Collin is my fighter. As with all my LFR characters, he is built with an eye towards effectiveness and an eye towards roleplay, which makes two eyes. That’s how you know I’m not a beholder. In practice, this means he’s a sword and shield fighter; I haven’t gone for the maximal damage cheese but I do like him to be pretty good at what he does. Which is minimize incoming damage and control the location of enemies on the battlefield. He can push and pull like nobody’s business.
If you care about his character sheet, make sure to check out the notes; he’s got a couple of powers and an item from a recent Dragon article which hasn’t gotten into the character builder yet.
He also has a backstory. Most of his life, he’s been a simple farmer in Chessenta. No family: he’s a bit too cranky and irascible to maintain a relationship, and he wasn’t really a very successful farmer. You grow some crops, you shout at kobolds to go away, and you do what you can. Chessenta is not exactly a farming nation.
About a year ago, a knight came riding onto Collin’s farm and dropped dead. Collin says “knight” when he tells this story, because it’s easier for the fluffheads of Cormyr to understand, and he’s been spending time there lately, but really he means a commander of the Akanax legions. Either way, the guy was wearing scale armor and carrying a nasty longsword, and he dropped dead on Collin’s doorstep. This represented two things.
The first thing was a huge problem. Legionnaires do not ride alone. It’s contrary to Chessenta military doctrine. Thus, Collin was soon going to have more legionnaires on his farm, and they would have questions which he could not answer in a satisfactory manner. These would eventually lead to questions which he could answer, but did not wish to answer, such as “How soon will Collin die once he’s stuck with a spear?”
The second thing was a great opportunity. Or at least a semi-interesting opportunity rendered deeply tempting by the previous thing. Collin could take the knight’s armor and the knight’s sword and the knight’s horse and ride off to find adventure somewhere other than Chessenta. That was a pretty good deal, considering the alternative. Using a sword couldn’t be too hard, right? 35 isn’t too old to learn a new trade. Sure.
The horse portion of the opportunity turned out to be not so good, since the knight’s horse was a warhorse and did not want some random farmer riding him. Collin still managed to make pretty good time on foot, and dodged his impending problem successfully. By dint of serious practice – he always was pretty athletic – he managed to pick up enough swordplay to get hired on as a merchant ship guard, and that went well enough for him to get paid, and so on.
Now he’s wandering around the eastern half of Faerun seeing the sights, hanging out with interesting people, and hitting things with an amazing new magic sword. Could be worse.
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