I’m no stranger to anger. (I always preferred dealing with anger than disappointment from family members.) For years, many folks knew that the strength of my anger was powerful and to steer clear of it. With the toxic mentalities I was around growing up, it felt like I was .5 seconds away from erupting into a raging storm of fury with the slightest provocation.

Anger was easy; Controlling it was hard.

With some natural personal growth, healing and therapy, I was able to contain my anger (and unfortunately a good amount of my emotions) pretty well. So when came an opportunity to become a new character for a new D&D campaign, I eventually found myself as the half orc Barbarian of the Storm – Brute.

I don’t believe I ever planned to play a Barbarian type character. As much as I loved getting into the thick of battle as a tanky cleric, I don’t think I was ever mentally prepared to be a character like Brute.

I was hoping to be a rogue or a ranger. Barbarians were really fascinating to watch, but never could be something I saw myself doing. I wanted to be hidden, at a distance from the heart of the battles. If there’s anything I’ve learned about myself playing D&D, I am a strategist – I want as much information from a good vantage point before I make a real move. (I feel like the need to get the whole picture to make an effective plan might just be my journalistic need to know as much as possible before coming to any conclusions, but who knows?)

I am one of the most stubborn people I know. If I really wanted to, I probably could have dug my heels in and become a different class. But something in my gut, other than my DM saying it could be cool, was telling me to give it a try. I believe that if there enough signs telling me to do something that don’t scream “this is a HORRIBLE idea,” it can’t hurt to at least try.

Barbarians get to choose a primal path that really shapes their rage and fury. I chose the path of the Storm Hearld, specifically the storm of the sea. So when Brute rages, there’s always an aura of the storm brewing in the form of thunder at an enemy within a specific radius. As terrifying as storms are, they are absolutely beautiful to watch from a safe distance.

But this was a nice way for me to rethink about anger and rage. Like a storm, it could be sudden and come from out of nowhere. And if you weren’t careful, you might hurt your loved ones with your fury.

Just a small thing like this helped me focus my anger outbursts. I no longer let the emotion consume me. I would do my absolute best to remember those who loved me and only focus that anger on those who are trying to hurt me.

After rolling our stats, I noticed that Brute’s intelligence was average, but the way I wanted to play it, this meant that they were smart for a barbarian, but not as sharp as their greataxe was.

No matter how much this frustrated the hell out of me, this was mostly a move for me beginning to heal from my head injury. I was struggling for a long time to just get words to form something vaguely coherent. As someone who loves words, you can pretty much figure out how much of a bad time that was for me. So Brute’s intelligence gave me a new way to approach thinking. I had to think, in real time, how to form a sentence and just break it down into something simpler.

My brain was used to functioning on a complex level. I needed to relearn my baseline and build from there. So with Brute, we both learned how to communicate better over the course of the campaign thus far. Progress was progress, even if our spelling wasn’t so great.

Even something as simple as their outfit choice was important to me. As you can see, Brute, as wonderfully drawn by my friend Eleni, they are wearing essentially a suit that once probably looked really good. The way I imagine, it just got to the point where the sleeves of the suit jacket were ripped off in the early rages for this young half-orc that they gave up trying to fix them. The only other things in great condition on Brute are: the Greataxe, the fanny pack of holding and the blue necktie (for headcanon reasons obviously.)

This outfit was absolutely something I thought about a lot. In my life, especially during my senior year of undergrad, I would dress up when I felt like my life was falling apart. I could look good on the outside but be an absolute mess on the inside. I would keep specific things in the best conditions to really distract from the rest of the chaos surrounding it.

No matter the amount of chaos going on in my life, I am fiercely protective of my friends. (I’m pretty sure one of the bonds of Brute is that they’ll protect their friends like a litter of newborn puppies, which absolutely tracks.) One major clash between Brute and I would probably impulse control.

My natural reflex when it comes to making decisions usually means a lot of deep thought and analysis before anything happens. With this character, I was able to get out of my head a little bit more. I knew what was important to me, in this case making sure my friends weren’t in the line of fire, and some situations call for action sooner rather than later. I definitely feel like I’ve missed a lot of opportunities in real life because I just got caught in the depths of my mind over a decision. It’s a leap of faith to trust your gut and the universe to help you land exactly where you need to be.

Somehow, faith would yet again play a role in my D&D characters. Partially because I found myself always wanting to help heal people despite no longer being a grave cleric, but mostly because I knew that just giving into rage wouldn’t be the answer forever.

Thus began the challenge of multiclassing. It was a challenge for sure but the amount of times I found myself instinctually reaching to heal had me reevaluating my character’s path. I’m also a huge fan of growing from challenges, and a D&D related one was something I definitely didn’t wanna pass up on.

The road to becoming a Paladin / Barbarian was tricky. Charisma isn’t usually a strong point of Barbarians, and when I created Brute, I treated that stat as a dump stat. But to me, the thing about learning is that you need to start somewhere.

Brute is a paladin to Heimdall, exclusively the Idris Elba version from the MCU. The way we played it in game was a vision came to Brute in an unfortunate situation with fae horses(?) and a spike pit of Super tetanus (it was complicated, someone got poisoned, no one died it’s fine.)

As the party was midair over these spikes on these fae creatures, we said that Brute definitely heard the call of Heimdall when they were desperately wishing they could help protect their friends more. As cool as imagery as it was, my charisma was just short of being where I needed to qualify to become a paladin. So we played it off as Brute, of good heart, just heard this voice and didn’t know what to do. They kept this memory with them for a while, asking the other paladin how he came to his faith and a nice chat with a priest of Heimdall eventually.

With time, Brute eventually leaned into this voice in their head (Heimdall trying to reach them.) My barbarian went from just acting impulsively all the time to being a little bit more tactical in their decisions both in battle and in RP.

With higher level campaigns, it’s only natural for the DM to also step up their game and truly challenge the players. Our bard got somewhat possessed by a dracolich and lost his hand, we might have accidentally killed a bunch of folks in an elevator drop, an ancient white dragon might have been on the loose AND our druid just recently died (came back to life in another form but in game we’ve still got to process that complex meatball.)

All this conflict brought a whole new internal challenge for Brute: can you deal with guilt, whether deserved or not, but ultimately can you forgive yourself enough to love yourself again?

I love character development. But I also like being effective in gameplay. When I chose to be a paladin, we just reached level 9. I was so tempted to stay a barbarian because of that beautiful thing known as a beautiful critical. But as I said before: anger was easy, control was hard. So as much as I would have loved that extra d12 (which would have meant 3d12 damage on a critical hit) this wouldn’t help Brute, or myself, grow.

As tempting as it was to go back to barbarian and get that brutal critical to become stronger to protect my friends, it wasn’t the right move. I want to grow and being angry about my failures won’t allow me to do that.

So here we are, at level 11. I have officially picked the Oath of Redemption for Brute. The tenets for this oath are peace, innocence, patience and wisdom. Based on Brute’s journey thus far, we need to learn forgiveness towards ourselves. We both feel like we failed our loved ones in some capacity and if we don’t forgive ourselves, we can never move forward or help others efficiently. And besides, when following these tenets are no longer effective, there’s always the barbarian storm brewing.

Theoretically, this journey is far from over. I’ll probably write about Brute’s shenanigans with the fellowship at some point in the future. So here’s to growing as Brute and as Kris.