," style.) This was all cut short by Mae's untimely death.

Analysis: Maehadros deals with a lot of questions I have concerning righteous action, authority, and the subjectivity of morality, I suppose? And of social pressures? Dunno.

Dnd Characters - what does this say about me?

A good deal of people think that when a writer creates a character, they invest something of themselves into the character. What's more, some people think that characters allow writers to explore internal questions that they don't know how to tackle directly.

I guess the plots of various books I have been interested in writing fall along a strangely similar line, save that the questions explored are outward, and not internal questions.

But what about my DnD characters? This will probably be a series of posts, one for each character.

I'll be starting in chronological order: Maehadros, Selar and her sister, Mikalo, and now Little.

Thoughts on Media and 9/11

One of my classes is Terrorism and the Press. We were talking about the 9/11 attacks today (WTC towers, Pentagon, and another airplane crash), and i was reminded how terrorism chose the timing of the 9/11 attacks.

See, they wanted symbolic targets - the Pentagon, and the WTC towers count, as does Washington DC (the probable target of the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania). But they weren't seeking to kill people, directly. In fact, they chose the time of attack with the greatest proportion of symbolic damage to the amount of deaths: The early morning.

See, both the pentagon and the WTC weren't exactly filled up, as they would have been a mere 3 or 4 hours later. The later in the day, the higher the casualties.

So why not do it at night, when people wouldn't be killed? After all, if you want a lower death count, then that would be best.

That's where media impact and the message that they were trying to send comes in. If you attacked when it was dark, then none of those powerful, scarring images of the WTC towers burning would have been able to be seen. Al-Quada didn't know the towers would fall (Osama was the most optimistic in positing that the tops might fall off), so the lasting damage would be limited to nasty, fire-gutted holes in the tops of the towers.

So daylight so that the American people can see what they did, and yet morning to avoid unnecessary deaths.