 About Benner doin MalekthasTechnicals:
Benner doin Malekthas 'Male' qlippoth-spawn elf-tiefling qinggong monk-inquisitor of the four winds of Ragathiel 1 LG Medium outsider (native) Init +2; Senses darkvision 60 ft.; Perception +7 -------------------- Defense -------------------- AC 15, touch 15, flat-footed 13 (+2 Dex, +3 Wis) hp 9 (1d8+1) Fort 14, Ref 15, Will 16 Resist cold 5, electricity 5, fire 5 -------------------- Offense -------------------- Speed 30 ft. Melee dagger +4 (1d4+4/19-20) or . . hanbo +4 (1d6+4) or . . hanbo flurry of blows +3/+3 (1d6+4) or . . unarmed strike +4 (1d6+4) or . . unarmed strike flurry of blows +3/+3 (1d6+4) Special Attacks flurry of blows, judgment 1/day Spell-Like Abilities (CL 1st; concentration -1) . . At will—deathwatch Inquisitor Spells Known (CL 1st; concentration +4) . . 1st (2/day)—cure light wounds, peacebond[UC] (DC 14) . . 0 (at will)—detect magic, detect poison, guidance, read magic . . Domain Conversion inquisition -------------------- Statistics -------------------- Str 18, Dex 14, Con 12, Int 12, Wis 17, Cha 7 Base Atk +0; CMB +4 (+6 grapple); CMD 19 (21 vs. grapple) Feats Breadth Of Experience[APG], Elemental Fist[APG], Improved Grapple, Improved Unarmed Strike Traits criminal (disable device), natural born leader, sacred touch Drawbacks warded against nature (suggested) Skills Bluff +10 (+14 to tell a lie), Climb +8, Craft (any) +1, Diplomacy +7, Intimidate +8, Knowledge (history) +7, Knowledge (any) +3, Knowledge (religion) +7, Perception +7, Perform (oratory) +2, Profession (Any) +5, Sense Motive +8, Stealth +9 ** Would like to switch point in KS: Religion +7 to Disable Device +7. Languages Abyssal, Common, Infernal
Background:
Benner doin Malekthas appears a horned, ashen-skinned humanoid - perhaps a human of twenty-six or thirty, perhaps an elf of ninety or a hundred. Fully one hundred and five years of age, the person with the swept-back brow-horns into which his ears grow was born in an elven village near Zimar in Taldor, just beyond the World's Edge Mountains from the Pit of Gormuz. Benner was one of over a dozen births in the village, atypically large for those sorts of events. It was determined (or at least believed) by the inhabitants of the village that some deranged priest or worshipper of the Great Old Ones or the Outer Gods must have concluded a pact nearby, and 'given' the qlippothic being leave to impregnate any likely female of the village. Unlike the other births, his mother survived the experience; Benner was one of the five foul children who survived as well, as most of the other children (perhaps fortunately) were either stillbirths or so foul they were slain by a horrified father or midwife. Because of their various deformities and common origin, they became a natural gang - Benner, Halest, Pojik the males, Denla and Siri the females. The qlippothic ideal of the utter destruction of mortals and the very world - the engaging in the most foul and destructive deeds to further this goal, or simply because one wishes to - was a pit into which Benner as a child easily threw himself. Along with the other four children, he performed acts of petty cruelty with unthinking malevolence that slowly grew into deliberate torments designed to elict as much pain from whatever they happened to be torturing before death. That they could not do so inside the village irked them, as it led to beatings, whippings, and other such punishments. It did not help that every now and then, something (or someone) would issue forth across the mountains from the Fanged Maw Temple, carrying pestilence, terror, and death enough that the village was virtually an armed camp. Eventually, enough was enough, at least to their immature minds. When they were forty, grown in their contempt and malevolence, the nasty little cohort decided to 'screw this little village, we're goin' to the big city'. This they did by murdering every other man, woman, and child in the village, taking everything they thought might have value, burning the place to the ground and heading to 'the big city,' Oppara. Unfortunately, the five did not really understand what value was, or how much living actually cost; they were often cheated horribly, and soon had to turn their hands to actual labor. Their unearthly heritage was stamped plainly across most of their faces and bodies - Denla a brutish, massive-shouldered hulk, Halest with two plates for teeth and many-faceted eyes, Pojik bearing sucker-lined tentacles for both hair and fingers. Only Siri and Benner approached 'normal', Siri a loose-jointed curvy female of clearly-unearthly beauty, Benner ashen-grey with temple-grown horns sweeping back to almost behind his head, his ears growing into them. Siri became their face to the world, Benner with his ruthless pragmatism their leader; the other three were cruel and callous tormentors. But all of them were strong, and though they had contempt for the patience it took to learn, with some certain things they were able to pick up the knack of the job quite readily. Between odd jobs, bottom-rung positions, and occasional mugging, they managed to survive. Living all piled into one room, naturally they began experimenting sexually with the only people they could trust not to backstab them - each other. Benner and Siri naturally became a pair, with Halest and Pojik forming a stable trois with Denla, the physically strongest (but perhaps most dim) of the five. Unfortunately, the little group could not truly remain tight-knit, as anyone with the least knowledge of a qlippothic-spawn's natures and proclivities could have told them. Around their fiftieth year, there was a falling-out: Benner and Siri were against the others, and things ... escalated. As Denla grappled with and pinned him, Halest and Pojik seized and - with leers of lewd cruelty - raped and killed (via excruciatingly slow knife wounds) Siri in front of his eyes. During his increasingly-frantic struggles as she drew her last breath, Denla choked him to death. Or, actually, just to unconsciousness. He awoke while the three were rutting in the pool of Siri's blood, their deformed bodies smeared with it. His heart frozen inside him, Benner rose, plucked one of the knives still buried in Siri's cooling body, and cut Pojik's throat from ear to ear and almost all the way to his spine. Denla's awkward backhand didn't kill Benner, but it knocked him flat - long enough for the other two to disengage from each other and Pojik's rapidly-becoming-a-corpse. Benner knew that he could not possibly take them both on, and fled the apartment they'd all shared, fled the city, fled the country. Thirty years later found Benner in Magnimar, in the middle of the nastiest winter in recent history. Working as a bouncer in a brothel, he spent an occasional evening maudlin and reminiscing, mugging soused low-life bar-goers - sometimes leaving them alive, but just as often spending some time taking out his frustrations on them. On one such 'occasional' evening, Benner picked the wrong target. To be fair, the snow was coming down pretty thick (the better to obscure his approach, muffle his footprints), so he didn't realize the man was almost as big as he was, and armed. The cosh to the head may have dazed the man, but it didn't prevent him from drawing the bastard sword at his side, which burst into flames the moment it slid out of the sheath. Benner was shortly
-------------------- Benner since wonders if it was a balisse angel that visited him as he lay dying, to give him a choice - burn forever in the flames of the hells, having earned his place there by his life of misdeeds, or to devote himself to making up for such cruelties and murders in Ragathiel's service. Not wishing to die and having been drifting away from the 'all life must die' viewpoint of his childhood, Benner gave himself to the service of the angel's tiefling-born Empyreal Lord Ragathiel, swore to be his hand in the world, to find and punish people who were just like he had been. The angel then touched his side as if to stop his blood loss, told him he would be found, and that he'd best get started. 'Getting started' on the road to redemption for a person such as he isn't generally an easy thing, but Ragathiel apparently had plans. Benner woke in a lowly grot, out of the cold and snow while being tended to by an old man. Though his basest impulse was to overbear and strangle him, the wiry, weathered human would have none of it - one glance at Benner's expression and *CRACK* went the old man's stone-hard palm across his face. Stunned, Benner stared at the man - late fifties, maybe sixty or older - as he lay there in ripped-apart, burned, bloodied clothes. "What the hell??" The old man finished tying the last of the row of stitches putting Benner's gut back together. "That," the old man said, "was to establish our relationship. You want to leave, you can do so any time you like - I'll let you go just the way I found you, dying in an alley. You and I, we're going to be on the same page from the start: you can try anything you want, but I will see it coming and I will kick your f%%%ing ass between your -- ears, horns, whatever the f%&$ it is those things are -- before I put you back where he told me I'd find you. You try to sneak off, same deal." Benner stared at the man. "You do what I tell you, when I tell you, the way I tell you to do it. You ask every single f*&%ing question that's in your head -- after, because you're no good g~+*@*n use if you don't know why you're doing what you're doing. "I'll teach you to lie like a champion, negotiate like a noble, and intimidate like a stone-cold killer. You'll learn to move through a crowd without them noticing, recognize a trap before it bites you on the ass, and know a man's thoughts before he knows them himself. You'll care like an angel and fight like a demon, run like the wind and hide in plain sight. And when I let you go, you will be able to get into anywhere you want, where no bow-carrying wilderness man, no paladin in armor, no thief with a thousand knives can get - so that you can get the people that no wilderness-man, no paladin, no thief can get, the people who make plans to rain cruelty on thousands. You will be able to get to them, and stop them." That made Benner blink. "An assassin?" The old man shruggged, cleaning his healer's tools with a fastidiousness that belied the overall run-down nature of the little cavern. "Some might call it that. F#!@ knows you won't find any of Ragathiel's other folk thinking it's right - they'd be just as like to string me up as shake my hand. Yours too, when you're done learning what I have to teach you. But the General of Vengeance sees something in you - maybe the same thing he saw in me, all these years ago. We kill only those who've done wrong - real wrong, like killing, working hand-in-hand with the Lower Planes, making people's lives miserable, brutish, and short. We don't kill people for bad-mouthing others, or thinking bad thoughts - we did that, f@*@, I'd have to snap your neck right now, then mine right after. It's actions done that count for us - sometimes even when there are others that are the tools." "What do you mean, others?" "Good question. Take Cheliax - bad place for people like me these days, nation's rulers all involved with devils and Asmodeus. What about the head of a City Watch? Sits on his ass all day, sending out orders to torture some poor bastard doesn't know his dick from a tree in the forest, or to burn down some block of buildings because a rich merchant wants the land to build a mansion. That's the kind of man never gets his hands dirty - not directly. He's the cause of it, though. So that's the kind of man I'm talking about, uses others as tools." "Sooo ... the City Guard ... are tools? He's not the tool, is he?" Benner was confused, and not just from the smack across the face. The old man shook his head. "Go to sleep, kid. We'll talk when you wake up." -------------------- So Benner trained, to fight with his hands and his feet, to think with his brain as well as his heart, to watch with his eyes and his hornlike ears. He learned to be able to turn his hand to nearly any simple task, and how to do the job of anyone from an accountant to a zookeeper. (He still has problems looking like an accountant or zookeeper, but he has at least a basic idea of how the jobs are done.) He picked up a smattering of every sort of knowledge, having been directed to steal every chance to read that he could. For twenty years, he's learned from the old man, travelling from place to place and helping him deliver justice to foes that neither stealthy assassins nor great armies could have removed. A few months ago, the old man died - quietly in his sleep where the two of them were living in Egorian, the old man trying to find a way to make his nearing death count by taking out a member or two of House Thrune. Benner, knowing he had a long way to go before he could possibly follow through on that desire, set the old man's corpse into a rowboat with some wood and oil, and burned his mentor before heading north - not necessarily to return to Magnimar, but at least to get away from the center of Chelish power. Arriving in Kintargo only a day or two prior to the start of the game, Benner by chance caught sight of two familiar forms - Denla and Halest, sauntering by in Chelish - House Thrune! - uniforms. Knowing most intimately the crimes they'd committed in the past, as well as the extremely remote likelihood that they were working for absolution themselves, Benner decided to linger for a few days in the tiefling-heavy city - to see if he couldn't blend in, and perhaps get a chance to deliver retribution upon his two childhood friends ...
Ten-Minute:
Step 1: write five things about your character’s concept and background, five things that you think are the most essential parts of your character. You don’t have to stop at five, if you like…this is just a minimum. 1. Benner is a liberator. Not born to it, but trained to it - to put an end to the people who make it impossible for other people to live decent, good lives.
Step 2: List two goals for the character that you, as a player, think would be cool to see accomplished in-game. 1. Denla and Halest are still alive. Benner desperately wants to correct that problem.
Step 3: List two secrets about your character. One is a secret the character knows, one is a secret that involves him but that he is not actually aware of yet. This will help me in creating plots that center around your character. I will also be creating a third secret which you as a player will not be aware of, so expect some surprises! 1. Known: Twofold, about his biology.
Step 4: Describe three people that are tied to the character though blood, romance or honor. Two of them are friendly to the character, one is hostile. All can do something useful for you, if you can get the situations to line up. If you like, you can include an enemy of yours here as well, so I have an instant NPC nemesis to throw at you. New to town and newly 'off the leash', Benner has nobody in town he can rely on; even other worshippers of Ragathiel (if there are any in this godsforsaken country) would likely take him to task should they find out who he is and what (and how!) he is doing. As for enemies, well, see above regarding Denla and Halest ... Step 5: Describe three memories that your character has. They don't have to be elaborate, but they should provide some context and flavor. 1. One thing Benner misses extremely much is the physical, sexual intimacy of someone who both knows and accepts what 'he' is. Thus, the memories of the pleasures he had shared with Siri remain rather vibrant in his mind.
What does Benner bring to the party?:
Benner is a flexible guy. (No, not like that.) He is not a born mimic, disguising himself as other people and whatnot, but his long lifetime and need to turn his hand at so very many different professions enables him to do what a real infiltrator and observer needs to: bow and scrape and blend in, not call attention to himself, observe while not appearing to be watching, and walk away - even if the object of his surveillance or plan is still saying things he needs to overhear - when the job he's doing (however badly) is done. Being able to lie with utter sincerity cannot be understated as an advantage here.
What's more, Benner is a walking, talking weapon. The forbiddance on arms and armor doesn't affect him; he can stroll along with a walking stick (i.e. his hanbo) one moment, then use it expertly as a lethal weapon the next. He can readily incapacitate without killing if 'we have to take one of them alive!', or if the group needs to infiltrate a place without killing anyone. (Unconscious and smelling of cheap wine?? Obviously drinking on duty!!) Finally, Benner is a surprisingly socially-adept individual. Despite being cold and standoffish, if given the chance he knows just the point to make to help convince someone of whatever he needs to convince them of - an appeal to their better nature, a reminder of what they have to lose, a temptation to their weak side, or even just a threat of pain or damage. Where does Benner plan on going?:
My current plans for Benner are for him to continue straight-up as a monk. As I'm not all that for the technicals side - Benner is SO not likely to be anywhere near an efficient build - I do intend on him continuing as a tough customer in combat, slightly enhanced by the small suite of Inquisitor abilities. I may look at Inquisitor more closely, but I'm reasonably confident I'll want to explore the monk's abilities, especially in the context of this sort of campaign, where being armed and armored is potentially dangerous to the success of your adventure and campaign. |
|
