so come out of your cave walking on your hands

SO. ive been playing d&d since 2017. i really got into it in april 2020. one of the reasons for this is me and my mom unearthed her OLD d&d books. i'm talking tsr basic/expert rulebooks and the ad&d 1e monster manual + dm's guide old.
we also found something that i consider to be worth its weight in gold: some of her old character sheets.
and with her permission i was able to reclaim her most used character, a human cleric named tie. i even made her a 5e sheet and did some art of her based on my mom's description of what she imagined her to look like.

and then my brain decided to give me an idea for her in a campaign.

tie was a wandering cleric of sorts, joining whatever adventuring party she could, helping out and then moving along her way (whenever my mom died in a campaign she would just take her sheet and move onto the next one).
this was a work-based world that primarily consisted of dungeon crawlers trying to make a quick coin and monsters to fight. you were as useful as your weaponry, and there were very strict rules and stereotypes as to what role you should play in an adventuring party based on who you were, down to your race.

one day, though, something really bad happened in the world, something no adventuring party could stop. thor, tie's god, made the decision to seal her away in one of his temples, putting her in a sort of magical cryosleep until, one day, hopefully in a better world, she could be awoken and go back to adventuring.
so she was sealed away, and many years passed, anywhere from 400 to 4,000 years.

a ragtag team of adventurers--anywhere from level 3 to 7, i imagine; enough time to bond and find a macguffin but not super strong--had located a seal belonging to an old, old god, and rumor had it that it could open up a sealed temple if you knew where to find it.
so they eventually find the temple, open it up with the seal and bit of magical prowess, and out walks tie, to find a party that is a far, far cry from what she's used to.
a person that appears to be part demon, an elven fighter, a halfling cleric, and a couple of others... these kinds of things were either unheard of or outright shunned in her world.
and then she realizes, upon trying to communicate with her god, thor, that he's no longer there. he no longer exists in her world. he's been dead for centuries.
and that's another thing: how the world has changed. there's not just dungeon crawlers and monsters; there are people adventuring for any number of reasons, and there's such a level of diversity that it overwhelms her at first. tie, as good of an adventurer she is, is a bit closed-minded at first, and admittedly a little stubborn about it.
but upon also realizing that her magic has been completely reset due to how long it's been (she starts back at level 1), and that she really has nowhere to go, she's forced to stick with this adventuring party until she can get her bearings again.
and during that time, as she adapts to this new world, as this adventuring party tries to help train her and get her used to her new magic, and how this world works, she starts to call into question some of her own ways of thinking... and starts to realize that this new world may not be that bad after all.

- - - -

tie's story (or the concept i have for it, anyway) is interesting to me for a large number of reasons.

for one, it's a commentary on the absolutely astronomical night-and-day difference between first edition d&d and fifth edition d&d. to put it simply for those unaware, the early editions of d&d were a bit more... restrictive compared to what we have now on a mechanical level (compare first edition to literally anything from tasha's cauldron, honestly), and because i'm an absolute clown i like to imagine how mechanical rules in worlds would work from an in-universe standpoint, and how those rules would change the world with new editions (monster hunter is another fun example of this that i want to try at some point).
and to make another point in this regard... the 80s were like That and the 2000s are like This acceptance-wise. yeah.

for another, on a less broad scale, it's an allegory for changing your ways of thinking. i imagine tie's somewhere in her 20s--the same age my mom was when she was playing d&d back then. a person growing up in the 80s tends to carry certain beliefs with them that are, to put it simply, radically different from ours. considering the world we live in now, it might take someone a bit of time to unlearn any potential harmful thinking that they've carried with them since their youth and try to open their mind to something that's a bit more accepting.
that second point is a bit personal to me. me and my mom agree on a lot of things, but disagree on others. we both know it's a generational thing, but it still hurts to see my mom hold some of those beliefs. it's a point that i think would be very interesting to explore in a character like tie with this kind of story, especially given the important tie holds to my mom and both hold to me, and also as i watch my mother slowly make potential steps on her own path to acceptance.

and let's be real, i'm also just a huge sucker for found family dynamics, wacky shenanigans and the power of friendship, and this story has the potential for all of those things.