TEN-MINUTE CHARACTER BACKGROUND

Name (nickname): Sabrak ("Crack / flaw" in Dwarven, chosen by his friend Darren, a dwarf wizard. He doesn't remember his original name)

-(bonus)- Catch phrase: "Some say they want to follow their dreams. If I say so myself, be sure to run fast."

5 Background and Concept Elements:

-1- He was quite lucky as a child, good family, tranquil life in a peaceful village, but he suffered from terrible nightmares. Eventually, in just one night, it was as if his nightmare left his mind to invade reality. The village was destroyed by the growth of intricate and dark vegetation and the population killed by fell beasts. The place was left to its fate by the local baron, with no intervention whatsoever, and he took refuge in the forest, where he lived terribly for the first years, and then a little better when he managed to control his strange powers.

-2- He is a half-elf, but he didn't inherit the elven love for nature, on the contrary he had a growing fear of everything related to it, culminated with the supernatural event described above. He had always been quite a handsome boy, and after the incident, his aspect reflected the darkness he had to withstand both inside and outside of him. His twisted charm is, in part, the very engine behind his powers, along with a not always apparent physical vitality. Quite unsurprisingly though, he is rather absent-minded and unaware.

-3- Right now, he is what somebody will call a Wildhaunt, a type of magic user resembling a druid, but the powers of which derive from spirits of the shadow world. He is capable of bringing whole portions of the shadow world in the natural world and while doing so, dislocate himself inside these areas. He can become a dark, often winged, beast-hybrid to deal with close combat, enter the summoned trees to control branches and roots in order to immobilize enemies, or become more indistinct spirit-forms that have influence over the minds and souls of beings.

-4- A naturally sociable person, he became very solitary due to the partly forced isolation. He hasn't got much control of himself during certain nights, and doesn't remember his actions. However, he rarely encounters intelligent beings, and he never found any elven village or other forest-dwelling populations inside his forest. This is strange because he explored it for years. But maybe due to his scarce control over what he does during his sleep or trances and due to his never very developed orienteering skills, he is probably just lost, and roving about in circles.

-5- Other traits of him include a very strong sexual drive (which he conceals out of shame), a quickly changing mood, an increasingly stoic vision of life, but a not at all stoic pain threshold: he hates to feel physical pain and tries hard to avoid even the slightest injuries.

Goals/Secrets (merged):

-1- He would like to see the world outside of the forest, but he's afraid to do so both because of what he could do to the outside world and because he never really experienced the outside since he was a young boy. Maybe his socially-aware personality is conscious that civilized people would look at him as a weird phenomenon, and after all these years he fears that kind of reaction more than everything else. He also lives with the burden of knowing that in some way, he killed all his friends and family. He is not sure about his family's fate, however.

-2- His powers came to him during a strange planar-storm event caused by an arcane experiment of the very High Magister of the Realm. She created conduits that tied the Dream Plane to both the Shadowfell and the Feywild. The village of Sabrak was more interested by Shadowfell influence, but due to the fact that dreams were so powerful in this boy, he acted as a gate for an unknown part of the Shadowfell to materially manifest upon the world. When the conduit of Sabrak's region was in some way sealed, these spontaneous manifestations ceased, but he gained some control of the planar-gate that was now inside his soul. He noticed this change and he's starting to wonder about a possible external influence. He probably isn't the only one in existence, but nobody apparently knows of him or others like him anyway.

-3- The nights that he doesn't remember are nights in which some external force gains some power over him through the remnants of the Dream Plane connection. This entity makes him perform rituals that bring more and more portions of shadow-forest into the natural world and prevent him from approaching the borders of the forest. This may have something to do with the High Magister or not, or not directly. After all, other planes have been interested by the incident, and somewhere else people is noticing how the army of the arch-duke is becoming increasingly more diabolical.

People tied to Sabrak:

-1- The "nightlings" he summons are entities that form a single consciousness tied to the primal spirits of the shadowfell. They are the "people" he passes most time with.

-2- The other "wildhaunts". There are some other and in one way or another, they'll meet, because the entity that is controlling them some times is clearly trying to concentrate their power in a small area. The reason they still hadn't met is that they're not in the same plane, except for the one in the Underdark...

-3- Ardanach Dwin'rretyn [another character of mine] is investigating over the beastmen of the forests (which are in some way tied to the rituals Sabrak performs unwillingly). The two may meet at any time. And they might find out that they're relatives.

-4- Darren Thoradin is the only intelligent being that has met up with Sabrak and has not run away. He is studying him and writing about him for his "arcane thesis".

Memories

-1- His childhood nightmares of course, culminated with the incident that broke his life. He remembers how he could partially "control" the course of the dream, and that he tried with all his strength to save his mother and father from ill-fate. He didn't want to look for their corpses, thinking that however they would have come back if they survived, and they never came back.

-2- The encounters with intelligent beings in the forest. Very few, sometimes with supernatural beings. These memories are difficult to recall. Love or sexual interests might be involved.

-3- A strange "presence" that he remembers being inside of him in the moments of madness. Sometimes he draws dreadful things that he feels associated with this presence. With his limited knowledge, he can't possibly identify the nature of this entity from his drawings, but maybe some other will be able to. He is waiting for Darren Thoradin to be someone he can trust, before showing him.