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[higglety]

Ok, so journals need content, right?  So I’m going to yell about my dumb wonderful D&D characters, so that later when I put up stories of the ridiculous things we’ve done, y’all know who I’m talking about.

 

So currently I’m in a 5e game that one of my buddies got around for the purposes of introducing a couple players who are brand new to D&D to the game.  In this campaign, I play Mervyn, one half of a pair of twin criminal halflings.  Mervyn and his brother Jerry (who is a PC being played by another party member) have been scamming, conning, and robbing their way across the country, gaining and burning underworld contacts along the way.

 Mervyn and Jerry are identical, and use this fact to their advantage.  They grew up poor in a podunk town.  When they were young, they each jumped at whatever opportunity they could grab to get out of there.  Jerry joined the military, and Mervyn joined the church.  He got disillusioned pretty quickly by the amount of corruption and lack of care for the common folk from the church leadership, and by extension the deity - because if the deity was ok with granting holy magical powers to lousy clerics like those, the deity probably wasn’t shit, either.  One day he came across an old battered hand-written pamphlet talking about a dude called The Traveler, and after that, he got thinking.  Maybe it was divine intervention, maybe he was just fed up, but he decided that the church and their god could go stuff themselves, because he was going to hit the road.  He kept the pamphlet as a good luck charm, and started half-jokingly praying to the Traveler.  Nothing formal, and not particularly serious, just talking to him like an imaginary traveling companion.  Gradually, he started noticing things that could be interpreted as the Traveler talking back: lucky breaks, rapid healing, a guard overlooking him when by all rights he should have been caught.  He started praying in earnest - still not formal, but with genuine intent, and the Traveler answered.  He was granted the magical abilities of a trickster cleric, and turned them toward aiding and enabling his life of crime.

 

Meanwhile, Jerry had deserted the army, joined up with a mercenary crew who he’d then deserted as well, and turned to his own life of crime hiring himself out as security and hired muscle.  The twins met back up on a job, and began doing crimes together.  Mervyn employed his Traveler-granted abilities to alter his appearance and make it seem like there were more of him to bamboozle people into confusing himself, his brother, and his illusory doubles.  The identical halfling act was so potent that Mervyn committed himself to the bit to the extent of breaking his own nose and cutting distinctive scars into his face to match those his brother had gained during his time as a fighter.  By the time our campaign started, Mervyn and Jerry are seasoned thieves and a practiced double act.

 

(When you are imagining them, imagine swarthy skin, rough, plain features, brown eyes, clean-shaven, and black hair cut in a mullet.  Jerry switches between a short bow and dual wielding a short sword and a dagger, Mervyn switches between dual wielding handcrossbows and firing off sacred flames - his somatic component is dual finger-guns.  Mervyn also conjures a spiritual weapon in the form of a giant spectral hand to smack people with.