ok so yesterday i was playing with my 13th age group (like dnd but a little different) and there was this HUGE development for my character and I’m shook

(this is what they look like btw, thank you @rewhined for doing this commission!)

so like. we’ve been playing for nearly 2 yrs. my character is a forgeborn – dwarf made robot. and their whole arc is that, the forgeborn are basically perpetual motion machines, not sentient. the dwarves set them digging in the mines and leave them there. the forgeborn are equipped with enough data/sensors to send back anything interesting.

one day my character, Clepsydra/Cleps, comes across this glowy crystal (basically the arkenstone)  that causes a tear in reality. The eldritch magic this thing radiates wakes Cleps up – Cleps can remember the centuries they spent digging, but it’s like a dream. They think that they can wake up the other forgeborn, so they try, but they fail: again and again for decades.

Eventually they give up and leave. Fast forward to our campaign – Cleps is with a motley crew and they come across this half elf. This half elf has essentially the dwarven equivalent of the Victoria Cross for bravery, the Igneous Star. Her name is Kendra. Back two, three hundred years ago: when Cleps was just barely awakened, Kendra helped smuggle the elderly and injured and children away from the Dwarven citadels in Vahora when a drow army invaded. The people Kendra helped were people who’d been left behind in the initial panic and evacuation.

Well, Cleps has pretty much been avoiding dwarves or anyone dwarf-adjacent because they know a dwarf won’t see them as sentient – a dwarf will see them as a washing machine with a weird glitch that needs to be studied and fixed. But then Kendra sees our party and approaches and she’s this old, grizzled adventurer and she immediately clocks Cleps.

And she says – when she was helping the children and the elderly and the injured escape the invasion, the Forgeborn suddenly stopped mining. They came out of their tunnels. They helped the dwarves escape. They used their bodies to hold up the roof of the mines before they collapsed. They gave her these magical gauntlets, something one of them had kept as a treasure.

And then she escaped with the dwarves and the Forgeborn are still trapped down there with the drow above them looting the citadels. Because the dwarves kept the Forgeborn secret, largely – they were an experiment the dwarves don’t trust to the other races. 

So like there’s me and like; Cleps’ whole thing is that they don’t know if they’re sentient. They don’t know if they’re just being possessed by this crystal or a spell, if their identity is an illusion. They’ve been totally alone for centuries trying to figure out who and what they are. And now there’s a possibility that all the Forgeborn are sentient and that they’re trapped beneath the mountains mining forever for no reason because the dwarves are gone and no one else knows that they’re there. 

Anyway I was Shook.