Born on one of the multiverse's countless medieval fantasy planes, magician Daniel Obrove has established a dimensional link between his world and realms beyond to seek excitement and adventure!
Besides the natural proclivity for magic, Daniel Obrove is through and through a normal human being. You know, genetically speaking. His family line can be traced back to a clan of farmers trying to eke out a living in a land plagued by goblin raiding parties, necromantic legions, and the odd draconic menace. Generations later, not much had changed, save for the odd child born with the spark of magic in them. After accidentally setting fire to a grain silo with an errant spell, Daniel was shipped off to the kingdom's eminent mage's college, where he learned to control his powers and impose his will on the natural world.
His tenure at the school complete, Obrove now earns his keep by performing wizardly duties: advising young knights, selling "take-and-bake" prefabricated spells to townsfolk, running DPS in adventurer parties, and so on. He has settled down in a cottage outside one of the realm's calmer villages, where he maintains his spellcrafting enterprise. When he's not conducting his studies in the arcane, Obrove finds most of his time spent exploring the vast multiverse. The boundless possibilities of infinite worlds has only very recently opened up to him, thanks to a serendipitous discovery.
After his wizard's training was complete, Daniel set to work performing independent study of the magical arts, as magic users are wont to do. The most important result of Daniel’s work was his discovery of a spell allowing him to create portals to other worlds. It was an old spell, used by the ancient Horde Lordes in times where goblins and similar brutish species ravaged the multiverse. Thankfully, Daniel had taken a course on ur-goblin languages in school, and was able to translate the spell from the snotty rag he found in the depths of the university library.
The spell, when cast, would cause the ground to split apart and produce an ominous arched gateway, constructed of dark stone and lined with ur-goblin runes. With an infusion of magical energy, the symbols could be activated in specific sequences to open a portal to new worlds. Upon choosing a destination, a sister gateway would be created on the other side, allowing for a two-way transit between realms. Convenient!
Creating his first portal in the depths of a secluded cavern, Daniel stepped through to find a world not unlike his own. Sword and sorcery abounded, knights rescued maidens, it was par for the course as far as Daniel Obrove was concerned. He passed through the portal again and again to find that each new world he visited was exactly like his own except for usually imperceptible key differences.
By studying the list of coordinates scrawled next to the portal spell, Daniel finally learned of a radically different sequence of runes. The wizard stepped through one more time to discover a world which was a true departure from what he knew. A towering forest of steel and brick stretched before him, and metal carriages crawled along concrete thoroughfares wider than any of the dusty paths back home. It was crowded, and it was noisy, but it was also so new! Fertile ground for research!
Since that first success, Daniel has created a second portal under his home, to easily access the myriad universes waiting to be discovered. He has kept his findings from the mage's college, preferring to keep the knowledge of the wider multiverse (what he refers to as the "Hither and Thither") to himself, so as to not risk his world's exposure to alien threats, or something. So he claims. The truth is that the greedy magician currently believes that withholding the knowledge of the multiverse is more beneficial to himself. Perhaps, one day, Daniel Obrove will see fit to share his discoveries with his world. Why, one theory states that this has already happened.
Despite his sage knowledge and vast repertoire of earth-shattering spells, Daniel Obrove is only a few years out from his graduation at the mage's college. He is a little over twenty years old, with a friendly face that's beginning to round out slightly. His neglect of exercise and years spent poring over tomes has caused his muscles to atrophy, so he is easy for physically-capable foes to overpower if they can get close enough, and if he hasn't quaffed a potion of strength or something. Also take into account his height advantage, if you’re under six feet tall.
Daniel cares greatly about looking neat and well-groomed, and thus has yet to adopt the long beard typical of his profession. That, and beards are itchy.
In terms of clothing, Daniel is typically arrayed in a freshly-pressed purple robe, complemented by a wide-brimmed, if worn, pointed wizard’s hat. The hat is useful for when Daniel is brooding mysteriously in the corners of taverns, or when it’s raining outside. Slung from Daniel’s hips are an assortment of small leather pouches for gathering spell components while traveling, as well as for toting any assorted arcane accouterments he will need to have available.
Daniel Obrove's magic relies primarily on the magical energy present in the environment and generated in moderate amounts by his own body. With training, Daniel will be able produce more magical power on his own, but for the time being he has made due using the ambient energy hanging in the air. There’s plenty of it, and none of his spells are so powerful that he has to deplete his surroundings.
Not yet, at least.
Daniel will generally utilize magical energy in order to produce elemental effects: casting a fireball, dousing the blaze caused by that fireball, creating sandbags after flooding the surrounding area, and so on. Exceptions include the spellcrafting he's taken up to make a living, the summoning he utilizes to bring creatures from the Hither and Thither directly to him, and the passive warding magic devised in order to survive on other worlds, as well as a select other miscellaneous techniques.
Spellcraft requires reagents and spell components to bind a particular magical effect to a sheet of parchment. This can include anything from a gust of wind to the portal spell that has proven essential to Daniel's work. The magician uses spellcrafting to fund his research, creating spells that anyone can activate and then selling them to non-magical individuals that might have need of them, such as the citizens of the village near his home.
Summoning demands intonation and ritual to pull named entities from the Hither and Thither into a binding circle. On other worlds, the incantation acts as the means of defining and calling whatever is being summoned--spoken word is the “meat” of the summoning spell. On Daniel's world, the circle, as well as the assembly of the ritual itself, is key. A chalk circle is inlaid with runes and sigils and offerings are placed around it, all to loan identity to the summon and entice it from whatever realm it hails from. The effort required to exact a ritual provides most of the energy needed for the spell to be cast, so a mage has to expend little magical power to call what they intend to call. Once an entity appears in the circle, it is trapped there unless a mistake was made in preparing the ritual. Lots can go wrong, but summonings are foolproof when done right, unless of course some numpty trips and breaks the fragile chalk circle, as often happens with Daniel Obrove. The fool.
Besides his primary focus on evocation, spellcraft, and summoning, Daniel also possesses knowledge of a wide range of miscellaneous magical spells. He prides himself on being a wizard generalist, focusing on learning techniques from a variety of magical traditions, rather than choosing to specialize in one school. As a jack of all magical trades, he possesses a variety of cantrips and minor enchantments to suit almost any situation. For example, the wizard has dipped his toes into the school of abjuration for when his travels take him to environments that are inhospitable to most life. A quickly-executed warding spell in can help Daniel survive in the worst situations, even extreme hot or cold.
If Daniel does happen to die, which he sometimes does, he has also studied a little under priests and divine communicants, to gain a little extra edge when negotiating for a second chance with a universe’s respective psychopomp, deity, or games master.
Daniel Obrove is the "prime" instance of a potentially infinite number of other Daniel Obroves which exist throughout the Hither and Thither. In this case, he's a newly-graduated generalist magician, but in other universes he might be a powerful archmage, a magical blacksmith, or a shapeshifting deep-space explorer! None of these Obroves are in any way Daniel's past lives, his blood relatives, or his close acquaintences, but they are all, by some intrinsic spark or quality, Obrove.
Some of the other Obroves know of the Daniel in question, but for the time being, he is wholly ignorant of all the other "himselfs" running around. With time and experience, maybe Daniel Obrove will get a clue and come to realize that he isn't so alone in the multiverse. One theory states that this has already happened.
More of the aforementioned alternate Obroves can be found on their alt list, here.
There are more "Danalogues" to come, eventually, so we kindly ask that you...
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