This is just a thread about a character I'm playing. I started in a starfinder game recently and it is the first time I have played in an RPG since I was a teenager in the 90's. The setting is so well developed. Very inspiring for coming up with rich sets of backgrounds and motivations.
Zel is Damaya Lashunta, born in Roselight. His mother is a distinguished manager within the Ereus matriline, an influential Technomagical corporation (described in Armory) largely run through an extended family network. His childhood bedroom looked out on Hallas and the shifting mass of Liavara below, seeping into his dreams. He later spent time in corporate housing several places in Arkanen. The reason for the Ereus operation was a result of the presence and ongoing negotiations surrounding the mining of Thaumagen, a magical gas described in the CRB and then left unexplained in PW, which we have decided can be made both into a drug which can both increase your magical abilities at a cost, and also is the primary "plotanium" for the industrial creation of magical items. It can be taken in small (and then increasingly larger) doses by Technomancers to enhance their perceptions (think Navigators in Dune), and in larger more possibly deadly doses by various Mystics and lunatics which can cause release of the astral body into some other plane or similarly intense effects (think of the way the Bene Gesserit use the spice to create their Revered Mothers).
His only experience of Castrovel was as a teenager when he was sent to a series of boarding schools out in the wilds of Asana intended to keep the wild-eyed youngster in touch with his family heritage. Learning to ride the native beasts, eat the native food etc. Zel hated Castrovel. For a sensitive telepath who grew up in a stark space station environment bombarded from birth by strange radiations, entering a lush environment filled with all manner of beings (from houseplants onward) highly adapted to interact with the 'psychic plane' was alienating and overpowering. Not to mention being an offworlder in boarding school was totally weak. He couldn't wait to get back to Roselight, despite feeling depressed and disconnected from his life with his family.
When he returned, a youngling barely past puberty (I guess for Lashunta shortly after the age of deciding what subtype they will be) his mother had a new associate in her research team. An intriguing human with a dashingly handsome face and equally strikingly bizarre ideas.. regarding for instance the use of spirits in the research and development of hybrid tech. Not to mention, privately, an indulgence in the use of Thaumaugen. This was in fact his personal reason for employment in Ereus, although they were of the impression they had hired him due his precise skills in the purity analysis of several other magically reactive elements. When they met, although Zel was still a young one, there was undeniable chemical spark between them.. although the better man would simply smile to himself and disregard the interest of a teenager, Fredrick Bahchktin Ramakrshna was never very good at being the better man.
A lurid tryst developed. Freddy taking Zel under his wing and teaching him about some of the things he knows. Spirits were summoned in private occasions to share and participate in their pleasure. He gave him experience of many varieties of mind-altering substances. Leading, of course, to a larger then advertised dose of uncut Thaumagen. More then Freddy had ever had the nerve to take himself. This was Zel's Initiation.
Astral body tossed into the Maelstrum, the now-nameless consciousness which was Azelator Ereus floated adrift for an indeterminate eternity. At one point a memory emerged of a story. About an ancient spirit of the sea who became a great lady, honored by many. She sailed in a boat, which was then a spaceship, which was then later a world within its hull, which was also a constellation in the night sky. With the Thaumaugen still raging in his system his still-living soul appeared as a bright beacon in the seas of the maelstrum, and the Starwraith closed in, Besmara's crew curiously fished him out of the waves and hauled his sorry soul aboard. He remembers very little afterward, but as returned to his body he was marked by Lady Besmara and his fate was bound.
[Part One]