Aldraxis Timberwalk

Wood Elf · Druid · Circle of Spores · Level 1 · Chaotic Good

“I grew up where the oldest trees remember things no living creature should. I left because the dead asked me to carry something outward. I refer to them as still here — just quieter.”

At a Glance


Race	Wood Elf
Class	Druid — Circle of Spores
Level	1
Alignment	Chaotic Good
Background	Hermit
Ruleset	2014 Player’s Handbook
Proficiency Bonus	+2
Spell Save DC	8 + WIS modifier + 2

Ability Scores

STR	DEX	CON	INT	WIS	CHA
Dump	2nd (+2 Wood Elf)	3rd	Flexible	Best ★	Flexible

Priority: WIS first — it drives your spell DC, Shillelagh attacks, and Insight. DEX second for AC and Initiative. CON third to stay on your feet.

Suggested array: WIS 16, DEX 14, CON 13, INT 12, CHA 10, STR 8

Derived:

AC: 13 (Leather Armour 11 + DEX +2)
Initiative: +2
Speed: 35 ft (Wood Elf)
Hit Points: 8 + CON modifier

Cantrips — Always Prepared

Shillelagh

Staff attacks use your WIS modifier — dump STR entirely. This is your primary melee attack. With WIS 16: +5 to hit, 1d8+3 bludgeoning.

Guidance

Hand it out freely. +1d4 to any ability check. One of the most useful cantrips in the game — use it before every skill roll you can.

Chill Touch

Necrotic ranged attack. On a hit, the target cannot regain hit points until the start of your next turn. Use against healers, regenerating creatures, or anything you need to finish off.

Level 1 Spells — 2 Spell Slots Per Rest, Swap Daily

Healing Word (Bonus Action)

Range 60 ft. Heal an ally for 1d4 + WIS modifier. The bonus action cost means you can still attack or cast another spell on the same turn. Your primary tool for keeping allies alive.

Entangle (Concentration)

20-ft square, range 90 ft. DEX save or restrained. Difficult terrain for all. Locks down groups — use it at range the moment enemies cluster.

Faerie Fire (Concentration)

Range 60 ft, 20-ft cube. DEX save or outlined in dim light — all attacks against outlined creatures have advantage. No concentration cost if you drop it for something else. Worth casting early; your whole party benefits.

Speak with Animals (Ritual)

Can be cast as a ritual — costs no spell slot. Commune with any beast. Invaluable for scouting — birds, rats, and wolves see things guards miss.

Skills & Proficiencies

Skill	Stat	Notes
Nature	INT	You read land the way others read faces
Perception	WIS	Sharp-eyed — passive Perception 13+
Medicine	WIS	You mend from caring, not just knowledge
Insight	WIS	You see through people as easily as fog
Survival	WIS	You know how to disappear — and how to last

Other Proficiencies: Light armour, medium armour, shields (but not metal armour), clubs, daggers, darts, javelins, maces, quarterstaffs, scimitars, sickles, slings, spears, herbalism kit, druidic language.

Equipment

Item	Notes
Quarterstaff	1d6 B · 1d8+WIS with Shillelagh active
Leather Armour	AC 11 + DEX — light, keeps you moving
Druidic Focus	Gnarled bone-wood hung with spores and bark — carved from a tree that grew over a burial mound
Herbalism Kit	Craft poultices, identify plants, brew antitoxins
Explorer’s Pack	Bedroll, rations (10 days), rope, tinderbox, torches, waterskin
Journal of the Dead	Hand-written field notes: names of the dead, their last landscapes, fragments of what they left behind. Not a spellbook — a record.

Class & Racial Traits

Halo of Spores (Circle of Spores — Reaction)

When a creature you can see moves within 10 feet of you, you can use your reaction to release a cloud of necrotic spores. The creature makes a CON saving throw (DC 13) or takes 1d4 necrotic damage. Resets each turn. Free — use it constantly.

Symbiotic Entity (Circle of Spores — Action)

Expend one use of Wild Shape (does not transform you). For 10 minutes:

Gain 4 temporary hit points
Halo of Spores damage doubles (1d4 → 2d4)
Your melee weapon attacks deal an extra 1d6 necrotic damage

This is your combat mode. Use it instead of Wild Shape in most fights.

Wild Shape (Druid — Action)

2 uses per short or long rest. At Level 1: CR 1/4, no flying or swimming speed.

Useful forms:

Wolf — Pack Tactics (advantage when ally is adjacent to target), 40 ft speed
Giant Rat — Darkvision, small enough to slip through gaps
Raven — Mimic sounds, excellent scouting perch

Mask of the Wild (Wood Elf)

You can attempt to hide even when only lightly obscured by foliage, heavy rain, falling snow, mist, or other natural phenomena. In the right terrain, the forest covers you entirely.

Trance (Wood Elf)

4 hours of meditation replaces a full long rest. You remain awake and aware throughout — you are never truly asleep and cannot be caught off guard by night ambushes.

Fey Ancestry (Wood Elf)

Advantage on saving throws against being charmed. Immune to magical sleep. You will not be controlled.

Personality


Ideal	Nature above law — but never above people
Bond	Every person deserves one honest chance from me
Flaw	Stupidity ignites me. I know I should breathe first
Trait	I empathise deeply — rudeness closes that door fast

Backstory — A Root That Holds Stone

The world is in Year 1127 NR.

The lich came in the year 30 Before Reckoning — more than eleven centuries ago. What it left behind was not destruction alone. In the south-west, where the oldest forests grew, there are places the spore remembers. The trees there grew back through bones. They grew through everything.

Aldraxis was born in the Lands that Lived — the south-western territories that survived the lich scourge when much of the world did not. The Wood Elves there are not the luminous, untouched elves of bardic songs. They are older. They grew up beside ruins of the War of Life: the last stand against the lich’s expansion, where the living held the line with everything they had. The ruins are still there, in the Bay of Mithril Tears. Aldraxis has seen them.

He trained under a Circle elder who had no patience for the living and infinite patience for what the living left behind. The Circle of Spores does not believe death is the end — it believes death is a different kind of presence. The spores carry memory. The mycelium connects. Aldraxis learned early to read what the dead left in the soil, and to speak, in limited ways, back.

What pulled him out of the Lands that Lived was not a quest or a calling from a patron. It was the journal. Over six years of solitude in the deep forest, he recorded names — not his names, not family names. Names that came to him in trance-state, whispered through root-networks and spore-drift. Fragments of people who never made it home. His Journal of the Dead began as a record. It became something heavier. He started to understand that carrying these names outward — into the world, toward places the dead once wanted to reach — was the only way to put any of them down.

That path led him north and east.

Nestorian Holdings — The Years in Alecton

The Nestorian Empire is not welcoming to wanderers from the south-west, and Aldraxis arrived in Alecton looking like what he was: a Wood Elf who had been in the wilderness for a very long time, carrying a quarterstaff wrapped in bark and a satchel of dried spores that the gate guards found deeply suspicious.

He spent fourteen months in Alecton. Long enough to understand the city — its politics, its cold-war tension with the Thassian powers to the east, the carefully managed poverty of Relast beyond the border, the Nestorian habit of treating every neighbouring nation as either a buffer state or a future problem.

What kept him in Alecton longer than he intended was the Tardin Trade Guild.

The Tardin are unlike anything in the south-west: wizards on reinforced wagons, bouncing through portal-networks to deliver magical parcels across the known world. They are fast, precise, expensive, and entirely unconcerned with the politics of whatever nation they’re crossing. Aldraxis encountered them when a Guild courier delivered a sealed package to a dying man in the Alecton lower quarter — a man who had no family, no estate, and no one to receive it. The courier left. Aldraxis stayed.

The package contained letters. Twenty-three of them. Written and never sent.

He added the man’s name to the journal.

Over the following months he ran errands for the Tardin — carrying small packages through the city’s outer quarters when the portal-routes weren’t cost-effective for short hauls. It gave him legitimacy, a small income, and access to information about where things were moving. He heard, through Guild channels, about the Sevillian colony in the Bay of Mithril Tears — a settlement forming near the old War of Life ruins. People heading somewhere the dead had already been.

He decided to go.

Purpose — What He Carries

Aldraxis does not believe he is a hero. He has spent most of his adult life in places where there are no heroes — only people making the least terrible available choice.

What he carries with him:

The Journal — Names, fragments, last landscapes. He does not know what he will do with it when it is full. He suspects he will understand when the time comes.
A suspicion about the ruins — The War of Life ruins in the Bay are not just rubble. Something in the spore-network that runs under the Bay of Mithril Tears is still active. He has felt it from the Lands that Lived — a low, persistent signal. He does not have a name for it yet.
The question of the Mardak — The mindless rage-orcs of the south-west are held back by geography, but they were not always what they are now. The oldest trees in the Lands that Lived remember a time before. Something made them. Aldraxis thinks the lich had a hand in it. He cannot prove this and does not mention it in polite company.
One honest chance per person — He means this literally. He will extend it to the most difficult, most aggravating, most suspicious individual he encounters. After that one chance is spent, he stops pretending.

Connections to the World


The Lands that Lived (SW)	Home. Still feels it in the root-network. The trees remember him.
Bay of Mithril Tears	War of Life ruins — the source of the signal. Where he is heading.
Sevillian Colony	The party’s destination. Aldraxis has reasons of his own.
Alecton / Nestor	Where he learned that empires eat their neighbours slowly. Fourteen months of watching.
Tardin Trade Guild	Former errand-runner. Knows their routes, some of their faces. Owes them nothing. They owe him even less.
The Lich Event (~Year -30 NR)	1,157 years ago. The spores still carry it. Some of the names in his journal are that old.
Mardak Orcs	He knows what they are. He suspects what made them. He is not ready to test that theory yet.

Combat Quick-Reference

Standard Combat Round

Move — 35 ft. Use Mask of the Wild if any natural cover is available.
Action — Shillelagh strike (+WIS, 1d8+WIS) or cast a spell.
Bonus Action — Healing Word if an ally is down, or nothing.
Reaction — Halo of Spores when anything moves within 10 ft.

Opening Round (Hard Fight)

Action: Symbiotic Entity → 4 temp HP, doubled Halo, +1d6 necrotic on hits
Then: Shillelagh every turn; Halo every turn as reaction

Support Round (Easier Fight / Party Struggling)

Bonus Action: Healing Word on downed ally
Action: Faerie Fire (advantage for whole party) or Entangle (lock down)
Cantrip: Guidance before anyone makes an important check

Scouting

Wild Shape (Raven) for aerial view — or Speak with Animals (ritual, free) on any bird or beast in the area
Perception passive 13+ — you notice most things before they notice you

Level-Up Notes

Level 2: Wild Shape improves (CR 1/4 → 1/4, gains swim). Symbiotic Entity becomes more valuable. Consider picking up Thunderwave or Healing Spirit as new spell options.

Level 3: Cantrip Toll the Dead (WIS-based, scales with levels) becomes available as a Spores feature bonus. Halo of Spores upgrades to 1d6.

Level 4: ASI — push WIS to 18 if possible. Everything improves: spell DC, Shillelagh damage, Insight checks.

Level 5: Spell slots increase. Mass Cure Wounds becomes available. You become significantly harder to kill.

Aldraxis Timberwalk · Wood Elf Druid (Circle of Spores) · Level 1 · Year 1127 NR