Progress

During the last couple of days memes have started to land in my inbox, one after another. I thought about making one as well, but I don't have enouch old pictures to use in there.
But it did give me an idea to redraw a couple of old roleplay characters, for nostalgic purposes.

Meet Cliodna, my very first roleplay character. She was born in October 2005, for Harry Potter Clubs frpg ''Draakoni Saladuste Ordu'' (The Order of Dragons Secrets). I was a young, yet enthusiastic member of Harry Potter fandom and that forum sparked my cruriosity towards spiritualism, paganism and roleplays. It was also where I got my internet-alias from - at first Cliodna was just a name mentioned in ''The Philosophers Stone'' when Ron told Harry about the chocolate frog cards. It was during later times that I grew out of Harry Potter and discovered that Cliodna had other, more distant, celtic meanings. I had grown fond to this name, so I stuck with it and I've been using it for six years now.

Anyway yes, I was a rebellious, childish Harry Potter fan, and soon I had read almost the whole forum, even the archives - all the threads that looked worthwhile or even slightly interesting. That brought me to roleplays. I can recall reading through a roleplay called ''Unede klaas'' (The Glass of Dreams), that had been finished and moved to the archives. I also read "Pai'Na'' with great enjoyment and I thought ''Well, why not join one of those games. It would be almost as if *I* was the one doing all those adventures, right?''.

That's how Cliodna the celtic druid was born. She had brown hair, like I do, although her hair were straight. Unfortunately mine are curly. She had green eyes, like I do, although her eyes were actually GREEN, mine are amber-colored. And her age...it was my age + ten years, her birthday was the same as mine and in any way she was a bit mary-sueish. It's like I put myself into the roleplay - what I would have liked to be when I grew up.
She was 22.
By now she would be 26.

I long to use her again in some roleplay, since I still like her design and motives and she fills an important slot in my roleplay experiences (I have no other MSN/frpg characters who know healing magic).

A couple of words about her: I never decided whether she was a witch, a druid or a healer. She had the usual lifestory - happy childhood, parents died, became an orphan, moved to a far-away-relative who taught her magic, then she went to explore the world with the intention to learn as much as she can, then one day go back to her teacher and tell her all about what she had found out.
Cliodna has got a talking raven named Coran whom she attained as a payment from an old woman whom she had healed. Right now I'm thinking that it's more likely that the old woman just wanted to get rid of the bird since Coran is selfish, gluttony-ridden, voracious, greedy, talkative towards Cliodna, corrupt, easily buyable, steals shiny things and he's also a shameless coward only interested in his own preservation. He claims not to be owned by Cliodna and that he just follows her around for food and lulz. So. Yep. He's a raven with the mind and tongue of a human, but the personality of a bird. It's also possible that Coran is actually a human who has been turned into a raven by some witch because of his personality, which sparked an idea to ditch Cliodna and do a couple of MSN roleplays with just Coran. His original name was Corvus...but about halfway through the roleplay I sort of forgot it and started to spell it as Coran. So...yep. It was an accidental typo that kind of stucked.

In a couple of frpg's and one short story where I set her as one of the main characters she showed a great interest in rare potions, especially invisibility potion for which she always tried to find new ingredients. The rarest ingredient of all was the fern blossom...since as we all know ferns don't bloom, but that didn't stop her from searching.

Amongst her other things there's a staff, about the same height as she is, with the lower part of it being made of rowan and the upper part from...ebony? I thought it was a good idea at first, but now I see that there's no way a staff like this would stay together. The tip of it has been carved in the shape of a horse, with red gems for it's eyes, because I had looked up a couple of celtic sites in search of animals that celts considered holy. And then there's the shoulderbag with countless empty and full bottles, vials, packages, food and drink. Still, no matter how much stuff she carries she still faints after a couple of spells and once spent three days on only two apples and a piece of bread because I had ''forgotten'' that people need to eat.

I made a couple of drawings of her but I never managed to scan them and only two of them have survived all these years - the felt-pen picture and the scene with the giant squid, both of which I was very proud of at the given time. I consider it my first ever attempt at anime. I'm not saying the 2005-picture IS in anime style, but that was exactly what I was aiming for, with only a couple of Digimon stickers as a reference on what anime should look like. In my mind anime style meant a drawing style with small noses, big eyes, pointed chins and cell-shading, so I wouldn't stop before the eyes looked big enouch, the nose was non-existant, the face was shaped like a heart and the shading was...quite cartoonish actually.

Oh...nostalgy. How I miss all those communities. Maagide Ordu, Vendement, Harry Potter Club. HPC is still up and running but I haven't been there in three years or so. I re-read my first roleplay. It was full of typos, promises for ''adventure filled life in the monastery'', noisy smoke, hilarious monstrosities, like for example a giant squid arose from a spring and tried to kill us all + there were werewolves and vampires and invisible bowmen and there were old men in the middle of uninhabited forests selling horses as soon as we needed to get some. I'm sad that the frpg died off, it had potential and we ruined it. -.- But atleast I got the general idea.

I wonder what has become of Drumador...haven't talked to him in years. I'd like to know how he's doing, what has become of him.

Nostalgia.
Enouch about ranting.

Cliodna (the character) © Cliodna (me)
2005 version: Felt pens and HB pencils.
2010 version: Watercolors, black pencils, colored pencils, HB pencils. [link]

Progress 2 (the making of Atra): [link]

Also, thanks Lumos, for creating DSO and bringing me to roleplays.