Exchange of Realities

This week was one of those times when the subject material fit thematically with the session. Hoorah!

I do a lot with the thematics of the mentor-student relationship in my game, mostly through the NPCs. And one, in particular, is a walking excuse to explore it. You may remember Kiara, from a few weeks ago.

A lot of her relationships work around the student-mentor thing. She serves as mentor to Luath, one of the PCs—granted, now that everybody’s getting into power levels that can be defined as “ridiculous” it’s harder to find things to teach him, but it’s not impossible. And I managed to get a decent level of respect going pretty much from the beginning. She was his mentor by choice, with a shared backstory both of us worked on drawing up, and it helped—during the first session, there was a bit where I demonstrated one of her talents, and Luath’s reaction was essentially to bathe in the reflected glory. Score. Even now that he’s mostly beyond the need for her teaching, he still listens to her—we learned during one session that she’s quite possibly the only person in the world who can get him to shut up in one sentence. (It’s often referred to as one of the game’s biggest unstatted powers.)

Meanwhile, there’s her own old mentor, Amaya. There’s a lot of respect there; the two of them may be in separate worlds at this point, but it doesn’t keep them from working together at times. (Amaya, amusingly enough, has served as teacher or teacher-of-teacher for most of the party. Remember that reflected glory thing I mentioned a while ago? She gets a lot of it.)

Kiara’s practically a living example of “Why can’t Teach save the world?” She’s not much of a fighter—she can hold her own against standard opponents, but against what it takes to challenge most of the group she’s clearly outmatched and knows it. (Except once when her particular brand of fighting was more suited than I thought for a situation; that was nice.) And after her (non-plot-expected) abduction early in the game, her luck’s gone from bad to worse; the group practically expects her to get in trouble on a regular basis. And she’s got her own responsibilities elsewhere.

When last the group had seen her, everyone around her was dealing with major, world-altering crises, and she was dealing with something smaller: the disappearance of another fellow slated to be her student, a guy named Devin. Loyalty to one’s students is a strong part of her moral code—partly because she was raised in a duty-bound society in the first place, and partly because it came along with the rest of her teachings. Find the kid? Definitely. Stumble into a trap meant for someone else? Figures. Talk her way out of it using obscure knowledge of the local traditions, even managing to bring her student with her? Sounds about in character. Gain the respect of her student, maybe get the group to quit assuming that any time she goes off on her own they’re going to have to go in after her? Check, and…. we’ll see.

Fun?  Definitely.