Artemidorus "Arte" Agapov-Olossëa

High Elf Divination Wizard, 7th level, Neutral Good

if thou read this, o caesar, thou mayst live; if not, the fates with traitors do contrive.

Strength: 8 Dexterity: 10 Constitution: 16 Wisdom: 18 Intelligence: 20 Charisma: 10

Arte is a D&D 5e character I've been playing for about a year now in a high-fantasy, high-intrigue homebrew campaign. He's truly the apotheosis of all my character-writing fascinations, which might be why I've been so utterly insane about him. Prophetic visions, a desperate desire to change the future but a fundamentally human misunderstanding of how to go about it, good intentions leading to fanaticism, brain damage, old man yaoi, tentative reconciliations after ages apart, a brat summer, I could go on- he somehow checks every box.

I think two of his biggest inspirations were Mei Nianqing from Heaven Official's Blessing and Finrod Felagund of Silmarillion fame, though he's diverged significantly from both those concepts since I started playing him.

On naming: Artemidorus is a reference to the character of the same name in Julius Caesar, who is in turn a representation of a historical dream interpreter. Within the context of the setting, though, it's an archaic name that roughly translates to 'gift of the moon,' referencing the real-world meaning which is roughly 'gift of Artemis.' Arte is pronounced 'are-TAY'- rather than 'art'- because he's a valley girl. Olossëa, his maiden name, is a bastardization of Tolkien's Quenya; olos, meaning dream or vision, becomes Olossëa when mutated to match the island of Tol Eressëa. I did this to imply a 'dream island,' of sorts, for thematic reasons. Agapov is his husband's surname, from Russian agap and Greek's agape, to love.

Lore Summary

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Arte was born in the autumn of a thousand-year war between the countries of Osorid and Petha, in a small Pethan farming town. His mother, Athenodora Olossëa was born into a long line of seers, and her visions called her to enlist in the army and protect her homeland. When Arte manifested their gift as a child, she urged him to follow in her footsteps and use their gift to protect the world in any way he could. Not long after, she went off to battle and Arte foresaw his own mother's death. Arte promptly tried to go stop it, but he was the elven equivalent of six; he just fell into a ditch and got stuck there the whole night. His father, a cleric called Kir, briefly had to think he'd lost his son and wife in the same night and demanded that Arte not pursue divination any further.

Though he tried for a while, Arte proved to be a legitimately terrible cleric. For all of his fervency, he just could not put his faith in a god. But spending so much time around spellcasters allowed him to observe the mechanics of magic, and he started trying to reverse-engineer the mechanics of them, eventually stumbling upon wizardry in a world where it had been near-fully erased due to the war.

The war ended with the deaths of the previous monarch and the marriage of two princes when he was forty-one, and with it came new educational reforms. Wizardry was no longer an outlawed practice, and the first mages' college opened just in time for Arte to enroll. He spent his college years learning everything he could, getting into a centuries-long academic feud with famed-artificer-to-be Elias Harlow, doing fantasy coke, and working as a tutor part-time.

Artemidorus "Arte" Agapov-Olossëa

High Elf Divination Wizard, 7th level, Neutral Good

if thou read this, o caesar, thou mayst live; if not, the fates with traitors do contrive.

Lore Summary

0-291

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