BIODATA
Name: Tristan ben Leland
Age: 16
Canon: Original
Canon Point: Post-campaign/post-history
Appearance: tall and lanky; pale and redheaded; usually clean and well-groomed, if not particularly well-dressed; pensive
Birthday: Sometime in the spring
Height/Weight: 5'10"; 140ish lbs
Canon Abilities:
NECROMANCY -- the studied, ritualized ability to summon, communicate with, and to a lesser degree command the spirits of the dead and undead
ASSORTED SPELLCASTING -- basic wards, shielding, buffing, and sleep spells
History: Tristan was born a little over sixteen years ago in Khola, a medieval Jewish fantasy village in fantasy sorta-Russia otherwise known as Vesevia: ruled over by the Summer and Winter Tsars from afar, and relatively fresh from the eventually-defeated campaign led by charismatic and infamous King Alexandre to overthrow them and unite Vesevia (and possibly the world) under a “just” banner. For the first fourteen or so years of Tristan’s life, however, these global concerns were strange and remote -- stories told by Alexandre’s soldiers who settled down in his village, and the sight of Alexandre’s final resting-place in the form of the tomb outside of town. Tristan’s life was much simpler, brought into the world the much-younger second child of local farmer and part-time town watchman Leland. From his father and his older sister Lydia he learned stern principles -- and internalized them a great deal more than either of them intended, probably -- and a certain bullheaded independence, reinforced by the fact that he was technically the eldest of the seven or so village children and agemates of his generation. He befriended gung-ho Fabiana, the daughter of Pamela, Alexandre’s once-right-hand woman; he was raised with the expectation that he would take over the family farm and the watch post and marry Evangeline Miller, another childhood friend. The path was laid out for him. He embraced it wholeheartedly. What could possibly go wrong?
Well. Not long after his fifteenth birthday -- and his engagement to Evangeline -- Tristan encountered the specter of King Alexandre himself, which became a repeat acquaintance: a sort of benevolent-seeming creepy mentor figure who encouraged him to take up magic and necromancy from Khola’s limited library resources, and Tristan, a bright but not perhaps entirely wise boy, took to it with interest. He also fell unfortunately and completely in love with Alexandre, who even more unfortunately “returned” his affections, after a certain Alexandre fashion. This was naturally kept a secret from his family and friends -- somehow -- and Tristan grew and flourished as a baby mage alongside his cadre of fellow Khola teenagers: Fabiana, Linnet the young hedgewitch with whom Tristan frequently locked bossy horns, fisherman Brad Crowninshield whom Tristan took to fussing patronizingly over on a regular basis, and of course, Tara-Fay Smith, aggressively antisocial would-be thief.
Their lives were promptly made more interesting when Lydia’s wife Rilla was seemingly abducted by fairies and “Tristan and friends” as Tristan invariably thought of his group set off to rescue her, in the face of all adult reprimand. In the process of this, they learned a few valuable lessons about their own idiocy -- okay, probably not enough valuable lessons -- and that Rilla was, in fact, the fairy queen who had staged her own apparent abduction, and Tristan talked Rilla into working things out with Lydia. Sort of. It didn’t take that much talking. The success of this endeavor only affirmed Tristan’s confidence in his own decisionmaking and he hurtled on with his own studies, and investigation of Alexandre’s condition and history, while his fiancee Evangeline concocted a harebrained plan to run away to the dwarven city of Altstadt with the others as an excuse to see the sights and get out of Khola for a while. This plan, uh, succeeded actually, and Tristan, curious himself about the wider world and about the libraries and politics of Altstadt, found himself and his friends embroiled in a wider set of plots surrounding revolution against the Tsars and involving one of Linnet’s mothers. In the process of attempting to avert death and destruction in Alexandre’s name, Evangeline broke her leg, Tara-Fay was nearly killed and discovered she was in fact part-demon and Brad made bank on fish sales. This adventure was one of Tristan’s first clues that Alexandre’s influence and agenda extended a bit more beyond the grave than he’d first assumed, but he naively ignored some of these signs and carried on.
At some point between these events Tristan turned sixteen. This was an event that deserved its own paragraph.
Not long before the set date of Tristan and Evangeline’s wedding, a young steppe rider came to Khola pleading for help with a dragon problem: specifically, help with a dragon that was slaughtering people and livestock. The details were hazy. The mission was impossibly dangerous. Naturally, the five teenagers were right on it. As they pursued this lead, the kids discovered that dragon transformation was in fact a communicable disease -- one passed on to an unfortunate donkey and, in fact, Brad Crowninshield -- and Tristan came into communication with Alexandre’s seemingly deceased wife and murderer, Parsbit. Soon, upon chasing down the apparent root of the dragon problem, the plucky children discovered that Parsbit was not so much dead as a sentient dragon, and nearly lost their lives (while Linnet lost her non-dragon status, alas) to a maddened Parsbit until they managed to release her from her bindings. Through all of this, Tristan’s awkward conversations with Parsbit revealed her motive for killing Alexandre -- to stop him from conquering the world. Or attempting to conquer the world, depending on your level of faith in Alexandre. Whichever.
Anyway, this probably should have shaken Tristan’s faith in Alexandre more than it did -- and he did in fact confront him, but Alexandre’s genuine idealism, such as it was, and his understanding of Tristan’s actions in Altstadt and with Parsbit, kept their relationship in good graces for the time being. Meanwhile, Tristan’s wedding loomed and strange supernatural happenstance became more commonplace; Tristan pushed down his extremely conflicted feelings about marrying Evangeline and continued heading down that particular garden path; and on the day of the wedding, several undead broke free from the local crypt and a now-materialized Alexandre revealed his plan to bring his undead army through the gate from the underworld and raise his campaign once more against the Tsars, with only a 100% chance of destruction of Khola in the interim. You know.
Needless to say, Tristan was not best pleased. His heartbreak was only exacerbated by his bride dumping him at the altar for a passel of extremely understandable reasons which he still has not really fully accepted. In a state of some shock, he wandered about with his friends for a while and then at one point split off to perform his trademark necromantic summoning ritual to, well, talk to Alexandre: a conversation which was no less heartbreaking, but at least provided some degree of closure. Tristan asked why Alexandre was doing this, and Alexandre provided the answer "grave necessity" -- idealistic, alas, to the end. So was Tristan. Alexandre kissed him; Tristan tried to banish him; so, you know, the breakup was finalized.
Soon after, the group of friends decided -- not quite unanimously -- to venture into the underworld in a hopeless endeavor to stop Alexandre before the town-destroying spell was complete. Some messing about with layers of time in the underworld later, and after some successful interference with Alexandre's plans, Tristan took it upon himself to attempt to kill Alexandre's ghost. This turned out to be the wrong thing to do. Instead, he managed to release Alexandre in corporeal undead form upon Khola and the world, and the teenagers found themselves locked in a battle with Alexandre and a giant undead dragon. Extremely tearful and extremely determined, Tristan confronted Alexandre one-on-one -- believing, once again, that this was his particular responsibility -- and eventually dealt the finishing blow, sending him permanently to his grave.
Suffice to say, this was not how Tristan would have liked to see things go. Nevertheless, having righted what he considered his wrong, he went through the next few hours and days in a bit of a bereaved daze while his friends and the citizens of Khola picked up the pieces of their lives, relatively unscathed but entirely changed. One ensuing night, Tristan was visited by the spirit of Dvoyre -- Alexandre's loyal follower and the teenagers' one-time enemy -- who expressed more sympathy for Tristan's position than he might have hoped for. Tristan told her, with full sincerity, that he understood Alexandre's dream and meant one day to find a better way to carry it out; and Dvoyre promised to hold him to it.
Lastly, some weeks later, Tristan mustered the courage to ask his friend Brad on an awkward basket-making date. So while the grieving process has yet to finish completely, things are looking relatively up for Tristan--after all, he has a country to save now and a dream to follow through on.
Personality: Despite his tender years and place as the baby of the family, Tristan has appointed himself older brother to the world at large: grown-up, an honorary adult -- in fact a full-fledged adult, honorary be damned -- ready to solve any problem and make any decision, for himself or, indeed, for anyone else in his age group. It's probably important to point out that this unbelievably arrogant worldview comes from a good place, essentially. Tristan feels the burden of a great deal of responsibility, real and imagined, and wants to live up to what he thinks his family and village -- and king -- require of him; he also possesses a great deal of genuine compassion for other people, which is unfortunately not matched by a particular amount of emotional sensitivity or personal understanding. He's softhearted and idealistic, at core, and these things guide his decisionmaking more than anything else; however, he's also conceited and patronizing in the way of someone who Knows What's Best and thus fundamentally believes that other people Don't. He is intelligent and deeply naive: he has the brains to learn beyond the typical capacity of a middle teenager, but not necessarily the wisdom to make use of it. He deeply desires to save everyone and everything from themselves. But probably more than that, he wants respect and he wants to prove himself. In short, this all makes for a deeply susceptible cocktail of a sixteen-year-old heading for a fall. Arguably he's still in midair.
Outwardly, Tristan is a placid, polite, mature-seeming boy who wants you to know that he's got it all sorted: earnest and wholesome, "obedient" to his elders and kind to his juniors. Inwardly he's anxious and a little irritable, proud and defensive, with a brittle mask of pleasant superiority to hide the fact that he worries a great deal, both about others and self-pityingly about his own life. He's very image-conscious, very careful to present his best foot forward and to try at every moment to live up to the person he aspires to be -- which, until recently, was a responsibly married man, a full-fledged member of his community and just also the devoted disciple of a benevolent king. All of that has been shattered. He hasn't really had the chance to get to constructing something new in its place, or, heaven forfend, taking himself on his own merits.
This is not to say he's a deceptive person. He has a rigid moral code that means that outright lies sit ill with him, even if disobedience doesn't, and he is painfully earnest, most of the time; in a sense, he's lived his own myth for so long that he really starts to buy into it. He somewhat hypocritically likes rules, and enforcing them on other people, even if he tends to treat them a bit flexibly as they apply to himself. Tristan believes wholly in justice and the possibility of a better world, which is what makes him so vulnerable to Alexandre's vision; he also, however, believes in kindness and leaving no one behind and the possibility of a happy ending, or at least the importance of striving for the best possible ending. He has trouble sacrificing the individual for the group, even in small ways -- he once researched and devised an elaborate new necromantic spell to avoid killing a turtle. He tries to make it his mission to care about each and every person he knows, or doesn't know, for that matter, even if he doesn't like them -- possibly especially if he doesn't like them. Is there such a thing as spiteful compassion? If so, Tristan practices it more often than he'd want to admit.
As a social being, Tristan can be unsurprisingly awkward and offputting. He values his friends highly; one wonders what he would do emotionally without them; however, this does not stop him from talking down to them and meddling with their lives. He argues that if you knew his friends, you'd meddle with them too. When his patience is tested he gets more and more brittly condescending. He is possibly the least patronizing with Fabiana or Linnet, for different reasons, and the most with Brad. Wizards are not a humble lot, and Tristan no exception. He has brought about an early definition of the term "mansplain." However, he's sunny and helpful enough to get away with it much of the time, and has a gloss of respect for adults: perhaps betraying a mite more calculation in the Tristan persona than otherwise expected, perhaps not.
He likes children and animals. He's self-disciplined and hardworking; he aims to be unimpeachable. He is, in fact, thinskinned and sensitive, and his feelings are easily hurt, armored in many layers of feigned magnanimity. He's going to save the world as he knows it. Again.
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