Playing a Raen

The life—or unlife—of a raen isn’t an easy one, but it’s as fascinating as it is unsettling and distressing. Raen aren’t just limited to one physical experience. Whether you’re a newly-dead raen or a soul that’s inhabited many bodies, writing a raen is both a challenge and a boon.

Pros of playing a Raen

Playing a raen offers a writer the opportunity to tackle many difficult but interesting subjects. What would it be like, if you could live for more than a century—experiencing not just one life, but many? What sort of person would you become?

When it comes to character interaction, raen often have a wide reach. Your raen is a wick now, but she might’ve been a gated passive in her previous life, and a human before that. How many people might she know from those lives? What would happen if she met them again? There are a lot of opportunities for plotting.

Furthermore, the existence of raen is believed to be indicative of something terribly wrong with Vita. What could possibly be causing souls to slip out of the cycle of reincarnation? Playing a raen, you’ll have plenty of opportunity to make lore discoveries, and you’ll enjoy a distinctive — if antagonistic — relationship with the mona.

Cons of playing a Raen

Well... there are quite a few, to be honest. But adversity is what makes us stronger, right? Raen can be difficult to keep track of and to pin down.

If you play a raen, your character will be uniquely limited by each of the bodies they choose to inhabit. Bonding to a body comes with its own issues, including but not limited to:

• continued difficulties with coordination (both fine and gross motor skills), balance and movement
• continued circulatory issues that could effect day to day function, both publically and, uh, privately
• difficulties making the necessary mental connections to learn new skills, follow direction, think clearly, and remember information
• difficulties in speaking or remembering a particular language (spoken or written)
• difficulties in expressing appropriate emotions to a situation

The mona are displeased by your existence, and even if you are occupying a magical being, you will have an incredibly hard time successfully performing magic.

Almost all other civilized beings of the Six Kingdoms, with rare exceptions, know absolutely nothing of your existence, only vaguely aware of ghosts and possession and often confusing a raen’s existence with such stories. When unbonded, a raen will slowly lose their memories of their previous life, and monic objection will affect everything around them in some form or another. When bonded, a raen must often pretend to be someone they are not and will most likely never meet another of their own kind in their long lifetime.

Raen Beginning Skills

Like galdori, a raen has limitations on their Aptitude Skill choices based on their need to maintain mental focus of their incorporeal selves. Their Mental Aptitude Skill cannot be Poor and their base Physical Aptitude Skill cannot be Good, to make up for the mental effort it takes to inhabit a body and the awkwardness of controlling something that wasn't originally yours.

Aptitude Skills

Mental : Good
Physical : Poor
Social : Average

Mental : Good
Physical : Average
Social : Poor

Mental : Average
Physical : Poor
Social : Good

Focus Skills

Upon creation, a player can choose to be either a newly awakened raen fresh out of their original body or a previously-bonded raen who has been forced to find a new body for any number of reasons. This affects a player's starting package in the following ways:

• It is strongly recommended that new raen begin play with no Focus Skills at all as they have only whispers and vague ideas of their former lives, but instead they may raise any 2 Aptitude Skills one tier or 1 Aptitude Skill twice. Their Physical Aptitude cannot be raised above Average and no Aptitude can be raised to Master.
  • Note: if you have other ideas for starting Focus Skills based on your raen's memories, etc. don't hesitate to ask an Admin or Moderator for an exception or two. Just be prepared with a narrative reason that best fits your character's story. If your raen remembers more of their former life, and you have a clear vision on how to play those skills at character creation, let’s chat.
• A previously-bonded raen begins play with 5 Focus Skills at Beginner (none of which can be spent in Magic of any kind, galdori or wick) as evidence of the lives they've borrowed previously. They may trade up to 2 Focus Skills to raise any 2 Aptitude Skills or 1 Aptitude Skill twice, but their Physical cannot be raised above Average and no Aptitude can be raised to Master.

While raen can progress their Mental Aptitude Skill, for a raen inhabiting a galdor or wick body to be able to use any Magic is next to impossible because of how the mona rejects their existence. Steps must be taken to repair this monic relationship.

If the body the raen comes to inhabit is a magical race, that raen will technically have a field, but it will be weaker once the raen inhabits the body and they will lack the ability to control their field in the same disciplined manner expected of their body’s race. The field will become frayed and wild without use, fading only slightly away as the mona continues to reject the raen's existence, but may occasionally flare to life again like a miniature diablerie of a passive because the mona is attempting to reject the raen from its host body (this is the equivalent of a Beginner-level spell at random, much like a passive diablerie with an area of affect even if the spell doesn't normally have one).

Getting into Character

• How does your raen feel about being thrown out of the reincarnation cycle?
• Does your raen feel guilt for stealing the bodies of the living, or that it is their right?
• Does your raen prefer to live a nomadic life, or adopt the life of the bonded body?
• Would your raen ever tell another person their true nature, or would they be too afraid of the consequences?
• Do they long for death, or embrace this new half-life?

Raen in Combat

A raen is physically limited to the body it has bonded with, though the raen does not retain the skills of that previous body. That means that even if your raen has inhabited a champion boxer with muscle mass and calloused knuckles, that doesn’t mean that you know how to swing those fists! You must relearn how to use weapons and combat skills in your new body, and if that new body is damaged, diseased, or cast against, your bond to that body may come to an abrupt and untimely end (again).

Your very existence causes disruption in the casting of spells by others, and while a raen can work on their relationship with the mona and eventually perform magic to some successful degree, please cast at your own risk at all times (as well as at the risks of others!), as the possibilities of backlash are much higher for the raen than for any other race.

Get a job!

The benefit of being a raen is you can have any job you want - you just gotta steal a body to do it!

Raen Goals

Do you want to live a quiet life, settling into the life of each body you inhabit, adopting their identity and attempting to forget your true nature? Perhaps it’s the opposite: you want to seek fame or political power by taking the lives of influential people. Are you interested in the bigger picture, in what has caused your condition and what it means for Vita, and will you try to find others like you? Will you hold onto what makes you yourself? How do you even know what that is?