A drawing of two D&D characters I came up recently: Bright Tooth and Notched Ear of the Smoking Mountain clan. The mountain in question is in the background.
Siblings born when their clan was subject to and imprisoned in the lair of a Red Dragon with a taste for humanoid flesh, Tooth and Notch were liberated when a brave adventuring party killed the dragon. Their captivity has left deep scars on both of them. The older sister, Tooth had been ‘under preparation’ to become the dragon’s next humanoid meal, being force-fed and fattened up by the dragon’s sadistic Kobold worshippers for the purpose; for two years, she successfully maintained a brutal training regime between every forced meal to keep from reaching the size where they judged her ready to be eaten. Much as they tried, she never broke, and during the liberation a good number of those Kobolds met their ends by the glaive she picked up from the Dragon’s hoard and continues to carry today. Her younger brother, Notch, perceived just like his sister as a ‘troublemaker’ by the Kobold jailers, had his arcane curiosity exploited by them when they allowed him to make his way to a soul-stealing artifact in the dragon’s hoard that had already cost several Kobolds their lives. He managed to avoid death from the artifact by a hair, but it nearly severed the link between his soul and body all the same, and to this day that link remains extremely tenuous. Functionally, it put Notch in an ‘out of body experience’ state and robbed him of the ability to control his body as if afflicted with a motor neuron degenerative disease. He has partially recovered and is able to control his body’s broad movements, but they remain comparatively weak and unsteady and fine movements like facial expressions, speech, and using his fingers for anything other than clasping remain mostly beyond his reach. At the same time, this curse has awakened within him limited arcane abilities, most notably telepathic speech and telekinesis, that he uses to compensate to some degree.
Free and inspired by the people that rescued them, the siblings are taking to the adventuring path themselves. Both take a hard-line stance against dragons of any kind meddling with and being in charge of people’s affairs. Tooth in particular is looking to slay evil dragons personally, to ensure that they can never do to others what she and her clan suffered under for decades. She also sees herself as her brother’s protector and caretaker, and part of their collective motivation to take to the adventuring path is to find a cure for Notch’s condition.
Tooth is a fighter with the Samurai subclass from Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, while Notch is a Witch (Middle Finger of Vecna homebrew class) with the ‘hollow’ curse.