"We need to keep looking. Small puddles of rainwater like this can't sustain us for long."
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Jocasta tugs at Kayden's sleeve. Whisper: "There's someone else here."
Jocasta pauses when she sees the rocks. "How odd. These were... molded, somehow. But not by volcanic action. I've heard of stone shaping with the One Power, so that is a possibility." "If the water is potable, then this might as well be a place to set up for the moment. The boulders should give us some solid ground for an encampment."
"Let's see how much water, and from where it issues," suggests Jocasta. She lets Kayden lead her (and possibly others) to the water hole.
Jocasta takes in Lazar's commentary somewhat incredulously, but then seems bemused. "Since I can touch the One Power without danger... for now... I believe that somewhat improves our chances." "The wolf may well smell things we can't see, but I think the first thing we need is a source of fresh water."
"I'm just going to try to grab the One Power for about six seconds. If I stop responding for more than twice that, give me the right."
"I wonder if those weaves are the result of some natural process. The Power does sometimes occur wild. Or as a result of a broken angreal or similar device. The scale is impressive," says Jocasta about the volcano. "I'm going to take a moment to try to embrace the Source and see what happens. I will need someone ready to knock me out if I get stuck, before I meet the fate of our ship's channeler." She waits for one of the gents to volunteer to whack her with a stick if things get out of hand.
Jocasta boards one of the small boats and remains quiet as the team rows to the shore. She accepts a hand leaving the boat, and takes a hesitant step onto the sandy beach. "I remember reading about this place," she says eventually. "An isle full of madmen, raving and violent. Let's hope we don't run into anyone dangerous before we can find a secure place to set up a camp." She pauses and squints at the volcano in the distance. "Does anyone else see... that?" she says, pointing.
"Let's assemble some supplies and figure out a direction to go, then."
The ageless face of the Aes Sedai reveals little. With the Great Serpent ring and the obvious signs of the White Ajah, she is probably driven principally by logic. Odd to see a White Ajah outside of the Tower. Assuming she isn't secretly a Darkfriend... but they were annihilated during the Final Battle, weren't they?
"Jocasta." The Aes Sedai is perfunctory. "Of the White Ajah, obviously," she adds. She hesitates a moment before accepting Kayden's handclasp. "Once we are ashore, we should look for a source of fresh water, so that we can set up an encampment. Our investigation will not last long if we do not account for our base, physical necessities. Once that is established I can tentatively attempt some simple Weaves and see what kind of interference, if any, I encounter. That may give us some clues as to the nature of the problem. We should also note any high points—whoever is in the lookout spot in the crow's nest should be able to tell the high spots of this island—for exploration, as those will give us a view of the landscape for further investigation."
"Insufficient evidence to draw a conclusion. The fate of our Windfinder was not an accident. The only likely place to investigate is here, ergo, we need to find whatever secrets are hidden here," says Jocasta. "And because the Windfinder's death was not accidental, this is likely dangerous."
He looks the woman in white in her eyes and asks, "Do you think what caused the windfinder's death could also be part of the land we will be making our landing at?" Although he is not quite thirty, his sharing his rations on the sly with his non-horse companion has made him appear to be slightly malnourished. "Impossible to tell until we make landfall and I can safely embrace the Power," says the woman smoothly. She taps her Great Serpent ring against the railing. "Even then, I suspect we shall find more questions than answers." The powerwrought vambraces on her arms glitter in the sun. She points to the landfall and says, "No doubt someone has been here before, but the records of such are lost or hidden."
Finally doing my powerwrought item allotment. Powerwrought studded leather armor +5 (25,000 mk, 20 lbs.)
Total = 37,000 mk of powerwrought items
Jocasta hugs her white shawl tighter to her shoulders, as women always do in Jordan's books (that, or tugging at their skirts). She peers out over the railing toward the sight of land. "Dangerous time. Without the Windfinder, the lookouts must make certain that the ship does not run aground while trying to find landfall. Even if we make it to land, the solution to problems of the One Power is not always obvious." Her voice is high-pitched and slightly monotone, the kind that could put someone to sleep if she sang a lullaby. Her black hair contrasts with her white garb and her fair complexion. As is almost always the case with Aes Sedai, she remains quite composed even in the face of lethal mysteries.
Pinged!
Updated!
I don't have access to the WoT d20 book while I'm at the office, so I'll have to try to finish up tonight and squeak in just under the timer. Wait, nope, I won't be home until after midnight tonight. I've been driving for 16 hours in the last three days. Just no time.
I have to go out of town for the weekend, which is slowing things down. Should be back in action at last on Tuesday.
Sorry I'm slow. Traveling out of town for three consecutive weekends, had a wedding to attend this weekend and that's on top of my normal work commute, which is formidable.
its +5 years post TAR. I'll leave it up to you if you want a warder or not.Still tooling things but the broad points are done, info in the profile. @Jesse Heinig, let me know if you are interested in warder bonding Den to Jocasta.Lemme do a little reading, I seem to recall the White being the least likely to have a Warder at all, but I could be misremembering (that might be Reds). Also Jocasta is a little more worldly than other Whites and unconventional in her interactions with the rest of the world, so she may not follow form. Yeah, I'm chewing on it. It's always more fun with another player.
Still tooling things but the broad points are done, info in the profile. @Jesse Heinig, let me know if you are interested in warder bonding Den to Jocasta. Lemme do a little reading, I seem to recall the White being the least likely to have a Warder at all, but I could be misremembering (that might be Reds). Also Jocasta is a little more worldly than other Whites and unconventional in her interactions with the rest of the world, so she may not follow form.
The woman whispers to whomever she's behind, "I think he's... Weaving? With saidin?" She closes her eyes and exhales.
The woman hunkers down and crouch-walks behind Ceirn and Lazar. On the downside, she doesn't seem to be very good at blending into the landscape. On the up side, maybe that means whoever is out there will miss the others while they are watching her approach?
The woman crouches near one of the stones to make herself a smaller target. "He can't maintain the lightning strikes forever... can he?" she says.
Perhaps unexpectedly, the woman turns back toward the mountain. "I'm not leaving Noleem behind. But we can't get caught out in the open with that storm!"
The woman turns to look back up the mountainside and points. "That way—but I do not know if he has escaped the lightning."
"Did you not hear the thunder? That lightning is not natural!" she says, breathing hard.
"Get to cover!" the woman says loudly, squirming ineffectually in Lazar's grasp. "It is not blades that follow!" Her plain brown hair is disheveled and her face somewhat gaunt—she seems to be somewhat deprived, perhaps from too long on the road, or becoming lost in the mountains.
Reading now.
Ain't no high adventure like accounting.
Since she isn't a full Aes Sedai yet, Jocasta is still navigating low-level tower politics, so it's likely that she's already either annoyed one of the influential Aes Sedai and been instructed to go out and knock her stubborn head against the realities of the world so that she gets some sense, or assigned to support other Aes Sedai priorities in the region either for recruitment or for information-gathering. Jocasta herself would be curious about the why behind unusual demographics: If an unusual concentration of channelers appears in an area, what underlying mechanism caused such a concentration? How is this location different and what could explain this phenomenon? Or is it merely a statistical aberration with no causative tie to any prior event?
Ok time for some characters to exit the narrative and others to arrive!
I see that over in play the GM is back and ready to start up again, but I still haven't gotten a yes or no on this admittedly unusual character concept. Do I need to make changes? Punt and rewrite as a gray or yellow initiate? Go away and let you recruit someone else b/c nobody liked my idea? Where are we at?
Apropos of nothing: I recently wrote an RPG campaign that I'm releasing soon that is longer than the first WoT book. :)
Anyway, like I noted above, I have a whole wild internal thought process for how she works, but I can always switch her over to be a hard stereotype of an Aes Sedai-in-training from a more conventional standard. I've read most of the books. (I trailed off as they started getting really bloated and eventually Jordan perished and I just got tired of going through lots and lots and lots of stuff that didn't go anywhere...)
Yeah, and it would be a while b/c this character doesn't have the requisite feats for the prestige class yet. Which gives time to develop more personality and interactions with the Tower! At the end of the day the character is just gonna go through a bunch of harrowing adventures, try to get Accepted by the tower, and wind up in whatever Ajah decides they can tolerate taking her. Anyway, like I noted above, I have a whole wild internal thought process for how she works, but I can always switch her over to be a hard stereotype of an Aes Sedai-in-training from a more conventional standard.
"No" is a perfectly adequate response. :) I am happy to rewrite Jocasta's personality and history into a more conventional Yellow or Gray Ajah. Oh! One last thing to consider when thinking about an Aes Sedai who doesn't seem to mesh perfectly with the stereotypes of her Ajah: Almost nobody in the Tower liked what Moiraine was doing when they found out.
Good to know! I figured a more elaborate explanation might help to illuminate the character's perspective by adding context from actual philosophy and logic, so I wanted to take one shot at a more detailed explanation. (It's what a White sister would do...) If the team doesn't like it, then off to the bin it goes! BTW @RizzenMagnus since you have so many custom rules, if you like, I have an Obsidian Portal account, and I could set up a page for your campaign and build a wiki there with all of the relevant rules but including all of the custom material. That would make it searchable and linkable and hopefully easier for people to find class info, Talents, Feats, skills, and so on. It would take me a few days to build out the structure, but I could give you DM privs (if you have an OP account—they're free) and then you could have allllll of your rules in one place with the house rules directly integrated. Offer stands even if I don't get recruited into the group!
First off, apologies for the wall of text as I defend my dissertation. ;) I didn't spell it out in so many words in the backstory, but what Jocasta has stumbled across is called (in our world) the Falsification Principle, as elucidated by philosopher Karl Popper. Basically it is the dividing line for what constitutes science: If you have a hypothesis that can be falsified—you propose a rule or idea or pattern and there is a way that you can test it that might show that it is false—then it is subject to the scientific method. If a claim is not falsifiable, then it is not scientific (which in turn has ramifications for its applicability to logic). Jocasta would not express it in that way, but that's essentially what she has stumbled across in her "learning from failure" methods. It's also the same argument that the Greek philosophers had in epistemology, about whether truth can be ascertained purely by reason or through observation of the world. Plato, for instance, believed that experimentation and observation did not yield truth, because truth (knowledge) was fixed (Platonic ideals) whereas the world and the objects within it were changing and mutable, and therefore observation and experimentation yielded results of change and thus could not discover eternal truths. Jocasta has tumbled to the notion that formal logic is a useful theoretical tool but it is only valid in practical terms when it is tested against reality—that you only discover what is true in the world by actually challenging the world, not by just thinking about it in a (possibly literal) ivory tower. It's a rejection of the Chicago school ("that idea is great in practice, but how does it work in theory?"). So this character's built as a deconstruction of tropes (something I tend to do a lot). At the base, the White Ajah is looking for truth via philosophy and logic. Jocasta is taking that underlying approach, the search for truth, and saying, "In order for our work to have any meaning, we must accept as true that we exist in a physical world with these observable qualities. Therefore, our research must acknowledge these qualities when we try to ascertain truths that are relevant to our material existence." This doesn't preclude the search for truth in the abstract, as theoretical models and pure mathematics are still valid forms of inquiry (albeit with the caveat that it's unknown whether mathematics corresponds tightly to descriptions of reality for some reason or just happens to coincidentally match), but Jocasta is then applying logic to the process of inquiry itself and saying, "Ok, you have this beautiful abstract hypothesis, and... what is the point of it beyond a mere intellectual exercise?" If your thought exercise cannot survive collision with the real world, or describes nothing relevant to the real world in some way, then why are you spending time on it? (Notably, Jocasta's rigor in this regard could be seen as flawed: Abstract thinking provides alternative ways to view problems and manipulate models, and the human capacity for thought and troubleshooting and imagination provides its own rewards. But she only has a 15 Intelligence, she has blind spots philosophically.) She applies this standard to the White Ajah as a whole: if the work of the Ajah never has any practical use, then how does their existence benefit the Aes Sedai and the world at all? Ergo, Jocasta sees herself as White Ajah in that she uses logic, deduction, and the scientific method in the search for truth. Her goal set, though, of discovering testable, falsifiable hypotheses—using the scientific method!—clashes with the White Ajah's cultural standard of being "total logic" machines. This means that Jocasta challenges assumptions of the usual White Ajah method. Why do members of the White Ajah decide to be totally unemotional? How does this improve (or worsen!) their pursuit of actual truth? What is served by devoting the intellectual resources of the White Ajah to purely abstract exercises that have no practical use in the real world? (It's kinda like Star Trek VI when Spock says "Logic is the beginning of wisdom.") It also means that Jocasta attracts disdain from other members of the White Ajah, because while what she is doing is an actual epistemological search for material truth, it does not fit the cultural standards of the White Ajah, and in the Aes Sedai, the appearance of cultural fit is sometimes more important than pursuit of the actual goals of an Ajah (that is, the Aes Sedai place a high amount of social capital on conformity; the Ajahs are very much like sororities, in that they push for people to sort into groups where they can fit a specific expectation, and they talk about those groups according to those stereotypes). Jocasta believes that she is doing what the White Ajah claims to do (pursuing truth through logic and experimentation) but she does so in a way that does not meet the White Ajah's social stereotype, and thus she suffers social consequences for doing so. Anyway, that's the giant word salad at how I arrived at this unusual character that pushes on the boundaries of what the White Ajah does and how she's a deconstruction of their tropes. :)
Based on this comment about losing the team's Aes Sedai, I've converted an old alias over to a new character for this, using the rolls that I made previously (here). I have read most of the books and I am pretty familiar with how the Aes Sedai work. Jocasta here is a bit unconventional by the standards of the White Ajah: While she is a philosopher and logician, she believes that "total logic" and absence of all emotion is actually a hindrance to understanding, because people have emotions, so any thinking that ignores this is automatically flawed. As one might expect, she is not especially popular with her Ajah, or the Tower in general... which is why they "encouraged" her to go out in the world a bit. Jocasta is a defender and healer. She doesn't have any offensive weaves yet, just warding, healing, a little conjunction. Of course as she grows in experience she'll likely learn some other Talents and pick up some battle magic! (Also, I can always tweak the character and pick up some Elemental weaves instead if we need some blastin'.)
Hope all's well! It's been over a month - is Raltus OK? Still very busy?
I'm fine, how are you?
Jocasta stands around like someone who has no ranks in Heal.
Huh. No notifications of unread messages on Gameplay. EDIT: Uh, yeah, as far as I can tell we aren't in combat, we're waiting for the healers to check on Terry. |