Ludara

Ludara (she/they) is a character played by Ty (they/he) in Lost at Sea: A Tiresian Archives Non Fiction One-shot. She is a Goliath Berserker Barbarian with the Gambler background.  

Description

Ludara is 8'4 with a powerful build. Her skin is deep grey, mottled with paler flecks and accentuated by broad features, a pronounced aquiline nose, and deep green eyes. They dress plainly, likely passing at first blush as an impoverished traveler, in worn, fraying cloth pants and a leather jerkin. Ludara heaves an enormous anchor of dark wrought iron, flecked with barnacles over her shoulder. Her bald head is covered with scars while scalp to toes she is covered in an interconnected crosswork of swirling tattoos - black and deep blues - occasionally flaring into runic recollections of her kin's feats.   Ludara's personality is serious and direct, mournful but never quite dour. They are fiercely affectionate towards their kin, but reticent with those she has not yet fought alongside. She despises constructions of power outside what can be earned and defended through honorable battle, and as a result has a quick and severe issue with most entrenched authority, as well as being generally distrustful of mages.  

Backstory

Ludara was raised by an eccentric dwarven sellsword she knew as Uncle Kazzy. She grew up on the road, fetching firewood and tending to camp for Kazzy's Brightstar Company, until she grew strong enough to swing a sword. Her earliest memories are her uncle's boastful storytelling, the song of starlight and firecrackle that lulled her to sleep each night, and her old hound Nettles.   With her teen years came her first contracts - small bounties for minor criminals, the odd monster hunt, and search and rescues in the treacherous Redwillow. These formative jobs taught her strength, resolve, and a profound distrust of the arcane.   In her twenties, Ludara fell into a series of contracts with a corps from the Company that took them north through the Redwillow and into the periphery of The Tundra. The party - Celen-Ra, Scattered Lep, Vasya, and Jul'zum Meel - grew comfortable, obligated, and eventually entwined with one another, and elected to form their own company. Beneath the aberrant lights of the Tundra's night sky, the Midnight Suns were born.   Ludara lived and fought alongside the Suns for the better part of two decades. They carved out a reputation as a formidable band: sneaking onto the Stained Hand's flagship to collect Old Glimmerbeard's bounty; slaying the wyvern matriarch that made roost and ruin of Kelton; routing the necromancers who lurked behind the mercantile veneer of the Copper Cartel. And they found comfort and kinship in one another: collectively raising the Twins, homesteading on their brigantine Starfallen, and nursing one another through illness, injury, and grief along the way.   The Midnight Suns shattered in the cold waters of northeastern Kauvet. Reports of disappearances sent the band north, and something huge and hidden struck in the gloomy pre-dawn hours. Poor Lep's screaming descent into the depths was all his watch could do to wake the rest of the band, and by the time Ludara reached the deck, the ship was splintering and collapsing beneath her feet.   She leapt for the vague dark shape of the submerged colossus, hammer overhead, as the night sky cracked and split with lightning called down by Celen-Ra's death curse.   Ludara awoke, battered and dehydrated, on the surf-churned cliffcoasts of a barren island. No memory of the beast in the depths rose to her call beyond the stormwracked cries of her dying kin. No record of the Midnight Suns washed up alongside her, save - bafflingly - the Starfallen's barnacled anchor.   Ludara hefted the wrought iron sledge and set off. For two years she has sought answers, found no record of any other Sun surviving besides herself. And so she yet wanders the Kauvetian coastline, searching for signs of the monstrosity that took her family from her. Desperate for the day that the beast resurfaces, so that she can beat it back down into the sunless hell it rose from, or else join her company in their glorious rest.  

Trivia

Ty has provided a reference image for Ludara, seen here.