radicans

Name: Cass
Age: So old
Other Characters: Yseult, Nell, Freddie
Interests: Hoping to diversify my cast a bit with someone younger, less intrepid, and much less sure of her place in the world


Name: Maud Van Klerk
Canon/OC: OC
Journal: radicans
Race: Human
Nationality: Marcher
Occupation: Merchant's wife, alchemist
Division: Diplomacy or Research, maybe Diplomacy to start with an ultimate aim to transition her into Research
Mage or Not: No
Age: 24

History

Maud Van Klerk was born Lady Maud Brauer, the middle child of five to Lord Geoffrey and Lady Henrietta Brauer of Braubach, a village located between Ansburg and Markham. Like nearly everyone in this region, the Brauer family is in agriculture, but rather than vast fields of grain or cattle their modest lands have long been devoted to growing herbs for alchemical potions. Both Lord Geoffrey and Lady Henrietta are alchemists of some renown in that community, but their innovations have a tendency to be impractically complex or obscure, of more academic value than actual.

Maud (often Maddie to her family) grew up like many members of the country gentry, spending much of her time in fields and gardens, running and riding and learning the land. She shared her family's interest in alchemy, enough to spend several years studying at Markham University, but she never showed her parents' flair for creativity or dramatic eccentricity. The rest of her siblings followed in their footsteps in one way or another: eldest sister Joan turned every chicken in the village blue at 7 and was helping her parents develop potions by 16, Herbert was composing for the Margrave's Opera by the same age, and twins Daphne and Karol filled half the estate with elaborate contraptions they'd invented to avoid performing simple chores.

But Maud's genius, according to her family, lay in bookkeeping. An adolescent attempt to help her father sort out his study ended up with her assuming de facto responsibility for the family accounts, and it became accepted that such practical matters were Maud's area, the rest of the Brauers grateful to wash their hands of the boring stuff.

Over the last generation or two the Brauers have increasingly shifted their focus to growing rare herbs used in more obscure tonics, potions, and mines. The combination of narrower market and the more obscure components requiring far more land, effort, skill, and good luck to grow successfully strained the family finances. By the time the Inquisition started purchasing all sorts of rare potions, the Brauers were in debt up to their eyeballs.

The Inquisition money was a life preserver, so when the Chantry re-absorbed them and began revisiting all existing supply contracts for the Exalted March, they were desperate to keep it. A hasty marriage was agreed between Maud and the son of a merchant associate in Tantervale whose family had generations of close ties to the Chantry and social aspirations that would benefit from a noble daughter-in-law. Vows were said, the contracts were secured, and Maud packed her bags for Tantervale. A few weeks later her new husband set off to join the Exalted March, leaving her alone with her new in-laws and the stifling strictures of Tantervale's polite society.

After the better part of a year, finally at the end of her rope, she faked an anchor with a variant of glowstone and escaped to Kirkwall.

Personality

Maud's life has been defined by being "the Practical One," the one who remembers things like buying food and keeping track of loans and ensuring customers pay their bills on time. She didn't ask for that role but for a while she was happy with it, pleased to have found her place in the family and be doing something they appreciated. And by the time that wore thin, she was all too aware of just how important her role was and what could happen if she gave it up. No one in her family would have begrudged her if one day she'd thrown down the books and expressed a passion for something impractical, or if she'd refused to marry to save the business. But she's not convinced they would've figured out how to manage on their own either, and she could never bring herself to step back and risk letting things crumble. So she swallowed her dissatisfaction and her envy of the single-minded purpose the rest of her family seemed to've been blessed with, and got on with it.

The truth is she really isn't all that practical except compared to their eccentricity, a fact that's become incredibly clear since her arrival in Tantervale. She's adaptable, approaches situations with good nature as much as she can and at least good manners when she can't, but the confinement, isolation, and incredibly strict rules of conduct in Tantervale are an intense culture shock for a young woman used to informality, intellectual debate, and countryside rambling. She stuck out like a sore thumb at first and even if she's lately managed to keep her head down and assume an appropriately demure tone, the prospect of continuing to do so indefinitely while waiting for the return of a husband she barely knows is just too much.

Faking an anchor is the sort of crazy her family has always assumed she didn't have in her, and they're right she isn't usually given to such dramatic, reckless acts. But she's not a stoic or a saint, just normal amounts of calm and sensible, with a good head on her shoulders and too much experience with her wacky family to be easily ruffled, though the problems facing Riftwatch (and some of the proposed solutions) are on a different magnitude that will give her pause. She's good at taking both direction and initiative, and will work best and be happiest in a team where she can make substantive contributions, but may struggle until she finds that fit. She's a good listener, and capable of holding her own in conversation and defending her opinions when she wants to, but also with a habit of fading into the background around bigger personalities, particularly insecure about being relatively boring and uncreative. Her time in Tantervale especially has added a layer of carefully-mannered reserve and concern for appearances, but it won't be that hard to chip away at once she gets to know people and gets more comfortable with Riftwatch society.

Opinions & Affiliations

Chantry: casually Andrastian in the sense of going to services regularly as a family with the rest of the village, accepting the Chantry's role as a standard feature of life, and then rarely thinking about it otherwise. Her experience in Tantervale with its strict interpretation and zealous application of Chantry law has soured her somewhat, but she's still mostly concerned with the Chantry as a customer of her family.

Mages/Templars: Customers, the fall of the Circles took a chunk out of the business that only the Inquisition has restored. She met one once in Markham at the university, but otherwise they're just distant consumers of potions whose issues they've debated at the dinner table but otherwise never been touched by. Templars are still a more normal fixture of life, especially among the lower rungs of the gentry, she knew kids who were sent to be Templars, so she isn't likely to buy into the notion that they're all evil or anything.

Qunari: scary, but in a distant boogeyman way

Wardens: heroic, but in a distant fairytale way

Strengths & Weaknesses

Strengths:

Alchemy: she's not a genius mad scientist like her parents, but she's a capable alchemist with solid training and more potential than her low profile in the family would suggest and given the necessary ingredients will be able to make the potions, mines, tonics, etc. available in the games. She's capable of innovation too, just a bit more of a late bloomer and in need of inspiration. For in-game purposes, her peak skills are probably more on the level of refinements, variations, and combinations of existing known alchemical products and their applications rather than creating anything wildly new totally from scratch. Very knowledgeable on useful plants and how they're grown and used.

(The family business isn't going to get Riftwatch piles free potions and remove the need for herbal fetch quests; she can probably get some small amounts of stuff here and there, but she used some of the Chantry money to hire a real accountant/manager to keep the business going in her absence so isn't in control anymore and besides they can't afford to do any big favors.)

Bookkeeping: she's familiar with the accounting of the day and the means of running a business and is good with numbers, though not any kind of mathematics prodigy. Given the right documents and the chance to study them, she could probably figure out whether someone's books were crooked and how

Country gentry stuff: she's a very capable horsewoman and comfortable with hunting dogs and the occasional stray bit of livestock, good gardener, average-ly musical, half-decent archer, with a solid grounding in all the usual subjects but a rather haphazard education beyond that, and familiar with running a not very large but fairly disorganized house and estate

Weaknesses:

Combat: Other than the sort of backyard archery practiced by ladies (and country kids), she has no fighting skills to speak of and no experience with anything more than a decades-ago sibling wrestling match.

Life Experience: Other than Ansburg, Markham, and Tantervale, and maybe a short trip or two to other nearby Marches, she hasn't really been anywhere or done anything. She doesn't know places or have contacts, neither her family nor her in-laws are powerful or important, and the versions of polite society manners she's learned are limited to the loose country version of her home, and the uniquely, absurdly complex social rules of Tantervale. Her language skills are limited beyond some rusty schoolroom Orlesian, and her wardrobe isn't going to be up to par in truly fashionable society.

Insecurity: She doesn't have any great confidence in her own abilities or capacity to be useful at the sort of big important dangerous heroic work Riftwatch is doing. She sees herself as a boring extra in the background and lets that hold her back, and it will take time to break out of that enough to reach any more helpful potential.

Lies: She doesn't actually have an anchor and won't be able to keep up the lie about it for very long. Just hopefully long enough to convince and then ditch the maid her in-laws sent with her.

Inventory

A set of alchemical equipment, potions, and compounds. Some rare ingredients and less-common potions, but not large amounts of anything. Includes specially-treated gloves that allow work with hazardous substances.

A horse, pale gold, of good quality and temperament, named Shortbread.

A bow, of the middling quality but handsome design popular among young ladies.

One ladies maid from Tantervale named Imelda, a spy but only in the sense that she reports back on Maud to her in-laws and will probably include some scandalized accounts of Riftwatch in general that may make the rounds in Tantervale society, but you know they already believe everyone in Kirkwall's a demon anyway.

The usual clothes and personal knick-knacks, a few books including a couple alchemical tomes, some minor pieces of jewelry.

Motivation

She's pretending it's because she's got a sliver of weird magic in her hand, but actually she just cannot handle another moment stuck in an austere sitting room with her mother-in-law who only speaks when she has something judgmental to say and this was the best and least long-term controversial escape she could come up with.

SAMPLES

both here