Born to a traveling troupe of entertainers, Elthana was raised surrounded by a variety of performers and encouraged to find her own preferred method of expressing art and she quickly found she was a natural dancer and began developing her art. When she was a teenager, her caravan came under attack by a particularly powerful bandit clan and she was badly injured. After she recovered, she knew that she never wanted to be put into that position again and so when the troupe stopped at a monastery to rest for the night, she stayed to learn self-defense from the monks that lived there. Their ascetic lifestyle was not something she was ever able to become accustomed to, but she found that her background in dancing offered her unique insights into the movements of the martial arts that the monks practiced. She learned what she was able to before the wanderlust that defined her youth set in again and she left the monastery. Over the years she has worked to perfect her unique fusion of martial arts and dance while furthering her reputation as a performer.
Design Notes: This character idea actually came from playing through Yakuza 0. Through the course of gameplay one of the characters, Goro Majima learns a rather… unique style of fighting from watching several break-dancers “battle” in the streets and he incorporates their bombastic movements into his martial arts to create one of the more hilarious but somehow still effective fighting style. So I wondered how this concept could be incorporated into a 5th Edition character. And so Elthana came into being. The Way of the Open Hand is 5e’s attempt to distill martial arts in it’s purest form without any magical or supernatural frills, and so that’s what I settled on for this character. I can easily see pirouettes and other dance movements being introduced into the various forms and katas that a martial artist would practice, creating a new, unique fusion of a fighting style.
Ben Erickson
