Brandis and Merlissa

First of all, mundania... It's Over... Now, maybe we can start to heal and get along???

Writing is coming back. Maybe it's because winter is coming, and D'oril is in the north...

I think everyone who has been reading my blog knows Brandis, in one form or another. I've been doing some writing practice, and one way I"m stretching my brain before getting back to Imperfect hope is to Remember, Rewrite, and Revise stuff I'd done in the past. Character histories are something I have always practiced. That dredged up a bunch of memories, some of which involved how Brandis' character history has evolved over the years.

In the beginning, (gah, I actually used it. Somebody shoot me) his history was pretty simplistic. Something on the order of "He's from the north, and all of his people were killed in a horrible attack". Later on, I added more details, explaining why he came south, what happened, who the k'tath were, and who the bad guys (anyone remember the "Black Axe Dwarves", the original B.A.D. guys???)

Later, as I started working on writing the first games that took place in D'oril, I amended the simple to a bit more complex, "Brandis thinks he's the last of his kind, but in truth, he came south because of Elorna's need". Suddenly, Brandis was no longer a refugee, rather he's now an emissary, though he doesn't know it yet, due to some machination of the goddess that he's not privy to.

Then there was Merlissa. About this time, I was reading a lot of MZB (Marion ZImmer Bradley), which often contained an edge of romance novels. When one of the D'oril games ran, my game aides added a bit of content intended for Brandis' history, (with my permission, albeit unknowing of the details) that smacked of the classic MZB romance. Merlissa, a tentative non-player character, later to become a PC) was wondering where Brandis was, pissed that he'd disappeared, leaving no word, and no clue from Elorna, except a sense of "He's alive, I know it, I'd feel it if he were gone". In the process of feeding information to the players of the mini-game, I was playing Brandis as an NPC, who'd returned to D'oril for some unremembered reason, and had fallen into the wrong hands. The end of the minigame provided the reunion, a classic high tension moment of complicated emotions for the NPC's.

After that, I revised and reworked Brandis history many times, usually adding more detail, occasionally changing something to fit the growing D'oril universe more smoothly. I never revisited the Merlissa story line, in part because the once NPC became a PC, and it wasn't in my rights to rework that part of the storyline. I considered "cloning" the character for my own purposes, but chose instead to stay away from the issue. Instead, I wrote him off in another direction, he faced another exile from D'oril. This one was explained by a short story I wrote about how Elorna intervened directly in a Shadowlord Plot, saving him from the hands of Beauty and the Empire, but in doing so forcing her to pull her hero from D'oril because she'd upset the balance.

Brandis became the center of several short stories, all incomplete writing practices that revolved around his adventures in many other lands outside the IFGS. He played in many IFGS games as well, his character darkening as he spent more and more time away from home. The crux came after a series of very dark mini's that he played in, most of them with Cerredwyn on his team. In them, Brandis and Cerredwyn became close friends, in some ways a substitute for Merlissa, but one that didn't touch on the intimate side of that relationship. Instead, his soul became exhausted by the constant war, this gave me the excuse to withdraw from playing him for several years (actually due to the pressures of being an Air Traffic Controller). In my writings, he found some spirit healing from a k'tath healer sent to help him, though he was still unable to return home.

I wrote about other topics for a while, and played Brandis in a few other games at Ray Michel's request, playing him still as an exile, becoming somewhat of a tragic figure. His mood deepened the more he spent away from home, while I sought through writing a way to finish his story that began as a character history. At one point, I outlined a series of D'oril games that could do just that, but FAA time pressures never allowed me to go beyond that stage.

I've recently gone back to the history, considering what I might do with the saga. Since I'm writing Imperfect Hope in the D"oril universe, Brandis can and should be a part of that, but I've going to place him in a different time frame from IH, probably a few dozen years earlier. The lands of the Seven Tribes, in which the IFGS games take place, have changed to the Confederation, at least in the present. Brandis' saga would detail the re-contact between the k'tath and the people of the south. But what ever happened to him. Did he ever get home? Did Merlissa ever find him again? Should I drop hints about the past, little easter eggs that, should someday I get published, fans (yeah, right) would argue over the meaning of online and at cons.

In the meantime, I"m going to keep practicing. Brandis' history is, at last count, some 40 pages of story and scenerio and random notes, maybe my next project will organize that. More to come later.....

Clear skies,
Jim