by Adelene » Wed Jan 27, 2016 4:43 pm
hee. ^^
More thoughts on Lurkerforged:
Okay so the thing with the magic. When House Cannith was first making warforged - and optionally right up to the end to a degree, since idk exactly how JD is going to want to play this - they weren't thinking 'make a suitable artificial body for a soul to pilot around', they were thinking 'magic a golem into being able to do all the things a person can do'. And to start out with, they kind of... overshot. In a fairly specific way, though; it's not that Lurkerforged has a bunch of extra magic power clinging to her or something, it's that she has a bunch of technically-superfluous spells doing things that she'd be better off if her soul was handling, primarily with her speech (such as it is) and senses.
On the speech front, she's somewhere in the vicinity of Wall-E, or a cross between Lapis-in-the-mirror and a star wars bot - she can generate words and short phrases, but not a full range of them and it's hard to understand her if you're not familiar with her, and she has a much easier time mimicking things she's heard recently than adding things to the set of phrases she can consistently say; on the other hand she can and does make a wide variety of expressive noises, including ones biological creatures can't manage. She also has a tendency to lose control of her voice when under extreme stress - the correct way to handle a warforged's voice is to let their soul do the heavy lifting of figuring out what to say and how to say it, and limit the magic to sound generation; in her case the magic tries to generate utterances itself, and most of the time she has that under control but every once in a while she slips. (I haven't figured out what this sounds like yet, or even whether it's clear that it's happening; I'm probably going to wait and see if it comes up in-game and decide based on what makes for a good story.)
In terms of senses, she's much closer to normal - golems don't talk at all, so they were kind of taking a shot in the dark with that and even if they'd been right about what they needed to do the result wouldn't've been very good, but they do have senses, so there was more of a starting point to work from in that case, and most of the time it's not obvious that there's anything weird going on there at all. But under the surface, she's still got magic doing stuff that isn't generally handled that way, and when she had her run-in with the magic-detection-granting living spell, she noticed, and ended up with what is basically a meta-sense: she can 'see' how her sensory magic works, and with practice she's learned to fiddle with it, with various effects.
History: She's one of the very oldest warforged - maybe not in the first ten, but certainly in the first fifty and probably in the first twenty - Eberron being Eberron, she's likely #13, in which case she does know the actual number of older warforged and what happened to each of them. In any case, she's the first one they made an active effort to keep around in the long term - in the earlier and most of the later testing models, they were trying to work out what would make the warforged effective as warriors, but she was made as a case study in what works with regards to warforged as people, so they needed to keep her around for longer-term observation. That was the focus of the first few years of her life; the trip to observe the kobolds happened relatively early in that - it was a test of how much autonomy a warforged could be given and still act as required, and she very nearly 'failed', but the kobolds helped her work out what was happening, and she went back and at least gave the appearance of cooperation, to keep the opportunity to affect how they treated the other warforged.
Once House Cannith was satisfied with their warforged-training plans, they retired Lurkerforged as a test subject. She knew this was coming (she'd seen it with others) and didn't want 'retired' to translate to 'destroyed', so she made a point of making herself useful in another way. Ideally this means she was helping to build new warforged bodies, but the sourcebooks aren't clear on whether that's a thing; it kind of sounds like the forges just took in raw materials and spat out finished products with no human intervention in between, in which case she found some other sort of work to do and picked up warforged repair later. (It's possible, actually, that she was the first warforged artist and that caught someone's eye well enough to get them to request that she be kept around... yeah, I like that as the backup, go with that if helping create new warforged isn't an option.) That made up the bulk of her ~35 years; she was occasionally pulled to be a guinea pig for something when they needed a warforged and didn't want to risk one of the more valuable ones, but not often, and she did a good enough job of hiding the true extent of her capabilities that they never sent her off on a task that was completely out of her depth. (Yes, she regularly lied to them about what happened. This is part of why I want her to have a warforged repair skill, so that putting 'I got mauled by X but fixed myself' in her reports when it's not true is an option.)
And that brings us more or less up to the present day. The thing with the living spells was recent, perhaps a few months before the start of the campaign; she's been looking for an opportunity to sign up for a longer expedition since it happened, and the Xen'drik one is the first even slightly suitable thing she's heard about.
For social interaction... she comes off as friendly and outgoing, even perky, and there's a degree to which that's true, but it's mostly an act: she really, really doesn't trust people, as a general rule, and putting on an act that she's fairly shallow is her first line of defense to keep them from watching her too closely. In reality, her first instinct with almost any sort of interesting or unusual information is to keep it a secret, and she spends a lot of time and mental effort on figuring out what makes people tick so that she can tell them whatever will get them to react the way she wants them to. She does use this power pretty strictly for good - even if she didn't, the fact that she's running an ultra-long con limits what lies she can tell, but even above and beyond that she doesn't want anyone to get hurt or even be seriously inconvenienced; it's just that between her lack of direct power to protect people and the fact that so many of her interactions with other people have involved them manipulating her, she sees it as the obvious way to get things done.
In a fight, she focuses on being hard to hit and waiting for her attacker to give up and go away rather than actually defeating her opponent; when that doesn't work, she tries to disarm them and see if that gets them to back off before making any serious attempt to hurt them. In a group combat situation she's inclined to be somebody's flanking buddy. (Checking the rules, it appears that you can't feint an opponent to distract them from a flanking ally's attack; this seems like an oversight and she wants to be able to do that.) Outside of combat, she's about equally comfortable working in a group or working alone, but it's important to her to be able to spend time by herself on a somewhat regular basis; this manifests in a few different ways, but one of the most obvious is that she'll 'volunteer' for scouting missions by just going and doing them without discussing it with the group, and she also tends to wander off to be by herself during mealtimes. Beyond that, she's pretty focused on fitting in and keeping her head down, at least until (or, more accurately, unless) she comes to trust her companions not to be awful if they happen to get a more accurate picture of her.
Also, when they get back from Xen'drik and she hears about the day of mourning, her reaction is going to be to go right back home and try to find out what the fuck. Depending on her relationship with her companions at that point, she may tell them that she's going or even try to talk them into joining her, but short of someone physically restraining her, yeah, that's going to happen.
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