COVID Character: Laverne

All things must end, even this COVID Character retrospective. In order to go out with a bang (and not a whimper) I have decided to end on a high note with perhaps my most favorite character of my COVID gaming career.

Since the start of the pandemic, I have played more role-playing games than I ever have before. I thought I'd use my space to introduce you to my characters, and give you a little background about the system they're in, what they're like, and what they're doing.

Laverne

Aliases: None
Pronouns: They/them, but really any/all
Character Concept: Leshy seem cool. I'll play one of those!
Character Stats: 8th level NG Fungal Leshi Alchemist, Scroll Trickster, and Criminal
Campaign: The Fall of Plaguestone/Age of Ashes
System: D&D 5E
Campaign Status:Abandoned

 

"I would DIE for Laverne."

 

I often have no idea what I'm doing when I'm making a character. When that happens, I look through the book and try to find an interesting combination of things or a new ancestry/class/etc. that I've never had the chance to play before.

Pathfinder 2E has a lot of character options--which I like and appreciate, even as I am constantly overwhelmed by them. One of these is the leshy. They're sapient plant people. There's a bunch of different subtypes, including gourd people (you can store stuff in your head), and fungal leshy (which, yes, okay, fungi and plants are different, but it's a magical fantasy world of myth and whimsy, so we can ignore scientific accuracy just a bit here).

The second I saw the fungal leshy, I was like, "I'm gonna play one of those!"

And so, Laverne! They're a little mushroom person who is incredibly cute, disarmingly cheerful, upbeat, and enthusiastic. Despite this optimistic personality, Laverne was a little bit sketchy. They had a criminal background and would do a little breaking and entering and similar should the situation require it. Despite that, they were much beloved by everyone in the party, probably because I played up the, "I'm just a silly little person, don't mind me!" whenever I got the chance.

Laverne was an alchemist, which was a character class I never played before. I enjoyed alchemy at low level, but found it frustrating at higher level. Everyone else in the party seemed to outpace me in power and "doing cool stuff" fairly quickly. This was good for them, of course, but much less so for me. I think the big reason for my frustration is that the game wants you to specialize in the type of alchemy you do, but Laverne was more of a generalist. So I got a lot of little things as opposed to one big thing.

This turned out to be a bit of a blessing in disguise, because it gave Laverne lots of little levers to pull, no matter what situation they found themselves in. I doubled down on this aspect of the character by taking scroll trickster (which lets you make low level spell scrolls and create minor magical effects) and also by grabbing every low level magical item that the other party members didn't want and cramming them in Laverne's bag of holding.

This led to the most fun aspect of the character, which I privately called my, "Swiss Army Mushroom" time. Do we have a problem? Let's see what I've got in the bag! Do I not have exactly what I need in the bag? Let's see if I can cobble something together with random bits I find in the bag!

The most memorable example of how Laverne worked went a little something like this: We encountered a really nasty monster, which we of course tried to fight. It kicked our asses and sent us scrambling to a safer part of the dungeon. While the party licked our wounds, I reached into my bag to see if I could find anything that would help us defeat the monster.

Eventually, I settled on the following plan: I took the decapitated head of a spider we had previously beaten and filled it with the nastiest ingested poison I had on my person. Then I used a scroll that I found to cast a spell on the spider head to make it look like the most pristine, highest-quality spider head anyone had ever seen.

We walk back into the monster's lair and I apologize profusely to the monster for disturbing it. Then I present the spider head to the monster. The monster is overcome with how delicious the spider head is, promptly devours it, and is poisoned. Then the rest of the party jumped it from the shadows.

I don't want to say that it was no match for us after that (because, holy crow, greater barghasts are scary), but it was slightly weaker, and we needed all the help we could get!

There's a lot more I could talk about with Laverne: Like how they and Jora, our Champion of Desna became the unofficial parents of the rowdy, half-orc twins in the party. Or how I used their Criminal background make nice with some bandits who had been paid to ambush us (which raised a lot of questions!). Or how I helped the party to win a dance battle in the Mwange Expanse. 

Maybe another time!