Varric Tethras (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
brosbeforeprose) wrote2021-05-11 10:56 pm
brosbeforeprose) wrote2021-05-11 10:56 pm
Erythraia app
Player;
Character;
CHARACTER NAME: Varric Tethras
AGE: 40
CANON: Dragon Age
CANON POINT: After the events of Dragon Age II - Varric, Hawke (his bff, the protag) and friends fled together after being kinda responsible for their city burning to the ground. Varric was the only one to come back - and found himself very soon arrested by the Templars.
BACKGROUND/HISTORY:
Varric Tethras is an outlier among dwarves. Most are born in the underground city of Orzammar and live most of their lives down there, coming to the surface only grudgingly and often for business, terrified of falling into the wide open sky all the while. His family are exiled nobles in the surface city of Kirkwall, their fortunes reversed by Varric's older brother Bartrand, the limitlessly ambitious businessman. Varric? A professional younger brother. The spare to his brother's heir. And he's happy with that.
Dragon Age II alone covers ten years of Varric's life, so to sum up each of the three acts very quickly:
Act I (Varric is 33): Bartrand is planning an expedition for ancient forgotten treasure. Varric helps - mostly by making up for his brother's flaws in planning by hiring experts in the area and the monsters inhabiting it, plus investors. The trek is successful, but no one accounted for cursed treasure. Bartrand abandons Varric and the expedition for dead, possessed by the artefact.
Act II (Varric is 37): Varric escaped, but his brother has vanished. Varric is forced to take the reins of House Tethras and hates every second of it. He's known for not showing up to meetings. He finds his brother during this year, possessed irreparably and driven insane by the artefact he found, and must make a choice: kill the very last of his family and have his revenge, or keep him alive and imprisoned, for he will always be a danger to those around him. Bartrand, in a moment of lucidity, begs Varric to kill him. [player choice] Varric obliges. [/player choice]
Act III (Varric is 40): Kirkwall politically starts to fall apart. Varric is largely spared beyond some damage to his bottom line, but his friends are direly affected, and therefore so is he. He tries to sell Bartrand's old estate, but can't due to the small problem of it being haunted. This turns out to be the work of Bartrand's erstwhile artefact. Varric's tempted to keep the artefact to try to understand what happened to his brother, [player choice] but is ultimately dissuaded, and gives it to an expert in these matters. [/player choice]
One of Varric's friends, Anders, driven to the brink by a decade of political chaos in Kirkwall affecting his freedom and personal rights, commits a terrorist attack on the city's core religious temple. Varric's whole group is forced to flee.
Varric does return to his home. His chosen family scatter to the winds.
PERSONALITY:
Varric is not the born businessman. He's the carer. Fiercely loyal to both blood and adopted family, he's been his mother's carer during drunken rages, his brother's loyal retainer(ish) despite there being very little love lost between them, and the curator of a collection of informants he mostly has because he loves a good gossip and he likes them. So, really, they're friends. Sometimes the gossip is good for Tethras business - then they're informants.
Though he's not afraid to tell someone he cares about if they're screwing up, it genuinely takes a horror like mass murder to lose Varric's loyality completely. And that's hard when you're friends with people from all across the political divide. So Varric idealogically fence-sits, and he doesn't see a problem with it. He chooses the side of his friends, and scrambles to avoid any mental conflict in befriending both oppressed and oppressors. (case in point, when Hawke/the player has to choose which major side to join in DAII's endgame? Most of the party have chosen their own sides by then. Varric does not - he follows Hawke regardless)
He takes people seriously, but not very much else. Even by the end of this tumultuous decade of his life, he lives in his local tavern, The Hanged Man, talking to everybody, playing cards and telling stories. Is he personally reliable? Yes. Is he reliable to business or to important matters? No. This is a man who tells flagrant lies under interrogation, sometimes to obfuscate his real, subtler lies, but also, because he's the kind of man to sass the interrogator.
An author of everything from political intrigue to biography to trashy serials and trashier porn, Varric still loves a story, the more exaggerated and outlandish, the better. Often, he's not even trying to be believed. There are a lot of good reasons to keep people guessing, and as he himself says, stories have power. (Note that he doesn't lie quite as much as he claims to. He's claimed to be a compulsive liar, which he definitely isn't.)
Varric may be a businessman these days, and judging by him keeping that business going for several years he's not bad at it, but ultimately, he stays in the background, determined to stay the younger brother to absolutely no one. The family's various dealings and side-dealings, holdings and investments are made in the name of his cousins, his cousin's pets, his fake cousins and his fake cousins' fake pets while he sits in a bar and tells tales about that time he, no shit, walked into a mansion and killed a horde of armed and very angry men single-handedly. Basically, Varric would be an immature jackass if he wasn't such a damned caring one.
But not everything is the same as before. Varric's a little more guarded now. He won't give out his loyalty so readily, and a sense of hopelessness at the world is starting to creep in. He can't sit on the fence anymore, the world's changing too fast and the people he loves are in the centre of it. He's not lost everything, but sometimes it can certainly feel like it. And his role right now is to stay where he is and his family is not, because the best way to protect them is to not be with them.
SUITABILITY:
Haha, funny story. Varric hates the outdoors and everything about it. The second his bff leaves the city limits in-game Varric will be there bitching about it. However, note that he will be there. For all his love of sitting in bars telling stories, Varric can work in a group and he understands the concept of working together to get out of a shit situation. He might be afraid of effort and commitment, but he's not afraid of danger.
So, his time in the game will involve happily swaggering his way into conflict and racking up kill counts with anyone who'll indulge, but also complaining if he gets mud on his boots.
I don't know if his determination to be Switzerland will really come into his time in the game. Like I said, by the end of DAII and coming into the sequel, Varric is starting to realise that some things are too important to stay out of, and people he cares about might just have to get hurt along the way. I'd like to play with that somewhat here if the chance does come up.
ABILITIES/SKILLS:
Combat (Bianca): Varric's prized possession is his crossbow. A(n almost) unique model in his world, it's heavily built and repeat-firing (the unique aspect, as far as he knows), with ornate embellishments and a retractable bayonet. He can pair it with a couple of little upgrades: poison-tipped or fire arrows, or even a large, explosive shot. The weapon itself and what he can do with it could be something he can develop more in-game as well (with permission!).
Lockpicking/Trap disarming: As a rogue class, Varric's lock-picking skills are superb. He's also very good at spotting and disarming various kinds of traps, and though he doesn't place them (he probably could if pressed, but he's better at dismantling), he has good knowledge of the art and good dexterity.
Hidden weaponry: I don't tend to mess with the rest of the assassin/sneaking-type rogue skills in RP, but as Varric's talked about using daggers in canon, I imagine he carries slightly more subtle weaponry in case he needs to - small knives on his person, a garrotte disguised as a bracelet, little poisons and things like that.
Immunity to magic: Not completely. If someone shoots fire at him magically, he'll still burn, all that kind of physical stuff affects him like anything else. But in his own world, dwarves are cut off from the source of magic, broadly speaking, so they can't use it or be affected by it. In magical terms, Varric's an inanimate object. (I'm open to playing around with this in various ways, though)
Night vision: Given that they've been underground for a thousand years, dwarves have excellent eyesight, including in the dark.
Telling stories: I would be a bad Varric player if I didn't make sure to include this.
INVENTORY:
Bianca - the crossbow from above
His jewellry - some of it was inherited from his father and it's all expensive
A small dagger
A fancy notebook containing unfinished drafts of the next instalment of his procedural serial drama Hard in Hightown
Samples;
SAMPLE ONE:
Game thread
It's an old thread, sir, but it checks out. I still play him pretty much like this. This is a close canon friend, so naturally he won't be this open with everybody. Or this truthful.
SAMPLE TWO:
TDM thread
SAMPLE THREE:
Game thread
This is still in line with how I would play Varric now. Yaha was not a person he liked, but one he somewhat cares about nonetheless, and one he recognised as someone very dangerous, who liked him. They're both hallucinating, and Varric's having major issues juggling his own hallucinations with keeping Yaha sane and finally wondering if he's really right to have made himself friends with someone so dangerous.cut>
Character;
CHARACTER NAME: Varric Tethras
AGE: 40
CANON: Dragon Age
CANON POINT: After the events of Dragon Age II - Varric, Hawke (his bff, the protag) and friends fled together after being kinda responsible for their city burning to the ground. Varric was the only one to come back - and found himself very soon arrested by the Templars.
BACKGROUND/HISTORY:
Varric Tethras is an outlier among dwarves. Most are born in the underground city of Orzammar and live most of their lives down there, coming to the surface only grudgingly and often for business, terrified of falling into the wide open sky all the while. His family are exiled nobles in the surface city of Kirkwall, their fortunes reversed by Varric's older brother Bartrand, the limitlessly ambitious businessman. Varric? A professional younger brother. The spare to his brother's heir. And he's happy with that.
Dragon Age II alone covers ten years of Varric's life, so to sum up each of the three acts very quickly:
Act I (Varric is 33): Bartrand is planning an expedition for ancient forgotten treasure. Varric helps - mostly by making up for his brother's flaws in planning by hiring experts in the area and the monsters inhabiting it, plus investors. The trek is successful, but no one accounted for cursed treasure. Bartrand abandons Varric and the expedition for dead, possessed by the artefact.
Act II (Varric is 37): Varric escaped, but his brother has vanished. Varric is forced to take the reins of House Tethras and hates every second of it. He's known for not showing up to meetings. He finds his brother during this year, possessed irreparably and driven insane by the artefact he found, and must make a choice: kill the very last of his family and have his revenge, or keep him alive and imprisoned, for he will always be a danger to those around him. Bartrand, in a moment of lucidity, begs Varric to kill him. [player choice] Varric obliges. [/player choice]
Act III (Varric is 40): Kirkwall politically starts to fall apart. Varric is largely spared beyond some damage to his bottom line, but his friends are direly affected, and therefore so is he. He tries to sell Bartrand's old estate, but can't due to the small problem of it being haunted. This turns out to be the work of Bartrand's erstwhile artefact. Varric's tempted to keep the artefact to try to understand what happened to his brother, [player choice] but is ultimately dissuaded, and gives it to an expert in these matters. [/player choice]
One of Varric's friends, Anders, driven to the brink by a decade of political chaos in Kirkwall affecting his freedom and personal rights, commits a terrorist attack on the city's core religious temple. Varric's whole group is forced to flee.
Varric does return to his home. His chosen family scatter to the winds.
PERSONALITY:
Varric is not the born businessman. He's the carer. Fiercely loyal to both blood and adopted family, he's been his mother's carer during drunken rages, his brother's loyal retainer(ish) despite there being very little love lost between them, and the curator of a collection of informants he mostly has because he loves a good gossip and he likes them. So, really, they're friends. Sometimes the gossip is good for Tethras business - then they're informants.
Though he's not afraid to tell someone he cares about if they're screwing up, it genuinely takes a horror like mass murder to lose Varric's loyality completely. And that's hard when you're friends with people from all across the political divide. So Varric idealogically fence-sits, and he doesn't see a problem with it. He chooses the side of his friends, and scrambles to avoid any mental conflict in befriending both oppressed and oppressors. (case in point, when Hawke/the player has to choose which major side to join in DAII's endgame? Most of the party have chosen their own sides by then. Varric does not - he follows Hawke regardless)
He takes people seriously, but not very much else. Even by the end of this tumultuous decade of his life, he lives in his local tavern, The Hanged Man, talking to everybody, playing cards and telling stories. Is he personally reliable? Yes. Is he reliable to business or to important matters? No. This is a man who tells flagrant lies under interrogation, sometimes to obfuscate his real, subtler lies, but also, because he's the kind of man to sass the interrogator.
An author of everything from political intrigue to biography to trashy serials and trashier porn, Varric still loves a story, the more exaggerated and outlandish, the better. Often, he's not even trying to be believed. There are a lot of good reasons to keep people guessing, and as he himself says, stories have power. (Note that he doesn't lie quite as much as he claims to. He's claimed to be a compulsive liar, which he definitely isn't.)
Varric may be a businessman these days, and judging by him keeping that business going for several years he's not bad at it, but ultimately, he stays in the background, determined to stay the younger brother to absolutely no one. The family's various dealings and side-dealings, holdings and investments are made in the name of his cousins, his cousin's pets, his fake cousins and his fake cousins' fake pets while he sits in a bar and tells tales about that time he, no shit, walked into a mansion and killed a horde of armed and very angry men single-handedly. Basically, Varric would be an immature jackass if he wasn't such a damned caring one.
But not everything is the same as before. Varric's a little more guarded now. He won't give out his loyalty so readily, and a sense of hopelessness at the world is starting to creep in. He can't sit on the fence anymore, the world's changing too fast and the people he loves are in the centre of it. He's not lost everything, but sometimes it can certainly feel like it. And his role right now is to stay where he is and his family is not, because the best way to protect them is to not be with them.
SUITABILITY:
Haha, funny story. Varric hates the outdoors and everything about it. The second his bff leaves the city limits in-game Varric will be there bitching about it. However, note that he will be there. For all his love of sitting in bars telling stories, Varric can work in a group and he understands the concept of working together to get out of a shit situation. He might be afraid of effort and commitment, but he's not afraid of danger.
So, his time in the game will involve happily swaggering his way into conflict and racking up kill counts with anyone who'll indulge, but also complaining if he gets mud on his boots.
I don't know if his determination to be Switzerland will really come into his time in the game. Like I said, by the end of DAII and coming into the sequel, Varric is starting to realise that some things are too important to stay out of, and people he cares about might just have to get hurt along the way. I'd like to play with that somewhat here if the chance does come up.
ABILITIES/SKILLS:
Combat (Bianca): Varric's prized possession is his crossbow. A(n almost) unique model in his world, it's heavily built and repeat-firing (the unique aspect, as far as he knows), with ornate embellishments and a retractable bayonet. He can pair it with a couple of little upgrades: poison-tipped or fire arrows, or even a large, explosive shot. The weapon itself and what he can do with it could be something he can develop more in-game as well (with permission!).
Lockpicking/Trap disarming: As a rogue class, Varric's lock-picking skills are superb. He's also very good at spotting and disarming various kinds of traps, and though he doesn't place them (he probably could if pressed, but he's better at dismantling), he has good knowledge of the art and good dexterity.
Hidden weaponry: I don't tend to mess with the rest of the assassin/sneaking-type rogue skills in RP, but as Varric's talked about using daggers in canon, I imagine he carries slightly more subtle weaponry in case he needs to - small knives on his person, a garrotte disguised as a bracelet, little poisons and things like that.
Immunity to magic: Not completely. If someone shoots fire at him magically, he'll still burn, all that kind of physical stuff affects him like anything else. But in his own world, dwarves are cut off from the source of magic, broadly speaking, so they can't use it or be affected by it. In magical terms, Varric's an inanimate object. (I'm open to playing around with this in various ways, though)
Night vision: Given that they've been underground for a thousand years, dwarves have excellent eyesight, including in the dark.
Telling stories: I would be a bad Varric player if I didn't make sure to include this.
INVENTORY:
Bianca - the crossbow from above
His jewellry - some of it was inherited from his father and it's all expensive
A small dagger
A fancy notebook containing unfinished drafts of the next instalment of his procedural serial drama Hard in Hightown
SAMPLE ONE:
Game thread
It's an old thread, sir, but it checks out. I still play him pretty much like this. This is a close canon friend, so naturally he won't be this open with everybody. Or this truthful.
SAMPLE TWO:
TDM thread
SAMPLE THREE:
Game thread
This is still in line with how I would play Varric now. Yaha was not a person he liked, but one he somewhat cares about nonetheless, and one he recognised as someone very dangerous, who liked him. They're both hallucinating, and Varric's having major issues juggling his own hallucinations with keeping Yaha sane and finally wondering if he's really right to have made himself friends with someone so dangerous.cut>