From 4456b0c4da7d03e5273c14286a21b94fa4721983 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Andrew Cohn Date: Sat, 6 Dec 2025 11:09:54 -0800 Subject: [PATCH] vault backup: 2025-12-06 11:09:54 --- .obsidian/workspace.json | 12 +- Avalon/04_NPCs_Faculty/Kalen D'Serris.md | 259 +++++++++++++++++++++++ 2 files changed, 266 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-) create mode 100644 Avalon/04_NPCs_Faculty/Kalen D'Serris.md diff --git a/.obsidian/workspace.json b/.obsidian/workspace.json index 535718d..95526fb 100644 --- a/.obsidian/workspace.json +++ b/.obsidian/workspace.json @@ -13,12 +13,12 @@ "state": { "type": "markdown", "state": { - "file": "Avalon/02_Sessions/session_5.md", + "file": "Avalon/04_NPCs_Faculty/Kalen D'Serris.md", "mode": "preview", "source": true }, "icon": "lucide-file", - "title": "session_5" + "title": "Kalen D'Serris" } } ] @@ -155,13 +155,13 @@ "state": { "type": "outline", "state": { - "file": "Avalon/02_Sessions/session_5.md", + "file": "Avalon/04_NPCs_Faculty/Kalen D'Serris.md", "followCursor": false, "showSearch": false, "searchQuery": "" }, "icon": "lucide-list", - "title": "Outline of session_5" + "title": "Outline of Kalen D'Serris" } }, { @@ -196,8 +196,10 @@ }, "active": "a00a1de0a2e471f0", "lastOpenFiles": [ - "Avalon/02_Sessions/session 4.md", "Avalon/02_Sessions/session_5.md", + "Avalon/04_NPCs_Faculty/Kalen D'Serris.md", + "Avalon/09_Student_Handouts", + "Avalon/02_Sessions/session 4.md", "Strahd/Sessions/Session 3.md", "Strahd/Locations/Barovia.md", "Avalon/02_Sessions/session 6.md", diff --git a/Avalon/04_NPCs_Faculty/Kalen D'Serris.md b/Avalon/04_NPCs_Faculty/Kalen D'Serris.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..51cc1bf --- /dev/null +++ b/Avalon/04_NPCs_Faculty/Kalen D'Serris.md @@ -0,0 +1,259 @@ +# Kalen D'Serris + +## Overview + +- Former leyline field engineer / battle-mage who watched a city almost die in a node collapse. +- Co-designed the Root Oversight Array – remote monitoring + partial control of the leyline “grid.” +- Genuine believer that surveillance + control are the only things keeping the world from burning again. +- Treats Avalon Academy as a **critical but expendable** node: a testbed and early-warning system. +- PCs are “anomalous survivors” of the B2 event. He uses them as on-site sensors and guinea pigs. +- He becomes fixated on one student, **Fouadriel** (“Fouad”), as a statistical outlier and potential Harbinger. +- Everyone assumes D'Serris is a paranoid weirdo scapegoating a harmless idiot. + He is, unfortunately, correct. +- Final arc: party has to decide whether to side with D’Serris (ends-justify-means antihero) against Fouadriel/Root, or reject both. + +--- + +## Early Life + +- Born in a low-magic industrial city built over a thick leyline junction. +- Family background: line of minor maintenance mages, ward technicians, and municipal workers. +- Grew up seeing leylines as **infrastructure**, not mysticism: + - The thing that keeps lights on, water clean, wards stable. + - The thing that, if mishandled, blows buildings apart. + +- As a kid, obsessed with **patterns**: + - Streetlight failures, power brownouts, small anomalies in ritual times. + - Skipped normal wizard school track to apprentice under grid-engineers. + +**Personality seed:** pragmatic, dry, not impressed by heroics – impressed by systems that don’t fail. + +--- + +## The Leyline Crisis (The Thing That Broke Him) + +Set ~10–15 years before the campaign. + +- Serving as a junior field engineer / battle-mage in the **Leyline Stabilization Corps** during a regional crisis: + - A cluster of nodes was over-tapped by warring factions. + - One city’s main trunk started to **awaken** – Root consciousness bleeding through. + +- D’serris was part of the team sent in to: + - Reinforce containment sigils. + - Shunt excess power to sacrificial subnodes (smaller communities, outlying infrastructure). + +- He witnessed: + - Melted streets, people cooked by backlash, protective wards failing in slow motion. + - High-minded mages arguing theory while people burned. + +- The critical decision: + - A classified ritual was proposed: **shunt a hostile emergent consciousness** deeper into the Root network instead of letting it detonate locally. + - D’serris signed off on the calculations and helped implement it. + - It “worked”: city survived, but something ugly was effectively **caged inside the world-tree**, its influence diffused along the grid. + +- Official reports: “Anomaly neutralized. Network stabilized.” + Unofficial reality: they shoved a monster into the walls and hoped it would never rattle them again. + +**Guilt:** he believes that if Oversight had existed earlier, the crisis could have been controlled before it got that far. Everything he does afterward is about never letting that happen again. + +--- + +## Birth of the Root Oversight Array + +- Post-crisis, a coalition of governments/magocracies pushed for: + - Standardized monitoring of major leyline trunks. + - Centralized anomaly logging. + - “Command nodes” that could throttle or shut down taps remotely. + +- D’serris ended up on the design team: + - Turned his crisis experience into protocols: + - Automated alert thresholds. + - “Red branch” shutdown logic (like B2). + - Deep logging of spell traffic (“telemetry,” but also surveillance). + +- Philosophically: + - Sees the Array as **necessary authoritarianism**: + - “Freedom to do anything with the grid” nearly killed a city. + - He’s willing to spy, lie, and shut down communities to prevent another awakening. + +- Politically: + - Not high-ranking nobility; more like a senior sysadmin with far too much access. + - Disliked by idealistic mages; quietly backed by hardline security types. + +--- + +## The Avalon Node + +- When the Avalon Adventuring Academy was proposed as a regional anchor node, D’serris: + - Advocated to plug it into the Array. + - Argued that a school full of young casters is **high-risk** but strategically useful: + - Lots of ritual traffic → good early-warning “noise.” + - A controlled environment to test new containment protocols. + +- Design decisions he pushed through: + - Subnodes (A1–A3, B1–B3, etc.) arranged like a **labyrinth of fuses**. + - Custodial / maintenance staff wired into a separate “eyes and ears” channel. + - Low-visibility presence: students aren’t told his name initially; he is “Root Oversight.” + +- When B2 blew: + - From his POV, this was a partial rerun of the old crisis: + - Sudden destabilization in a branch. + - **Student biometrics** logged in the tap cell at the exact moment. + - Root behavior around Avalon shifted – a small echo of the thing he shoved into it years ago. + +- His immediate move: + - Kill remote control to that branch (“oversight offline”) and treat it as a quarantined wound. + - Tag the involved students (party) as **anomalous nodes**: + - “Subjects A3-01, -02, -03, etc. survived direct exposure with minimal corruption.” + - That’s not normal; that’s *useful*. + +--- + +## Kalen D’serris, Right Now + +**What he wants:** + +- Stop whatever is echoing the old crisis from manifesting at Avalon. +- Maintain the illusion of control to his superiors – if they think he’s lost the grid, he gets replaced by someone worse. +- Use the party as instruments: + - They can go places and interact in ways automated tools can’t. + - They are already “dirty”; he sees further exposure as an acceptable risk. + +**What he’s willing to do:** + +- Lie to them about the true level of danger. +- Withhold information that might make them refuse to help. +- Threaten to cut power, locks, or protections to force their hand if necessary. +- In an absolute pinch: advocate **killing a student** (Fouad) to protect the Root, if no other solution appears. + +**What he won’t do:** + +- He won’t casually sacrifice entire towns / cities again if there’s any alternative. +- He does not enjoy hurting kids; he just thinks the options are “hurt a few now” vs “watch many die later.” + +--- + +## The Fouadriel Obsession + +Fouadriel (“Fouad”) = idiot harbinger. + +From D’serris’s POV: + +- As soon as Fouad enrolls and is granted a student access token, the Array starts logging anomalies: + - Background noise spikes whenever he’s on campus. + - Minor desyncs in root heartbeat when he passes certain wards. + - Statistical correlation between “Fouad present” and “micro-glitches” in the node. + +- The pattern is subtle but unmistakable to D’serris: + - It matches **low-level signatures** from the old crisis. + - Not enough to make a public case, but enough to set off his trauma radar. + +- He flags Fouad as: + - “Subject FH-01 – Potential Harbinger / carrier.” + - Pushes for extra passive monitoring: dorm ward pings, attendance logs, spellcasting records. + +No one else buys it: + +- Larkvale thinks he’s scapegoating a harmless, dumb kid to justify more authority. +- Elias thinks he’s reading patterns into noise. +- Students, once they hear “D’serris thinks *Fouad* is the big threat,” assume D’serris is completely out of touch. + +From a campaign standpoint: + +- Freshman–Junior years: + - Every time D’serris can, he tries to insert **“and keep an eye on Fouadriel”** into orders. + - The party reads this as bigoted / paranoid / laughable. +- Senior year: + - Evidence piles up that Fouad is, in fact, where the Root’s caged consciousness is trying to manifest. + - The line “I told you from the first anomaly” hits hard. + +--- + +## Relationship to the PCs (over four years) + +**Initial impression (Freshman):** + +- He sees them as: + - “Subjects who survived contact with a destabilized node.” + - Both a risk and a resource. +- Tone toward them: + - Clinical, cold, impatient with teenage bullshit. + - Low-key impressed they didn’t die or crack. + +**As they investigate / help:** + +- If they’re competent: + - He develops grudging respect. + - Starts sharing more technical detail, still holding back core secrets. +- If they constantly blow things up: + - His reports become harsher. + - He starts planning contingencies *around* their chaos. + +**Potential turning points:** + +- If they hand him a big win (prevent a major cascade, identify a saboteur): + - “You are idiots, but you’re my idiots now.” +- If they defy him over something moral (e.g., refusing to accept “kill Fouad” as the only option): + - He is furious but also secretly relieved if their plan works. + - If it fails, he feels justified and becomes much harder. + +--- + +## 4-Year Arc (High Level) + +**Freshman Year:** +- Focus: B2 destruction, figuring out what’s wrong with the Avalon node. +- D’serris role: + - Remote presence, creepy hologram, “Root Oversight Voice.” + - Treats PCs as instruments; doesn’t fully grasp their emotional reality. + - Starts dropping “monitor Subject FH-01” into directives. + +**Sophomore Year:** +- Focus: attempts to **reinforce / upgrade** the node; experiments in routing more power for academy projects. +- D’serris: + - Shows up more often via projection. + - Tests the PCs: small missions that look like maintenance but are actually stress tests on the Root. + - First hints he was involved in an old cover-up. + +**Junior Year:** +- Focus: the “villain who’s actually trying to stop the real villain.” + - Some mid-boss type is sabotaging the grid to prevent the Root consciousness from consolidating. +- D’serris: + - Frames saboteur as terrorist, pushes hard to neutralize them. + - PCs discover the saboteur has a point. + - Revealed: D’serris helped shove the monster into the Root in the first place. + +**Senior Year:** +- Focus: Fouadriel / Harbinger arc. + - Root consciousness begins to seriously push through academy node. + - Fouad becomes locus / vessel / pivot. +- D’serris: + - Goes full “necessary monster.” + - His plan may involve sacrificing Fouad and/or segments of the node to starve the Root. + - PCs must choose between: + - His brutal but effective plan. + - Their own third-way solution (redeem Fouad, re-route the Root, etc.). + +--- + +## How to Play D’serris at the Table + +**Voice & vibe:** + +- Sounds tired more than angry. +- Speaks in technical metaphors (“You are trying to hot-patch a live trunk, child.”). +- Doesn’t raise his voice unless truly cornered. +- Treats teenagers like junior technicians, not “chosen ones.” + +**Quirks:** + +- Uses **student ID numbers** / subject codes casually, then corrects to names only if someone calls him on it. +- References past crises without giving full context (“I’ve seen this pattern before; last time we lost a district.”). +- Has a dry, unintentional sense of humor when describing horrific shit. + +**Key lines to remember:** + +- “You think I enjoy watching you? I barely enjoy watching the grid, and it’s smarter than you.” +- “Yes, I am ‘surveilling teenagers’. The last time I assumed adolescents wouldn’t break the Root, I had to sign off on a mass burial.” +- “Fouadriel is not harmless. He is a *pattern*. Patterns kill cities.” +