Kenku

            After staying up too late playing a D&D game my wife is running, I’m quite tired and having trouble coming up with something to blog about, so I’m gonna tell you a bit about the character I’m playing in this game. I apparently have a knack for making fairly unique characters, so you may hear about some others in the future.

            I try to build characters suited to the game I’m playing, and the unique situation surrounding this game forced me to be more creative than usual. You see, I originally wasn’t going to be playing in this game due to a scheduling conflict, and so I started off helping Colleen brainstorm and flesh out her ideas for the story. That meant that when the situation changed and I was invited to be a player, I already knew far too much.

            Now, this in and of itself isn’t too much of a problem. I could simply pretend that I had no idea what was going on – but that makes it complicated when it comes to having my character help figure out mysteries and such. If a situation arrived where I knew what was happening, I’d have to carefully navigate around the treacherous waters of guessing what I would figure out without my prior knowledge. It would be better, I thought, to have a character that was generally unable to help with such matter. And so I set to work.

            At first, I considered simply having a stupid character, but instead I landed upon the idea of playing a kenku. A kenku is a race of humanoid crows that were cursed long ago, having their wings removed, the “spark of creativity torn from their souls”, and, most importantly, their ability to speak removed – they can mimic sounds they hear, like a bird, but they have no ability to actually speak. For someone who knew too much about the plot of the game, it was perfect.

            And so I put together my kenku rogue whose name was the sound of a bird’s wings fluttering. He was a strange creature raised in a life of crime, situated perfectly for being dragged into any adventurous situation. And then the fun began.

            Because of the kenku’s ability to mimic sounds he heard, I began listening to the other players very carefully. Any time they said a sentence I felt might be useful in the future, I wrote it down in a way that would indicate the inflection – with a note of who said it. With these carefully selected phrases, I began my rudimentary form of communication.

            At first the other characters were somewhat confused at hearing their own words mimicked back to them, and a little annoyed, but the strange bird-man proved useful in battle (even if he did have a tendency to steal eyeballs) and he kept following them around. Eventually they were able to figure out that he could actually understand them and think for himself, and even that the strange fluttering-wings sound was the name he was calling himself.

            However, lacking the ability to mimic the sound, the more “normal” characters decided to give him a name they could pronounce. Thus he was fully accepted into the group with his new name: Rustle Crow.

Check out my YouTube channel where I tell the stories of my D&D campaigns.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.