Jia "Silk Violet" Sunicial's page

Combat gear Darkleaf lamellar armour, MW katana, cold iron wakizashi, composite longbow, arrows (20), scorpion whip, naginata, nunchaku, spell component pouch, Alchemical tricks alchemist’s fire (3), cardice oil, chroma grenade, holy water, liquid ice, silver weapon blanch (3)
Other gear Wand of cure light wounds (10 charges), cracked gold nodule ioun stone (carried by Vinyo), wooden holy symbols of elven pantheon, ink, pen, journal, scroll case, signet ring, sealing wax, holy text (Findeladlara), book of war prayers (Elven), tome of epics, healer’s kit, 201 gp
Mount and comfortable travel gear Oksalummi (M combat-trained reindeer), studded leather barding (+3 AC, -1 ACP, 40 lbs.), military saddle, pack saddle, saddle bags, portable altar, tea ceremony set, zither, cold weather outfit, scholar’s outfit, courtier’s outfit (in navy blue satin), silver and lapis lazuli necklace (30 gp) and matching silver and crystal earrings (20 gp), shaman’s kit

Skirmisher’s Challenge (Ex): Once per day, a warrior poet can challenge a foe to combat. As a swift action, she chooses one target within sight to challenge. She adds her samurai level to her damage rolls on her first successful attack against a challenged target each round. She can use this ability once per day at 1st level, plus one additional time per day for every three levels beyond 1st, to a maximum of seven times per day at 19th level.
Challenging a foe requires much of her concentration. She takes a –2 penalty to her Armor Class, except against attacks made by the target of her challenge. The challenge remains in effect until the target is dead or unconscious or until the combat ends. Her challenge also includes other effects which are listed in the section describing the warrior poet’s order.
Order of the Songbird (Ex): Edicts: The samurai must never destroy art unless doing so is part of an artful act or performance of her own. She must respect the skill of her opponents and never desecrate or purposefully humiliate a foe. If she takes a sapient life, she must create a piece of art, performance, or poem in honor of the fallen creature or creatures in order to memorialize what she has taken from the world.
Challenge: An order of the songbird samurai gains a +1 dodge bonus to AC and a +1 sacred bonus on saves against the attacks and abilities of the target of her challenge. This bonus increases by 1 for every 4 class levels the samurai has. The samurai must be wearing light or no armor, not using a shield, and carrying no more than a light load to gain this benefit.
Skills: An order of the songbird samurai adds Knowledge (religion) and Perform to her list of class skills. The samurai adds half her level to Craft checks and Profession (gardener) checks.
Versatile Performance (Ex): At 2nd level, the order of the songbird samurai gains the benefits of the bard’s versatile performance ability with one Perform skill.
Dancer’s Grace (Ex): When wearing no armor and not using a shield, the warrior poet gains a bonus to AC equal to her Cha bonus (to a max of her samurai level). A warrior poet loses this bonus while flatfooted or otherwise denied her Dex bonus. This replaces the samurai’s proficiency with medium armor, heavy armor, and shields.
Graceful Warrior (Ex): The warrior poet counts glaives, katanas, and naginatas as if they were light weapons with the agile/finesse property. This does not alter the weapons’ properties for the purposes of any other effects.
Flourish (Ex): The warrior poet is skilled at performing elegant moves in battle. At 1st level, the warrior poet gains a flourish of her choice. She gains another flourish at 3rd, 5th, 9th, 13th, 17th, and 20th levels. This replaces mount, weapon expertise, banner, and greater banner.
Harmony of the Tranquil Garden: The warrior poet can focus her senses as a move action to gain blindsense out to 5 feet for 1 round.
Propitiation (Ex, Su, Sp): A ward speaker can perform a special ritual to propitiate kami and gain a sliver of their power. This ritual must be performed at a shrine or a location warded by a specific type of kami. The propitiation takes 1 minute and involves clapping, ringing bells, bowing, and token offerings of coins, food, incense, or other gifts. The ward speaker’s propitiation must be performed uninterrupted to receive any benefits from it. At the end of this ritual, the ward speaker immediately gains a fortune depending on the type of kami she sought to propitiate. The fortunes each of those kami grant are listed below.
As an immediate action, the ward speaker can dismiss the fortune to reroll one d20 roll before the results of the roll are revealed; she must use the result of the second roll, even if it’s worse. If not dismissed, a fortune remains in effect until the ward speaker regains the use of her daily abilities, at which point the fortune and its benefits end. If a ward speaker dismisses a fortune to receive a benefit based on the specific kami she propitiated (see below), she does not also gain the reroll described here.
The ward speaker can perform this ritual once per day at 1st level. This replaces resolve, greater resolve, and true resolve.
Jinushigami (Ex, Sp): The ward speaker (and her mount, if she has one) gains a 10-foot enhancement bonus to base speed.
Kodama (Su): As a standard action, the ward speaker can afflict one target that can see her with a distracting gaze. If the target fails a Will save (DC = 10 + half the ward speaker’s samurai level), it is staggered for 1d4 rounds. Once a creature has been targeted by this ability, it cannot be targeted by it again for 24 hours.
Shikigami (Ex): The ward speaker gains Catch Off-Guard and Throw Anything as bonus feats.
Toshigami (Sp): The ward speaker can speak with plants, as the spell. The ward speaker’s caster level for this is equal to her samurai level.
Zuishin (Sp): As an immediate action, the ward speaker can dismiss this fortune to cast cure light wounds as a spell-like ability. The ward speaker’s caster level for this is equal to her samurai level.

Spirit magic spells: color spray (1st), hypnotic pattern (2nd), daylight (3rd), rainbow pattern (4th), overland flight (5th), chain lightning (6th), prismatic spray (7th), sunburst (8th), meteor swarm (9th)
Spirit ability: Stardust (Sp):A As a standard action, the shaman causes stardust to materialize around one creature within 30 feet. This stardust causes the target to shed light as a candle, and it cannot benefit from concealment or any invisibility effects. The creature takes a –1 penalty on attack rolls and sight-based Perception checks. This penalty to attack rolls and Perception checks increases by 1 at 4th level and every 4 levels thereafter, to a maximum of –6 at 20th level. This effect lasts for a number of rounds equal to half the shaman’s level (minimum 1). Sightless creatures cannot be affected by this ability. The shaman can use this ability a number of times per day equal to 3 + her Charisma modifier. (5/day)
Hexes: A primal warden shaman cannot select the chant hex, the evil eye hex, the misfortune hex, or any witch hexes, and at 4th and 12th levels gains the Primal Blessing and Greater Primal Blessing hexes. This alters hexes and replaces the hexes gained at 4th and 12th levels.
Unstable Spellcasting: When the primal warden would spontaneously cast a 1st-through- 8th-level spell using the spirit magic class feature, she produces a random spell from the list of shaman spells in the ACG of 1 spell level higher than the spell slot expended. When she would spontaneously cast a 9th-level spell using spirit magic, she instead casts a random 9th-level spell from the shaman spell list in the ACG, treating her CL as 2 higher. There is no way to predict the spell before the shaman begins casting it using spirit magic, and she cannot enhance the spell using metamagic feats. The spell uses the shaman’s CL, even if it would normally be too low to cast the spell. There are 47 potential 2nd-level spells, 46 potential 3rd-level spells, 41 potential 4th-level spells, 30 potential 5th-level spells, 22 potential 6th-level spells, 22 potential 7th-level spells, 18 potential 8th-level spells, and 14 potential 9th-level spells.
At 8th level, after determining the spell that she would cast using spirit magic, once per day as a free action, the primal warden shaman can choose to randomly select another spell instead, using the same method of randomization as she used before (if she obtains the same result a second time, she must keep that result). At 12th level and every 4 shaman levels thereafter, she can choose to randomly select a different spirit magic spell one additional time per day, up to a maximum of four times per day at 20th level. She cannot use this ability more than once in the same round.
This alters spirit magic and replaces the hex gained at 8th level.

Vinyo
CG Tiny construct (Ioun wyrd familiar, valet)
Init +2 Senses blindsight 30 ft.; Perception +2

DEFENSE
AC 17, touch 15, flat-footed 14 (+2 Dex, +1 dodge, +2 natural, +2 size)
hp 17 (half mistress', count as her HD)
Fort +2, Ref +2, Will +5 (use her base saves or mistress', whichever better)
Defensive Abilities: Immune construct traits Resist 10, per diem

OFFENSE
Speed 0 ft., fly 30 ft. (average)
Melee slam +0 (1d4-3)
Space 2-1/2 ft.; Reach 0 ft.

STATISTICS
Str 4, Dex 15, Con --, Int 7, Wis 14, Cha 5
Base Atk +1; CMB +1; CMD 9
Feats Cooperative Crafting, Dodge
Skills Fly +10, (or use mistress' ranks, with Vinyo’s ability modifiers)
Languages Common (can’t speak)

SPECIAL ABILITIES
Able assistant, magical manipulation (open/close, prestidigitation), teammate, empathic link, deliver touch spells, ioun affinity (1+ ½ HD), share iouns

5 key concept elements:
Ecumenical anthropologist of religion: While she has individual leanings to or from particular spirits (most notably, for her people’s traditional gods and nature spirits), Jia has emerged from her isolated upbringing with boundless curiosity for the spirits of other lands and peoples, and tries to bring a suitable amount of respect to all cases. She is forever collecting and then offering up things that she thinks might please the spirits, whether on her travelling altar or at a local temple, to the point that she wryly calls herself a ‘spirit magpie.’
Scarred: Jia’s devotion to the spirits can be at least partially explained by a narrowly avoided disaster in her early childhood about which she is reticent, offering little beyond the statement that if the spirits hadn’t saved her, she would no longer be among the living. She does occasionally make a cryptic remark about ‘being put back together’ or ‘rekindling a frozen heart,’ although mostly only in the company of folks with spiritual bonds that she thinks have offered them related experiences: mainly oracles, witches, and some druids.
Easily distracted: While it may be “bad for monks and priests, and worse for wizards,” Jia, though able to concentrate when she sets her mind to it, too often just doesn’t. Her past is chequered with a series of enthusiasms briefly taken up and then largely abandoned just as quickly. Of them all, her most enduring interests to date lend themselves to contemplation: writing, sketching, formal dance and – somewhat more frivolously – tea.
Deadpan: As one might expect of an Ilverani, let alone a shaman, Jia enjoys keeping folks guessing as to whether she can actually be serious. She mostly tries to keep a straight face, and when she does smile, it’s most often because she’s pulled off some wild feat of chaotic magic that leaves onlookers unsure if she’s actually crazy.
Tree-hugger: Having grown up in the far north where the only large plants were those carefully nurtured by druids and their magic, Jia is fascinated by trees and forests of all kinds, and some of her favourite southern spirits are those that take care of them and the other green things that are more glamorous than those she’s used to.
Goals:
(IC): Circumnavigate Lake Encarthan, at least, before deciding whether to make Kyonin her home for the next little while, and prior to planning further explorations in other elven domains and all the weird and wonderful lands between the Crown of the World and the Inner Sea.
(IC): A little thing, but if she can get a wayfinder to start poking about a bit more in how ioun stones work, that would help keep her out of trouble, at least sometimes.
(OOC): Probably too much to hope to get anywhere near fulfilling her story feat, but maybe a few fun moments might be possible, especially if we get to a point a point that Jia can form temporary bonds with wandering spirits. A wandering hex is probably out, but maybe we can get to where she can get her samurai order ability online?
Secrets:
1) Jia tries to be diplomatic about even the shadiest and most unpleasant of other people’s spirits – partly out of reasonable caution given mortal frailty, and partly out of sometimes horrified fascination with how people justify themselves – but she very definitely has her own opinions, and if faced with an egregious offense to her sensibilities that she thinks she has a chance of redressing, she can be surprisingly forthright.
2) Of all the dimensions of her spiritual life, Jia keeps one most private: that she is, among everything else, also a seeker of the Brightness. On the one hand, since it’s a specifically elven phenomenon, as far as she knows, she’s wary of provoking more envy than the simple fact of elven longevity does. On the other, while heresy is a complicated matter in most aspects of elven religious thought, let alone with respect to the Brightness, based on her own interactions with the spirit world, she entertains ideas about the possibility of streamlining the cycles of incarnation that might raise eyebrows.
3) Just what happened the night that brought Jia’s connections to the spirits sharply to the fore is long lost to a storm of darkness, adrenaline, and horror, and so she often worries if she’s remembering her obligations correctly. She vaguely recalls flashes of light around a figure dark even against the arctic night, but in actual fact how many parties were involved never properly registered. [I imagine that the inciting incident was her being lost on the ice away from her hometown, and that she was saved probably by some fey. The problem would be that there would be more than one involved, and which took an interest in her surviving and why might be surprising. Was it a huldra? An ankou? Ijiraq? Even a norn? Up to a GM to have fun with that. :) ]
Important people:
1) Jia’s relationship with her parents is affectionate but somewhat strained. For whatever reason, until her, her family has not had much to do with magic in the past couple of generations, and has mostly been involved in merchant business along the Path of Aganhei the more awkward way. Since she is an only child who gave her parents quite a scare in her late girlhood, that she’s off gallivanting who knows where and consorting with who knows what spirits is not, understandably, very reassuring. She thinks of them often, but mostly to think she owes them another letter, given how long it takes for one to get there, even with elven logistic shortcuts.
2) Suulimir: Jia’s quite close to her mentor, even though he’s a priest bound much more tightly to one god – Findeladlara – and temple traditions than her own freewheeling, chatty relations with spirits generally. Although bemused by some of the more unusual manifestations of her magic, what calm and good sense Jia possesses stems largely from his good offices in encouraging the patience required for arts arcane, aesthetic, and altruistic.
3) Cedunnakha: Jia’s first girlfriend and ex did not leave her, on balance, with very happy memories. As a trader from the south, it eventually became clear that Cedunnakha wasn’t going to stick around, and while she’s not exactly proud of it, Jia decided it was better to break a heart than have hers broken, and the rest is history. Since Ilverani communities are small and tight-knit, however, the two can hardly avoid rubbing shoulders when in the same town. They can mostly be kept from sniping about one another in company, but the tense knife-edge of politeness often tends only to be marginally more pleasant for onlookers. Fortunately, now that Jia's traveling, such scenes are ever more rare, though the route through Icegate offers unfortunate opportunities for an encounter.
4) Iramine: One would think, after all that, that Jia would have learned her lesson, and she did, mostly, restricting herself to some inconsequential dalliances until such time as she’s ready to start looking for something more serious. That was still the plan when she met Iramine, but things got frustratingly … complicated. Unlike her first heartbreak – her fault – Jia’s not entirely sure how she feels about what went wrong with Iramine, though things definitely got deeper than they ought to have, somehow. Under ordinary circumstances, Jia would let bygones be bygones, but apparently Iramine’s people have lost track of her recently. Despite their falling out, Jia’s not nearly so heartless as to be unwilling to keep an eye out for her, and, of all things, she’s picked up the trail of someone that sounds like it could be her in keeping up with the gossip about this new spirit and supposed god on the shores of Lake Encarthan…
Quirks:
Vain: Although she carries herself how she imagines a devout and knightly lady should, Jia doesn’t have roots even among the gentry (unless the Good Neighbours count). This feeds into her straight-faced demeanour, as does her fastidious, solemn dress: both serve as a way of disguising eliding her humble origins. Her touchiness on the point if called on it, and an almost embarrassing weakness for gems, arguably don’t do her any favours, though.
Dark night of the soul: To those familiar with shamanic traditions, and even Jia’s personal penchant for stargazing, she can seem unusually focused on the shadows rather than the lights, and uninterested in the finer points of astronomy. While she has trained her familiar to be able to arrange their gems into a star map when helpful, she isn’t too fussed about keeping it up to the minute or the confusion introduced by them adding a stone here or there or letting them wander a bit.
Between the worlds:Even though she’s quite young, her curiosity and her ancestry have given Jia a remarkably good grounding in elven cultures across the northern hemisphere. While she still instinctively throws in her lot with the Ilverani, she can see herself spending more and more time among the Aiudeen in the near future, and – significantly – on the most practical level, some of the rites she performs daily for the spirits, and the stories and tools she carries with her, ultimately go back to family in Jinin.
Soubriquet: As an Ilverani, Jia takes it for granted that politeness and reason dictate that if one wants to know someone’s real name, one offers one’s own first. In the far more populous (and easy-going) south, that means that she’s got used to answering to her nickname “Silk Violet” much more often than she’d have thought. (“Silk” to friends, and “Vi” to a very few close friends in whose mouth the latter doesn’t grate.)

Jia is short for an elf (at 5’ 8”), which she tries not to let get to her, taking comfort in the other blessings the spirits have given her: milky, smooth skin and a flowing mane of hair that shines with just a hint of the blue-white sheen of a glacier in the early morning light, and the twinkle in her eye that sometimes flashes through the luminous auroral green that predominates, despite her generally serious mien. She’s not really built for armour, preferring to float about in dark blue robes (ideally, embellished with gold and silver embroidery) whenever she can, as becomes especially clear in natural settings, where plants barely bow and snow scarcely sinks beneath her weight.