Brahnamin's Characters: Kish
Kish, the Mad
"The advantage of the knife is never having to reload"
Heritage: Gnoll [F]
Class: Deep Apiarist
Calling: Enlightenment
Active Beats:
(Minor) Dissect something or interrogate someone that can shed light on your task.
(Minor) Allude to the events that led you to seek forbidden knowledge to achieve animpossible task.
Appearance:
Kish is rather lithe and lean for a gnoll, even a female gnoll. She has a mottled dust and brown hide, common to her people, but the comb of the hive that indwells her can be seen on her skin
Uncommon to her people are her amber eyes, where her fellows' are usually green.
Kish is not in the habit of wearing clothing or adornment beyond the belts, pouches, and pack she needs to carry her gear with her into the Heart.
She is always grinning and constantly barking the signature laugh of her kind.
Resistances & Stress
| Resistances | Stress | Protections | Fallout |
|---|---|---|---|
| Blood | +2 | ||
| Echo | |||
| Mind | |||
| Fortune | |||
| Supplies |
Resources
Dried dream-mushrooms
Heartsbloom rose in a glass jar d6 Occult, Fragile
Equipment
Bootleg Ambrosia: Mend Mind D6, Potent, Expensive
Ritual Blade: Kill d6
Skills, Domains, & Abilities
| Skills | Knacks | Domains | Knacks |
|---|---|---|---|
| Compel | Cursed | ||
| Delve | Desolate | ||
| Discern | Haven | ||
| Endure | Occult | ||
| Evade | Religion | ||
| Hunt | Technology | ||
| Kill | Warren | ||
| Mend | Wild | ||
| Sneak |
CORE
UNORTHODOX METHODS: You blend together method and madness in pursuit of your goals.Gain the Discern skill. Once per session, before you roll dice to resolve an action, instead state that your result is a 6. You succeed but take stress.
THE HIVE: The sweetlings nest within your body. Some of your organs are replaced with complex copies made from wax by industrious bees. They live within you – a few at first, but as you grow in power, great swarms. Their curious buzzing aligns your mind with the Hive. At the beginning of each situation, clear all Mind stress as incipient madness flows through you and into the Hive. You can never bene‐ fit from Mind protection or remove stress from Mind, aside from using this ability.
RELEASE THE SWARM: You send out a swarm of bees, eager to defend you. Gain access to the following weapon: (Kill D4, Spread, Ranged).
MAJOR
ANNIHILATION: Your body is unHeart; it burns through the parasitic world of meat and bone. Against heartsblooded people or creatures, your touch functions as a (Kill D8) weapon. As you use it, your flesh roils and cracks, but the swarm repairs it as quickly as it is unmade; your opponent doesn’t have that luxury. Against any other target, it functions as a (Kill D6) weapon.
MINOR
HUNTER OF THE DAMNED: You bring order to the Heart with sword and shot. Gain the Hunt skill. Once per session, when you eliminate a heartsblooded creature, remove D6 stress from any of your resistances.
MANY EYES: Each of your companions is a vessel for your sight. Gain the Discern skill. When you stand still and close your eyes, you can see through the eyes of any of your bees, allowing you to spy around corners or look into closed spaces. You can’t control the bees directly, but you have enough at your disposal to cover the area around you.
UNCANNY BIOLOGY: Aside from the Queen nestled inside your heart, every part of your body is replaceable by the swarm. Gain +2 Blood Protection.
Background, Bonds, and Notes
Her tribal name is Kish [the Mad], but in the lands below, she introduces herself as Windchime.
- Windchime fled the spire after her murder. What she misses most about the world above is the sensation of the wind in her face and running through the rough tall grass of the savanah.
- Waking and sleeping the Heart is always with her.
- The blood raven is the most common guise in which the Heart visits her dreams, but there are also the scarabs. Flesh eating scarabs that taste like copper and dust.
- Windchime knows where the Heart is strongest. She has but to look for the black veins. The more there are, the thicker and longer they grow, the stronger the Heart is in that place.
- Her connection with the Heart changed her eyes from green to amber.
- Windchime recently witnessed another Deadwalker die the final death. His blood was a malevolent black stain on the earth. Bas was with her when it happened. He smiled.
- The Death that Follows: Windchime is accompanied everywhere by a spectre of Death. It appears to her as a roughly manshaped, mansized creature of grey stone with a face like a jackal and hands like massive curved swords. She has never successfully pronounced the name he gave her for himself and has settled on calling him Flint. He seems amenable to that.
- The Grove [Landmark]: The Grove is a shalow cavern festooned with stalagtites and stalagmites nearly as old as the world itself, calling to mind the trunks of great trees. The grove is dark to the eyes of the living, but to any who have died the stones glow with warm light. It is a place of rest to her kind, but treacherous to living souls who take refuge there, for the stone of that place swallows the living as they sleep.
- The Commune of the Red Hand [Haven]: A small community of Gnolls, the Commune banshed Kish and gave her the sobriquet 'the Mad' for attempting to eat a clergyman of the Commune.
We just had to cross a damned bridge. Trouble was, the bridge was literally damned. We poured the holy essence at the start of the bridge, and started across. That is when things went south. North? Dead shit started crawling up out of the stone and trying to drag us down.
- I don't know which of my companions got the holy essence to the far side and settled things. I was in the grey the whole time trying to drag the crusty bastards back to their own realm.
- Barley Fetch the Candlemaker. Lovely woman. Keeps her own bees, brews her own mead. She talks in the most soothing tones, and the way her copper hair catches the light . . . but no one sees past those vicious scars on her face. Shame.
- Threshgrass, judgy Incarnadine gnoll bastard. "Gnolls are of the tribe of Life!" he rants. "No gnoll should stand proud among the Dead!" he spits. His name was meant to decorate ritual blades.
- Kish originally died in the Spire, an envoy for her people, tasked only with carrying word back and forth from the city to the savanah. But she was waylaid by a person she never saw who attacked her from behind. So swift and sure was the attack that she hadn't even time to think much less cry out.
- The last thing to go through her mind as she died was a handspan of fine Aelvish steel.
- In her passing, she caught glimpses of several heavans, the forest being the paradise she most longed for, but it was the Grey that fought hardest to keep her. And in the end, perhaps it won, though she came back to the world and not a heaven, the Grey still let her come and go freely.
- She doesn't allow herself to linger on the why of things.
