🦀🕯️ Brae (Dragon Age RPG)

Personality: Softspoken, Introspective, One-track-minded, Reclusive, Academic, Obsessive, Observant

Likes: History, Music (Especially Elven Music), Dalish Culture, Storytelling, The Color Green, Skirts and Dresses, Archery for Fun

Dislikes: Small Talk, Loud Crowds, “The Game” and Other Orlesian Nonsense, Hiding Their Heritage, Elf-erasure in Academia, Pants and Leggings, Archery for Violence

Design Notes

Physical Appearance:

• Human-passing with a hat on, but their long, pointy ears give away their elven heritage
• Average height for a human, tall for an elf (5'7" / 170 cm))
• Thin and lanky (~125 lbs / 57 kg)
• Flat chest
• Big hands and feet
• Straight, silky brown hair usually pulled back with a cloth headband

Clothing and Equipment:

• Traveling/casual clothes are a hodge-podge of city elf and Dalish clothes (green and brown, always with a skirt rather than pants)
• Wears a dress when performing
• Wears light leather armor in combat/risky situations
• Nigh-exclusively uses a longbow in combat

Character Notes

Backstory:

• They were born of a secret fling between a young, wealthy Orlesian woman and her city elf friend in Val Royeaux.
• Their elven heritage is the city’s worst-kept secret. Their mother and grandparents insist their pointed ears are “merely a birth defect, certainly not inherited from their human father who tragically died in battle before they were born.” (Their grandparents devised the shoddy cover-up out of embarrassment, and their mother went along with it because she wanted a good life for her child.)
• Once they were old enough to keep a secret, their mother started taking them to visit their father in the alienage so they could know both sides of their heritage.
• They excelled at school and music from a young age, so their mother and grandparents enrolled them in the University of Orlais, where they studied music history for 4 years. They enjoyed their studies there, but the anti-elf sentiments and erasure of Elven culture and music from the music history curriculum left them feeling disillusioned about the formal education system.
• Instead of pursuing graduate studies at the university, they left on a journey to do independent research on the history of Elven music. Unfortunately, their research has been quite slow thus far because the Dalish clans they’ve visited have been hesitant to share their culture with some random travelling scholar with an Orlesian accent, no matter how pointy that scholar’s ears were, and the alienages they’ve visited don’t seem to understand they even have music history.
• Their dad enthusiastically supports their research and their mom reluctantly supports it, but their grandparents have all but disowned them over it.

Other Info:

• They've been doing archery competitions for years and really enjoy archery as a sport. However, they don't know the first thing about combat archery and are rather reluctant to learn -- shooting a darkspawn that's actively trying to kill you isn't quite as satisfying as shooting a target.