This is going to be a bit of a different post but I swear it’s still relevant so bare with me!

One of the things that’s become pretty clear is that Ash and Flowers is also a home for a lot of TTRPG characters that I used to play all the time or never really got to play as. One of them is actually my first ever TTRPG Character – Magdiana.

(art from 2011. I was not as good at perspective back then).

I first came up with her in 2011 for a DnD 3.5e campaign I was playing with my then group of friends. It was pretty great and honestly was able to successfully itch a part of my brain that never really got to be itched successfully.

She was a Tiefling Rogue who basically existed to dismantle traps and take anything out as quickly and efficiently as possible. In fact, she was the only reason why a lot of the other people at my table didn’t end up dying (or at least stay dead) because of how effective she was at dealing with conflicts and being the only one who was clearly built and design to deal with Adventuring and – in turn – survival.

The campaign ran for I think about a year or so before things eventually went off the rails due to the group growing (started with 3 or 4 players and then eventually grew to like…6? or something?) and due to inter-group drama so she was a character that ended up getting shelved for quite some time even though I kept playing TTRPGs.

Flash forward the last handful of years where I started playing TTRPGs again and fell into PF2e and took a look at the Rogue and like… Damn was that shit boring. In fact, I took a second look at Rogues in general in both PF2e and DnD 5e and was incredibly dissatisfied with what I was seeing.

Like none of it felt particularly creative, to be honest, and it was part of what made me realize that the reason why I feel so bored by TTRPGs over the last while is that there’s a certain kind of creative experience that’s actually missing to them. I appreciate how crunchy PF2e is (it’s part of why I enjoyed DnD 3.5e so much) and I appreciate the kind of world building that DnD 5e has to offer but there’s a bridge between both of those experiences that was lacking that somehow I only noticed when I started looking at the Rogue.

It’s a weird thing to say but I just genuinely appreciated how playing a Rogue forced me to get creative about how to deal with obstacles in my way – especially in battle.

They’re not built to land heavy hits so it’s not like I could just take a massive sledgehammer to a bad guy’s face to take them out. They also can’t really rely on magic to do damage from a distance or to do anything that would help enhance anything happening.

They just kind of exist to sabotage and kill. That’s about it. And when you’re up against a massive fire breathing dragon, it really forces you to stretch how you think.

ANYWAY, this is when I started thinking a bit about Magdiana. I remember having a fuck load of fun playing as her and we did decide that she’s definitely in Ash and Flowers but as a sort of background member to the Pirate Crew that you have to help so they can take part in the final mission to bring down The King and Thirteen.

In fact, she plays a pretty pivotal role since a good chunk of what the Pirates actually have to do is very much in alignment with what she used to do when she lived a life as a rogue (Dungeon crawling and uh… Killing). We joked a lot about what that must be like since for the most part, her time as a Pirate is very much her living happily as a Pirate until they run into a Problem and I mentioned how she’d likely have to bring out her “Uniform” to deal with that problem.

And then there was a lot of pausing because honestly what the fuck does that mean?

Anyway, this is a pretty long way of saying that I realized that Magdiana really does exist with two sides. There’s the part of her that the Pirates see … and then there’s who she is in reality which is just someone – something – that’s always lurking in the shadows waiting for what she should be killing.

Designing her now was an interesting experiment because I really hadn’t worked with her in almost a decade and a half. I was even struggling to figure out what weapons she’d use now since I couldn’t see her using daggers and after some time Pinterest-ing, E. was the one who helped figure out that she’d be using something akin to a Roman Nail and a mining pick and honestly? Yeah. She would. Why? Because if she’s been at this for long enough then her mentality would be to find the most effective way to immobilize her target (read as literally paralyze) and take them down (read as blow to the head).

The Romain Nail also works perfectly since part of what she does for the pirates is using The Faithful Four (a fortune telling card game that we came developed for Ash and Flowers) to help them figure out what they’ll be doing next while they’re sailing around Pirating.

Designing her was also an obstacle in and of itself because I swear the only way I could describe her in her Rogue “uniform” is that she’s just a literal shadow. Just… Black. Her skin was always intended to be a dark onyx like tone and her hair/hones/hooves only matched it, so if her goal was to make sure she could just stay waiting until the right moment, then it’d only make sense that she’d just be in all Black.

The only other details I could see were red glowing eyes (different than her original Orange ones since Savari already has Orange eyes), and uh… just small shimmers of metal on her outfit that would lightly reflect from what little light was likely available around her.

As trippy as all of this may be, she definitely helped me remember the parts of what made playing a Rogue interesting in literally every single game that I was playing for a while at that time and is definitely a bit of the inspiration for how we’ll be designing the Rogue pursuit.

And that’s it for now! We also just realized that we literally have the Fateful Four sitting and waiting to share to some degree which we’ve already tested and it’s yielded pretty freakishly accurate results so we’ll probably be sharing that eventually.

Until next time.

~ Dre