goldfishontherocks | OOC: Infopost (The D&D 5e Character Sheet Edition)

Because Keyleth here needs one, and my original infopost for Beauregard was tragically short on gifs, plus I've gotten a little more lore drop for her since; also because I felt like giving a quick overview of their canon.

. . . or, you know, just posting a bunch of gifs. A bunch. No seriously, there's a lot of gifs here.

Critical Role
Where a bunch of nerdy-ass voice actors sit around and play Dungeons and Dragons.

That's the show's tag line. It's pretty self-explanatory, right?
Matthew Mercer runs the game as Dungeon Master, and the cast consists of Laura Bailey, Travis Willingham, Ashley Johnson, Marisha Ray, Liam O'Brien, Taliesin Jaffe, and Sam Riegel. You've most likely watched at least one animated show or played at least one video game that has one or more of them in it.
Since they first started playing the game in each other's living rooms several years ago, they've become a bunch of best friends, and it shows — and that’s one of my favorite aspects of the show.
Literally the entire series consists of watching a group of professional voice actors and theatre nerds who are also gigantic geeks sit around a table, roll dice, and play pretend for 3-4 hours every Thursday night on Twitch. ~~It has eaten my life please help.~~
Which is far more compelling than it sounds like on paper; anything can turn on a dime depending on how the dice roll, and when a clutch roll comes in at just the right time — or an unfortunately terrible one, for that matter — it can make for some amazingly dramatic moments. Or make the story go in a completely different direction, like “hey, we were just trying to meet up with this guy but we crit-failed a stealth roll and WHOOPS SOMEHOW WE’RE PIRATES NOW IDK?” (That actually happened.)
There are two campaigns, and two casts of characters, so far: Vox Machina and the Mighty Nein, whose respective opening credits sequences are linked there for a quick overview of both sets of characters.
Vox Machina’s story focused largely on their quest to collect enough powerful magical artifacts to help them defeat an alliance of ancient dragons and later a would-be evil god, but with personal character story arcs woven into the narrative as they went along; so far, it looks like the Mighty Nein, in addition to semi-accidentally wreaking havoc across the land, may be a bunch of misfit fuckups who were just trying to get a new start and have unwittingly gotten caught up in a power struggle between the gods that’s been a long time coming (like you do), and we’re in the process of exploring their personal stories along the way.
. . . and now I have a character from each campaign. On to them!

Keyleth of the Air Ashari
Not the Voice of the Tempest yet.

Comes from the first campaign of Critical Role, where she's played by the lovely Marisha Ray ~~of actual goddamn sunshine~~.
She's a gawky six foot tall half-elf with red hair and green eyes, and a distinctive circlet with antlers that she's almost always wearing. It’s a druid thing.

She hails from Zephrah on the continent of Tal'Dorei, on the world known as Exandria.
As a member of the Air Ashari tribe, she shares in their responsibility for guarding the gateway between the Prime Material Plane and the Elemental Plane of Air. The Earth, Fire, and Water Ashari tribes are scattered across the continent, and do the same with the gateways to their respective elemental planes. (Guess who's a huge Avatar: The Last Airbender fan?)
Her father, Korrin, is the Headmaster of the Air Ashari and has designated Keyleth as his successor; her mother Vilya was supposed to have taken on that role, but while Keyleth was still very young Vilya died on her Aramenté: a sort of rite of passage involving visiting each of the other Ashari tribes and learning from them, and one that all prospective Headmasters are required to undertake.
. . . yeah, Keyleth does not at all handle the pressure of those expectations well. As a matter of fact, while she’s largely quiet about it, she resents the pressure and the position she’s been saddled with, and really wishes she hadn’t turned out to be so magically gifted so she could have just had a normal life.
As part of her training, her father is sending her to Fandom in the hopes that interacting with new and different people will help give her the confidence to be comfortable with her future leadership role.

So she's kind of a princess, in a way. Her friend Vex'ahlia likes to call her one, anyway.
She has a tendency to blame herself a lot, and too harshly, for things.
She isn't really aware of the harsh treatment and prejudice that half-elves are subjected to in the larger world, as that's not really a thing among her people; both her parents are also half-elven, and the Ashari in general are a quite diverse society.
She can also, thanks to the druidic Wild Shape ability, transform into an animal a couple of times a day.
- All druids have Wild Shape, and can generally turn themselves into small and fairly harmless creatures. Keyleth’s particular druidic tradition, though, lets her turn into larger and combat-capable animals; her favorite is a white saber-tooth tiger that Vox Machina will dub Minxie.
She is not yet the element-controlling badass she will be someday, but does have a decent command of nature-based magic already.

She's highly skeptical about religion and the gods, who in Exandria are barred from the Material Plane; she's seen enough of the bad side of religion to trust that it's entirely benevolent, and thinks that the gods have a tendency to manipulate their followers.
She's still several years away from starting on her own Aramenté — and meeting the rest of the dignity-deficient dysfunctional dumbasses who will become Vox Machina, who might be the saviors of Emon and all of Tal'Dorei but are still a bunch of dorks who use the indoor hot springs in a magical mansion to have cannonball contests.

She's painfully aware that if she becomes a powerful enough druid, she has the potential to live for a thousand years; understandably enough, she has a complex about watching everyone she cares about die and is afraid to get too emotionally attached.
This means that she tends to think a little too long-term and big-picture, so she's cautious in a lot of her approach to things, but sometimes she can get too eager to help and gets herself in trouble that way.
She doesn't get angry often, but when she does? Yikes.
She's a sweetheart who's shy and awkward and flaily and a total dork, and also quite possibly bisexual.

Why this username? Because Keyleth holds the distinction of being the last member of Vox Machina to have died (temporarily, because D&D).

As a goldfish, at the bottom of a 1000-foot cliff off which she took a highly ill-advised dive. As you do.

And because I'm terrible. (No seriously please watch the clip, it may be one of my favorite things ever.)

Beauregard (

notallbluemonks )
Fledgling Monk and Disaster Lesbian Extraordinaire

Comes from the second and currently ongoing campaign of Critical Role, which takes place 20 years after Vox Machina's adventures, and is also played by Marisha Ray.
She's around 5'4" or so with dark brown skin, brown hair shaved into an undercut and tied up into a topknot, piercingly bright blue eyes, and features that in real-world terms would be indicative of some Asian heritage; she's basically all lean muscle. She also has multiple piercings, including several in each ear, and left eyebrow and left nostril piercings as well. Realistically this would be impractical for a martial artist, but you can't tell her what to do.
She's about 21 or 22 years old and a human monk in training, although she doesn't really act like it: she likes to drink, occasionally take drugs, and get into brawls. She also swears a lot, and is in general really super not ascetic at all.
She hails from the town of Kamordah in the Dwendalian Empire on the continent of Wildemount, across the Lucidian Ocean to the east of Tal'Dorei. Wildemount is fairly insular and difficult to access, so the people there don't really know much about the goings-on in the wider world (as for example, Vox Machina’s history).
She's never really had friends, and just sort of assumes that people she gets along with will inevitably eventually leave again, if she doesn't do something to drive them away first.

Her monastic tradition, the Cobalt Soul, is aligned with Ioun, the goddess of knowledge, but seems to be more focused on knowledge than spirituality. Beau certainly hasn't shown any signs of having religious inclinations yet.
She grew up with affluent parents who ran a wine-making business and paid for her to get a good education, but seemed to be less than happy that she wasn't the kind of child they wanted her to be. Which is to say that she was expected to be refined and ladylike and hated every second of it.
CW for brief abuse mention: She's alluded to her father being an asshole who may have hit her sometimes; it's very, very unlikely that this is going to come up but in the unexpected event that it does you will absolutely get an OOC heads up.
As we found out in the most recent episode (that TORE MY FUCKING HEART OUT, THANKS MARISHA, LAURA, AND ASHLEY), her father was also extremely overprotective “because of things he believed,” so Beau was really sheltered and grew up lonely and angry because of it.
She hates tarot cards and fortune telling for some unspecified, family-related reason that probably has something to do with the above, but we don’t know for sure yet. Ah, the joys of live canon.
In an act of teenage rebellion, she started hanging out with unsavory people and getting deeper and deeper into some shady criminal shit, which included stealing some of her family's wine to run a little racket of her own.
When her father found out about it, he actually paid the Cobalt Soul monks to kick her ass, drag her off to the monastery, and try to make her into the kind of person he wanted. This did not work, because once Beau got past her initial resentment and realized she actually liked it there, the monks taught her how to fight, which she'd always wanted to learn but had never been allowed. (Who cried when that bit of backstory dropped? Was it me? Yes.)

Is literally a disaster lesbian, as confirmed by Marisha. She's quick to flirt with women she finds attractive, although nobody ever said she was good at it.

”Hit it and quit it” is kind of her thing, though. It’s too complicated otherwise.
She has serious issues with authority, and in fact ran away from the Cobalt Soul because she seems to have kept butting heads with teachers there, which is how she ended up in Fandom. (Although there's some mysterious thing about how her family had wanted her to come home shortly before she ran away. We don't know any more than that yet.)
As such, while she has met built_fjord_tough courtesy of Fandom, she has yet to meet the rest of the chaotic disaster dumbasses that will decide to go and call themselves the Mighty Nein. (Yes, there are only seven of them.)
She tends to look out for herself and her own interests, and those of the people she cares about. Not to say that she won't help people or do good things, but she isn't driven by a desire to do the right thing; that's not her main motivation or her priority. She hasn't yet hit all of the canon character development that I will absolutely cry at you about for hours if you let me.

Honestly? She's kind of an asshole for complicated reasons that involve a good deal of self-loathing. There's a caring person underneath all of that, but that's something she keeps very closely guarded, so likely all you're going to see is the abrasive loudmouth. That said, if she actually likes you, she'll look out for you.

Is going to be very evasive and vague about her backstory, partly because we haven't gotten that much of it in game yet and it pains me.
Actually, what we do know about her backstory so far also pains me. And when we find out the rest of it, it will break me.
She does have a last name per Marisha, who left a character Pinterest board public just long enough for people to find out what it is, but until it gets officially established on the show in gameplay I'm not using it.
In conclusion, please have clips of two of my favorite scenes in the campaign so far, which give a pretty good sense of her personality.

Why this username? Because it's fairly well known among the fandom that Keyleth was inspired by Marisha's fondness for Avatar: The Last Airbender, and when Beau was introduced everyone started drawing parallels to Korra. According to Marisha the resemblance wasn't intentional the same way Keyleth's was to AtLA: “Not all blue monks, you guys.”

Besides, Beau is so far from being a typical Cobalt Soul monk, it works.

As for Peebee (onefootoutthedoor), Éponine (filleauloup), and the rest of my alumni, well, nothing's really changed there, and as for me, I still apologize for my slowness during weekdays, when I'm limited to sneaking pings from my phone, or at nights and on weekends when I got distracted by a video game or am off playing D&D or something.

OOC: Infopost (The D&D 5e Character Sheet Edition)

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