Kallyr Starbrow: personality

So what's she like? The High Council description in 1613: "a very strong and proud woman, always trying to maintain justice and prestige for her tribe" gives the rough idea. Like a lot of Vingans, Kallyr has no children to protect, so substitutes first the rest of her family (almost all are now dead), then her clan (all dead), then her tribe. Later she applies the same idea to the whole of Sartar. This fierce protectiveness can be misunderstood, and often is, especially by people who don't particularly want it applied to them.

In 1613 she was being torn between trying to protect the Kheldon tribe (who would lose a lot in any war with the Lunars), trying to protect her Sartar heritage and keep whatever vows she had made, and defend an important Orlanth holy site. As the High Council pack tells us: "she has great faith in her deity." She doesn't seem to have handled this kind of pressure particularly well: "..haughty and volatile, and easily goes into fits of shouting and accusation.." Then again: haughty by whose standards? This was written back in the very early days of roleplaying, when the idea of a woman doing something other than what she was told by the men was a new one. I suspect we can discount that. The rest of it though, the quick temper: yes, that's Kallyr. Not that she stays angry for long, but when something annoys her, everyone around gets to know about it.

Set against this, we have to remember that everyone likes her. They may find her irritating, they may think she's an idiot who shouldn't be let out without a keeper, but they like her. Two writers at the time, Minaryth Blue and Denseros the Scribe, refer to her as "the good queen": Denseros isn't that flattering to anyone else in the whole of CHDP!

So why do they like her? Well for one thing, a lot of people admire her determination. She's spent most of the last twenty years fighting the Lunars and losing, she's lost her home and most of her family, but she isn't giving up. Once she's committed herself to a cause, she stays with it: look at all the help she gave Broyan. She keeps her promises and repays her debts: that's why she's trying to rescue the kingdom, rather than making something out of it for herself. All of this applies at smaller scales, too: if she feels she owes the PCs something, she'll do a lot to help them.

She's optimistic: excessively so, some might say. She really does believe that everything will come out all right in the end, and that most people are nice really, despite all the evidence to the contrary. On the other hand, once a problem is staring her in the face, she won't try to hide from it. She'll believe there must be a way of fixing it, and try to do so. And she doesn't think small. For instance, a potential Temple of the Reaching Moon in Sartar is a problem. Some people might try to bribe the masons, or disrupt the convoys of building materials: or just give up. Kallyr hijacks a Lunar ceremony and summons a dragon.

It's perhaps worth taking a look at her style of leadership here. As lots of people have pointed out, as a strategist she's a disaster. But she wins at least one battle, despite being heavily out-numbered, by "sheer inspiration of her men". That, I think, is the point. She's had a lot of experience of leading smaller groups: adventuring parties, clan warbands, tribal warbands, heroquest rings. In every case, she treats the group as an extended family: and her attitude to her family is protective, affectionate, and generous. She expects to know every one of them individually: not just put a name to a face, but know them. Naturally, this has wonderful effects on morale. But there's a limit to how far this approach can be scaled up, and she hits it every time she tries to handle kingdom-sized armies.

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