Lucretia (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
madamdirector) wrote2018-12-25 12:14 am
madamdirector) wrote2018-12-25 12:14 am
Entry tags:
Hadriel app
PLAYER
Player name: Buttercup
Contact:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
butteredcups
Characters currently in-game: none
CHARACTER
Character Name: Lucretia
Character Age: IT'S COMPLICATED...Physically, she was stuck in her very early 20s for about 100 years, aged normally for 10 years, then suddenly aged 20 more, so she appears to be in hear early 50s. She has been alive for about 130 years total.
Canon: The Adventure Zone
Canon Point: Lunar Interlude IV (Episode 50), after The Eleventh Hour arc and before The Suffering Game arc
History: Lucretia at the Adventure Zone Wiki
The Stolen Century at the Adventure Zone Wiki
The Adventure Zone Transcripts - Lucretia appears mostly in the Lunar Interlude episodes and the Stolen Century and Story and Song arcs.
At a young age, likely her early 20s or so, Lucretia is chosen by the Institute of Planar Research and Exploration (IPRE) to be one of seven crewmembers of the interplanar spaceship the Starblaster, along with Captain Davenport, Magnus Burnsides, Merle Highchurch, Barry Bluejeans, Lup, and Taako. Lucretia's role is the ship's recordkeeper. When we first meet her, she is shy and reserved, focused on chronicling the journey of the Starblaster and reluctant to actually participate alongside the rest of the crew in their adventures traveling between the planes. This all changes 65 years into their journey, when the other six are captured and put on trial for both their past and future actions by a group of gigantic, otherworldly Judges. The trial does not go well, with all six being found wanting and turned to stone.
Lucretia alone avoids being captured, and spends the next year alone, outrunning the Judges, learning on her own how to repair and maintain the ship, and ultimately escaping the plane, bringing her friends back in the process.
She spends the later years of the century working on her own plan to stop the Hunger. She asks Merle to teach her the spell "Shield of Faith," and works to master and improve it:
Her plan is to create a shield big enough to encompass an entire world, keeping the Hunger at bay and effectively starving them out. However, when she presents her idea to the rest of the crew, they choose instead to go with an alternate plan: split the Light of Creation into seven parts, reducing its "signal strength" to prevent the Hunger from finding it. The light will be hidden inside seven magical artifacts, and those artifacts distributed throughout the world. Lucretia isn't happy, but goes along with the decision.
These artifacts go on to become the Grand Relics that the campaign's PCs spend the majority of their time tracking down and retrieving. They are, as Lucretia describes them, weapons of mass destruction. They are incredibly powerful, and just because the Light is split doesn't mean that what is referred to as its "crave-ability" goes away. As before, the Light wants to be used, and it is. The artifacts, in the hand of the world's people, wreak absolute havoc, destroying entire cities and igniting horrific wars. Obviously, it's incredibly hard for the Starblaster crew to see this and the damage they caused by creating the artifacts. Things only get harder and harder to watch as the death toll mounts, until Lup disappears while searching for a way to retrieve her relic and end the destruction, and Lucretia has to act.
Lucretia feeds her journals to the Voidfish, erasing her friends' memories. Lup is gone, presumably dead, and Barry is gone with her. As an undead lich, he's able to keep his memories, and is therefore a threat to Lucretia's plan. But Taako, Merle, and Magnus forget their years on the Starblaster, their status as members of the IPRE, their creation of the Relics, and their relationships with each other - including Taako's twin sister Lup. Davenport, their captain, was so defined by their mission that he remembered only his name, and so Lucretia kept him at her side throughout the years following, ensuring his safety.
She makes sure the rest of her friends are safe too, with peaceful, satisfying lives, and goes on to spend ten years searching for a way to retrieve the Relics. When she's forced to give up twenty years of her life in Wonderland (giving her the appearance of a middle-aged woman) and still fails to retrieve the Relic hidden there, she finally concludes that she can't do it on her own, and goes on to form the Bureau of Balance, thus bringing us back to the beginning of the campaign.
Personality: Lucretia undergoes massive development over the course of the campaign, from the shy and reserved journal keeper to the confident, determined Director of the Bureau of Balance. She has always been a hard worker, keeping redundancies of her journals and learning and developing new spells in her effort to stop the Hunger. She is by nature kind and softhearted, and hates to see her friends suffering.
A major shift in her character came in Cycle 65, when her friends were captured and executed by the Judges and she was left to find a way out herself, knowing that if she was also killed, not only would her friends be doomed forever, but without anyone to stop the Hunger, so would the entire multiverse. Though we never hear much of what happened during that year beyond her having to constantly outrun the Hunger and learn to fly and repair the ship herself, we know that it wasn't easy, and we can conclude that she learned two lessons that would go on to shape her actions throughout the rest of her life:
Pragmatism - She had no choice but to keep going, without letting anything or anyone get in her way, no matter what. If she died, it wouldn't be just her own life that would be lost, it would be those of her friends and, eventually, everyone else.
Self-reliance to the extreme. She spent a year alone after sixty-four years of having her six closest friends, her family, at her back. That year, she learned to trust in herself, and she learned that in the end, she was the only one she could rely on. It was a lesson she never forgot.
She became stronger, braver, more confident, and her friends were proud of the change in her, and in what she'd accomplished, as they should have been. But that year stuck with her, and not all the changes were for the better. That memory of being alone, being forced to do whatever had to be done in her effort to stop the Hunger, would remain with her, and would be what eventually allowed her to make the decision to feed her journals to the Voidfish over thirty years later.
As a result of that year, she is pragmatic to an extent that can manifest as cold and uncaring. When she enters Wonderland to retrieve the relic the Animus Bell, she brings a companion and guide named Cam along with her. After realizing that her mission would be a failure and that staying longer would mean putting herself at risk, she escapes with her life - leaving Cam behind as an animated head. She left him not because she herself was afraid of dying, but because she had a greater purpose. If she sacrificed herself or stayed behind so that Cam could escape, she couldn't continue her work to retrieve the Relics or stop the Hunger.
Likewise, after finally concluding that only the other members of the IPRE, the ones who created the Relics, could be trusted to retrieve them without falling to their thrall, she recruits Taako, Merle and Magnus to the Bureau and sends them out into the world to do so. She knows that these missions are incredibly dangerous, that she's risking her friends' wellbeing and their lives, but while she does warn them and caution them to be careful, she sends them out all the same, not because she doesn't want to keep them safe but because they are the only ones who can do the job.
Lucretia is introverted and reserved, and spends much of the series maintaining an air of strict professionalism in order to keep up the fiction that she and her closest friends are strangers. She does have a very dry sense of humor, however, and isn't always able to entirely keep herself from responding to Taako, Merle, and Magnus' banter.
Inventory: Bulwark Staff
Set of blue and white robes
Bureau of Balance Bracer
Carved wooden duck made to look like her
Abilities: Lucretia is a magic user from Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition. Though her class is never stated outright in the show, in-game evidence points to her being a wizard specializing in the Abjuration class.
Seeing as The Adventure Zone only loosely follows the rules of Dungeons & Dragons, however, Lucretia's abilities extend a little beyond that. She has over a hundred years of experince in learning and practicing magic, including learning and then massively improving upon the Cleric/Paladin spell "Shield of Faith."
She uses this spell to cut the Hunger off from the rest of the universe, ultimately leading to her defeat. As a result, she was described as "the most powerful person I think I’ve ever met" by one of the beings who made the made the laws of physics and aracana that governs her world. She is an incredibly accomplished wizard, speaks eight languages, and can write with both hands simultaneously.
Flaws: Although Lucretia always has the best intentions, she has major flaws as well. She is incredibly intelligent and talented. However, she tends to be shortsighted and single-minded, so focused on what she's trying to accomplish that she neglects to consider either the consequences of her actions or any potential alternatives. She also tries incessantly to do everything on her own. This trait is less arrogance than perfectionism, and an inability to recognize her own limits or admit that she needs help until she's far past that point.
We see two significant instances of these flaws in action. The first is when she develops the spell that would create a shield against the Hunger. She learns a spell that, as a wizard, she should have been unable to learn, then refines that spell to its maximum potential. She spends decades doing this alone, eager to put the work in, to develop it and make it perfect and then save the day, not for glory, but simply so that no one else will have to suffer. She doesn't tell anyone what she's doing until years later, when Lup presents her own idea for how to stop the Hunger. When Lup points out the flaws in her plan, Lucretia dismisses her objections. She's so committed to the work she's been doing for years that she can no longer stop to think about the potential negative consequences. It has to work, and she'll figure out the rest later.
If Lucretia had chosen to share her idea with her friends sooner, allowed them to work on it with her, it's possible that neither her proposal of cutting off an entire world nor Lup's of splitting the Light into dangerous, deadly relics would ever have been enacted. Working together, they might have come up with a third option sooner.
Instead, the Grand Relics are created and begin to wreak havoc, ultimately leading to Lucretia's second major mistake. When Lup's plan fails, when her friends become depressed and disillusioned and Lup herself sets out to stop what they'd put into motion, Lucretia doesn't gather her friends to talk to them about trying something else. She'd been rejected once, and during her year alone in Cycle 65, she'd learned that in the end, she could only rely on herself. She also doesn't want to burden her friends with the task of gathering the relics and seeing firsthand the effects of what they'd done. She cares deeply about them and cannot bear to see them continue to suffer, any more than she can continue to watch the death and destruction they had brought to the world. She decides to act, but as before, she acts alone, without either asking for help or stopping to consider the long-term consequences of her actions.
Rather than offering her friends the opportunity to make their own decision, or allowing them to live with the ramifications of their own actions, she decides that, once again, she will fix it all on her own.
She feeds the memories of the hundred-year journey, the Light, the Relics and all the rest to the Voidfish, erasing herself and each other from her friends' memories, erasing Lup from Taako's life, turning the once brave and talented Captain Davenport into a mockery of himself.
She felt that it was the only choice she had left to make, and she didn't do it gladly. But she also did it because she still believed that the only person she could rely on was herself. Because, as when she'd worked on her plan for the Shield in secret for decades, she wanted to present a perfect solution to stop her friends' suffering in its tracks, and to do it without needing to ask for anyone else's help. Lucretia truly believed that she could collect the Relics, find Lup, and fix everyone's problems, and she thought that she could do it alone and so quickly that erasing and then restoring her friends' memories wouldn't be a big deal. Once again, she failed to truly consider the consequences of her actions, and she allowed her eagerness to save and protect her friends to override everything else, including their own autonomy.
SAMPLES
Action Log Sample: Test drive meme
Player name: Buttercup
Contact:
Characters currently in-game: none
CHARACTER
Character Name: Lucretia
Character Age: IT'S COMPLICATED...Physically, she was stuck in her very early 20s for about 100 years, aged normally for 10 years, then suddenly aged 20 more, so she appears to be in hear early 50s. She has been alive for about 130 years total.
Canon: The Adventure Zone
Canon Point: Lunar Interlude IV (Episode 50), after The Eleventh Hour arc and before The Suffering Game arc
History: Lucretia at the Adventure Zone Wiki
The Stolen Century at the Adventure Zone Wiki
The Adventure Zone Transcripts - Lucretia appears mostly in the Lunar Interlude episodes and the Stolen Century and Story and Song arcs.
At a young age, likely her early 20s or so, Lucretia is chosen by the Institute of Planar Research and Exploration (IPRE) to be one of seven crewmembers of the interplanar spaceship the Starblaster, along with Captain Davenport, Magnus Burnsides, Merle Highchurch, Barry Bluejeans, Lup, and Taako. Lucretia's role is the ship's recordkeeper. When we first meet her, she is shy and reserved, focused on chronicling the journey of the Starblaster and reluctant to actually participate alongside the rest of the crew in their adventures traveling between the planes. This all changes 65 years into their journey, when the other six are captured and put on trial for both their past and future actions by a group of gigantic, otherworldly Judges. The trial does not go well, with all six being found wanting and turned to stone.
Lucretia alone avoids being captured, and spends the next year alone, outrunning the Judges, learning on her own how to repair and maintain the ship, and ultimately escaping the plane, bringing her friends back in the process.
She spends the later years of the century working on her own plan to stop the Hunger. She asks Merle to teach her the spell "Shield of Faith," and works to master and improve it:
And so, you work with her on Shield of Faith, you teach her Shield of Faith. And she practices it constantly, and you’ve— you see her, you know, you’ll step outside of the ship and see her outside, just practicing this spell. But it starts to change. It’s not just sort of this shimmering field that just barely wraps around her form, it starts to turn into this big, like, semi-opaque bubble.
And one day, I think close to the end of the year, she comes to you and asks you to like, hit her with the biggest shot, the biggest like magic spell you’ve got. And so you just throw a Lance of Faith at her. And she throws up this shield, this big like… almost completely opaque bubble, that just completely deflects the attack. And when the bubble comes down, she looks so pleased, and she says,
Lucretia: I’m gonna save all of us, Merle. We’re done dying.
Her plan is to create a shield big enough to encompass an entire world, keeping the Hunger at bay and effectively starving them out. However, when she presents her idea to the rest of the crew, they choose instead to go with an alternate plan: split the Light of Creation into seven parts, reducing its "signal strength" to prevent the Hunger from finding it. The light will be hidden inside seven magical artifacts, and those artifacts distributed throughout the world. Lucretia isn't happy, but goes along with the decision.
These artifacts go on to become the Grand Relics that the campaign's PCs spend the majority of their time tracking down and retrieving. They are, as Lucretia describes them, weapons of mass destruction. They are incredibly powerful, and just because the Light is split doesn't mean that what is referred to as its "crave-ability" goes away. As before, the Light wants to be used, and it is. The artifacts, in the hand of the world's people, wreak absolute havoc, destroying entire cities and igniting horrific wars. Obviously, it's incredibly hard for the Starblaster crew to see this and the damage they caused by creating the artifacts. Things only get harder and harder to watch as the death toll mounts, until Lup disappears while searching for a way to retrieve her relic and end the destruction, and Lucretia has to act.
She could not live with the cost of what the seven of you did to the world below. She could not sit idly by as the world killed itself pursuing the weapons you created. But she couldn't go against the will of her friends to fix it; and so that will had to be altered. Moreover, she couldn't handle what the destruction you caused was doing to you. She couldn't bear your sorrow, your pain, your guilt; how it made you… miserable, and calloused, and shut off from the world. That anguish, it could be altered too. Before her work could begin, she had to make sure her friends — her family — were safe and happy.
Lucretia feeds her journals to the Voidfish, erasing her friends' memories. Lup is gone, presumably dead, and Barry is gone with her. As an undead lich, he's able to keep his memories, and is therefore a threat to Lucretia's plan. But Taako, Merle, and Magnus forget their years on the Starblaster, their status as members of the IPRE, their creation of the Relics, and their relationships with each other - including Taako's twin sister Lup. Davenport, their captain, was so defined by their mission that he remembered only his name, and so Lucretia kept him at her side throughout the years following, ensuring his safety.
She makes sure the rest of her friends are safe too, with peaceful, satisfying lives, and goes on to spend ten years searching for a way to retrieve the Relics. When she's forced to give up twenty years of her life in Wonderland (giving her the appearance of a middle-aged woman) and still fails to retrieve the Relic hidden there, she finally concludes that she can't do it on her own, and goes on to form the Bureau of Balance, thus bringing us back to the beginning of the campaign.
Personality: Lucretia undergoes massive development over the course of the campaign, from the shy and reserved journal keeper to the confident, determined Director of the Bureau of Balance. She has always been a hard worker, keeping redundancies of her journals and learning and developing new spells in her effort to stop the Hunger. She is by nature kind and softhearted, and hates to see her friends suffering.
A major shift in her character came in Cycle 65, when her friends were captured and executed by the Judges and she was left to find a way out herself, knowing that if she was also killed, not only would her friends be doomed forever, but without anyone to stop the Hunger, so would the entire multiverse. Though we never hear much of what happened during that year beyond her having to constantly outrun the Hunger and learn to fly and repair the ship herself, we know that it wasn't easy, and we can conclude that she learned two lessons that would go on to shape her actions throughout the rest of her life:
Pragmatism - She had no choice but to keep going, without letting anything or anyone get in her way, no matter what. If she died, it wouldn't be just her own life that would be lost, it would be those of her friends and, eventually, everyone else.
Self-reliance to the extreme. She spent a year alone after sixty-four years of having her six closest friends, her family, at her back. That year, she learned to trust in herself, and she learned that in the end, she was the only one she could rely on. It was a lesson she never forgot.
And she was different after that, in a way that made the rest of you proud. She never volunteered to stay back with the ship again. She spent less time chronicling your journey and more time participating in it. She became fierce and confident and decisive. She wouldn't go on to found the Bureau of Balance for decades still, but this, this horrible lonely year, this is when Lucretia became Madam Director.
She became stronger, braver, more confident, and her friends were proud of the change in her, and in what she'd accomplished, as they should have been. But that year stuck with her, and not all the changes were for the better. That memory of being alone, being forced to do whatever had to be done in her effort to stop the Hunger, would remain with her, and would be what eventually allowed her to make the decision to feed her journals to the Voidfish over thirty years later.
As a result of that year, she is pragmatic to an extent that can manifest as cold and uncaring. When she enters Wonderland to retrieve the relic the Animus Bell, she brings a companion and guide named Cam along with her. After realizing that her mission would be a failure and that staying longer would mean putting herself at risk, she escapes with her life - leaving Cam behind as an animated head. She left him not because she herself was afraid of dying, but because she had a greater purpose. If she sacrificed herself or stayed behind so that Cam could escape, she couldn't continue her work to retrieve the Relics or stop the Hunger.
Likewise, after finally concluding that only the other members of the IPRE, the ones who created the Relics, could be trusted to retrieve them without falling to their thrall, she recruits Taako, Merle and Magnus to the Bureau and sends them out into the world to do so. She knows that these missions are incredibly dangerous, that she's risking her friends' wellbeing and their lives, but while she does warn them and caution them to be careful, she sends them out all the same, not because she doesn't want to keep them safe but because they are the only ones who can do the job.
Lucretia is introverted and reserved, and spends much of the series maintaining an air of strict professionalism in order to keep up the fiction that she and her closest friends are strangers. She does have a very dry sense of humor, however, and isn't always able to entirely keep herself from responding to Taako, Merle, and Magnus' banter.
Merle: What is this by the way? What is this purple shit that you’re drinking?
The Director: Grape juice.
Merle: Oh. How old is it?
The Director: 125 years old.
Inventory: Bulwark Staff
Set of blue and white robes
Bureau of Balance Bracer
Carved wooden duck made to look like her
Abilities: Lucretia is a magic user from Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition. Though her class is never stated outright in the show, in-game evidence points to her being a wizard specializing in the Abjuration class.
The School of Abjuration emphasizes magic that blocks, banishes, or protects. Detractors of this school say that its tradition is about denial, negation rather than positive assertion. You understand, however, that ending harmful effects, protecting the weak, and banishing evil influences is anything but a philosophical void. It is a proud and respected vocation.
Called abjurers, members of this school are sought when baleful spirits require exorcism, when important locations must be guarded against magical spying, and when portals to other planes of existence must be closed.
Seeing as The Adventure Zone only loosely follows the rules of Dungeons & Dragons, however, Lucretia's abilities extend a little beyond that. She has over a hundred years of experince in learning and practicing magic, including learning and then massively improving upon the Cleric/Paladin spell "Shield of Faith."
She uses this spell to cut the Hunger off from the rest of the universe, ultimately leading to her defeat. As a result, she was described as "the most powerful person I think I’ve ever met" by one of the beings who made the made the laws of physics and aracana that governs her world. She is an incredibly accomplished wizard, speaks eight languages, and can write with both hands simultaneously.
Flaws: Although Lucretia always has the best intentions, she has major flaws as well. She is incredibly intelligent and talented. However, she tends to be shortsighted and single-minded, so focused on what she's trying to accomplish that she neglects to consider either the consequences of her actions or any potential alternatives. She also tries incessantly to do everything on her own. This trait is less arrogance than perfectionism, and an inability to recognize her own limits or admit that she needs help until she's far past that point.
We see two significant instances of these flaws in action. The first is when she develops the spell that would create a shield against the Hunger. She learns a spell that, as a wizard, she should have been unable to learn, then refines that spell to its maximum potential. She spends decades doing this alone, eager to put the work in, to develop it and make it perfect and then save the day, not for glory, but simply so that no one else will have to suffer. She doesn't tell anyone what she's doing until years later, when Lup presents her own idea for how to stop the Hunger. When Lup points out the flaws in her plan, Lucretia dismisses her objections. She's so committed to the work she's been doing for years that she can no longer stop to think about the potential negative consequences. It has to work, and she'll figure out the rest later.
Lup: If that barrier cuts off everything from outside, you risk severing the bonds between this world and the rest of existence. A world cut off like that… I’m, I’m sorry Lucretia, but it… it won’t survive.
Griffin: And Lucretia gets kind of upset, she says,
Lucretia: You don’t know that. We don’t know anything about what the Light is capable of. Even if that’s true, fine, this world has some lean years until we starve The Hunger out, but please, I’m begging you, just – just think about it.
If Lucretia had chosen to share her idea with her friends sooner, allowed them to work on it with her, it's possible that neither her proposal of cutting off an entire world nor Lup's of splitting the Light into dangerous, deadly relics would ever have been enacted. Working together, they might have come up with a third option sooner.
Instead, the Grand Relics are created and begin to wreak havoc, ultimately leading to Lucretia's second major mistake. When Lup's plan fails, when her friends become depressed and disillusioned and Lup herself sets out to stop what they'd put into motion, Lucretia doesn't gather her friends to talk to them about trying something else. She'd been rejected once, and during her year alone in Cycle 65, she'd learned that in the end, she could only rely on herself. She also doesn't want to burden her friends with the task of gathering the relics and seeing firsthand the effects of what they'd done. She cares deeply about them and cannot bear to see them continue to suffer, any more than she can continue to watch the death and destruction they had brought to the world. She decides to act, but as before, she acts alone, without either asking for help or stopping to consider the long-term consequences of her actions.
Rather than offering her friends the opportunity to make their own decision, or allowing them to live with the ramifications of their own actions, she decides that, once again, she will fix it all on her own.
I’m gonna save all of us, Merle.
She feeds the memories of the hundred-year journey, the Light, the Relics and all the rest to the Voidfish, erasing herself and each other from her friends' memories, erasing Lup from Taako's life, turning the once brave and talented Captain Davenport into a mockery of himself.
She felt that it was the only choice she had left to make, and she didn't do it gladly. But she also did it because she still believed that the only person she could rely on was herself. Because, as when she'd worked on her plan for the Shield in secret for decades, she wanted to present a perfect solution to stop her friends' suffering in its tracks, and to do it without needing to ask for anyone else's help. Lucretia truly believed that she could collect the Relics, find Lup, and fix everyone's problems, and she thought that she could do it alone and so quickly that erasing and then restoring her friends' memories wouldn't be a big deal. Once again, she failed to truly consider the consequences of her actions, and she allowed her eagerness to save and protect her friends to override everything else, including their own autonomy.
SAMPLES
Action Log Sample: Test drive meme