I wanted to talk about a character I created for a “forever DMs” D&D game I’m playing in. I’ve DMed way more often than I’ve played D&D, so the few times I’ve made a D&D character for myself to play, I’ve tried to drill down to some idea or theme I want to explore. Usually it starts as a fun visual or concept, but if that’s all the character ever becomes, I find them kind of boring to play (my hilariously named kenku gunslinger “Bawk Holiday” for our Strahd game was humorous, but didn’t have a central theme or idea, so he could be a bit one-note and boring at times).

For this game, some of the work was done for me because several of the other players had already come up with their character concepts — two fighters and a cleric — and based on that, I figured we needed another caster to help support everyone. I considered playing something I hadn’t played before, like a wizard or a sorcerer, but I love bards and I haven’t actually played a bard in years.

I’ve wanted to play a heavy metal inspired bard for a long time. I’ve gone into HeroForge and created and re-created this bard a dozen times — first they looked like Pickles from Dethklok, then Lemmy Kilmeister from Motorhead, then like Eddie from Stranger Things. Eventually, I took inspiration from a band I’ve been pretty obsessed with in the latter half of this year called Ghost.

Ghost is a metal band with a bit of an old school sound similar to Dio, Ozzy Osborne, Judas Priest, and some Metallica. Because their sound isn’t super heavy with lots of double pedal kick drums and growling vocals like Amon Amarth or Cannibal Corpse, they’ve gotten flack in the metal community for over ten years for being too soft, but they are definitely metal. While I’ve listened to them a little bit here and there for a few years, even putting a couple of their songs on a playlist for a novel I was working on, it wasn’t until my wife started listening to them back in July or August that I really started appreciating them. They lean into imagery and lyrics reminiscent of the Satanic Panic era of metal from the 70s and 80s, and a lot of their songs are about how powerful organizations use hypocrisy and manipulation to control people.

Ghost is a bit like a reverse Dethklok. Dethklok is a band from a cartoon called Metalocalypse whose songs became popular enough that the creator of the show started performing the songs live, even going on tour and releasing them on albums. Instead of a real band touring and playing the fake band’s songs, Ghost features a “fake” band that tours and plays real songs released by a real singer and musician named Tobias Forge. However, you don’t see Forge in concert. Instead, you see the pope (anti-pope?) of a Satanic church who goes by Papa Emeritus — which is actually Tobias Forge in costume.

The original concept for Ghost was to be an anonymous theatrical band inspired by Forge’s love of horror movies and Swedish metal traditions because, according to Forge, (paraphrasing), “these songs don’t sound like they come from dudes that look like me.” So he decided to create a fictional persona to perform named “Papa Emeritus.” They bought a Halloween mask that they painted to look like a skull, he donned ceremonial looking robes, and he dressed his band like plague doctors, calling them his “Nameless Ghouls.” Since then, the band has gone through a few personas, with each album traditionally being led by a different “Papa Emeritus.” And each time a new Papa has taken over, the backstory and lore of the band has grown, so much so that they’ve begun releasing little short films chronicling the exploits of the latest Papa when he’s not touring with the band.

I may end up writing up a post just about Ghost’s silly lore, but for now, the gist is: one of the nuns of the church, Sister Imperator, used her influence to have the previous front man, Terzo, aka “Papa Emeritus III,” removed from his position. He was forcibly dragged off stage by men in suits mid-song during the last show of his tour. A new front man took over, eventually being instated as the new Papa Emeritus IV. It’s been implied, but not explicitly confirmed yet, that this new Papa is actually the secret son of Sister Imperator, and based on art that the band has released on merch depicting Papa IV as having devil horns, growing wings, or having a marking similar to Damian’s from The Omen, some fans have speculated that we may learn that this new Papa is actually the Anti-Christ, but possibly an unwitting or unwilling to fill said role.

This all sounds super heavy, so for context, please be aware that many Ghost fans often describe their style as “Scooby-Doo chase music.” One of their instrumental songs features a shredding sax solo performed by a former Papa who is de-fibrillated back to life long enough to perform his solo before the effort is too much and he dies again. Forge seems heavily inspired by 60s and 70s era music, and his most recent EP was two songs that were just straight up 60s groove tracks — “Mary on a Cross” and “Kiss the Go-Goat.”

So what does this have to do with my D&D character?

This latest Papa has been consistently depicted as being disinterested in if not contemptuous of his papal duties and is more interested in watching movies and goofing around — one of the short films had him literally creating a terrible audition tape for SNL in which he misquotes famous scenes from dozens of movies. Even the Nameless Ghouls don’t like him, and they’re often openly antagonistic with each other during shows, with Papa IV shooing them away when they get too near him, or them starting the next song over top of him when he’s talking to the crowd. It was that angle I found particularly interesting — the idea that someone could be born into or even trained and groomed to fulfill a a terrible destiny, but they’re not only uninterested, but doing everything they can to avoid it — like Hellboy in the Del Toro movies.

My character, Daymon Hyde, is fleeing a prophecy that states he will somehow bring about apocalyptic doom. In a series of terribly tragic circumstances, Daymon was confronted by his mentor in the monastery in which he was raised and told he would “be the doom of us all!” Then his mentor tried to kill him with a dagger, and in the ensuing struggle, Daymon accidentally killed his mentor and fled the monastery. Since then, he’s been dedicating himself to being a Good Boy^TM in the hopes he can somehow fend off this terrible fate.

That was one idea I wanted to explore: what does it mean to be a good person if you’re destined to bring about doom? Do you embrace that destiny because it’s what fate has decreed, or do you try to change it, if you even can?

So with that idea locked and loaded, I started thinking about the type of monastery he would be from. In my mind, my spooky metal bard was always going to be College of Spirits from Van Richten’s Guide, and the fact that Papa’s band is a bunch of nameless ghouls lent it self to that pretty well. But if I wanted to maintain that religious vibe, who would be Daymon’s stand-in for the devil? I wanted to capture the counter-cultural spooky vibe of Ghost, but devils are objectively real in D&D. Asmodeus, Belial, Baalzebub, Dispater, and Mephistopheles are all often used as synonyms for the devil in pop culture, but they’re also actual literal devils in D&D. Atheism isn’t really a thing — at least not in traditional Forgotten Realms style D&D — and therefore atheistic, Satanic counter-culture wouldn’t really work, either. I didn’t want my character actually be a devil worshiper and working against the party. Unless you’re super comfortable with your table, that usually sucks.

Then I started thinking about how death in a lot of Western media and folklore is often portrayed as terrifying. We depict death as a skeletal reaper coming to harvest souls with a giant wicked scythe, we come up with safe allusions like “they passed on” or “they’re no longer with us” or “we lost them.” Of the 21 deities listed on the Forgotten Realms wiki in the Death domain, 15 are some form of evil, and the rest are neutral.

I thought it’d be interesting to explore the idea that, sure, death is final and unknown and therefore it’s natural to be scared of it, but it’s also the most natural thing and something that all natural creatures have in common. What would it be like to be raised in a culture where death isn’t something you run from, but something you embrace — not in a suicidal way, but with respect, understanding, even acceptance. Fight for your life, but when it’s up, embrace the unknown of the next grand adventure.

I settled on the Raven Queen as Daymon’s deity of choice for several reasons. For one thing, she has very spooky, gothy vibes that are perfect for the type of character I was going for. For another, since plague doctor masks look like crow or raven heads, I could work in that element from Ghost as well into the monastery’s rituals. But the more I dug into the Raven Queen, the more I noticed surprising parallels between her story and the way Ghost often depicts Satan, especially in their later albums.

The Raven Queen is a relatively modern deity in D&D’s pantheon — she wasn’t even introduced until the 00’s in 4th edition, and she’s one of the few that seems to have been carried from 4th into 5th edition. She’s often tied to the Shadowfell, which is sort of like a dark mirror world of the regular one where everything is corrupted and terrible, but she herself is not an evil goddess. She’s officially aligned as neutral, which makes sense — death comes for everyone, after all. It can be cruel and slow or swift and merciful, but it’s the station all of our trains are headed toward eventually. In that way, she shared a lot of the spooky taboo that writing songs about Satan would have in our world.

Beyond that, though, the Raven Queen was a mortal woman who, via some sort of ritual, was able to ascend to divinity. The Forgotten Realms wiki says she was an elven queen who believed she could reunite the fractured elvish pantheon, but her ritual was sabotaged, so while she did ascend, she and her followers were transported to and trapped in the Shadowfell and she herself lost her physical form and most of her memories of who she once was. In other versions listed, the elvish gods, angry at what they considered an act of treason, erased her from the minds of all elves in the material world, leaving only her followers in the Shadowfell to remember her.

One of the more common stories of the devil is that he was an angel beloved by God who led an insurrection against Him, and as punishment he and his followers were cast out of heaven and relegated to hell where they became twisted versions of their former selves reflecting their corrupt souls. This act being perceived as a betrayal and punished with banishment from the realm he knew as home is a fascinating parallel to the Raven Queen’s perceived betrayal and punishment.

The Raven Queen’s story deals a lot with memory. Whether her own memory of herself was destroyed in the ritual, or whether the gods erased everyone’s memory of her as punishment, she is said to have influence over the realms of spirits and will claim memories from her as they travel through her domain. In Critical Role, this is expanded further and the Raven Queen is a psychopomp — a being in charge of transporting the souls of the dead into the great beyond. Her task is to ensure that beings that die arrive at their appropriate afterlife — similar to Davy Jones in Dead Man’s Chest. As payment for this duty, she often claims powerful memories as a toll.

In that same vein, bards in D&D are most often tasked with recording and sharing stories of great deeds and heroism, musical Homers and Ovids acting as singing historians or archivists, and therefore they also find themselves in the business of capturing and preserving memories.

There’s also some delicious irony that Daymon is a Shadar-kai, which is what these elves banished to the Shadowfell are called, which means he has the extremely long life cycle of a D&D elf. While Tolkien’s elves are immortal(ish), D&D elves can live around seven or eight hundred years, close to 1000 if the circumstances are right, which I think could also be fun to explore: it’s easy to say that death is natural and no big deal when your life alone can outlast five or more generations of other humanoid species.

This is…heavy, right? Like, this is a lot of heavy subjects to tackle with this character. And I’d feel like I was coming in too dark if at least 3 other characters weren’t also tied to the Raven Queen (cleric, paladin, and one of the fighters), and if one of our fighters wasn’t a re-assembled Frankenstein’s monster with no memories or sense of his own identity, ha ha. None of us set out to intentionally make such a gothic game, but damned if we didn’t do it anyway!

We’ve played a few sessions, and I’ve been having a lot of fun so far. I’ve long been a fan of the Sam Riegel approach to bards — singing covers of popular songs retooled to fit thematically with the situation, spell, etc. I’ve been able to come up with some great uses for some classic metal songs — I already dropped a retooled “Paradise City” by Guns N Roses to some pretty hearty chuckles, and I’ve got a great idea for a Ghost song I can use when my bard uses his channel spirits ability. I’ve stumbled into him having a sort of 70’s rocker British accent — sort of Keith Richards-esque, but not quite. Honestly, he probably wanders into Australian a lot — I have a tendency to do that — but whatever. It’s D&D — we’re all doing terrible accents of one kind or another.

Thank you for indulging me as I blather about my D&D character. If you play D&D and are so inclined, I’d love to hear about your character and why you decided to build them in the way you did.

I may end up writing a post or two about the OneD&D playtest and my opinions about the changes that have already shown up in 5e because why not? Embrace the geekery!

‘Til next time friends!