Nadeann Durrass

 

Randlander Travelling Lady Bard

 

Place of birth: Andor

 

Age: 48

 

Hair: Platinum-streaked brown, worn long and often in a braid

 

Eyes: Green

 

Height: 5’ 5”

 

Weight: 120lbs

 

Talents: Wit

 

Primary Weapon of Choice: Longbow

 

Secondary Weapon of Choice: Belt Knife

 

Tertiary Weapon of Choice: Hand to hand (i.e. anything handy)

 

Personality:

 

Nadeann is a restless soul, forever seeking to discover new things and find

a new audience for her music and songs. She loves nothing more than to find

a group of like-minded, appreciative people and engage in sociable

activities. Loving to share, she’ll often set up camp outside the major

cities and lure people from their confines to participate in large groups of

singing and dancing. At heart, she is a solitary soul, preferring the life

of the open road and the individuality of each new day, of what lies on the

other side of the next hill.

 

History:

 

“I have more songs to my name than you have had hot dinners, young man!”

 

Starting at an early age, Nadeann remembered having a talent with words,

putting together simple rhymes not long after she learnt to talk. Always

about the things she saw around her, or experienced, Nadeann put the words

into lyrical form and phrase, and later accompanied by a tune played on the

lute her parents had gifted to her as a fourteenth name day present. It was

a magnificent piece: carved from a dark wood she later discovered to be oak,

with tiny embellished carvings that neither hampered the player, nor impeded

the beautiful sound it produced and Nadeann cared for it well. All

throughout her teenage years, Nadeann would make up little songs and set

them to music, her eidetic memory storing them easily until a situation that

called for it arose. Then, she accessed it, as she needed it. Her entire

life she had done that, storing the songs and twiddles of music from

experiences and occasions of note.

 

She lived an intransigent life, leaving her parents’ home at sixteen to see

some of the world instead of remaining in their small house in the outer

city of Caemlyn with a planned future of hearth and children. The prospect

was not appealing to Nadeann in the slightest; so she convinced her parents

to let her go see the world and to come back and settle down when she was

ready to do so. The problem had been that the more she had seen of the

world; the less she had wanted to return. Making her living by playing music

for people and by drawing. Nobles and the nobility had always wanted a

flattering portrait of themselves for posterity, and to show future

generations who had the great power in the Houses. Nadeann had talents in

those areas, so she offered her services as a travelling bard and artist,

never quite managing to obtain fame in either field, but good enough to keep

her in a good life and to sleep in a good bed whenever she was contracted to

do some work.

 

Travelling alone, as she preferred to do, Nadeann soon learnt to defend

herself - protecting her virtue and her person from the occasional man who

got too friendly, or on the other hand from the bandits which seemed to

punctuate the countryside more than ever these days. She spent time

travelling on her own, wandering from village to village and through towns

and cities, never staying in any place longer than she had to and learning

how to make the materials she needed from the natural herbs and minerals she

would find on her travels. Different petals when crushed yielded different

colours to be used as dyes to make paints. Minerals crushed with those

petals gave different textured paints and colours. Nadeann travelled with

her satchel full of such ingredients and wandered happily, sometimes with

the Travelling People for company, as they loved her music and her stories.

A just person, Nadeann would stick up for anyone she saw an injustice

happening to and so life rolled on, the years passing by without a care in

the world. Until she felt the stirrings of darkness starting to touch the

land, and she now strives to make her small skill useful to people, to give

them some relief from the shadows, and the dark days that forebode…

"If music be the food of love, sing on!" -Shakespeare

 

[stamps]

Consider this cross-checked

*bumping back into order*