The Liminal Man

I didn’t plan him. That’s probably the most important thing to know about Cailean Uen.

He was built on the fly during my first ever D&D session — zero prior experience, approximately no idea what I was doing, character sheet assembled in the moment with all the careful deliberation of someone grabbing whatever’s nearest. The result was a Wolfkind Barbarian with a dead adoptive family, a moon goddess, a pyrophobia, and enough psychological damage to constitute a one-character ensemble cast.

I think that says something about me. I’m choosing to believe it says something good.

His name, I should mention, came from the Scottish Gaelic form of Colin. Which I didn’t fully clock until after the fact. So there he is — this haunted lycanthrope dragging his guilt through a gothic horror campaign, carrying the most resolutely ordinary name in the British Isles, just dressed up in translation. My own name comes from Eòghann. We’re both wearing our Gaelic names in their anglicised everyday clothes, and honestly, that feels appropriate.

The character grew from a handful of sessions into something I didn’t expect. He worships Selene. He has a found family he doesn’t feel he deserves — including a party member he calls “Dad,” which should tell you quite a lot. He transformed involuntarily in front of a crowd once and spent the aftermath convinced he was about to face some kind of trial. He was offered puppet versions of his dead parents by a mysterious skeleton and turned them down, because comfortable lies felt worse than the pain of the truth.

That last bit I’m particularly proud of. It’s the moral core of who he is — someone who chooses the weight of reality over the ease of pretending.

I’ve been writing his journal as a way of processing sessions, and it’s become something I care about more than I expected. There are five entries now, running from just before his first transformation through to the most recent session — where a friend was murdered by a vampire and he drew a triskelion on her grave. He worships the Moon, but he reached for a transitional symbol rather than his own faith, because he wanted her transition into the aether to be comfortable. I took about a month to actually write that one up. Some entries need to sit before they’re ready.

The honest version of this retrospective is that Cailean is based heavily on me. The anxiety, the guilt that lives too large for what might reasonably warrant it, the moon-tracking, the Scottish heritage, the fourteen-year special interest in lycanthropy that the people around me have learned to simply accept. Playing him has been unexpectedly cathartic. He gets to have the experiences in heightened form — literally transforming, literally losing control, literally being offered the chance to undo his worst moment — and I get to write him working through them at a remove.

D&D just gave me a formal occasion to do something I was already doing. Cailean was always in there somewhere. He just needed a character sheet.

(He also gave me more reason to learn Gàidhlig na h-Alba, which I’ll count as a side effect rather than an excuse. It was absolutely an excuse.)

We haven’t had a session in months. I don’t know when the next one will be, or what it’ll look like when it arrives. Cailean is somewhere in the middle of things — Sammy freshly buried, Strahd still out there, the party scattered across whatever limbo campaign hiatuses produce. He’s waiting, which, honestly, suits him. He’s spent most of his life in some form of threshold or another.

The journal is still there if you want to read it — cailean.journal.ewancroft.uk. Start from Silver Fire and read forward. It’s better that way, knowing what’s coming when he doesn’t.

Whether there’s more to add to it yet, I genuinely can’t say.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​