Beekeeper, Servant of the Ankh

From January 2022 to January 2023, I was a player in an online Everway mini-campaign run by Civil Savage on RPGnet. I'm quite familiar with the Vision Cards used for Everway, and I've therefore taken to randomly rolling Visions to avoid picking the same favorite cards over and over when generating a Hero. In the Silver Anniversary Edition of the game, this is easy to do since the Visions are divided into seventeen sets of twelve images. I roll 1d20 to determine the set (rerolling results of 18-20) and then roll 1d12 to determine the specific card from that set. I do this five times as per the Everway rules (which recommend picking 3-5 Visions).

The five Visions I rolled (1101, 1208, 1310, 1512, and 1612) led me to come up with a priest Hero. Vision 1512 depicted the Gods of the Ankh (the deities of ancient Egypt in our world) in combat with dragons, so I decided my Hero served that pantheon. Vision 1310's depiction of a man undergoing a painful ritual in a desert setting supported this decision: this was clearly a reference to my character's training for religious orders. I used Vision 1101 (which depicts two children looking into large urns) to decide that my Hero had been given to the local temple as an oblate; he and his fellow acolytes were mischievous rascals who stuck their noses into every corner of the temple compound. I also decided that the battle in Vision 1512 was a destructive attack on the temple by dragons that left my Hero and a small handful of survivors without a home. Vision 1310 referred to the moment when a Fortune Deck reading revealed that my Hero was a Spherewalker, and Vision 1208 shows the first Gate he passed through on his quest to determine why his temple was attacked.

I wanted to work the Hero's childhood curiosity and sweet tooth into his adult concept, and some research into ancient Egyptian religious practice revealed that honeybees were supposedly formed from the tears of the sun god Ra to serve as messengers for the gods. With that fact in mind, I named my hero Beekeeper (his job in the temple compound) and set about determining his game stats.

Here's the final version of the Hero:

BEEKEEPER, SERVANT OF THE ANKH

MOTIVE: Adversity

Beekeeper swore an oath to determine why the dragons attacked, and he can't return to his home Sphere until he learns the reason.

VIRTUE: The Griffin, upright (valor)

On the one hand, you can't keep bees if you're afraid of bee stings.

FAULT: The Eagle, reversed (thoughtlessness)

On the other hand, sticking your hand into every hive you encounter is eventually going to get you stung.

FATE: The Dragon (cunning vs. blind fury)

Beekeeper's Fate is a literal one: there are some dragons out among the Thousand Worlds who can tell him why his temple was destroyed, and he's going to find them. Secondarily, it's a character conflict: will he approach the search in a careful and clever fashion, or will he rush in to confront the dragons?

AIR: 4 (insect lore)

FIRE: 4 (baking)

EARTH: 5 (resisting poison)

WATER: 4 (finding hidden things)

POWERS: 3

Invocation (Water). Beekeeper's priestly investiture allows him to channel the might of the gods to achieve miraculous effects. Cost: 3 (frequent, major, and versatile).

Bee Charm (Air). Beekeeper knows a simple spell to calm bees, wasps, and other stinging insects. Cost: 0.

After some initial difficulties playing the character (he initially had the weaker version of priestly powers, the one requiring a congregation of believers--which didn't work when he was off adventuring in Realms where the Gods of the Ankh held no sway), I got into a groove with him. He took part in a baking competition at a local fair, earning kudos for his honey cakes, and he made clever use of the gods' blessings: he invoked Horus's keen vision to see in the dark, used a boon from Bast to confuse a suspicious witch's cat familiar, and held off a small band of goblins in a maze of twisty passages by promising their blood to Sobek in exchange for making his dagger bite like a crocodile's tooth. I would definitely play the Hero again.