Ellanora's page

Weirdo wrote:

Avaricious wrote:

Oracle (Heavens Mystery, Cloudy-Eyed)

Profession: Astronomer. The irony that I could always see stars perfectly at night while being restricted to 60' of vision was hilarious.

I love that, actually. Everything else is clouded, but through it all the stars are always clear...

I like dichotomies and very opposed traits like that were great. It just felt wonderfully right that there was a silver lining to the Curse, that it was a price willingly paid for that benefit. I had comrades I trusted... leave everything else within 60' to me!

I considered it fitting that I shared a feature with the Iconic Oracle as well.

Plus, early on my Comrades deliberately took steps (as new Players too!) to ensure they always kept track of me because at first I could only see out 30'. Most hallways ended up being brave frontiers that I had to advance through, and I had to mark waypoints by chalk or scratch so I could navigate even something as basic as a riverboat casino.

The same thing happened for my clouded vision oracle (my first character) - it actually fed into how my husband's character and mine met. (I wanted to travel to learn more about the abilities I'd gained as a child at the cost of losing my vision from the potency of the holy power I'd channeled to cure a plague; he was an ex-soldier looking for redemption after making some poor choices that got his commanding officer killed. So he ended up becoming my escort and bodyguard.) And getting our Kinsight Goggles so I could finally see a sunset again was quite the moment. :)

On an OP-related note, she ended up running a hospital in retirement, out of her wing of the castle our party was given. She was also a high priestess of Pharasma, and led a small congregation from the castle as well. Predictable? Maybe. But she was my first character, what do you expect? She didn't even have a last name. :)

The oracle I'm playing right now is, at least to a certain degree, an oracle by choice. Her town got overtaken by a plague when she was a child, and her mother was an herbalist trying to discover a cure, but was killed before she could get it figured out. Mom made a plea to the gods, who granted her the ability to pass along the power to cure the plague, but it needed someone to act as a conduit. Mom came to Ellanora to ask her to be that conduit, and Ellanora agreed in order to save everyone. Though she didn't keep the full power (too much to handle; it ended up nearly blinding her), some of the ability stayed impressed upon her spirit, and she's adventuring now to understand that ability better and improve her ability to control it.

So, she didn't intend to keep that power forever, just to allow herself to be used to cure that particular plague outbreak, but it stuck around. That's one of the easier ways I see to handle becoming an Oracle by choice - intentionally seeking power, but having it stick around and manifest in ways you didn't necessarily intend, as well as causing harm (the oracle curse) in a way that the person didn't intend.