Larina "Nix" Nichols

"Larina Nix was only six when she heard the call of the Goddess."

- The Complete Netbook of Witches & Warlocks, 1999

Larina was not my first character. She was not even my first "witch" character. But over the years of playing her and using her in many games, she quickly became a favorite of mine.

Larina "Nix" Nichols by Claudio Pozas
Larina by Cladio Pozas

I first rolled her up in July of 1986. At first, she was a "magic-user," and I would play her like a witch. She had a few adventures that year, but that was also when my then DM was heading out of town, and I was getting ready for my senior year at high school. 

Then Dragon Magazine #114 came out in October. 

I read it all over and wondered how I should convert her. The answer became obvious to me right away. She was a witch, only pretending to be a wizard so she could go to Glantri's School of Magic. I kept her magic-user levels and then went on to advance her as a Dragon #114 witch. In the game, I said she ran out of money to keep going, so instead, she got a job at the library in hopes of paying her tuition. 

I updated her sheet and declared her birthday was October 25, but she tells everyone it is October 31st.

As the game progressed, she became less the magical powerhouse I envisioned and became more the group's sage, occult expert, and polyglot. So when it came time to level her up, I took the spells that gave her more social and mental power/aspects. If the choice was to take a power/spell/magic item that gave a blasty power OR say, learn a new language, then I always took the language.  This was also the origin of the "From the Journals of Larina Nix." 

I kept playing her over the years. In college, I kept notes on her and how she played, including her witch spells and powers vs. her magic-user/wizard ones.  I combined these notes with notes I had started back in 1983 on a witch class, and eventually, they became my first Witch class. Since she was so focal in those experiments, I also re-did her as one of my new witches and featured her in a bit of fiction when she was six years old and discovering that she was a witch.

Larina Dragon #114 homage Dragon #114 October 1986
"Larina" by Djinn and "Spirit of the Night" by David Martin

My conceit here is that the original AD&D Larina, with brown eyes (thankyouverymuchVanMorrison) died while battling a vampire. And by dead, I mean dead-DEAD. Witches in my games do not have access to Raise Dead or Resurrection, AND they can't have those spells cast on them. So when a witch dies, she is dead. BUT she can be reincarnated.  The original Larina died, but she was reincarnated. She next appears as a precocious 6-year-old witch in my AD&D 2nd Ed Complete Netbook of Witches and Warlocks" and as an adult witch in my 3rd Edition games (same character), she also appears as a witch in my WitchCraft/Buffy games. They all share some similar memories and at age 25 they can contact their other selves, essentially making her a coven of herself. 

There is a multi-verse of Larinas out there now, one for every game I ever play.

Over the years then, I have used her whenever I picked up a new game. I'd stat her up to see how she worked and test out the magic system. She was also my test character for this massive Excel file I have that would allow me to convert any character to just about any system, though I stopped updating about 10 years ago. So I had multiple versions of this character for I don't know how many systems.  

Influences

Nothing exists in a vacuum, and I did not birth Larina fully formed like Zeus did with Athena. Some very obvious influences (to me) brought her to life. 

Genesis. First and foremost, Larina grew out of my reading of Jung, particularly his notions of a "Dark Anima" side to your personality. I remember sitting on my bed in my old childhood bedroom and thinking about what my own dark anima would be like. In Jung's philosophy, males have a female anima, and women have a male animus. So. What would my anima be like?  I let that one process a bit while I worked on other things. I detailed a lot of this with some armchair pop-psychology a little bit ago, with Jungian and Freudian influences. 

Other witches in my games. As I mentioned above, Larina was not my first witch-like character. But all these characters help shape who she was. Luna Mondgott was a cleric of "the old ways" for Basic D&D. She would later go on to marry Johan Werper I and convert over to his religion. A lot of things I did with her were very witch-like within the boundaries of the Basic D&D Cleric class. Marissia, my so-called "First Witch," was pretty much my rough draft of Larina. Some of the non-Larina bits of Marissia would spin off into Siân, Larina's mother. Another was one of my first AD&D characters. She was a female illusionist named "Cara Niemand," German for "nobody" since her last name was supposed to be a secret. She was a witch I tried to build using just the PHB "by the book" illusionist that I styled as a witch-like character.  I pretty much based her on the art from D1-2 Descent into the Depths of the Earth by Bill Willingham.   I didn't like how she turned out, but she was a great character all the same. She was, like Larina would become, a redhead.  

Her name. Well, this one is much less philosophical, really. "Larina" was a bastardization of Laurana Kanan from Dragons of Autumn Twilight. I only found out Larina was a real name later. When I did discover what it meant, I knew her father now had a name, Lars. Larina isn't really anything like Laurana; though there was a few seconds when Larina was almost a half-elf. I would later explore that with a variety of half-elf magic using characters, in particular Heather (her best friend), Taryn (her daughter), and Sinéad.  Her proper last name did not come till much later, but she was always "Larina Nix." Nix, of course, comes from Stevie Nicks for obvious reasons. But also related to "Nyx" the Greek Goddess of Night.

Her look. Larina has evolved through the years. From her eye color changes (when she turns 25) to little habits like biting her nails. But a lot of her was there on her sheet from 1986. She is 5'4" and 125-127 lbs, which makes her average for the most part. Her looks are striking, but she does have a bit larger than average nose. She is a witch, after all. I think this comes from a girl in junior high who had a larger nose and whom I had a huge crush on. Her hair is red. I had done a lot of blondes already (I'm blonde, so that is where that comes from), and red was a more "witchy" color to me. But it also comes from Barbara Gordon, the Batgirl. She was smart and kicked ass. It also comes from Red Sonja, Daphne (Scooby-doo), and possibly a little of Shelia from the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon. At least the timing is right. It was going to be that or black/brunette. 

There is also a better-than-average chance that a lot of her look was influenced by a lot of the horror movies I was watching at the time. One was easily The Devil's Nightmare (1971), which I scored on VHS tape, and The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave (1971), both featuring the lovely Erika Blanc, who is almost a "live-action Larina" in my mind. However, there is no doubt that one of the biggest influences on how she looked was Cassandra Peterson, aka Elviria. Though not her Elvira character, how she looks in real life. 

She wears a lot of purple because I always felt she would be a fan of Prince. She wears bracers of defense, or at least leather wraps, on both arms, thanks to my love of Wonder Woman. She has magical charms on her wrists and belts. She also wears a strand of dragon teeth that are enchanted to give her elemental protection.  The satchel of scrolls represents her occult knowledge and learning. She also has a full-back tattoo of the triple moon goddess symbol with a pentagram.

Larina by Lady Deddelit

The Games

So here are some of the conversions and revisions I have done of her on these pages. I have a lot more.

There are a lot of Fantasy games here, some horror, and even some supers. The linked ones appeared on this blog. The unlinked are ones I have stats for but have not posted to this blog yet.


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