I have been trying to make my character be a descendant of a legendary hero from the Sword Coast. At first I thought about making a member of a branch family of a noble or royal family but I have changed my mind about that as branch families (in the traditional japanese sense) don't really work in D&D, unless you want to create a whole family structure for your character and that is not what I want.
What I want to do is insert her into the lineage of an existing legendary hero from the Sword Coast but have that hero be long dead and the family has "branched" many times since then, so she is only distantly related to said hero.
I am really struggling with this part. I have purchased the Sword Coast Adventures Guide, to help me with the creation of this backstory but I am still having trouble for the following reasons:
I am looking for a legendary hero who actually had a family
I need that family to have "branched" over generations into various different families
I want the family she comes from to be merchants by trade, sprinkled with a few heroic ancestors like knights and adventures and so on
I want her legendary ancestry to have wielded powerful magic, but that magic has been dormant for generations.
Also, I am trying to make this character totally unaware of her true bloodline. Essentially, over the generations, the stories of their legendary ancestor has been twisted, added to, detracted from and finally largely forgotten. Her family no longer tells of where they come from, bards no longer tell the tales of her ancestor and so they have mostly faded into obscurity.
Perhaps her legendary ancestor was legendary for being a chaotic or evil antihero, whose tales have been forsaken in favour of the more traditional tales of Paladins and so forth. Perhaps their heroic deed was only a side effect of something they did in malice or out of spite or maybe even by accident. Something that made them legendary - for a time.
Can you guys and gals who are familiar with the Sword Coast and its adventures and legendary NPCs, possibly help me out with this please because I am really struggling to come up with a linage that feels right and not contrived.
Try searching the internet for "Knights of Myth Drannor" - that's a famous adventuring group from the Forgotten Realms going back to earlier editions of the D&D game. Whilst they were active across the whole of the Realms, rather than just the Sword Coast, they would still be famous.
Overall though, I would suggest talking to the DM of the campaign and telling them what you'd like to do and seeing if they have any suggestions - if it was me running it, I would love to be able to work this into the campaign plot. :)
In all honesty, with how you described it, you could just make up a legendary hero that time forgot. Since you said that over generations their tale was changed and then forgotten, you could make up a legendary hero and roll from there. You could even talk to your DM and try to get part of the campaign to be finding clues to your ancestry and reveal your true bloodline. The best anybody can really say here is, work with your DM and see what they think and where to go from there.
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Coming back to this thread after a few weeks to say that I have been doing some research on the Knights of Myth Drannor as as Stormkight suggested and I quite like Illistyl Elventree. Her story of how she joined the Knights as a replacement for her teacher and then became babysitter to her teachers child - later taking over where Sylune had left off, fits really well with this character I think.
Having her be distantly related to Illistyl Elventree, would be interesting. Her ancestor has been part of a legendary band of knights and has taken part of things that would at the time have made her a legend in her own right, but ultimately forsook her position as a knight and an adventurer, to take up more family and community orientated roles.
Certainly, I can see her descendants becoming the traders and merchants of Shadowdale and some of them becoming quite wealthy - branching of and marrying other more prosperous merchants and so on from other parts of Faerun - whose descendants branched off and married others; some becoming adventurers and knights, while others settled down to starting families of their own, who intern started their own families, down through the generations until we get to the characters family - now only distantly related to Illistyl.
So now we have the character related to a once legendary and powerful Mage.
The only last issue that I had is that Illistyl Elventree had Mystra as a patron deity and it seems most likely that she would have passed down the worship of Mystra to her children; however, I have the character becoming an acolyte of Sune as part of her backstory - so, her patron deity is obviously Sune. It seems that Mystra has in the past had a working relationship with Sune.
Would this not make things difficult? Having a character; who by her bloodline, should be a worshiper of Mystra, becoming an acolyte of Sune?
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A caffeinated nerd who has played TTRPGs or a number of years and is very much a fantasy adventure geek.
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Hi everyone,
I have been trying to make my character be a descendant of a legendary hero from the Sword Coast. At first I thought about making a member of a branch family of a noble or royal family but I have changed my mind about that as branch families (in the traditional japanese sense) don't really work in D&D, unless you want to create a whole family structure for your character and that is not what I want.
What I want to do is insert her into the lineage of an existing legendary hero from the Sword Coast but have that hero be long dead and the family has "branched" many times since then, so she is only distantly related to said hero.
I am really struggling with this part. I have purchased the Sword Coast Adventures Guide, to help me with the creation of this backstory but I am still having trouble for the following reasons:
Also, I am trying to make this character totally unaware of her true bloodline. Essentially, over the generations, the stories of their legendary ancestor has been twisted, added to, detracted from and finally largely forgotten. Her family no longer tells of where they come from, bards no longer tell the tales of her ancestor and so they have mostly faded into obscurity.
Perhaps her legendary ancestor was legendary for being a chaotic or evil antihero, whose tales have been forsaken in favour of the more traditional tales of Paladins and so forth. Perhaps their heroic deed was only a side effect of something they did in malice or out of spite or maybe even by accident. Something that made them legendary - for a time.
Can you guys and gals who are familiar with the Sword Coast and its adventures and legendary NPCs, possibly help me out with this please because I am really struggling to come up with a linage that feels right and not contrived.
Thanks for you help guys
XD
A caffeinated nerd who has played TTRPGs or a number of years and is very much a fantasy adventure geek.
Try searching the internet for "Knights of Myth Drannor" - that's a famous adventuring group from the Forgotten Realms going back to earlier editions of the D&D game. Whilst they were active across the whole of the Realms, rather than just the Sword Coast, they would still be famous.
Overall though, I would suggest talking to the DM of the campaign and telling them what you'd like to do and seeing if they have any suggestions - if it was me running it, I would love to be able to work this into the campaign plot. :)
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In all honesty, with how you described it, you could just make up a legendary hero that time forgot. Since you said that over generations their tale was changed and then forgotten, you could make up a legendary hero and roll from there. You could even talk to your DM and try to get part of the campaign to be finding clues to your ancestry and reveal your true bloodline. The best anybody can really say here is, work with your DM and see what they think and where to go from there.
Remember this is a game and it's suppose to be fun for everybody. Let's all have fun and kill monsters.
Coming back to this thread after a few weeks to say that I have been doing some research on the Knights of Myth Drannor as as Stormkight suggested and I quite like Illistyl Elventree. Her story of how she joined the Knights as a replacement for her teacher and then became babysitter to her teachers child - later taking over where Sylune had left off, fits really well with this character I think.
Having her be distantly related to Illistyl Elventree, would be interesting. Her ancestor has been part of a legendary band of knights and has taken part of things that would at the time have made her a legend in her own right, but ultimately forsook her position as a knight and an adventurer, to take up more family and community orientated roles.
Certainly, I can see her descendants becoming the traders and merchants of Shadowdale and some of them becoming quite wealthy - branching of and marrying other more prosperous merchants and so on from other parts of Faerun - whose descendants branched off and married others; some becoming adventurers and knights, while others settled down to starting families of their own, who intern started their own families, down through the generations until we get to the characters family - now only distantly related to Illistyl.
So now we have the character related to a once legendary and powerful Mage.
The only last issue that I had is that Illistyl Elventree had Mystra as a patron deity and it seems most likely that she would have passed down the worship of Mystra to her children; however, I have the character becoming an acolyte of Sune as part of her backstory - so, her patron deity is obviously Sune. It seems that Mystra has in the past had a working relationship with Sune.
Would this not make things difficult? Having a character; who by her bloodline, should be a worshiper of Mystra, becoming an acolyte of Sune?
A caffeinated nerd who has played TTRPGs or a number of years and is very much a fantasy adventure geek.