Now, as we all know, it all starts with the creation of the character, and I thought this was going to be a very important step, especially since this character was going to be both an RP experiment as well as a druid experiment.  However, as my method of character creation tends to be stranger than most, I figured I’d dive into it here first so you can see where I’m coming from and how exactly this tauren woman took shape.

If you’re actually interested in reading about my character creation process, then read on.  If not, well, feel free to skip to the very bottom of the entry for a picture of my new-ish druid.

I’ll be the first to admit that how I tend to go about creating my characters is a little different as it tends to be slightly more organic.  I let the characters come to me; they spring forth from frequent, often sudden, bursts of inspiration.  Yes, okay, it’s a bit more artsy than most people, but this is how things have gone for me after awhile.  I’m the sort of person who, in pen-and-paper RPGs, is constantly creating new characters and leveling them up appropriately in case something happens to the character I usually play, or just to get them onto the page so they can “exist”, so to speak.  Most of them tend to be whole from the moment of their conception, with how they look already decided and with strong backgrounds and personalities that I can draw from at any given time, though I might not know everything about them immediately.

In play, I tend to let the characters do what they want, act how they want in a way that makes sense to them.  Sometimes, I attempt to fight it, but they usually wind up fighting back so they can get to how they’re meant to be.  Sometimes, the things they do are a surprise even to me.  When a character says something about their background or does something a bit different, it doesn’t seem out of place to me, the player.  It’s the direction the character was meant to go in.  Yes, you can say that I’m just “making it up as I go along” (and I’d be inclined to agree with you sometimes), but it’s never felt that way to me.  It’s just how the character is meant to be.

I’m not alone in this; some of my friends operate on the same wavelength that I do.  We often joke that we’re tossing the “character magnet” back and forth.

Sadly, for about a week after I announced this project, nothing came to mind.  Nothing.  Nada.  I had done all this research on druids, on the tauren… and nothing.  Nothing was coming to mind.  Frustrated though I was, I wasn’t about to give up! No, I knew there was a character there somewhere.  I just had to wait and keep browsing.

Thus, I turned back to my old staple: WoWWiki.com.  There, I came upon the concept of savagekin, people that surrender themselves to the natural world, abandoning their humanity to live amongst the beasts.  While I didn’t want a savagekin exactly, as that would put a damper on RP interaction, I wondered if I could use that as a jumping-off point.  What came to me shortly after was the mental image of a tauren woman in one of the many druid armor sets (which set it was, I cannot recall, I’m afraid) wandering through one of the many forests of Azeroth.  She eventually came upon a logger camp in this forest, promptly shifted to the form of a bear, and proceeded to maul him and the rest of the encampment before shifting back into a tauren and wandering off as slowly as she had appeared. She was joined after by a female orc, whom I believe to be a warrior, who sat atop a barstool with a mug of some sort of alcohol in her hand, saying that the tauren woman pretty much came and went as she pleased, and that the tauren needed to get herself socialized again because she had spent so much time amongst the animals and the forests.

While I plan to play the orc at a later date, the tauren was beginning to take shape and I was rather excited.  What I had was an extremely nature-driven druid, who believed that respecting nature also involved protecting it by any means necessary (even if it involved killing her enemies), and tended to be slightly more abrasive as a result.  Everything seemed to fall into place after this, though I was still stuck on her name.

Eventually, I decided I wanted something that sounded somewhat strong, as well as having a Native American flair to it, as the Tauren culture seems to be derived from it, and, after browsing around naming websites for hours on end, I finally settled on a name I liked.  So, ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure to introduce you to Eyota Darkthorn.  Say hello, honey!

…or, you know, bow. That works, too.

She abandoned the druid, as well as all desire to play one, until recently.  With the arrival of multiple expansions, and, most recently, patch 3.2, her desire to play a druid was rekindled, especially after seeing the redesigned bear and cat forms.  Thrilled, she rolled up a tauren druid and is now happily running around Azeroth as a bear.

If you haven’t guessed yet, the girl in the story is actually me.  Who am I?  I’m Thyanel, the author of Pen and Shield, bringing you something new: my adventures as I learn to be a beartank.  I’ve said many times that the druid is my first class love, and, well, they’re special to me.  I learned how to play the game on a druid.  I know the rules of playing them have changed considerably, but I’m excited to give it a try once again and relearn everything from the ground up.

I’ve decided to do most of this without guides (except for the occasional gear/tanking guide), without any sort of rules.  Equipment is either made by one of my other characters or obtained via quest rewards.  Of course, as this is me, RP is also bound to come into play in one form or the other.

So, in the beginning, there was nothing, just a druid learning to be a bear.  Soon, however, she hopes to become something mighty.  This is her story.