Dan Chapman Hoshisabi's Projects

layout: character title: Spare image: SparePortrait.png race: Human (Custom Lineage — Shadovar) class: Wizard 4 (Order of Scribes) dnd_beyond: https://www.dndbeyond.com/characters/100533223/YOBfDI hide_breadcrumb: true campaign: Icewind Dale — Rime of the Frost Maiden (Heros That We Need) dm: Chris Hubbard location: in-person status: Retired—

Campaign: Icewind Dale — Rime of the Frost Maiden (Heros That We Need)

DM: Chris Hubbard — in-person

Spare appears human, but is a Shadovar — a variant lineage that masks a stranger truth.

He is a partial clone, created by a Netherese researcher and academy instructor whose name has never been recovered. The researcher’s student — a middle child of a minor noble family, unremarkable and overlooked, the family’s own “spare” — overreached his abilities and died. The researcher felt responsible, though he was never willing to fully admit it. The academy paid the appropriate people, the family was mollified, and the matter was officially closed. It wasn’t, for the researcher. The best he could manage was a partial clone of the student.

When Karsus’s Folly unmade magic and brought down Netheril, the researcher was among the victims. His clones failed to function — except one. The partial clone of the student, imperfect and incomplete, was left in a half-wakened state for millennia.

Velene found the clone vat and uncovered him. He woke up a slave, not knowing what he was.

He eventually found himself wandering Icewind Dale without appropriate clothing — no memory of how he got there, no clear sense of what he was or where he’d come from. A family of fishermen found him and saved his life. (This part is Chris’s.)

Spare is neither the researcher nor the student, but something between and beside both. He carries a mixture of their memories, and a persistent, unshakeable sense that he should be capable of far more than he is. He was named for what he was — the spare — and the name stuck, because nothing else fit. Neither the researcher nor the student were ever named; Spare was still sorting through which memories belonged to whom.

(His low level was always the point: a fragment of a Netherese wizard trying to remember how to be one. His netherese origin was a secret threaded into the icewind-dale campaign — the lore above is Dan’s own elaboration from that seed.)

He adventured through the early chapters of the Rime of the Frost Maiden until a confrontation with Father Lake left him with nothing left to give. He returned to Velene, refused to continue the work that had been asked of him, and was killed for it.

The story continued without him.

Class: Wizard 4, Order of Scribes — INT 18, spell DC 14, +7 spell attack. The Wizardly Quill and Awakened Spellbook suit a scholar who literally woke up mid-thought. Arcane Recovery.

Feat: Shadow Touched — Invisibility and Silent Image at will. Fitting for a Shadovar.

Notable equipment:

Languages: Abyssal, Common, Draconic, Infernal — a Netherese researcher’s working vocabulary. Alignment: Lawful Neutral — the scholar’s habits outlasted the scholar.