Role

Chapter 3

Why is her last name Cobb?
Rethienne was found as an infant by a human couple who raised her as part of
their family. Their last name was Cobb!

Why does she talk like she's Ruth from Ozark?
The Cobb family are part of a collective of herders and ranchers living in the
northern foothills. Good country folk, livin' simple country life, talkin'
simple country talk.

Why is she a bard?
Besides growing up hunting and playing in the woods with her siblings and
mending and sewing with her mom, she also spent time singing and dancing
with her family: the Cobb kids performing old folk songs and silly shows for
friends and family, until her siblings grew up and got their own spouses and
children, and Rethienne, still a child by elf standards, instead dedicated
her time to her aging parents. She's also, of course, creative and dreamy
at heart. She finds her way as a traveling companion thanks to her charm,
passion for adventure, and self-sufficiency in the wild.

What's she got against magic?
1. She's been told the story her whole life of how she was found in a meadow
under motes of light forming a constellation in the shape of an arrow on a
curved path. She hates the notion that she was some special gift elf to her
parents, or was magically made. She wanted to just be a girl.
2. At her father's funeral, the giant boar she caught and that her brother
roasted reverted magically into a corpse of a human, halfway after everyone had
started eating! This particularly left a bad taste in her mouth.
3. She discovers that the recent decline in game to trap or hunt is related to
a sudden surge in shapeshifting sorcery. "Pretend" predators and foragers
cleaning out the hills' resources and throwing off the life cycle.
4. She gets into some arguments and scuffles with some shapeshifters after she
ventures into the world, and things escalate most violently.

Why is she adventuring?
There must be more than this pastoral life! Her passion is discovery and
expression, but it is in conflict with and superseded by a deeply seeded desire
to resolve an undefinable melancholy within her, an incompleteness, even. She
doesn't know where she's really from, who her real parents were, but even beyond
that, she feels off, and doesn't know why. This tension of passions has a habit
of manifesting as anger intitially projected onto shapeshifting sorcery, but
often any obstacle in the way of her desires.