Godwin the Wise

Godwin, who is part of the Fast Track to Redemption campaign, is a former semi-reluctant clerk of the god Ignoramius who has recently renounced his old god and become instead a semi-reluctant cleric of The Divine Kale.

Godwin spent the first twenty or so years of his life traveling around Shamina with his father, a devoted cleric and theurge of Ignoramius named Solabein the Uninformed. As a pious Ignoramian, Solabein always did his best to shelter his son from all knowledge and keep him as much in the dark about himself, the world, and life in general as possible. Godwin therefore grew up greatly resenting both his father and his father's religion, and developed a profound curiosity and thirst for knowledge of all kinds early in his miserable young life. Life with his secretive and repressive--but well-traveled--father did have its up side, however, as it's difficult to entirely keep the wool over the eyes of a son who accompanies you on travels far and wide. Godwin was therefore able to see and learn a fair amount on the sly over the years. On a few rare occasions, in fact, he even managed to sneak a look at his father's spell books.

When Godwin was around twenty years old, circumstances of which he had no knowledge led to his father's death by fire. As the charred and mortally wounded Solabein lay dying, he performed two final acts: to burn all his spell books, and to cast the spell to officially confer upon Godwin the Ignoramian rank of "Wise" (having convinced himself, quite erroneously, that his impious son merited this rank--the next step up the Ignoramian hierarchy from the bottom rank of "Enlightened"). Scarcely saddened by the death of a repressive father with whom he had never so much as been allowed to develop much of a personal relationship, Godwin has ever since delighted in interpreting his rank of "Wise" ironically, and wearing it as a badge of pride.

Soon after his father's death, Godwin discovered, via experimentation with the few tidbits he'd managed to glean from Solabein's spellbooks over the years, that he was able to cast two of his father's old spells. It seemed--so Godwin surmised--that the god Ignoramius had not noticed Solabein's death, and was now mistaking Godwin for Solabein and continuing to power "Solabein's" spells! Freed from the misery of his youth by his father's death and empowered by his god's obliviousness, Godwin thus embarked upon a life of adventure. He was obliged, of course, to go through the motions of Ignoramian worship in order to maintain his "impersonation" of his dead father, lest Ignoramius realize his error, and so he became a reluctant Ignoriamian cleric and theurge, constantly battling with the cognitive dissonance that this produced in a young man who otherwise considered himself a scholar and dedicated seeker of knowledge of all kinds.

Godwin is motivated primarily by a deep-seated curiosity and yearning for knowledge, as well as by a certain craving for power and a strong drive to justify a view of himself as a saner and better person than his repressive father and said father's Ignoramian cohorts. The latter trait has led to a preoccupation with questions of morality and of what is moral--a subject on which Godwin received no useful guidance during his youth, since his father's conception of morality revolved entirely around willful ignorance and suppression of truth. However, his preoccupation with morality comes into conflict at times with his underlying and only semi-acknowledged craving for power--itself a product of the powerlessness and ignorance in which his father kept him for twenty years. Godwin is thus riddled with internal conflicts; outwardly, however, he tends to project a certain arrogance born of pride in his own intellect, the impressiveness of having rejected his father's insane ways while still preserving the power that came of them, and his desire to see himself as more sane, beneficent, and moral than the Ignoramians (and any others who strike him as similarly sinister, irresponsible, or crazy).

To his chagrin, however, Godwin has shown a certain pattern, since striking out on his own, of falling in with individuals rather more impulsive, undignified, and morally questionable than he would like, which has all-too-often rendered comically unsuccessful his efforts to affect a calm and dignified demeanor, and caused his various internal conflicts to be played out in interpersonal conflicts with his companions. During his adventures, Godwin has experimented and struggled with various approaches to morality (and sanity), and he has alternately sought role-models to emulate and striven to be a role model for others. He also very notably faltered in his struggle with morality on one occasion, when, feeling his personal power (as derived from his dangerous game of duping a deity) threatened, he went so far as to commit a cold-blooded murder that has haunted him ever since in order to preserve it. On the whole, however, Godwin tends to function (in the adventuring parties that he joins) as a seldom-heeded force for restraint, careful planning, and respectful, nonviolent treatment of others (as well as, when it comes to politics, an advocate of democracy and the rule of law, and a staunch opponent of tyranny).

Following a few years of miscellaneous adventures (during the course of which, incidentally, he became unwelcome in several of the City-States of Quashtiree), Godwin fell in with Kale Ecuttel, Merri Roundbottom, and a revolving group of other adventurers based originally at Kale's Tree just outside the Toswaldian city of Hinkerville. On December 31st, 999, Godwin and his companions succumbed, along with the entire city of Hinkerville, to a Frigid Doom in which the city was frozen, separated from Terrek, and then thawed millenia later out in the heavens in a strange and disorienting futuristic world with which Godwin has at times had considerable difficulty coping. He, his party of adventurers, and a transplanted Hinkerville are currently based on a world known as Pangea, where, through a convoluted and traumatic--but ultimately liberating--sequence of events, the god Ignoramius has, with the help of Godwin and his companions, recently been vanquished by a new god who takes the form of, and uses the name of, Kale. Though some people both in the party and not have long (and to Godwin's mind, foolishly) worshipped Kale himself as a god, Godwin carefully distiguishes between Kale his mortal buddy, and The Divine Kale whom he now somewhat reluctantly worships (though not quite as reluctantly as he formerly worshipped Ignoramius) and who has taken over the powering of his (mostly Ignoramian) spells.

A few notable quirks that Godwin has picked up during his adventures include an inordinate fondness for fish tacos (a food that he has not been able to enjoy now for several millenia), a debilitating fear of zephyrcraft travel, an on-again, off-again addiction to Potion Deux that has at times made his life very chaotic, and an unshakable attachment to and dedication to the preservation of the work of non-representational art that stands on display in the town square of Hinkerville.