Shellta

Mental characteristics

Personal history

Mother: Savira (Mage, born in 702; death/disappearance in 738) Father: Leonas (Warrior, claimed to be around 30y.o. and from another land) In 719 Savira meets Leonas; a man from distant lands that had a group of friends; they came to the tribe (she also never mentioned the tribe’s name) seeking advice and knowledge of the future. They claimed to be from another place entirely. Savira and Leonas fell in love. Savira decided to abandon her tribe and joined the group of outlanders. They spent months travelling and trying to find a way out of the Land of Mists. Leonas and his group were obsessed with it. Savira got pregnant at the beginning of 720 but kept that in secret. Their search for a way out started to get each time more dangerous and Savira opted to flee, when Leonas and her group claimed that they found a link to their lands in a domain called Sithicus, whose lord they say knows about their homeland. That seemed too dangerous and the thought of losing a child to his obsession made her run away. She has shown regretting it in later years, and sometimes made you feel bad about this, almost blaming you that she’d lost her love. She then herself became obsessed with the idea of leaving these lands. She started studying the ways of the Lands of Mists and used her magic knowledge to try and achieve her obsession. To support you and herself, she had business with merchants, and she guided merchant caravans. Especially the shady ones. (Vistani can’t stay in one place for long; you’ve witnessed physical illness whenever you were longer than a few weeks in one place) A year ago, in 738, your mother claimed it was time you took the reins of your own fate as she would search for clues of Leonas’s fate. She left for the dangerous land of Sithicus and you haven’t heard of her since. You kept her “business”. But you haven’t really revealed that you’re not her. So, you’ve done a couple or so business trips the past year. Ideas: To represent the Seer card (mental powers) as your enemy, maybe you could be a psychic? But you don’t really control your power and as such, whenever you touch something imbued with energy, that energy simply swarms your brain and cause pain/confusion or something like that (but brings you insights about the object or person touched). Could be an interesting element. Something like the character Rogue in X-Men, if you’re familiar with it, but you wouldn’t “drain” powers or anything; you would see into the past or present or future of the object/person touched. Extra knowledge:

Your mother has 2 vistani brothers; she never really mentioned their names but said one of them had the Sight (males that have the true sight are called dukkar) and had to flee the tribe. His brother followed him.

She taught you a bit of the vistani traditions, but never went deeper and always got irritated when you asked too many questions.

She was a bitter-sweet mother; sometimes extremely caring and sometimes a proper bitch.

You and your mother shared a weird thing: you were always able to see the New Moon. You see it always as a black hole in the sky.

You and your mother avoided the domain of Barovia as much as you could, although you do remember venturing in there during your childhood/youth. She always said that those are evil lands and that you should not be fooled by its beauty.

Through your travels, your mother was always interested in meeting strange people that claimed to come from very different places. She didn’t really tell you much about these encounters, you’ve witnessed a few. Enough to know that there’s a better world somewhere else. Or at least enough crazy people to think there is.

She taught you, though, that there’s a place that is “easily” reachable, a place that she called the Plane of Shadow. She was studying said plane for a while already, before she even mentioned it to you. But you’ve seen her dabbling with it: you’ve seen her making shadows move differently. You’ve seen her fall sick after meddling with the shadows; you’ve seen her eyes with deep black circles underneath… also seen her veins look darker, as if her blood were thicker and darker. As you grew both in size and understanding, she showed signs of weariness and even of mental disorder.

She taught you a bit of the Way of the Mists. Therefore you can travel through mists slightly better than regular folk. You can also sense what’s the general nature of the mists. And you can definitely sense when the mists aren’t “natural”.

You’ve learned something quite useful, although disturbing, after your mother left: your shadow is sentient. In game terms: you have a shadow as a familiar.