Roland Deschain

Player Info:
Name: Inkwell
Timezone: Chicago Time
Contact: mister_inkwell | AIM: misterporcelain

Character Info:
Name: Roland Deschain
Age: Unknown; I'd hazard a guess at mid-fifties.
AU/PG/CANON/OC: Canon | The Dark Tower

Key Points:

• Childhood: Roland is born the son of Steven Deschain, head of the gunslingers and basically king of Gilead. He grows up having how to shoot (and other skills) literally beaten into him by his teacher Cort.


• Manhood Test: Roland discovers some serious court intrigue involving his mother and his father's advisor, and this ticks him off so much he throws a bird at Cort and becomes a fully-fledged gunslinger.


• Hambry: Roland's dad sends him and two friends to a sleepy backwoods town to get out of the way of the war. It turns out the sleepy backwoods town is a key pivot point in their enemy's plans so that was a total bust. He also falls in love with a wonderful girl who dies horribly because she got involved with him, thus beginning his lifelong habit of killing the people he cares about.


• The War: Everyone Roland knows and loves dies. He is personally responsible for several of those deaths, including his mom. See what I mean?


• Wandering Around For Fuckever: In the wake of everyone he knows and loves dying, Roland sets off on his quest to find the Dark Tower and stop the world from being quite so shitty.


• Jake: While wandering in the desert nearly dead of heatstroke, Roland finds a small boy who fell into Midworld from New York and immediately adopts him. He drops him off some train tracks into a pit maybe a hundred pages later.


• The Big Sleep: Roland talks to one of the servants of the Big Bad, gets some prophecy laid on him, smokes some probably drugged tobacco, and wakes up ten years later. He immediately gets attacked by a mutant lobster and loses two fingers and his big toe.


• The Drawing: Roland takes a jaunt through three different doors to other peoples' minds in order to obtain the companions it was foretold he'd drag along on his epic quest (and also find some antibiotics for the infection he got from the lobster). The first two are some pretty cool people named Eddie and Susannah. The third is the mind of the guy who killed Jake in New York. Roland throws him in front of a train.


• Jake 2 (The Jakening): Turns out Roland hecked up the timeline by killing the guy who killed Jake, because Jake didn't die when he was supposed to. Roland now has two sets of memories, one where Jake is alive and one where he isn't. It freaks him out pretty bad. On the upside this means there's a New York where Jake isn't dead, so he gets to come back via some extended shenanigans and join the gang.


• Lud, or How Soon Can We Leave For Topeka: Roland and the gang visit the big city. As it turns out the big city is a really awful place, so they leave it on a sentient murderous train. I'll be taking Roland from when that train crashes in Topeka.

History:

(There's a lot to cover here and I had to be very brief about a lot of things and leave out explanations to meet the length requirement. Let me know if you need any clarification on anything!)

Roland grew up in Gilead, the capitol of civilization in his world. It was also the seat of government, which his father Steven oversaw as the leader of the gunslingers: men trained to bear guns and keep the peace. Roland, as his son, began training at a young age to inherit his guns.

Meanwhile war was brewing. 'The Good Man', Farson, wanted to overthrow the government and impose the rule of the people. When Roland was fourteen his father's adviser, Marten (secretly allied with the Good Man), revealed to Roland that he was having an affair with Roland's mother. Roland challenged his teacher Cort for the right to his guns, a symbol of manhood, so that he could kill Marten. He chose his pet hawk David as a weapon and maimed Cort badly enough to pass the test.

Roland's father heard what had happened and sent Roland his friends Cuthbert and Alain to the town of Hambry on the outskirts of the area loyal to Gilead. He assumed the war would pass them by there. While there Roland met and fell in love with a girl named Susan Delgado, who was promised to the mayor of the town as a 'side-wife'. The two struck up an affair in secret.

As it turned out the mayor of the town was in league with Farson and the boys found themselves dealing with a plot. Susan was killed in the ensuing fight. On the way back to Gilead to aid with the war Roland had a vision of the Dark Tower and this began his lifelong quest to travel to it.

The war itself went badly for the gunslingers. With nothing else left, Roland turned his attention to the Tower. He journeyed away from Gilead and fell into tracking the man in black, a servant of the same force that employed Farson. While following the man in black through the desert he found a boy named Jake who had died in another universe and been brought there. The man in black forced Roland to decide between catching him or Jake's life, and Roland let Jake die. He and the man in black spoke, and the man in black predicted he would meet others for his quest.

This happened via doors to other worlds through which he could bring people back to his. In this way he collected Eddie Dean and Susannah Dean, who he decided to start training as gunslingers while they sought the Tower. He also entered the mind of the man who killed Jake and killed him, stopping Jake from dying and splitting the timeline. This allowed them to collect Jake from the timeline where he was alive.

The group followed the path to the Tower to the city of Lud, where there was a train Jake had been having visions about. The train (Blaine) was sentient and suicidal, and he challenged them to a riddle contest for their lives. They won the contest but Blaine crashed anyway.

Personality:

Roland is a very practical man. As the book puts it, hes the kind of man who'd straighten paintings in strange hotel rooms. He likes things to be neat and in order both around him and inside him. His mind was molded from childhood into the mind of a gunslinger: someone who notices everything and is constantly taking stock of themselves and the world around them. Inter-personally he wastes little time on pleasantries except when he's dealing with someone who needs to be manipulated with them; otherwise he sees them as pointless filler. He sees his words and actions as weapons just as much as his guns and so he doesn't speak or act without reason. This can make him come across as blunt or uncaring but he much prefers to cut to the thick of things as quickly as possible rather than carefully dancing around a conversation.

Roland is the kind of man who needs to have a purpose. His entire life centers around that purpose and most everything he does is in service of that end goal (sometimes to the point of obsession, as it was with the Tower). He holds that goal above all else and is willing to sacrifice other people and his own happiness for it. See, Roland isn't a terribly moral person, but he believes very strongly in what is right. He will and has done horrible things in the name of what he thinks is right, and he feels no conflict over it except in the cases of it hurting people he cares for. Jake's first death for instance is something that ate him up inside even knowing that it had to happen, and it genuinely pains him to know that Eddie and Susannah are likely to die as well because they chose to follow him.

Unlike your usual grizzled older male protagonist, Roland doesn't work to put gulfs between himself and those he might hurt. Instead he craves emotional closeness and longs to love and be loved, particularly after the many decades he spent entirely alone. In canon he grows close to Jake, Eddie and Susannah very quickly, and comes to think of them as his as though that's the most sensible and practical thing in the world. To be incapable of loving is something that actually scares him; deep down under the hardened outer shell he's a romantic at heart.

He also believes deeply in the concept of ka, something which in his world loosely translates to fate. Ka binds people together, influences events, and is in general responsible for things continuing on as they're supposed to. It's a vague concept at best in the books because it covers so many things; falling love with and losing Susan was ka, killing Jake was ka, he and his little ragtag family are a ka-tet (group bound together by the same fate). Ka means less 'this specific thing has to happen' and more 'whatever happens is what was supposed to happen', and that tends to be how Roland lives his life even when ka fucks him over. He wastes very little time on 'what if' and 'if only' because there's no point in them; he prefers to look firmly forward and deal with what life throws at him as it comes.

Gem Considerations: Roland's gem is a Bisbee Turquoise, placed over his heart and cut into a donut. Turquoise is a stone of protection, of strengthening of relationships, and of sound leadership: it plays into all the traits Roland already exhibits or values. I also admit I found it funny that it protects specifically from falls when Roland is constantly swooning and falling over (plus, you know, the whole Jake thing).

As for the arc I'd like for him: I have a very vague idea right now. Roland is very stuck in his ways already and I don't foresee or plan on any serious changes in his personality. I'd more like him to have an external arc where he eventually builds himself a home and a family in the game, forming relationships, taking on a protective role, and acting in accordance with his gem in that way. If that then leads to his close CR opening up dialogues about the issues he himself doesn't care to address, that'd be incredible, but mostly I think he'll mellow more than change.

I used this site here for my info.

Power considerations:

• Present vision. The ability to see not into the future but rather things that are happening currently elsewhere. Those things are limited to things concerning him (so if someone was, say, messing with his room), the people he's close to (say, something bad happening to a friend), or things that will eventually concern him (something random that in a few hours or so will become his problem). He may get flashes that will prompt him to do what he's 'supposed' to be doing, ones that direct him toward the right place at the right time.


• Empathy. The ability to sense the basic emotional state of the people around him, especially strong with people he's close to and very faint to nonexistent with everyone else (though it should be noted even a very faint feeling from every person in a big crowd is going to be a good amount of empathetic feedback). It comes less as 'oh this person is sad' and more 'wow that sure is a dark, heavy, shitty feeling'.


• Projection. The ability to psychically 'stowaway' in another person's body, see what they see, and communicate with them as a little voice in the back of their mind. He can also attempt to take control of their body, but this would alert them to his presence (if they didn't already know) and they'd be fully able to fight him off. While he's in another person, his own body will be unconscious and vulnerable.

Roland has a low-level innate psychic ability, something that a fair number of people in his world have. He can (and was trained to) hypnotize people. Once they're hypnotized he is able to psychically suggest things to them or pull up memories of theirs. This isn't a skill he uses often: mostly it's reserved for when there's information he needs that he can't get otherwise. He also is able to communicate telepathically with and sense the emotions and energies of people he is particularly close to or linked to by ka. This likely won't be something he notices is gone unless one of those people shows up in-game. I've approximated most of the things he's capable of in canon with the powers listed above! You can think of them kind of like a very slightly powered up arsenal of what he already has naturally (except for the third one which is just me really liking the 'stepping into other people's minds' thing and running with it).

As for how he would react to gaining power, he'd likely see it as a new skill to master and wouldn't make a big deal out of it. In all honesty he probably wouldn't even use some gem powers (like shapeshifting or weapon summon) because his body and his gun are good enough for him already.

Sample: Here he is on the Test Drive!