#topsy tinsplitter

[immortalarizona-art]

portraits I did of the major npcs from my OotA game!! top row is Topsy and Turvy Tinsplitter (she/her and he/him, svirfneblin former wererat twins who the party cleric has adopted in all but, like, law), and the bottom row is Morwenna Ironfoot (she/her, heavily traumatized dwarf cleric and also the cleric pc's romantic partner, teehee) and Theo Freeman (he/him, himbo tiefling bard and former slave who has since become the paladin's romantic partner). I think my favorite portrait of the bunch is probably Topsy's, lol.

[immortalarizona]

if you're interested i always wanna hear about oota npcs...! how'd you approach topsy and turvy?

heyyyy!! sorry it took me so long to reply, I was trying to do the responsible thing and finish my homework Before I got to do fun things on tumblr. (I still have a math project left to do tonight, but it's only due at midnight, it's fiiiiiine.) this is probably going to be another long one, so I'll just put a cut here right now :)

okay, so!! the Tinsplitter twins (yes I made up a surname for them, same as I did for Buppido and Derendil and Jimjar, because No One Can Stop Me):

they're somewhere in the range of 15-20, age-wise. not children in the same way Stool is (they are a whole two months old, I have decided), but definitely not adults either. I started by having them always whispering to each other about something, with Topsy coming up to one of the surface-er PCs (might have been the rogue?) to ask her if she remembers what day it is (and therefore what phase the moon is in, because I've decided that a lunar cycle is three tendays for the sake of my sanity). the twins refused to elaborate on why they were asking, and after they received their answer, they went back to debating between themselves. I had this whole other foreshadowing planned out where Topsy would struggle with kleptomania and Turvy would struggle with even worse paranoia due to their wererat instincts, but I was also trying to juggle the Sarith foreshadowing and Jimjar foreshadowing and Ront's storyline with the barbarian and Shuushar Stories and Stool getting adopted by the fighter, so that particular idea fell by the wayside, alas. still, in a bit of text-based RP between sessions, the rogue and the bard had a little chat with Jimjar where they shared their theories on the twins (as well as the secretly dhampir barbarian) and bet on when one of them would "cause a commotion." (Jimjar is literally my setting's moon deity in disguise. of course he fucking knows when the full moon is coming, and of course he won that bet. this is another bit of foreshadowing that I'm trying to set up :D)

just last session was the full moon, and oh boy, was it tasty. the ranger had cast alarm around the camp and had included the twins in the list of people that could set it off, so he was immediately pinged when the twins snuck off in the middle of the night. they left the following note scrawled on one of the walls in ormu pigment: Sorry. Must leave. Not safe. Do not follow. Thank you. -T&T.

they had taken all their stuff with them, indicating that they had no intentions of returning to camp. it was this, plus the fact that they're fucking children, that convinced the ranger and the fighter to go looking for them. Jimjar dragged the rogue along (they had that fun long-term madness due to a night spent in faerzress where they were each other's lucky charms), and Buppido and the bard also came along, if I recall correctly. (I think Ront had already died and the barbarian had been fucking kicked out of the party during some truly terrifying-for-me-as-a-DM RP at this point, hence the barbarian's absence. fun fact, the artificer in my PC art post is the player's replacement character, and I'm so excited to finally meet him.) the group easily passed the survival check to follow the twins' trail (the droplets of blood from where Topsy had been clawing at her own skin didn't exactly make it hard) and came across the twins in a small cavern overlooking a 60-foot cliff. (the cliff was my failsafe in case things started looking like a TPK. thankfully, we didn't need it.) Turvy begged for the party to run, because Topsy was in too much pain to speak, and then they transformed, and it was time to roll for initiative!

the last thing I wanted was a death match, so I played the twins as fighting more out of animalistic fear and a perceived need for self-defense than anything, which fits with the wererat lore I later established in the homebrew mechanics doc I sent out to my players for review. this did allow for the bard to give the party a safe exit from the cavern with a peace offering of food and a very good animal handling check--but not before Turvy bit the ranger in like round one and the ranger rolled a 9 on his con save. (I had him roll another con save at the start of his next turn to see if he would start transforming because what the fuck do you do in this situation the DMG never covered this, and, well. . . nat 1.)

in the morning, when the detransformed ranger led the similarly detransformed twins back to camp, Topsy and Turvy were absolutely miserable. they felt horribly guilty for having passed on their curse, and they were fully packing up their bags and preparing to leave the party because they believed that the party wouldn't want them around anymore. "We're monsters, aren't we?" they said, and Ront would have absolutely said yes if the barbarian hadn't eaten him the day before.

anyways, thankfully, the party was able to convince the twins that yes, they still wanted them around, and they really wished that they would've said something sooner so that they could've helped them sooner and maybe avoided all of this. I've got it tentatively in brain that the twins have some sort of Emotional Issues relating to parents (perhaps they lost their father at a very young age, and perhaps they originally fled home after being bitten so that they wouldn't hurt their mother), so all this genuine (or, well, seemingly genuine in the case of the bard, that stinky stinky bastard man) kindness had them even more in tears than they already were. the session ended with a group hug, and the next few days of out-of-session RP largely followed the ranger very consciously taking the twins under his wing and swearing to find them a cure for their curse, even before finding a cure for himself. Topsy has already sarcastically called him "dad" when he expressed a desire to protect them from whatever the fuck is going on with Buppido, but trust me, it'll be genuine soon enough.

I loooove language itself as a mode of storytelling, so I set up this Thing where svirfneblin generally don't teach their mother tongue to outsiders, something which Topsy and Turvy explained after the bard asked if there were any lullabies they found soothing that he could use to try and soothe the rats within and they sang one in Gnomish--or the namneblin, as I've termed it from cobbling together D&D Gnomish with Tolkien Gnomish to get what I want. at some point, the twins are going to start teaching the party the namneblin, which is their way of emotionally claiming the party as family. (this is gonna make it ALL THE MORE tasty and devastating when the Cool Uncle bard reveals that he's actually a murderous little meow meow who's been manipulating mansplaining manslaughtering this entire time, and I CANNOT WAIT.) they may even start calling the ranger a term which they refuse to translate, but which Jimjar will--a term that translates to "father." I fucking love found family. I am having a blast.

unfortunately, now we're way beyond the characterization given in the module. they don't really have any personality beyond "secretly wererats," so I'm still working on who they are now that that furry little secret is off their chests. they're both pretty curious, but thus far, I think Turvy is actually the more adventurous one of the two. he's expressed an interest in flying, something which Topsy finds absolutely terrifying, and he's also a bit less mature than his sister. (he laughed when the rogue made a "these nuts" joke during one of the bard's stories, and laughed even harder when Stool was like "I don't understand. What's a 'these nuts'?", while Topsy smacked him.) I'm thinking Topsy is just a few minutes older, and as such, she has that Older Sibling Protective Instinct in her. Topsy and Turvy are almost identical on a mechanical level, but now that the party has leveled up again, I've chosen to give them different survivor talents (see Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft for reference; I'm kinda just making things up as I go along) to showcase their different personalities. Topsy has the Desperate Scream talent, while Turvy has Adrenaline Surge, hinting that she's more of a fighter while he prefers to stay out of the fray. (they both each have a dagger and a sling, but I think I might let the player controlling them in combat know that Topsy prefers the dagger while Turvy prefers the sling.) I'm also tossing around in my brain different interests each of them could have, just to differentiate them further. I'm thinking Topsy could really like shiny things and collecting rocks and fun facts about rocks, while perhaps Turvy really wants to feel what it's like to soar through open air. or maybe he really likes plants!! who knows. I am definitely open to suggestions for hyperfixations to give each of them :]

so yeah, the Tinsplitter twins!! resident party children (alongside Stool) and catalysts of a found family dynamic that brings so very much joy into my heart and that the bard and I are going to heartbreakingly destroy at some point in the future of this campaign <3