The Wanderer (he/him) is a character played by Aoife (any) in The Foe of Many Faces: A Tiresian Archives Fiction One-Shot. He is a Level 3 Aberrant Mind Sorcerer and a wildhunt (owl) drow shifter with a custom background that combines elements of the hermit and haunted one.
Description
The Wanderer is a 6'3" drow with hip-length white hair neatly tucked up into a vaguely mediterranean/north-african chaperon hat, and a long white beard. he wears long robes in deep forest colors, and can transform into a purple-black owl; when he does, his head becomes a full-on owl head, and both his hands and his feet become talons with (sadly ineffective) claws.
He is reticent, he is gruff, he is deeply scared of others, he is creepy, he regularly reads peoples' minds for fun, and he is most at home alone in the woods at night. As Aoife has said, "he does not know what he is doing here, my dudes."
Backstory
The Wanderer is a drow who grew up in a small semi-rural city. He was a farmer and a hunter...and one day a new voice popped into his mind. It needled him constantly and drove him crazy, playing with his mind and offering deals for magic until the wanderer eventually gave in. Xid bestowed upon him magic, and that night their mark was branded into his flesh. the wanderer vanished into the woods, unwilling to face the people in his old life, having been so obviously marked as aberrant. He never went back.
The woods changed him. He had been a hunter, sure, but he'd been hunting with teams of people. Suddenly, in the woods, fending for himself, if he didn't catch something he didn't eat. Being a drow, it made sense to hunt in the dark, when the wanderer got a masterclass in silent hunting from the local owls. He studied them for decades... and his new innate magic changed him. He started noticing feathers in his hair while he was hunting, but thought they must have fallen onto him...until he realized he couldn't pull the feathers out. He started noticing his nails growing longer and sharper when he was hunting. one night he abandoned his prey to drink from a pond... and saw "an entire goddamn owl head" where his drow head used to be.
Within 200 years, the Wanderer rebelled against his patron. He remembered what his life used to be like, he remembered what social interaction was like, and eventually he grew so fed up with his contract that he, by force of will, shut Xid out of his mind entirely. When Xid went, so too went his 10 levels in warlock...but the ambient aberrant magic had left its mark on him—he was left with a small amount of latent magic (namely, three points in sorcerer).
Trivia
Aoife has made a heroforge of the wanderer, seen here.
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