Jocasta Riverwood's page

About Jocasta Riverwood

Jocasta Riverwood
Female Illianer human initiate 5
Medium humanoid (human)
Senses Perception +10

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Defense
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AC 14, touch 11, flat-footed 13 (+3 armor, +1 Dex)
HP 40 (max 5d6, +10 Con)
Fort +6 (+4 base, +2 Con), Ref +4 (+3 base, +1 Dex), Will +6 (+4 base, +2 Wis)

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Offense
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Speed 30 ft.
Melee Dagger +3 (1d4+1/19-20/x2; slashing)
One Power Affinities Spirit (primary), Air
One Power Talents Conjunction, Healing, Warding
Weaves Known (CL 5th): Arms of Air (Elemental)*, Barrier to Sight (Warding), Circle of Silence (Warding), Create Fire (Elemental)*, Delve (Healing), False Trail (Conjunction), Heal (Healing), Heal the Mind (Healing), Light (Elemental)*, Master Ward (Warding), Polish (Earth Singing)*, Renew (Healing), Sense Shadowspawn (Conjunction), Trace (Conjunction), Ward Against Shadowspawn (Warding), Warmth (Cloud Dancing)*
Weaves per Day: 4/3+2/2+2/1
* Indicates a Weave outside of known Talents, so only 0-level Weaves are usable.

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Statistics
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Str 12, Dex 13, Con 14, Int 15, Wis 14, Cha 14
Base Atk +3; CMB +4; CMD 14
Languages: Common (Domani, Illianer, Midlander, Tar Valoner), Old Tongue

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Feats
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Level 1
Wealth: It's good to be rich. It's even better to be born rich.
Benefit: You begin the game with an extra 250 silver marks (mk). Furthermore, every time you go up in level, you can draw upon your family's investments, gaining 250 mk for each point of Reputation you have when your level increase occurs. This wealth does not magically appear in your pockets; you must collect it from a family business, a relation, or some other source of your family's wealth. If you cannot collect the money before you go up a level again, you lose the benefit for that level (but you can, of course, collect the money gained for your new level).

Background
Cosmopolitan: Your exposure to the thousand forking paths of the city has taught you things you ordinarily would never have uncovered.
Backgrounds: Cairhienin, Domani, Ebou Dari, Illianer, Tar Valoner.
Benefit: Choose a nonexclusive skill you do not have as a class skill. You gain a +2 bonus on all checks with that skill, and that skill is always considered a class skill for you.
Special: You may take this feat multiple times. Its effects do not stack. Each time you take the feat, it applies to a new skill.
Chosen skill: Swim

Initiate 1 bonus channeling feat
Extra Talent: You have an additional Talent.
Benefit: Pick a new Talent. You can learn and cast weaves within this Talent.
Special: You can gain this feat multiple times.
Chosen Talent: Warding

Initiate 2 bonus channeling feat
Extra Talent: You have an additional Talent.
Benefit: Pick a new Talent. You can learn and cast weaves within this Talent.
Special: You can gain this feat multiple times.
Chosen Talent: Conjunction

Level 3
Armor Proficiency (Light): You are proficient with light armor.
Benefit: When you wear a type of armor with which you are proficient, the armor check penalty applies only to Acrobatics, Climb, Escape Artist, Sleight of Hand, Stealth, and Swim checks.
Normal: A character that is wearing armor with which she is not proficient suffers its armor check penalty on attack rolls and on skill checks that involve moving, including Ride.
Special: All classes except algai'd'siswai, initiates, and wilders have this feat for free.

Initiate 4 bonus channeling feat
Extra Affinity: You have an Affinity with one of the Five Powers beyond the one you started with.
Benefit: Pick one of the Five Powers for which you do not already have an Affinity. If you are a female, you must pick Air, Water, or Spirit, unless you already have Affinities with all three of those Powers. Only then may you pick Earth or Fire. If you are a male, you must pick Earth, Fire, or Spirit, unless you already have Affinities wth all three of them; if so, you may pick Air or Water.
You now have an Affinity with this additioanl Power.
Special: You can gain this feat up to four times, giving you Affinities with two, three, four, or even all of the Five Powers.
Chosen Affinity: Air

Level 5
Combat Casting: You are adept at casting weaves in combat.
Benefit: You get a +4 circumstance bonus on Concentration checks made to cast a weave while on the defensive.

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Skills
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Total skill ranks: 30/10 (20 initiate, +10 Int; 10 background)

Composure +10 (5 ranks, +2 Con, +3 class skill)
Diplomacy +10 (5 ranks, +2 Cha, +3 class skill)
Heal +10 (5 ranks, +2 Wis, +3 class skill)
Perception +10 (5 ranks, +2 Wis, +3 class skill)
Weavesight +14 (5 ranks, +2 Int, +3 class skill, +4 competence bonus)

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Background Skills
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Linguistics +10 (5 ranks, +2 Int, +3 class skill)
Lore (philosophy) +10 (5 ranks, +2 Int, +3 class skill)

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Untrained Skills
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Swim +3 (+1 Str, +2 Cosmopolitan background feat)

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Gear
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Total starting wealth: 850 mk

Traveler's outfit (free)
Dagger (2 mk, 1 lb.)
Masterwork studded leather armor (325 mk, 20 lbs.)

281 silver marks, 3 silver pennies

Light warhorse "Cloud" (150 mk)
[
• Bit and bridle (2 mk, 1 lb.)
• Riding saddle (10 mk, 25 lbs.)
• Saddlebags (4 mk, 8 lbs.)
•• Bedroll (1 sp, 5 lbs.)
•• Flint and steel (1 mk)
•• Healer's kit (50 mk, 1 lb.)
•• Lantern, hooded (7 mk, 2 lbs.)
•• Oil, lamp, pint, 4 (3 mk ea., 1 lb. ea.)
•• Waterskins, 2 (1 mk ea., 4 lbs. ea.)
•• Rations, trail, 5 days (5 sp per day, 1 lb. per day)
•• Soap (5 sp, 1 lb.)
•• Traveler's outfit (1 mk, 5 lbs.)
]

Total weight carried: 21 lbs.

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Special Abilities
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Initiate 5

Weapon and Armor Proficiency: Initiates are proficient with the club and the dagger. initiates are not proficient with any type of armor, nor with shields. Note that some armor types incur armor check penalties to skills.

The One Power: Initiates, like wilders, draw upon the Five Powers of the True Source to cast arcane weaves.
Affinities: Your initiate begins play with an Affinity for one of the Five Powers (Air, Earth, Fire, Spirit, or Water). This Affinity makes the initiate particularly strong with weaves that use only that Power. He or she will be less capable with weaves that involves the other powers, and be somewhat hampered in weaves that don't use that Affinity at all. If your initiate is female, choose your Affinity from among Air, Spirit, and Water. If he is a male, choose Earth, Fire, or Spirit. Your initiate can gain more Affinities with the Additional Affinity feat.
Chosen Affinity: Spirit

Talents and Weaves: Your initiate begins play having one common Talent and knowing eight common weaves of 0 level or 1st level (including multilevel weaves that include level 0 or 1). An initiate can gain more Talents with the Additional Talent feat. As the game progresses, your initiate can learn new ewaves through observation and training.
An initiate is limited to casting a certain number of weaves of each level per day. The number of weaves he can cast per day is improved by his bonus weaves granted by Intelligence and Wisdom, if any.
An initiate may use a higher-level slot to cast a lower-level weave if he so chooses. For example, if a 5th-level initiate has used up all of his 2nd-lvel weave slots for the day but wants to cast another one, he could use a 3rd-level slot to do so. The weave is still treated as its actual level, not the level of the slot used to cast it.
To learn or cast a weave, an initiate must have an Intelligence score of at least 10 + the weave's level. The Difficulty Class for saving throws against initiate weaves is 10 + the weave's level + the initiate's Intelligence modifier.
Chosen Talent: Healing

Cross-Talent Weaves: Beyond 0-level weaves, initiates can only cast weaves within their Talents. An initiate may learn and cast any 0-level weave, but may only learn and cast weaves of 1st level or higher if they are within one of his or her Talents.
Overchanneling: Like wilders, initiates can overchannel to cast more weaves than they are normally able.

Weavesight: The intense training that all initiates go through requires them to identify and emulate a broad range of Talents and weaves. As a result, every initiate gains a +4 competence bonus to all Weavesight checks.

Slow Aging: The ability to channel slows the aging process. Starting at 3rd level, divide your level by 2. The result is the number of years that must pass for your character to age one year. For example, a 4th-level initiate ages one year for every two years that goes by (in other words, she ages at half the rate of normal people). A 12th-level initiate ages one year for every six years (or one-sixth the rate of normal people).

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Backstory
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Description: Jocasta has long black hair and often bears a serious expression. She has thin lips, soft brown eyes, and thin, dark eyebrows, with smooth and angular cheeks and a similarly angular face. She is tall, like most Illianers, and a bit curvy. She has deft fingers and takes careful care to groom her appearance.
Like all members of the White Ajah, Jocasta dresses in white. Unlike other Aes Sedai, though, she sees armor as a practical necessity in a dangerous world, and she often wears a white leather jerkin and pteruges, studded with steel and secured by a broad girdle.

Hair: Black, long
Eyes: Brown
Height: 5' 9"
Weight: 145 lbs.

Background: Jocasta has always been an oddity. From a wealthy Illianer family, she was groomed from an early age with an urban education, though she also spent some time on the Illian waterfront and enjoyed the ships and the harbor. The mercantile interests of her parents placed her and her two siblings in a middle-upper class lifestyle, and she enjoyed the benefits of tutors, socialite life, and leisure.
As a teen she seemed to have a soothing touch—a wise woman might call it a gift for healing; for Jocasta, it seemed that her presence eased the hurts of the injured, a talent that manifested on the rare occasions when a workplace accident around the city happened while she was nearby. Soon she was tested for latent talent with the One Power, and when this was affirmed, she was quickly packed off to Tar Valon for more grueling study.
The jarring transition seemed to firm up some sort of resolve in Jocasta. Instructors seemed to expect her to fold under the pressure, as she had known a rather easygoing life before. Yet she learned an odd sort of unexpected lesson from the hardships. She wasn't the smartest initiate, nor the most intuitive, nor the strongest with the One Power. Yet every time she failed, she seemed to learn something from that failure and take it with her to her next task. Slowly she built an eclectic repertoire of skills and knowledge with the Power based not only on rote practice and instruction, but upon learning from her continued failures and shortcomings.
Grudgingly, the tutors graduated her into the Aes Sedai, simply because while she was unexceptional, nobody could bring forth a compelling reason that she shouldn't graduate. She had nominal proficiency with the Power. She proved an able rhetorician. She dove into study of languages and learned many colloquialisms and accents.
Jocasta surprised her mentors by choosing to take the White. The expectation had always been that she would be a mediocre Green or Brown Sedai—a healer or a battle warder—but she had glimpsed something, an idea, a hypothesis that had been long lost: One proves an axiom not by showing that it is true, but by challenging it to see if it is false. To learn what succeeds, first try to see what fails.
From that axiom she derived her approach to the White Ajah's logic. Almost immediately, she was decried by the Ajah. Her methods were too based upon experimentation rather than reason. She eschewed total logic, instead arguing that emotion is a central part of thinking experience and thus cannot be discounted as both a motivator and an experiential factor. She also argued that the Tower had become too insular, too arrogant and xenophobic, that by holding themselves in a position of social superiority, they alienated the very people with whom they needed to form common cause. Such alienation could only lead to resentment, she argued, which increased the tension between Aes Sedai and other people, and led to calamities like the Children of the Light, who hunted and executed the initiates.
Her arguments were rarely successful. But her knack was in learning from her failures.
Well, the White Ajah had a solution to this problem: they told Jocasta to take her hypotheses and her insistence on holistic experience and her demand that the Aes Sedai re-unite with the material world, and get out. If she thought the world was so important, maybe she could go live in it for a while.
So she did. And her failure to navigate the politics of the Tower has turned into a learning experience that has helped her grow far beyond the expectations of her teachers.

Personality Traits: Jocasta is highly logical and organized, sometimes given to lengthy and rambling statements. She tends to approach problems by matters of known fact, honing down on the unknowns and sidebarring them in order to work on the elements that she can control. She relishes opportunities to try new experiments, as she believes that methodologically one must experiment and see failures in order to validate processes.
She is also a charming young woman who, unlike most White Ajah, does not eschew the physical world. She likes having friends. She likes good red or pink wine. She likes a savory fish-and-vegetable plate. She likes cats. She likes all kinds of things! She believes that closing oneself off to emotion is a liability like cutting off one's nose or gounging out one's eyes. It is a part of the range of human experience, so it should be experienced and understood, and any attempt to understand thought and reason without it is deliberately incomplete and thus flawed. So she likes things. She laughs. She cries. She loves (in secret). And she hopes. She hopes for a better tomorrow.