The Plays of Aphra Marlowe (Prologue): Who the Heck is Aphra Marlowe?

Table card created with MS Publisher and Hero Forge

 

In my first experience with 3rd edition D&D as a player, it was just me and the DM, and I ran a party of four characters. Two of these I'd converted from earlier 2e play: Conrad the farmboy paladin and Julie the irrepressibly curious elf mage/thief. To round out the party, I created two more characters: an athletic halfling cleric called Brother Murphy and a half-elf bard--Julie's cousin--named Aphra. 

Aphra, I'd decided, was an actor and a playwright, drawn more to the vulgar theater of her human father's people than to the sophisticated poetry and music of her elven mother's. Her tag quote was "Of course you don't have any lines. You're a tree." The campaign wasn't particularly heavy on role-play, given that I was juggling four characters, but somehow Aphra stuck with me after we left D&D3 behind for other games. She had that aura of trouble, fun trouble, that clings to great RPG characters.  She made a brief appearance in my 4e play (game-store Living Forgotten Realms), but didn't quite click with the system or the venue. 

And then I found an opening in a 5e mini-campaign. This was also public play, but we'd left the strictures of Living Forgotten Realms and Adventurers' League behind and just doing whatever the DM wanted to run. This is the period when Aphra got her last name (Kit Marlowe's rough-and-tumble life being closer to the D&D archetype than Aphra Behn's), her extensive collection of wigs (stored on a rack in her bag of holding), and her bibliography, which started as a list of titles illustrated by Playbill covers designed in MS Publisher.

So, anyway, the point of all that was to introduce the character who'll be the subject of the next several posts: Aphra Marlowe, enfant terrible of the Faerun theatrical world. (I used Forgotten Realms material out of convenience; most of the games I've used Aphra in didn't take place in the Realms, but it's a popular kitchen-sink setting and I've played and run a lot of D&D games that used it as a backdrop, so it was easier than making up cities and theaters and local politics out of whole cloth.)