HOME | DD

Description
Kathra Goldspinner and Bree Thistleton

Kath is a rune cleric with a fondness from human males. Born beneath the mountains in the halls of the Durgen lords, she has nevertheless spent most of her life in the hill durgen settlement of Hammerfast. A typical mountain durgen'len, she is a handsome, robust creature, a strong daughter of a warrior race. She has a strong will to match, and is remarkably independent and free-wheeling for a durgen.

Durgen women are expecially rare, and the males tend to keep them safely sequestered in their holds where no harm can come to them. Durgen breed very slowly, when they breed at all, and most of their women consider it their duty to propagate their dwindling race. As a priestess, Kath has more freedom than most, though her elders despair at the way she runs around half-wild like a human lass and immodestly shows her bare skin. They are even less enamoured at her appetite for tall human men. Of course, men and durgen cannot breed (without the help of forbidden magicks) but Kathra enjoys her love affairs nonetheless. She does indeed intend to give her people a child one day, and return to the mountain halls for a generation or two to raise her offspring. But she feels a deep kinship for the outside world, and this is ultimately where she wants to be.

Kathra is in some ways the den-mother of the group - though her people consider her a wild-child, she is serious, sensible and caring by human standards. She is always ready with a kind word or healing spell to assist her fellows, and feels especially responsible for the wayward kinder, Bree. Of course, orcs and their kind are deserving of nothing more than a hammer to the face...

The kinder ('the people'), sometimes called 'halflings', hobbits or hin, are a delicate, nomadic folk who call no land their home. Travelling in their wagon-caravels or river-boats, these nomads are a genial, friendly folk who would rather negociate and trade than fight, as might be expected from a people who average less than half the size of most other folk.

But there are exceptions to every race, and Bree grew up on the wrong side of the tracks, and fell in with the wrong crowd. You had to be tough to run with the forest bandits, especially for a woman, and especially if you were half their size. A tough scrapper, Bree soon learned their ways and gained their respect, and her band made their living preying on the goblin-kind of the wilds, raiding them in hit-and-run attacks, and bringing in goblin-ears for the bounties.

At some point, her band crossed the path of a group of travelling adventurers, and Bree decided to join them, figuring her skill with knives and locks would come in handy while exploring dungeons. Bree travelled with them for about a year, becoming fast friends with the durgen, Kathra. She underwent a serious crisis of personality when she 'adopted' a pathetic goblin as her sidekick, and his apparent death made her question the violent trajectory of her brief life. She spent some time among her own kind, and re-emerged recently as a wiser, more compassionate person than the young bravo of her youth.

Like most kinder, Bree has an impish look to her, a pixie-like prettiness. Unlike most of her kind, she dresses in brief, battle-worn black leathers and carries a wide variety of killing tools. Her favourites are her crossbow-pistol, her longknife and her throwing kunais. Always ready with a quip and a taunt, she is an exceptionally acrobatic warrior who takes daring risks to bring down much bigger foes.

Artist notes: This was a tricky one for me - I wanted to make the pair something more than just 'short humans' but also wanted them to be attractive to the human eye. There's always a temptation for me to draw elves or catgirls or something overtly 'sexy' which everyone will like. After the dragonborn & tiefling picture, I shied away from anything too exotic for a while. Now I come back to two of our oldest 4E characters, after a few aborted attempts. I hope I got them right.

The outfits are a bit less stripperific this time around, as that's what the players wanted, but I managed to negotiate some bare midriffs

On the role-playing side, dwarves are a strange bunch in 4E. They get the look and the fluff mostly right - I like the 'sexy' female dwarves and the angular look to their weapons and armour, borrowed straight from Lord of the Rings.

As a PC race, dwarves get bonuses to Wisdom and Constitution, which on the face of it seems to reflect their tough, stubborn characters.

But that makes them excel at roles they shouldn't really be good at, and non-optimal for classes in which they really should excel. For example, they are not optimised for the fighter or warlord classes, despite being a perfect fit - story wise - for these classic roles. And their stats make them good at things like Druid or Shaman, which flies in the face of their fluff. I just don't see them as treehuggers, period.

Dwarf clerics are pretty classic, though - even in 1st edition they were strongly tied to their pantheon. But they make better 'laser clerics' than battle clerics, which seems really stupid. I want my dwarfs to be up in the front ranks, busting orc heads with a hammer and some doughty battle-prayers, not hanging back and zapping foes with 'radiant energy'. Of course, not everyone needs their characters to be optimised, but is it too much to match the classes to the roles they are actually supposed to be good at? 4E is a very strange animal indeed.

Description
Kathra Goldspinner and Bree Thistleton

Kath is a rune cleric with a fondness from human males. Born beneath the mountains in the halls of the Durgen lords, she has nevertheless spent most of her life in the hill durgen settlement of Hammerfast. A typical mountain durgen'len, she is a handsome, robust creature, a strong daughter of a warrior race. She has a strong will to match, and is remarkably independent and free-wheeling for a durgen.

Durgen women are expecially rare, and the males tend to keep them safely sequestered in their holds where no harm can come to them. Durgen breed very slowly, when they breed at all, and most of their women consider it their duty to propagate their dwindling race. As a priestess, Kath has more freedom than most, though her elders despair at the way she runs around half-wild like a human lass and immodestly shows her bare skin. They are even less enamoured at her appetite for tall human men. Of course, men and durgen cannot breed (without the help of forbidden magicks) but Kathra enjoys her love affairs nonetheless. She does indeed intend to give her people a child one day, and return to the mountain halls for a generation or two to raise her offspring. But she feels a deep kinship for the outside world, and this is ultimately where she wants to be.

Kathra is in some ways the den-mother of the group - though her people consider her a wild-child, she is serious, sensible and caring by human standards. She is always ready with a kind word or healing spell to assist her fellows, and feels especially responsible for the wayward kinder, Bree. Of course, orcs and their kind are deserving of nothing more than a hammer to the face...

The kinder ('the people'), sometimes called 'halflings', hobbits or hin, are a delicate, nomadic folk who call no land their home. Travelling in their wagon-caravels or river-boats, these nomads are a genial, friendly folk who would rather negociate and trade than fight, as might be expected from a people who average less than half the size of most other folk.

But there are exceptions to every race, and Bree grew up on the wrong side of the tracks, and fell in with the wrong crowd. You had to be tough to run with the forest bandits, especially for a woman, and especially if you were half their size. A tough scrapper, Bree soon learned their ways and gained their respect, and her band made their living preying on the goblin-kind of the wilds, raiding them in hit-and-run attacks, and bringing in goblin-ears for the bounties.

At some point, her band crossed the path of a group of travelling adventurers, and Bree decided to join them, figuring her skill with knives and locks would come in handy while exploring dungeons. Bree travelled with them for about a year, becoming fast friends with the durgen, Kathra. She underwent a serious crisis of personality when she 'adopted' a pathetic goblin as her sidekick, and his apparent death made her question the violent trajectory of her brief life. She spent some time among her own kind, and re-emerged recently as a wiser, more compassionate person than the young bravo of her youth.

Like most kinder, Bree has an impish look to her, a pixie-like prettiness. Unlike most of her kind, she dresses in brief, battle-worn black leathers and carries a wide variety of killing tools. Her favourites are her crossbow-pistol, her longknife and her throwing kunais. Always ready with a quip and a taunt, she is an exceptionally acrobatic warrior who takes daring risks to bring down much bigger foes.

Artist notes: This was a tricky one for me - I wanted to make the pair something more than just 'short humans' but also wanted them to be attractive to the human eye. There's always a temptation for me to draw elves or catgirls or something overtly 'sexy' which everyone will like. After the dragonborn & tiefling picture, I shied away from anything too exotic for a while. Now I come back to two of our oldest 4E characters, after a few aborted attempts. I hope I got them right.

The outfits are a bit less stripperific this time around, as that's what the players wanted, but I managed to negotiate some bare midriffs

On the role-playing side, dwarves are a strange bunch in 4E. They get the look and the fluff mostly right - I like the 'sexy' female dwarves and the angular look to their weapons and armour, borrowed straight from Lord of the Rings.

As a PC race, dwarves get bonuses to Wisdom and Constitution, which on the face of it seems to reflect their tough, stubborn characters.

But that makes them excel at roles they shouldn't really be good at, and non-optimal for classes in which they really should excel. For example, they are not optimised for the fighter or warlord classes, despite being a perfect fit - story wise - for these classic roles. And their stats make them good at things like Druid or Shaman, which flies in the face of their fluff. I just don't see them as treehuggers, period.

Dwarf clerics are pretty classic, though - even in 1st edition they were strongly tied to their pantheon. But they make better 'laser clerics' than battle clerics, which seems really stupid. I want my dwarfs to be up in the front ranks, busting orc heads with a hammer and some doughty battle-prayers, not hanging back and zapping foes with 'radiant energy'. Of course, not everyone needs their characters to be optimised, but is it too much to match the classes to the roles they are actually supposed to be good at? 4E is a very strange animal indeed.