MoM App

[journalkeeper]

〈 CHARACTER INFO 〉

CHARACTER NAME:Lucretia aka “The Director”

CHARACTER AGE: Oh boy. She’s in her 50s, minus 20 years she wagered away and plus 100 years she never aged for

SERIES: the Adventure Zone

CHRONOLOGY: Just before Episode 51 (which is when she sends the boys off to Wonderland)

CLASS: Boss Lady. Like Fantasy M, she’s tough and in charge and she tries to do good even when making very questionable decisions.

HOUSING: Somewhere in Maurtia Falls please! Next door to her castmates would be hilarious but I’m flexible.



BACKGROUND:



Lucretia is from a world and omniverse that works on Dungeons & Dragons rules, sometimes to the point of metafiction, but this means it’s High Fantasy and that there’s dwarves and humans and elves and magic and adventuring along with some anachronistic technological advances and pop culture, often with the word “fantasy” put in front just to make sure you know it’s a fantasy podcast.

Very talented at magic, writing and art, Lucretia was a ghost writer for biographies before she got a very illustrious job with the Institute of Planar Research and Exploration (IPRE) -- think Fantasy NASA.

The IPRE studied the planar system – in this universe each reality is made up of planes like the prime material plane, where people live, the astral plane, where the dead are, etc. Using this plot device they discover called the Light of Creation the IPRE built a flying fantasy ship to take a team to explore the planes. The team was made up of the Captain, Davenport; Lup and Taako, a pair of magic-wielding twins; Magnus, the security; Merle, the botanist and cleric; Barry Bluejeans, lead scientist; and Lucretia herself, the chronicler of their journey.

The day of their departure coincided with the end of their world. As they sped off in their ship, a great black plane with tendrils and attacked their home plane. This was the first time they met the Hunger. Like an evil katamari, the Hunger basically ate planes, adding more and more stuff to its mass and getting more powerful each time. But it could only do that if it gets the Light of Creation.

Meanwhile, the IPRE crew ended up becoming intertwined with the universe itself and things got weird. This kept happening: they would escape the Hunger by leaving the plane, and when they came back to the Prime Material plane they’d be in an alternate reality, soon followed by the arrival of the Light of Creation somewhere on that world. Then a year later the Hunger would turn up and try to add that alternate reality to itself. The crew would escape, and would be reset to the version of themselves exactly as they had been on the day they left their own world, as long as at least one member managed to escape with the ship. Over and over and over again. If they brought the Light of Creation with them, the Hunger wouldn’t completely destroy that year’s universe, so finding the Light of Creation became a priority. This cycle would happen ninety-nine times. None of them would age during that time, but they would gain experience and grow closer together as people.

Lucretia was mostly an introverted, cautious wallflower for the first few decades. She was more concerned with recording all their adventures and everything they could find out about the worlds they visited in her journals. Some of these worlds included a world run by animals with no people, a world where people lived among giant poisonous bioluminescent mushrooms, a world where all the people died out but many of their spirits remained and could possess robot bodies, and so on.

On that last world I mentioned, unable to find the Light of Creation, at the last minute the crew considered destroying the thing that made the robots possible (and therefore their entire civilization) so the Hunger wouldn’t get sweet-ass robots. They choose not to, and afterwards Lup asked them all to promise not to get “that dark” ever again. Lucretia would remember that.

Lucretia worked on her journals and made friends with her teammates. One year they ended up on a world that claimed to have the Light of Creation in these caves nobody could get into – usually. But that culture was very dedicated in terms of the creative arts and would go outside these caves and perform or present their greatest work. There would be a flash of light and all memory of that song or poetry or whatever would be instantly forgotten by anybody in that reality. Sometimes the work would be judged worthy and be projected into the minds of everybody in the world. If not worthy, no one would ever remember it ever again.

It was Magnus that gained access to the cave and found out that this world’s “Light of Creation” were a bunch of floating jellyfish creatures (voidfish) that ate information and not the plot device, far too late for them to find the real thing and save that world. Magnus, however, befriended a small baby jellyfish creature he’d name Fisher. He introduced Lucretia to the voidfish too. They splash water from their cave on her that she accidentally swallows. This becomes important later, I swear.

When they left that reality, she helped Magnus rescue his baby voidfish friend and got it on their ship. While they couldn’t save people, they could save objects and animals. They put Fisher in a tank and it lived in Lucretia’s room from then on.

The cycles continued. One year they ended up in a world where their ship was shot down and all of them except Lucretia were taken captive and executed. Lucretia had to survive that entire year on her own for they would all die for good. She had to repair the ship, run away from the people who wanted to capture her too, keep the ship away from marauders who tried to take it, and all this on top of learning how to repair and fly the ship on her own. And she made it. But that year would change her significantly. In the words of the DM, “She became fierce and confident and decisive”; she was no longer merely a shy observer but an active participant in the adventure.

Over the years after that, Barry and Lup came up with a plan. They figured out that the Hunger kept finding them because it could sense what they called the Light of Creation’s “craveability”. The Light magically made people want it, and that property was how the Hunger found it.

But if they split the Light up into seven parts sealed within magical artifacts this would scatter the signal so the Hunger couldn’t find them. But any object made with the Light of Creation would have to keep that need to be quested for, and on top of that the objects would be hella powerful.

Lucretia disagreed with this plan and proposed her own: use the Light to power a massive shield spell and protect the plane itself from the Hunger. But the others said that would starve the world since everything is connected and it needs those connections to exist. (Nobody needs the extra 500 words in this app that explaining that would take.) Point was, they went with the artifacts plan over Lucretia’s objections.

On their 99th cycle they arrived in a world incredibly and conveniently similar to their home world. They found the Light of Creation and quickly used it to make what become the Grand Relics. Each team member made one: Lup made the Phoenix Fire Gauntlet, Davenport made a monocle called the Oculus, Merle made the Gaia Sash, Taako made the Philosopher’s Stone, Magnus made the Temporal Chalice, Barry made the Animus Bell and Lucretia made the Bulwark Staff.

They released these relics to the world below, because they needed people to want the Relics for plot reasons or the plan wouldn’t work. And it did; a year passed and the Hunger was a no-show. But unleashing super-powerful magical artifacts that want to be found and used on a world wasn’t good either.

The relics started huge, terrible wars. Lots of people died -- not just from the wars, but from the relics themselves. The Phoenix Fire Gauntlet regularly burned entire cities so badly that only a big black circle of glass remained, the Philosopher’s Stone transmuted a city into peppermint when a child got her hands on it, etc. The damage got real bad.

After another year of this, Lucretia couldn’t stand it anymore. But her friends had turned down her own plan and carried out this one even though the damage they were doing tormented them. Lup went down to the planet to do something about her gauntlet and never came back. The mood on the ship was very bleak. Lucretia secretly decided to fix everything.

You know Fisher, the voidfish from earlier? When she accidentally drank some stuff they were swimming in, she ingested some of its waste. She later discovered that this meant she could remember stuff the voidfish had taken away, and since it left its world it hadn’t rebroadcasted anything. Lucretia knew she was immune to forgetting and the others weren’t.

As chronicler, she had very detailed journals of their entire mission. So she edited them carefully and then fed those journals to Fisher. The crew forgot their mission, the Light of Creation, and the Hunger, and everyone in that world other than Lucretia forgot about the Grand Relics’ existence. They were still around, but it was a lot harder to fight wars over stuff people couldn’t remember existed.

Lup and Barry Bluejeans were missing (long story). Davenport’s entire life was the mission, so the only thing he could really remember was his own name. Lucretia made him her ward. She then found what she believed would be temporary homes for the rest of her friends: Merle, Taako and Magnus.

Lucretia went and recovered her own relic. But the next one she tried to go after was the Animus Bell in this place called Wonderland. She hired a sorcerer named Cam to come with her. Wonderland was terrible, built to cause people as much suffering as possible. Lucretia lost twenty years of her life over a chess game and aged instantly. She ended up betraying Cam so she could escape Wonderland, now knowing she couldn’t collect the relics on her own.

Lucretia recruited this family of scientists she knew to help her build headquarters (a fake moon) for an organization she called the Bureau of Balance, built with a distrust of magical items and made to hunt down the Grand Relics (the members were inoculated by the voidfish). That was when she transformed from Lucretia into what she would become known as: The Director of the Bureau of Balance.

The Bureau of Balance grew but there was a snag: the people sent out to bring back the relics inevitably fell to their magical thrall and tried to use them instead. It was going... poorly.

Then Fisher had a baby. Suddenly, after years of trying to do this all herself, Lucretia could feed the new baby voidfish information but still let people be inoculated by Fisher separately. This meant she could bring in the only other people immune to the relics: Merle, Taako, and Magnus, as she couldn’t go alone and Davenport wasn’t capable.

The three had managed to run into one of her employees tasked with stopping one of their rogue members from using the Phoenix Fire Gauntlet. They retrieved the gauntlet but not before it destroyed a city. She hired the three on, pretending she had never met them before and letting them remember the relic wars but not that they had created them or the IPRE’s century of cycles.

A pattern was soon established -- the Bureau of Balance would find out where a relic was and Lucretia would brief Merle, Taako and Magnus and send them after the relic, they would retrieve it and bring it back and be compensated in gold and prizes. Lucretia would stress the importance of “destroying” the relics (she was really retrieving them) and lied about the origin of the relics; she told them about the “Red Robes” a group of evil liches that made them for power before they all died. Even after they told her they’d run into one (a surprise to her, given she had no idea what had happened to their missing members) she kept up the lie and warned them against talking to this Red Robe and warded the Bureau against it.

Magnus, Merle and Taako didn’t remember who Lucretia was, so to them she wasn’t a friend, she was their boss, and she made sure to act the part. As the Director she tried to keep a very professional relationship with them, with the exception of exchanging Candlenight gifts and getting invited by Merle to a spa day and little things like that. She also hired on Angus Macdonald to help them out during this time.

One by one the relics were found on their missions while Lucretia worried about the three of them until finally only the Animus Bell remained. The same relic that was still held in Wonderland where she’d had such a terrible time. She trained them hard in preparation for it. And that’s when I’m pulling her from.


PERSONALITY:



Lucretia can be stern, pragmatic, observant, kind, funny, stubborn and awkward. While she is no longer the quiet wallflower who watched everything and was more concerned with writing it down than participating, there are remnants left over. She keeps herself apart from people. Not isolating herself but keeping everyone at arm’s length. On top of that, she’s been so concerned with working to save the world, trying to maintain a professional distance with her employees (and everyone she knew was basically her employee), and not letting herself get close to her former friends -- well, socializing is a skill she hasn’t been working on. In MoM she’ll have to learn and it may take a while, if she doesn’t throw herself into even more work.

That being said, she cares for people a lot. Every time she sent the boys on a mission, she worried. She cared for the members of the Bureau of Balance’s health and welfare and mourned any deaths. She doesn’t want to hurt anyone or see anyone get hurt especially her friends but also people in general. That promise Lup had them made to not sacrifice the people of a world in order to fight the Hunger was something that she kept with her, and was her primary drive when she made the decision to retrieve the Relics. She wants people to be happy, and when she made her team, her family, forget her it tore her up inside, but she tried to find places for them where they could live in peace, and the ones she didn’t find homes for weighed on her conscience. This trait of wanting people to be safe and happy will no doubt continue as she makes new friends and meets new people. She has an ever-expanding amount of love in her heart.

She is a woman who values friendship and would be willing to do anything for her friends. Anything, including making them forget her.

But that decision to make everyone forget their mission, so she could retrieve the relics and go against her friends wishes was made behind their backs -- on their behalf but without giving them any agency or choice in the matter. And despite the fact that her intentions were good, her plan did not go off without a hitch, often causing a lot of people stress and pain. Lucretia learned to make decisions to protect her friends during that one lonely cycle when everyone else was dead. She needed to make hard choices without any input from anyone at all, and that independence that she picked up means that she doesn’t always know how to rely on people or trust them fully. She can be controlling and paternalistic, and takes responsibility and puts it on her own shoulders often at the expense of her own happiness and without input from the people she’s making decisions for. She even took a poor, baby voidfish from its parent in order to sustain keeping her friends in the dark.

That year on her own, plus all the cycles running from the Hunger, and the years after she fed her journals to the voidfish taught her something else: survival. Lucretia wants to help people, but in order to do that she has to survive to do so. She will do what she needs to survive. At some points, like in Wonderland when she sacrificed Cam, this will come at other people’s expense. And while generally she wants to save people, she does have a bit of a “needs of the many come before the needs of the one” approach. She had an entire taskforce in the Bureau of Balance dedicated to taking out members who went after the relics themselves, even if they had to kill to do so. Lucretia values lives, but she will fight and she may let people die, even order their deaths, in order to save more. She prefers the solution that causes as little harm as possible but that doesn’t mean she won’t make tough calls.

This all makes her sound rather hard and serious, but Lucretia does have a wicked streak of humour to her. It’s a comedic podcast after all, so even when her speech patterns tend to be more formal, albeit almost nervous, she can just as easily make goofs along with the rest of them. Most of the humour coming from her is the stern Director giving the boys a debriefing and suddenly being more crude or irreverent. “Hot diggity shit that’s a baller cookie,” is a canon line. She can give as well as she can take. She values fun and on a personal level tends to have an often deadpan sense of humour, and likes to rib her friends.

Lucretia is highly intelligent (“she can speak 8 languages”) and it would be not be unreasonable to say she’s a bit of a prodigy. She’s implied to be very good at magic as well. She’s meticulous, to the point that when she was writing journals with the IPRE she would write in two journals with both hands ambidextrously so there would always be a copy. She’s described as tidy and neat, and likes order and balance -- look at what she named her organization. The Bureau of Balance is very structured, with rules and divisions and HR policies. That being said, even though she made the rules she included workarounds to get around those rules if necessary (like despite having an anti-magical object rule, she included a way of letting people use minor ones, and let the Fantasy Costco operate on her Moon). While she prefers to be methodical and ordered and for things to go according to plan, she’s not inflexible. In other words, she likes a certain order to things but she’s willing to get down and dirty if necessary. And it’s shown that she does admire other people’s antics and more free-spirited natures as well.

Lucretia’s strong, confident by necessity, intelligent, secretive, caring and lonely.

And I love her.

POWER:



1: Magic

So here’s the skinny! We know Lucretia has magic and we know she’s pretty skilled given that again, she’s something of a prodigy and also has an extra hundred years of practice under her belt. But canon is kind of vague and only shows a few brief spells. So rather than giving you a spell list, I’m going to simplify and give the general gist and if canon contradicts me any discrepancies will be blamed on the Porter messing around with her powers.

As a D&D wizard, Lucretia has prestidigitation and various cantrips which cover a bunch of smaller magics like lighting candles, making sounds, that sort of thing. We also know she can make some illusions (visual and auditory, sometimes even touch). Most of her spells, however, are defensive and protective. She can make a magical alarm that sounds under certain circumstances, as well as create magical traps, ward off undead, and create shields. One particular shield she can make is almost impenetrable.

So she’s not going to go around turning people into frogs or blowing up buildings, but she can hide things, protect things, counter and dispel magic (with player permission), enchant objects with protective spells and that sort of thing.

These have limitations! As a general rule of thumb: the bigger, more complex and/or powerful the spell is the less times per day she can use them and the shorter the spell’s duration. So for example, a big spell she can do about once per day for maybe ten minutes. That uses up a spell slot, so she can only cast a few bigger spells per day regardless of what they are. But for example, making a little visual glyph on things might last an hour and she can basically do that whenever she wants. Anchoring a spell on an object (usually ward spells or alarm spells) can make them last a lot longer, even months, but makes them use up more spell slots than they would normally.

Worth noting she’s also not the type to go slinging around big spells willy-nilly either, she’s more reserved than that.

2: Baby Voidfish. (For the purposes of not spoiling people, I’ll list this as simply “Voidfish” elsewhere).

So a voidfish looks kinda like a weird glowing jellyfish that floats around. It’s perfectly happy in water, but it doesn’t actually need it to live as it can float in the air too. It also doesn’t eat normal things either: it eats information. It feeds on the knowledge of pieces of art, music, events, etc, effectively wiping those things from people’s memories and replacing it with static. Now, in canon when it eats information it removes all knowledge of that information from everyone in reality which it won’t be able to do in game. It also won’t be able to project that information to everybody in reality either.

I’ve talked to the current Adventure Zone players and the baby voidfish will still be maintaining the static on anything it was already doing in canon (ie the IPRE, the mission, its own existence), and for future castmates the option to keep that up will be totally up to them.

As for any new information eaten in MoM, here’s how it’s going to work: it can still eat information, art, music, memories, knowledge of something etc. BUT it’s only capable of vanishing it from the minds of specific individuals and only with player permission.

ICly, the individual has to be specified somehow by whoever is feeding the voidfish, either by telling the fish the person’s name or giving them some sort of sample like a piece of skin or hair. From that moment on that person not just forgets but only hears static, sees blurs, or is incapable of reading anything specifically to do with whatever subject is being blocked, and if unprompted will be unaware they’re missing anything.

This effect can be reversed if the person is inoculated by drinking the voidfish’s ichor (basically water the voidfish has been swimming around and creating waste in. Yup). Being inoculated is irreversible. The other option is for the voidfish to project that information into the person’s mind (very rare). That being said, the dead are immune (if they are a ghost or lich, maybe zombie or other undead – but not people who have died before but are alive in MoM).

Oh, and Voidfish can also “talk” through body language, humming or sometimes projecting images into people’s minds. Voidfish aren’t human-level intelligent but they’re fairly smart for fantasy animals. The baby won’t really be old enough to have a conversation, but may be able to understand what it’s told if the concepts are simple, and likewise can communicate some very basic concepts.

(Which I’m mostly going to use to handwave the new limitations by saying the voidfish somehow told Lucretia about them. Shh.)

〈 CHARACTER SAMPLES 〉


COMMUNITY POST (VOICE) SAMPLE:


Have a test drive thread!


LOGS POST (PROSE) SAMPLE:

Lucretia has been to a hundred worlds. She’s seen empty cities and empty planets, and she’s seen thriving cultures teaming with people. This one is no exception. For a brief, heartbreaking moment when she first arrives she’s afraid that the cycle had started again. But that isn’t right -- it couldn’t be right. She catches a glimpse of her reflection and she’s still old; she hasn’t reset, she isn’t on the Starblaster, she isn’t surrounded by her friends.

Her friends -- where are they? Is she all alone again? The weight of this realization threatens to crush her as she’s handed her file and a pamphlet. She was so close. So very, very close. All she needed was the last relic and how could she finish her work if she disappeared? How could she protect the people she loved most when she had inadvertently abandoned them?

No, she will persevere. She watches out of the window of the car taking her to her new home. She will survive on this world where the battle wagons float and the technology is even more advanced than home. There were worse worlds to end up on; she lived through them. And she will live through this one.

Lucretia reads the file and the pamphlet carefully, and after figuring out the communicator she skims through the network too. This, more than anything else, calms her. Evidently this world didn’t work on the same rules as the worlds she visited while they’d all been pursued by the Hunger. Maybe, just maybe, she didn’t have to worry about the Hunger at all.

The relics weren’t here either. For the first time in a long time she doesn’t know what her purpose is. For now she’ll just focus on surviving, even if she has to do so all on her own. She’s used to being lonely. At least the I-Can’t-Believe-It’s-Not-A-Stone-of-Farspeech communicator thing they gave her has an established community that might help her be less alone.

Though, that being said, that sentiment isn’t entirely accurate. She isn’t alone, not truly. She looks down at the baby voidfish in her arms and listens to it hum.

At least she came with a companion.




FINAL NOTES:

She’s not bringing the Bulwark Staff with her into MoM at this point in time, nor is she bringing in any other magical items other than her Bureau of Balance bracer which will be depowered (even if it wouldn’t work anyway). I don’t know what those would be anyway.

Let’s all hope I don’t get totally jossed (griffined?) like a week from now. Griffin McElroy, please be good to me.