Sidekicks & Sidequests

Building a world, one character at a time.

Ahta

  1. This is a character that Joseph Anthony used an art prompt generator to create. These were the following prompts: a girl with dreads in a field of beautiful flowers, brewery, cafe, dovecote, ruins, wild beasts
  2. What is this character’s name? - Ahta
  3. What is their ancestry (i.e. human, elf, dwarf, halfling, etc)? - Half-orc/half-dryad
  4. What is your job or role (i.e. farmer, hierling/mercenary, shopowner, bandit, etc)? - Druid who has overtaken some nearby ruins and the surrounding area and runs a cafe and dovecote, thus "The Dovecote Cafe". She likes to make potions, drinks, and coffees. She was given a boon by a Nature spirit/god after doing a good deed and now is half-orc and half-dryad.
  5. How old are you? - 27-32
  6. Describe your physical appearance. - Dreads with flowers and moss growing in the hair. Literally, there's a connection with nature and plants in being a half-dryad. Desaturated grain (gray-green) skin, tusks, nose piercing through one nostril. She wears robes in multiple layers of browns and beiges, with one arm bare, and draping over her shoulder. Toga-ish, with plants growing from the robes. Any coloration of her robes comes from the plant material that grows. Inside her dreadlocks, there are some root structures. She has some wooden branch horns coming out (could be mistaken for a headdress).
  7. Describe yourself with 3 adjectives. - Happy-Go-Lucky, Empathetic, Inquisitive
  8. What is a valuable item/piece of lore/secret that this character possesses? Or do they value an ideal/concept or particular person (i.e. family member, guild member, honor, justice, love etc.) - One of her clan members hates that Ahta has these powers, and has vowed to fight her to the death the next time that they meet.
  9. What is a particular quest you would be willing to recruit or hire the player characters to go do? - Ahta needs the player characters to travel to some caves to the south past some swamps in order to retrieve a piece of a Giant Cave Fungus and bring it back to her.
  10. What would be their reward for succeeding? - Ahta can then offer a secondary sidequest to go investigate the suffering/pain from an animal/nature she is feeling in the nearby valley to the south. Ahta will then take the mushroom piece and incorporate it into the ruins of the Dovecote Cafe. She will then prepare a potion/receipe out of the mushroom. Consuming the potion will cause the Dungeon Master to role on a random table to produce a general, harmless effect for the player for a short amount of time. Ahta will then state to come back at a later time, and she will have then officially perfected the apothecary-type receipie to make a specific kind of potion (like enhanced night vision, bioluminescence, flight, etc.) with this mushroom. She then unlocks as a apothecary-type NPC for relatively cheap.
  11. What would be the consequence of failure or refusing the call? - If the players refuse the sidequest, Ahta is pretty chill and not going to be terribly upset. She won't lock you out any other additional sidequests. If the players accidentally fail in the quest (not malliciously), she also will not bear or hold a grudge. However, Ahta is not opposed to violence (she just prefers to not have to fight), so if murder hobos/aggressively anti-Nature/hostile player characters try to attack Ahta, and diplomacy fails, then she will summon her full wrathful might. This is Ahta's lair essentially, so she is able to summon grasping roots and vines to entangle their legs, while she retrieves a battleaxe from inside a tree and summon a multitude of animals to protect her.

Optional Questions - not required

  • Do you have a particular accent or language? Any idiosyncrasies in how you act and speak? - Ahta employs a Valley Girl accent. She is a chill, swole hippy.
  • What impact have you made on the world? How have you shaped the local area? - Ahta has improved the glade/ruins. There is a noticeable change in the abundance of fruits/berries/nuts that now grow here. Nearby towns have heard of the Dovecote Cafe, and go out to visit and treat it like how people in the modern world go to the Farmer's Market on the weekend. There is a mixture of people who like and appreciate Ahta, while some people deem her to be a "Wood Witch" who has "cursed fruit". Some try to treat her as a demigoddess, but she does not possess that level of power.