Given Name: Candace Saint Arnaud
Role: Candace was working as a front desk customer service representative for a local department store in Jacksonville, Florida prior to her arrival in the Dungeons
Class: Necromancer specializing in reanimation and debuff spells.
Appearance: Prior to her transformation, Candace was slender and fairly average height. She had fair skin, blue eyes, and somewhat dark straight blonde hair that she liked to get dyed to a lighter shade and which she typically kept fairly long. Candace’s transformation stretched most of her features, lengthening her limbs, her fingers, her feet, her torso, her toes, her nails, her neck, her face, her ears, and her hair. Her skin became more pallid, her ears became pointed, her hair became a greyish white, and her iris’s became a shimmering turquoise-green.
Age: 26
Gender: Female
Height: Just under 6 feet post-transformation. She was about 5’7 before that.
Weight: About 120 pounds prior to her transformation and only give or take 10 more pounds now.
Distinguishing Features: Candace has no tattoos, nor piercings yet. She had some acne scars that she typically hid with makeup, but her transformation has rectified those “blemishes”.
Starting Attire: Candace was wearing a rather chic white blouse, khakis, shades, and pumps. She has a medium sized purse that contains her wallet, keys, earbuds, a stick of lipstick, a tin of rouge, a bottle of mascara, a kit of eye shadow, brushes, a pen, a notepad, a bottle of lotion, a bottle of sunscreen, a can of pepper spray, her Iphone, and a charging brick and cable.
Personality traits: Candace is generally introverted and melancholy, but she can fake a smile and socialize with those around her as the situation demands. She can become loyal to a fault to certain people she has come to respect, often overlooking their faults and minimizing their mistakes, sometimes almost to the point of hero worship. On the other hand, she tends to be dismissive and judgemental of people who make a bad impression on her. Candace is afraid of herself, her feelings, and her pain, and she doesn’t want her friends to know of her struggles. She has also never particularly cared for pets and other animals, and although she never intentionally tortured animals, she did not take care of nor handle the few pets she had growing up well.
Ideals: Candace’s work in customer service to spoiled people has left her jaded to the human condition. Rather than having any intentions to bettering humanity as a whole, her priorities have shifted to preserving herself, her loved ones, and her friends at any reasonable cost. The discovery of her necromantic abilities and her visions will introduce to her the intoxicating possibility that she may be able to bring back the family she has lost. Once that's accomplished, her powers might even enable her to live happily ever after… forever.
Motivations: Disease and death haunted Candace, claiming her parents, her grandfather, her twin sister, and sense of taste in smell, as well as her overall physical and mental health. Her transformation has restored her lost senses and amplified all of them, however her family is still gone, and her sanity has only slipped further. Candace thinks she has seen her sister and believes that her sister is leading her toward the knowledge she will need to bring her, her grandfather, and maybe even her parents back. However, the road ahead will be a rough one, for not only does Candace need to discover her power, but she also needs to rediscover her body and her limitations. This is not a path she will be strong enough to walk on her own; she will need others to cover for her weaknesses and help her adapt to her new environment.
Flaws: Candace is still rather physically, mentally, and emotionally fragile and lacking in self esteem, despite her cool new looks and abilities. With access to souls and corpses, she can learn to create servants and employ spells to keep her enemies off of her, but without the proper raw materials, she is rather helpless if her enemies get to her. Some of the characteristics of her new mind and body will only exacerbate her difficulties in stressful situations. Candace doesn’t particularly value the lives of anybody and any creature that hasn’t earned her love or respect. While this helps her cope with the murder that getting the most of necromancy magic entails, this sociopathy can disconcert and disgust her potential friends and allies.
Weaknesses: Candace has become an elf, blessed with enhancements to most of the seven senses and an instinctual connection with magic that makes learning and using magic easier. These characteristics come at a substantial cost. She can see details up close and further away with greater clarity, colors are more vibrant, and her low light vision potential is above average, however, very bright lights are more disorienting and take longer to recover from and it takes longer for her eyes to adjust to light or dark environments. She can make out quiet sounds from further away and subtleties to music sound that much sweeter, but very loud sounds hurt more and the subsequent ringing takes longer to recover from. She can make out more subtle flavors, and good flavors are that much greater, but very spicy and awful tasting things are more debilitating and harder to sufficiently remove. Same patterns with good and bad smells, although like the human nose, the elven nose can get used to and tolerate smells after enough exposure. Her improved sense of balance also suffers from the general effect that if she becomes disoriented, it takes longer for her to recover, but until then she has greater ability to adapt to gravity’s effects on her. Enhancements to Candace’s senses of touch and bodily awareness increase her awareness of subtle environmental effects (such as wind and pressure changes), but also significantly amplify pain caused by physical trauma. All of the additional sensory data Candace receives takes longer for her elven mind to process, resulting in it taking longer for her brain to display unexpected developments. This doesn’t mean that she necessarily has slower reflexes, but rather that it takes her longer to gain control over her reflexes as the elven amygdala has to compensate for the longer timeframe the cortex needs to parse through the extra data (in game turns, this could look like Candace having an extra turn in an ambush scenario in which she can only employ a basic fight, flight, or freeze action before she can do something that requires logic such as casting a spell, and it would likely take her longer to formulate a logical response to and unexpectedly hurtful statement in a conversation). Additionally, the connection with magic results in increased vulnerability to harmful magical effects and substances, and contact with iron feels like contact with bleach. Wearing a suit of armor would feel like swimming in bleach, which would feel awful and distract her from being able to think clearly. Injuries caused by iron weapons cause even greater pain and take longer to recover from. Mechanically, I imagine all this comes out to disorienting effects such as stuns and staggers lasting an extra turn, Iron weapons dealing something like +2 damage, magic effects that require a roll to succeed against her have a modifier positive modifier along with the above mentioned delayed logical reaction time, having a lower base health points, and being unable to wield iron and other heavier metal equipment (although she could probably use bronze and other metals designed for magical creatures). In return, she would get a positive modifier to checks involving the 7 senses and checks on the success of spells she casts.
Background: Candace and her twin sister were orphaned when they were six years old when their parents perished in a car accident (Candace and her sister Melanie were not in the car at the time). Their grandparents on their mother’s side took them in and raised them in a small apartment in Jacksonville Florida. The sisters were inseparable, and both went to a community college in Jacksonville and had nearly graduated when 2020 happened. Covid ended up being incredibly devastating to the Saint Arnaud family, claiming the lives of Melanie and their grandfather, Jean, while leaving Candace and her grandmother, Marie, with long Covid symptoms including a loss of senses of taste and smell. Candace graduated college and got a job at a department store and was eventually promoted to be a customer service representative, where she got good at pretending to care about the company’s spoiled customers while she suppressed her grief. While she put up a strong face, inside, Candace was an absolute wreck as she struggled to mourn her losses and take care of her ailing Grandmother, and she constantly found herself praying to whatever higher power existed that her circumstances could change. Much to her surprise, they did…
When in school, Candace and her sister took dance lessons and participated in some school sports like softball and soccer, but Candace was never particularly amazing at any of these activities. The twin sisters still participated in some club activities during their college years, but after Melanie died and Candace began her career, she stopped taking lessons and participating in any athletics. The two girls did enjoy reading fiction, fantasy, and romance stories, and were quite well read.
Abilities: For simplicity's sake I will include a +2 magical modifier for racial her racial trait to listed rolls for spell success. Please let me know if you want me to adjust this. A lot of the spells I am listing here are abilities I plan on her eventually getting rather than spells that she will start off with. I imagine that she would only start with Sense Souls and Project Pain. Souls depart from the material plane within a minute after the host dies, so spells that use souls as ammunition cannot reuse spent souls. Reanimation spells are something of an exception to this as the souls are bound to entities on the material plane, however, once a reanimated being is destroyed, the souls powering them are lost.
Sense Souls: Candace can sense nearby souls depending on her emotional state. Souls will appear to Candace as faint blue orbs within the living (or dying) beings when Candace is experiencing “negative” emotions such as sadness, anger, fear, anxiety, or stress. The strength of the emotion impacts the range at which she can “see” souls, from less than 10 yards to almost 100 yards when she is having a full blown panic attack. Just because she is capable of sensing a soul doesn’t necessarily mean she will have the presence of mind to do anything productive with that information. This ability does not work when Candace is having a good time or when she is asleep (although nightmares could trigger it), and creatures with magical concealment abilities can mask her ability to detect their soul. This is a Basic Spell for Candace.
Project Pain: When in dire straits, Candace can project her emotional and physical pain onto a single nearby foe (within 10 feet), staggering them for d4 posts, potentially giving her friends and servants time to bail her out. In ideal conditions, the rolls are 1-7 equals a failure (target shrugs off the invading feelings), 8-14 equals partial failure (50% shorter stun period) and 15-20 equals total success (full stun period). Candace is loath to use this ability due to her fear of being emotionally vulnerable. This spell only works while Candace is in physical and emotional distress, and targets that don’t feel pain and emotions (such as skeletons) are unaffected by this spell.
Gather Soul: If Candace should acquire phylacteries for storing souls, she could learn to store souls of recently killed beings into these devices. The rolls for this spell would 1-7 equals a failure (soul escapes to the afterlife), 8-14 equals partial failure (soul is captured but is a level weaker) and 15-20 equals total success (soul is captured at full strength)
Soul Blast: Candace can project a nearby soul into the soul of another being, stunning the target for d4 posts and causing d10 damage in ideal conditions (hitting one target with the soul of an equal target at medium range [so around 25 yards] with no obstructions nor distractions). In ideal conditions, the rolls are 1-7 equals a miss, 8-14 equals partial failure (50% less final damage and 50% shorter stun period) and 15-20 equals total success (full damage and stun period). Hitting a human with a rat soul will typically do less damage and be less likely to stun while hitting a wolf with a minotaur soul will have higher damage potential and a longer stun. Souls of healthy living beings and hostile reanimated entities cannot be used as ammunition for this spell. Until Candace acquires phylacteries to store souls in, she will have to resort to using to souls of nearby dying enemies, killing small captured animals, or stripping the soul from one of her reanimated beings in order to employ this spell (once she learns how to do it). This is a Medium Spell. Beings that do not have souls nor are powered by souls are unaffected by this spell.
Hex of Terror: Candace can curse a single target with irrational feelings of impending doom. This can cause a target to become distracted, lowering their defences, or even freeze or flee in terror. In ideal conditions (the target is at medium range [so around 25 yards] with no obstructions nor distractions, and the target does not have extremely high moral), the rolls are 1-7 equals a miss (or the target brushes off the hex), 8-14 equals partial failure (target is visibly shaken and is more vulnerable to subsequent attacks for d4 posts) and 15-20 equals total success (target is frozen or fleeing in fear and is more vulnerable to subsequent attacks for d4 posts). This is a medium spell that does not cost souls to use. The spell does not affect mindless targets.
Curse of Sickness: Candace causes a single enemy to briefly experience some of the worst symptoms of Covid 19, causing them to experience terrible body aches and have trouble breathing for d6 turns. In ideal conditions (the target is at medium range [so around 25 yards] with no obstructions nor distractions, the rolls are 1-7 equals a miss (or the target brushes off the curse), 8-14 equals partial failure (the target is slowed by 25%, deals 25% less physical damage, and has a lower hit modifier by 1) and 15-20 equals total success (the target is slowed by 50%, deals 50% less physical damage, and has a lower hit modifier by 2). This is a medium spell that does not cost souls to use. The spell does not affect mindless targets.
Command Dead: Candace can attempt to dislodge the soul of a single nearby undead or animated construct that is not under her command, stunning the target d4 posts and causing d10 damage in ideal conditions (hitting one target with the soul of an equal target at close range [within 10 yards] with no obstructions nor distractions). In ideal conditions, the rolls are 1-7 equals a miss, 8-14 equals partial failure (50% less final damage and 50% shorter stun period) and 15-20 equals total success (full damage and stun period). This is a medium spell that does not cost souls to use.
Basic Reanimation: Candace will learn to be able to use Necromancy spells to bring back creatures to fight for her. This is an advanced spell that takes at least multiple minutes to do, so will not generally be useful in the middle of combat. This spell can only be used on one target at a time. The starting rolls for this spell in ideal conditions (the creature she is trying to reanimate is freshly dead and not much stronger than her) are 1-7 equals total failure, 8-14 equals partial failure (the body is only 40% effective and the animation spells break down after about an hour, and 15-20 equals total success (the body is 80% effective and the animation spell lasts about 30 hours).
Animate Skeletons: Candace can use nearby souls to animate d4 nearby skeletons if enough of the bones are present. This is an advanced spell that takes at least multiple minutes to do, so will not generally be useful in the middle of combat. The power of the soul used to power this spell must be similar to that of the skeletons being animated (so Candace can’t use a rodent soul to animate human skeletons and vice versa). If the spell is successful, there are multiple skeletons nearby, and the die rolls higher than one, the soul spent to cast the spell is split between all the raised bodies. A split soul cannot be used to power other spells. The starting rolls for this spell in ideal conditions (the creature’s skeletons that she is attempting to animate are nearly fully intact and not much stronger than her) are 1-7 equals total failure, 8-14 equals partial failure (the skeletons are only 40% effective and the animation spells break down after about an hour, and 15-20 equals total success (the skeletons are 80% effective and the animation spell lasts about 30 hours).
Candace will potentially learn more advanced versions of these spells as the story progresses, but hopefully this will suffice to explain the basic array of spells I see being at her disposal eventually.
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