U is for Mikau the Unwitting, Zora I Remember

Name: Mikau the Unwitting
Campaign: Osaevu the Chosen

U is a hard letter. Leveraging an epithet is a bit of a cheat, but whatever.

Mikau was a 3rd-edition character in a Legend of Zelda campaign, so prepare for a lot of unrecognizable words: he was a zora hexblade who multiclassed into warmage. His gimmick was low Wisdom, and his method of expressing it was by manifesting overtly evil magic in a way that used it for good (this is not the same player as Sammael, but they travel in the same circles). As a character in a campaign based on a video game setting he didn’t have a massive amount of complicated backstory, or at least not any that came up during game.

He may be the first character I saw in a campaign who had an arc, however limited. He started as a pure hexblade, and as the story progressed he realized his powers weren’t cutting it, resolved to change, and branched out into a mechanically similar (Charisma-focused combat magician) but thematically opposite (self-taught shadow paladin vs. academy-taught explosion wizard) class. A less forgiving DM might point out that he went from a class with excellent accuracy but low damage into a class with high damage mitigated by its bad accuracy, but there isn’t a lot of game-breaking damage you can do with 1st-level spells in an 8th-level campaign. I, on the other hand, encouraged the switch entirely by accident: when the players entered the Dark World I gave them corruption effects, and his (absolutely random, I assure you) corruption was a penalty to the schools of magic hexblades use and a bonus to the schools of magic warmages use. I figure if my dice like Mikau that much, who am I to argue?

I don’t have a lot to say about Mikau, but the point is that I have anything to say about him at all. He’s the only character on this month’s list from either of my first two campaigns. Most of the characters in those campaigns were forgettable stereotypes of either characters (the one-off joke, the straight-out-of-the-book rogue, the mechanical thinking exercise who really wasn’t a character, etc.) or players (the cheater, the joker playing himself, the I’m-only-here-because-my-boyfriend-is, etc.) Before reviewing my notes for this month I could only name half of them off the top of my head, and I certainly couldn’t put together two paragraphs like the above. Compare to my third campaign, where even ten years later I can say “oh, character X joined the party in session Y because the previous character died to monster Z despite the following list of mitigating effects”.

Mikau was the lone exception, memorable for something besides a gameplay story or a mechanical gimmick. In a way he was a more advanced character than we were ready for at that point in our careers so I didn’t give him as much chance to shine as he deserved. Now that I’ve caught up to him I’d like to run for him again, but he’s not in the current Zelda campaign and I’m not looking to run another any time soon. The only way I’d be able to do it would be if somebody else ran a Zelda campaign in which I was a player.

…Interesting.

The last session of the campaign is kind of a blur. I think Mikau survived the final battle against the campaign villain, the for-reals final battle against Ganon, and the during-the-credits accidental final boss disaster. As a victorious hero in a Zelda campaign, he probably started roaming the world looking for ways to make fans argue about timelines.