Vivaneau: Post-mortem

I've had some free time recently, so two days ago, I  thought... hey, isn't there an OC pageant going on? After finding their group page, I realized that yep, the due date for auditions was in two days! i.e. Today. So I gave it some thought whipped up an entry in the form of the picture you see above, and still hesitated, cause I didn't know if I wanted to give myself all that extra work. Then I had a look at the last few times this pageant was run, and realized the round prompts as they were presented didn't do much to inspire me personally, and so I decided not to enter.

That left me with a picture of Vivaneau! So I thought I would post it anyway.

Vivaneau Sanslendemain was a Half-Elf Paladin I played in my D&D group for a long stretch of time (though by now I've probably played Rubelle longer). You may have seen her in this gallery before. But that's not... The Whole Story.

As I believe I've mentioned before, the campaign in which I played her was only the latest in a long series of campaigns taking place in the same world. I think this was the third or fourth installment. I had only played near the end the very previous one, where the world already had a ton of history I knew nothing about, and my character was Marlin Sanslendemain, who would become Vivaneau's father.

From the start, while I loved the character I had created, playing Vivaneau was a challenge, for a few reasons. One, I am not a leader of anything in real life, nor do I aspire to be, and turns out I can't roleplay one either. Second, and most importantly, the composition of the party... My two most constant allies were a scheming necromancer, usually acting proper, but always surrounding himself with zombies and aiming for greater power... and a dangerously unstable rogue, who made a habit of stabbing almost every NPC we encountered. Not the best company to keep for a Paladin.

I had to keep wracking my brain for reasons and justifications and rationalizations to not turn on them. It went from changing my alignment from Lawful Good to Chaotic Good to inventing an elaborate secret backstory... she had a boyfriend in her teenage years, and being innocent lovebirds they went to a seer to see what their future together would be like. Except the vision they received showed them as bitter enemies, locked in deathly battle. The important part of that vision, though, was that her future allies, the necromancer and the rogue, were there in the vision fighting at her side. Clever, right? But that was never enough. Incidentally, the ex-boyfriend never showed up in-game. The DM knew of the secret backstory (he asked for us to come up with secrets), but never got around to using it before the campaign died out.

Momentous story things happened to her, of course. You may recall the time she was beheaded (almost)... that's when her long hair got cut short. She had been born with a dragonmark which are important things in her world. And after trying to rescue the necromancer at one point, they both acquired the mark of Death, which is a symbol of royalty and required to ascend to the throne. That's when her golden hair turned black, except for one remaining lock. They spent some time rescuing the Princess who is the actual heir to that throne and left her in the care of an undead former Queen for tutelage, and to pass Trials/Rituals that would evolve her own Mark of Death into its final form... We found the first piece of the King's sword, an ancient artifact (also required to claim the throne)... though apparently that piece came from the future and the Causality Police vowed to hunt me down someday? We also had some more future visions, where Vivaneau became Queen, and the party's rogue, secretly her half brother, killed her? or killed for her? It wasn't clear.

In the end, as our travels took us to the Feywilde, I took the opportunity to switch her out, and start playing the Monk/Rogue Sando instead. Sando was a lot of fun to play, he was everything Vivaneau wasn't... sneaky, not at all reliant on equipment, and most of all he didn't care about anything. His quirk of having stupid "rules" (the first of which was "There are no rules") was funny, and his extreme Dexterity and Acrobatics lent itself to epic stunts. I wish I'd gotten to play him longer! My idea for Vivaneau leaving was that she would embrace the Feywilde as her new home, with all its fey magic and nature that she loves... but our DM came up with another explanation that I like: the undead Queen from earlier showed up, announcing that the Princess had failed in her Trials... and that she was going to train Vivaneau instead as a backup Princess. My idea for Vivaneau joing the pageant was that it was part of her training assigned by the Queen.

Then the campaign ended without any resolution... we tried and gave up on the Tomb of Horrors, and a new campaign started. The one with Rubelle! Rubelle, much like Sando, is a lot more free-spirited, and she doesn't even care that her party includes a cannibal. To Rubelle, you're either friend or flammable... which category you belong to is up for you to decide. Wanna be friends?


I still love Vivaneau, but she was too pure for this world. May she rest in peace.
Not as in dying, but as in resting. in Peace.
Gods know you didn't have any of either of those while I was playing you.