Vivienne Ashworth

"The walls keep the beasts out. They were never meant to keep us safe."

At a Glance

Name: Vivienne Elise Ashworth Title: Sixth Scion of House Ashworth; The Uncourtable (a society nickname she privately enjoys) Age: 31 Role: Noble lady by day, secret arcanist and resistance operative by night System: Agnostic (narrative-focused, adaptable to any TTRPG)

Appearance

Vivienne Ashworth enters a room the way a blade enters a sheath — precisely, deliberately, and with the suggestion that she might come back out at any moment.

She is beautiful in the way that makes people uneasy. Her features are sharp and refined: high cheekbones, a strong jaw softened just enough by her mother's line, and dark brown eyes that hold a glint of something wicked. Her smile — when she deploys it — is warm and wide and completely disarming, which is exactly what makes it dangerous. It is a smile that has coaxed secrets from regime officials, charmed guards at doors she should not have passed through, and made more than one young lord forget himself entirely at a dinner party.

Her dark brown hair is her one concession to vanity. She wears it in extravagant braids — elaborate arrangements that loop and weave and pin, different every time, as though each configuration is a code only she can read. (Her youngest sister, Margaux, suspects the braids actually are a code, but has never been able to prove it.) The braids are impractical for a woman who sometimes has to run for her life, and she does not care.

She dresses as a proper lady of standing. Dark tones — black, deep red, burgundy, charcoal — in fine fabrics cut to current fashion. She does not wear armor to the opera. She does not carry visible weapons to afternoon tea. If you met Vivienne Ashworth at a society function, you would see a well-bred nobleman's daughter in dark silks, exuding a warmth that contradicts her color palette, and you would never guess that the hands folded politely in her lap had conjured fire the night before.

Those who look closely — and most do not — might notice small things. The calluses on her fingers that no amount of cream can soften. The way her eyes track every exit in a room before she takes a seat. The faint, sweet smell of ozone that clings to her hair after she has been "reading late" in the archive. But these are details for the observant, and Vivienne has spent years ensuring that the people around her are dazzled enough not to observe.

For art direction: Victorian silhouette, fitted bodice and structured shoulders, floor-length skirts in layered black and deep crimson. Hair always up, always elaborate. A silver brooch at the collar — the Ashworth crest (an open book over crossed keys). Small, practical boots hidden beneath the hem. Piercing dark eyes, strong brows, and a mouth that defaults to a slight, knowing smile. Subtle arcane hints: faint light between her fingers, a glow reflected in her eyes, the suggestion of power barely contained beneath propriety.

Personality

Traits

Vivienne is warm. This surprises people who know the Ashworth reputation — a family whose prestige has dimmed not through scandal but through the slow turning of the world. The old noble houses simply matter less than they once did. The regime rewards loyalty and utility, not lineage, and families like the Ashworths have watched their influence thin with each passing decade like ink fading from old paper. She laughs easily, listens genuinely, and has an instinct for putting people at ease — a skill she learned from her father, who could once make a duke and a dockworker feel equally welcome in the same room. She uses this warmth strategically, but it is not false. She genuinely likes people. She finds them fascinating. More importantly, she believes they deserve better than what they have been given.

She is ferociously intelligent and has never learned to hide it. Where her older sisters mastered the art of appearing just clever enough but not threatening — a necessary survival skill at court under the current regime — Vivienne abandoned that pretense early. She asks pointed questions at dinner parties. She corrects scholars who cite sources incorrectly. She has opinions about cartography, theology, metallurgy, and the structural weaknesses of city fortifications, and she will share them whether you asked or not.

She plays her part. She attends the balls, curtsies to the right officials, and performs the rituals of noble society with enough grace to avoid suspicion. But where her sisters must navigate court as their primary arena — unmarried, visible, dependent on making the right match — Vivienne's position as sixth child and functionally uncourtable gives her something precious: time that no one is watching. Hours unaccounted for. Evenings where her absence from a drawing room raises no alarm because everyone assumes she is in the archive again.

She is devout in her belief in the Ashworth duty — not the diminished, careful version her father practices, but the original oath. The Ashworths exist to protect the people. Not to manage appearances. Not to survive the regime. To fight.

Flaws

Obsession is her shadow. When Vivienne locks onto something — a pattern in the kaiju attacks that the government is ignoring, a new spell form she cannot quite master, a thread of intelligence from her resistance contacts — she cannot let go. Sleep becomes optional. Meals become interruptions. Relationships become obstacles. She has missed her youngest brother's birthday twice. She once spent eleven days in the family archive without coming out, subsisting on cold tea and dried fruit, because she was close to mastering an incantation that had defeated every Ashworth before her. (She mastered it. The cost was worse than she expected.)

She struggles to delegate because no one else cares enough. This is not arrogance — or not entirely. It is the genuine and terrible knowledge that the regime will not fight the kaiju, the resistance is outmatched, and if she stops pushing, people die. Her brothers navigate a military that serves a corrupt government. Her sisters play survival games at court. The twins are too young. And the walls will not hold forever.

She can be ruthless in pursuit of her goals. She has manipulated kind people, exploited vulnerable ones, and justified it every time with the same logic: the stakes are too high for sentiment. She knows this is a rot in her character. She has not stopped.

Quirks

• Hums while reading, especially when she finds something alarming. The more cheerful the tune, the worse the discovery.
• Keeps a running mental catalog of every person she meets: name, occupation, potential usefulness, potential vulnerability, likely stance toward the regime. She calls this "being polite."
• Cannot resist a locked door, a sealed letter, or a redacted government document. The impulse is almost physical.
• Has a sweet tooth that borders on the medicinal. She keeps sugar-dusted biscuits in her coat pocket at all times and eats them when stressed, which is always.
• Speaks to her journal as though it is a person. "You won't believe what I found today" is a common opening line in her field notes.
• After particularly intense magical practice, her braids come slightly undone. Percy has learned to read her hair as a barometer of what kind of night she's had.

Motivations & Goals

Core drive: Vivienne believes that House Ashworth's true responsibility — the duty that Aldric founded the family to carry — is to protect the people. Not to protect the government. Not to maintain order. To stand between the powerless and whatever threatens them, whether it walks on a hundred legs beyond the walls or sits on a throne within them.

The twin threats: The city survives behind its walls, hemmed in by kaiju — massive creatures that stalk the wilds and periodically assault the fortifications. The government maintains the walls, and for this it demands absolute obedience. The regime is authoritarian, oppressive, and content to rule by fear — fear of the beasts outside justifying the boot on every neck inside. The walls keep the kaiju out, for the most part. But they do nothing to stop the threat, and they do nothing about what the government does to its own people.

The resistance: Vivienne is an operative. She does not lead — she is too valuable in her current position, with access to court, to society, and to the Ashworth archive — but she provides intelligence, resources, and, when necessary, direct arcane intervention. Her resistance contacts know her only by a cover name. Her family, with the exception of Percy, does not know.

The magic: When Vivienne dove into the family trove — truly dove, past the texts her father approved, past the protocols Eleanora codified, into the oldest and most restricted collections — she found the tomes. Not histories. Not analyses. Spellbooks. Arcane combat magic of a kind the family had either forgotten or deliberately buried. She taught herself in secret, practicing in the deepest rooms of the archive with only Percy as witness and co-conspirator. She is now a capable combat arcanist — able to conjure destructive force, channel offensive magic, and fight things that no sword can touch. The regime does not know. The resistance does not fully know. Her father must not know.

Personal goal: She wants to be the Ashworth who ends the cycle — not by managing the kaiju threat or surviving the regime, but by understanding why the kaiju come, what the government is truly hiding behind its walls, and whether the two are connected. Every ancestor before her accepted the status quo. Vivienne refuses.

Secret fear: That her grandfather Harland found the answer, and the answer is why he disappeared. That by following his path — the magic, the questions, the refusal to look away — she is walking into the same trap. And that the trap was always the point.

The Ashworth Bloodline

The Founding: Aldric Ashworth and the Theft at Wethermere

The Ashworth duty begins with a crime.

Three centuries ago, Aldric Ashworth was a junior archivist at the University of Wethermere — a minor academic from a minor family, notable only for his obsessive work ethic and his talent for decoding forgotten languages. He was the kind of man who disappeared into library stacks for days, who forgot to eat, who considered a well-organized index to be a form of art. (Vivienne would have liked him very much.)

What Aldric discovered, slowly and then all at once, was that several of Wethermere's most respected theologians were not, in fact, theologians at all. They were members of a fellowship that predated the university by centuries — a group that hoarded knowledge about the true nature of the kaiju, the darkness that crept at the edges of the world, and the arcane forces that could be wielded against both. Not devil-worship. Not heresy. Power and understanding, kept locked away. They knew what the beasts were, how the darkness moved, what it wanted — and they had decided that this knowledge was too dangerous for anyone else to possess. They also held tomes of genuine magic: combat spells, wards, bindings, and incantations that could level a city block or hold a kaiju at bay.

Aldric disagreed with the hoarding. All of it.

Over fourteen months, working alone, he copied, stole, and smuggled out the fellowship's core texts — the histories, the analyses, and the spellbooks. He decoded their ciphers. He cross-referenced their observations with historical records of kaiju attacks, political collapses, and "divine wrath" that were nothing of the sort. By the time the fellowship realized what he had done, Aldric Ashworth understood the enemy better than most of them did — and he held the keys to fighting it.

They tried to kill him, of course. He survived — barely — and fled to his family's modest estate. He married well, invested wisely, and spent the rest of his life building what his children would need: a library, a fortune, a name, and a sacred obligation. The Ashworths would be the keepers of this stolen truth, and they would use it to protect the people from what the powerful preferred to ignore.

The motto Aldric chose for the family was simple: "Lux per cognitionem." Light through knowledge.

He also made a deliberate choice: the magic texts were separated from the rest and locked in the deepest vault of the family trove. Aldric believed the knowledge of what the darkness was mattered more than the power to fight it directly. He feared what magic might do to a family not ready for it. Future generations were meant to earn their way to those tomes.

Most never did. Most never even knew they were there.

The Codifier: Dame Eleanora Ashworth (five generations later)

If Aldric was the spark, Eleanora was the forge.

By her time, the Ashworth duty had become informal. Each generation inherited the approved texts, learned the signs, and did what they could when darkness stirred. Some were diligent. Some were not. The family had grown wealthy and respected — their intelligence on kaiju movements was valuable to whatever government held power — and it was easy to let the duty become a gentleman's hobby rather than a calling.

Eleanora Ashworth would not allow it.

A formidable woman who never married (by choice, not circumstance — she rejected four proposals, each from men she publicly described as "adequate"), Eleanora spent thirty years transforming the Ashworth duty from a family tradition into a system. She created the Ashworth Protocols: methods for identifying and tracking kaiju patterns, cataloging incursions, and coordinating the family's intelligence networks. She established the family archive as a working library, not a dusty collection. She trained her nieces and nephews personally, selecting for aptitude and temperament rather than birth order.

Most importantly, Eleanora proved that preparation defeats chaos. She predicted three major kaiju incursions and evacuated civilians before the walls were breached — acting where the government would not, saving lives the regime considered expendable. Her journals — which Vivienne has read so many times the pages are soft as cloth — are written in a tone of calm, surgical precision that Vivienne both admires and envies.

Eleanora knew about the deepest vault. Her journals make oblique references to "Aldric's reserve" and "the locked collection." She chose not to open it. Whether this was wisdom or caution, Vivienne has never been able to decide.

Eleanora died at seventy-eight, in her own bed, with a glass of good wine and an unfinished crossword. She is the Ashworth that Vivienne wants to be — though Vivienne has already gone further than Eleanora ever dared.

The Cautionary Tale: Harland Ashworth (Vivienne's grandfather)

Harland Ashworth was, by all accounts, brilliant. He had Aldric's talent for languages, Eleanora's strategic mind, and a charisma that made people want to follow him — literally and figuratively.

He went too deep.

Harland came of age in a world that was already forgetting what families like the Ashworths were for. The old nobility's influence had been thinning for decades — the regime valued obedience over lineage, and the grand houses that once shaped policy now merely decorated it. Harland refused to accept the fade. He was outspoken where his peers were quiet, asking questions about the kaiju that the regime preferred no one ask: why only containment? Why no effort to understand? Why were the walls enough?

He was not punished for this — not directly. He was simply ignored, which for a man of his intellect and conviction was far worse.

What the wider world did not know was that Harland also found the deepest vault. He opened it. He read the tomes.

Whether he learned to use the magic himself, no one is certain. What is known is that his final years were consumed by a theory: that the kaiju were not random, that they were being drawn to the city by something within it, and that the regime either knew or was complicit. He withdrew from the family, from society, from everything except his notes and his investigations.

He disappeared on a Tuesday in autumn, twenty-three years ago. His study was found locked from the inside. His final journal entry reads: "I was right. I wish I had been wrong."

No body was ever found. The family declared him dead after seven years. His portrait still hangs in the archive, and his children — including Vivienne's father — do not speak his name without a particular tightness in their voices.

Vivienne was eight years old when her grandfather vanished. She remembers him as a tall man with kind eyes who smelled of pipe tobacco and old paper, who let her sit on his lap while he worked and never once told her she was too young to understand.

She found the vault because of him. She read the tomes because of him. She taught herself magic because she refused to be as helpless as the family was the night he disappeared.

She is pursuing his theory too.

The Secret: Vivienne's Magic

Vivienne found the deepest vault when she was nineteen.

She was not looking for it — or so she tells herself. She was reorganizing a section of the archive that Percy had flagged as water-damaged, pulling texts off shelves to dry and catalog. Behind a false wall that had been sealed with a cipher lock — the kind Aldric favored, the kind Vivienne could solve in her sleep by that age — she found a room that had not been opened in decades.

The tomes were there. Not histories. Not protocols. Spellbooks. Arcane combat magic, meticulously recorded in Aldric's own hand and annotated by generations of Ashworths who had found the vault before her. Harland's handwriting was in the margins of the most dangerous volumes, neat and precise and heartbreakingly familiar.

She told Percy. Only Percy.

What followed was two years of secret, grueling, often terrifying self-instruction. The tomes were not textbooks. They were records of power that assumed the reader already had a foundation — a foundation no living Ashworth possessed. Vivienne built it from nothing, working alone in the deepest rooms of the archive after the household slept, with Percy standing watch and keeping notes on her progress in a journal he hides inside a hollowed-out copy of Agricultural Practices of the Southern Provinces.

She can fight now. Not elegantly — not yet — but effectively. She can conjure destructive force: bolts of concentrated arcane energy that can shatter stone. She can channel offensive magic through her hands, her voice, or — in desperate moments — through the silver Ashworth brooch at her collar, which she has quietly modified to serve as a focus. She is learning wards, bindings, and more complex battle forms, but she is largely self-taught and knows her technique has gaps that proper training would fill.

The resistance knows she has "unusual capabilities." They do not know the full extent. Her father does not know at all. If he learned that his daughter had opened the vault, learned the magic, and was using it to fight the regime he has spent twenty years carefully not openly opposing — the consequences would be a kind of earthquake the Ashworth family might not survive.

Percy worries about this. Vivienne worries about everything else.

Personal Arc

Vivienne Ashworth is a woman living three lives, and the weight of holding them together is the thing most likely to break her.

The first life is the one the world sees: a nobleman's daughter in dark silks, sharp-tongued and charming, attending court because she must and enduring society because it is expected. This life is a mask, but it is not entirely a lie — she enjoys the parties more than she admits, and the warmth she shows people is genuine even when it is strategic. This is the life her father believes she leads.

The second life is the one the resistance knows: an operative with access to noble society, who provides intelligence, resources, and occasionally devastating magical intervention. This is the life that gives her purpose, that connects her to something larger than the Ashworth name. But even here, she holds back. The resistance sees a useful asset. They do not see the full scope of what she is becoming.

The third life is the one only Percy witnesses: a woman alone in a stone room, surrounded by three-hundred-year-old spellbooks, teaching herself to wield power that her own family locked away for good reason. This is the life that scares her. Not the magic itself — that feels as natural as breathing, which is part of what scares her — but what it means. Every Ashworth who opened the vault went further than the one before. Aldric stole the knowledge. Eleanora refined it but left the magic sealed. Harland opened the vault and vanished. Vivienne opened the vault and learned to fight.

What comes next?

Her arc is a collision course. She believes — truly, with the certainty of a woman who has read every scrap of evidence and drawn her own conclusions — that the Ashworth duty has always been about this moment. Not about managing the kaiju. Not about surviving the regime. About standing up, with everything the family has kept hidden for three centuries, and fighting back. She sees herself as the fulfillment of Aldric's original promise: the Ashworth who stops watching and starts acting.

But Harland believed the same thing. And Harland is gone.

What she must overcome: Vivienne must learn the difference between conviction and obsession. She must accept that fighting alone — even with magic, even with Percy's help, even with the resistance at her back — will destroy her the same way it destroyed her grandfather. She must learn to trust, to share the burden of the vault, and to accept that the duty was never meant to be carried by one person. The Ashworths are a family, not a single flame.

She must also confront the possibility that her grandfather's disappearance was not a failure but a warning — and decide whether the warning changes anything.

Whether she listens is the question her story exists to answer.

The Family (Living)

Lord Edmund Ashworth — Father

The patriarch. Stern, traditional, and impeccably mannered. Edmund inherited the duty after Harland's disappearance and has executed it with rigid, careful discipline ever since. He grew up watching the Ashworth name lose its weight — not through any single catastrophe, but through the quiet arithmetic of a changing world. The regime does not need noble houses. It needs functionaries. And families that insist on independence, on keeping their own archives and their own counsel, find themselves gradually uninvited from the rooms that matter. Edmund runs the family like a man holding a cracked vase: gently, precisely, and with the constant awareness that one wrong move shatters what little is left. He maintains the Ashworth intelligence networks. He tracks the kaiju patterns. He shares what he must with the regime and hides what he can. But he does not fight. Not openly. Not anymore. He will not allow Vivienne to be courted until her elder sisters are settled — not out of cruelty, but because order is the only thing he trusts to keep his family safe. He loves Vivienne. He does not understand her. He is terrified that she is becoming Harland.

Maximilian & Frederick Ashworth — Eldest brothers (1st and 2nd)

Military intelligence officers, both — which means they serve a regime the family privately despises, and they know it. Max is the serious one: loyal, dutiful, their father's mirror, carrying the contradiction of service without complaint because someone must be inside the machine to know how it works. Frederick is sharper, more political, with a talent for reading people that makes him invaluable to the family and dangerous to anyone who underestimates him. Their military connections provide information networks that the Ashworths use to track kaiju movements and, increasingly, regime activities. They are proud of Vivienne in a way they express primarily through professional respect. They do not know about the magic or the resistance. Vivienne sometimes wonders what Frederick suspects.

Percival Ashworth — Third brother, and Vivienne's one confidant

The scholar. Percy is the sibling most like Vivienne — or perhaps Vivienne is most like Percy. He is quiet, brilliant, and happiest surrounded by books. He maintains the archive with a devotion that borders on the sacred, and he is the only living person who knows that Vivienne found the vault and taught herself magic.

Percy did not find the vault first. But when Vivienne told him — breathless, shaking, holding a tome that hummed faintly in her hands — he did not hesitate. He did not tell their father. He pulled up a chair, opened his own journal, and said, "Show me what you've learned so far."

He has been her spotter, her note-taker, and her emergency medical responder ever since. (Early magical practice is not gentle on the body.) Their bond is forged in shared secrecy and mutual obsession: Percy understands the magic intellectually in ways that help Vivienne understand it practically, and their arguments about theory versus application are legendary within the archive's walls, if nowhere else.

Percy worries. Not about the magic — he trusts Vivienne's talent. About the cost. About the resistance. About what happens when their father finds out. He has a contingency plan for that day, written in the back of Agricultural Practices of the Southern Provinces. He has not told Vivienne about it.

Rosalind & Cecily Ashworth — Eldest and second sisters

The unmarried sisters ahead of Vivienne in the courtship queue, navigating a court that serves a regime their family quietly opposes. Rosalind (eldest) is poised, patient, and playing a longer game than anyone gives her credit for — she paints watercolors, manages the household, and maintains social connections that keep the Ashworth name from sliding further into irrelevance. She is better at court politics than she lets on. Cecily (second) is less patient. She wants a life of her own, resents the slow irrelevance that has settled over the family like dust, and has a sharp tongue that she and Vivienne use against each other with equal skill. She blames the changing times for her stalled prospects, and she is not entirely wrong. Despite this, Cecily once sat outside the archive for eleven days while Vivienne was locked inside, leaving meals at the door. She has never mentioned this, and Vivienne has never thanked her for it.

Arthur & Ambrose Ashworth — The twins (younger brothers)

Seventeen, irrepressible, and utterly inseparable. Arthur is the bold one; Ambrose is the clever one. They are fascinated by the family duty in the way that teenagers are fascinated by anything forbidden and dangerous, and they idolize Vivienne in particular — the sister who disappears into the archive for days, who always smells faintly of something electric, who sometimes has bruises she won't explain. They do not know about the magic. They suspect something. Vivienne alternates between wanting to protect them from it all and wanting to train them for what's coming. She is not sure which impulse is love and which is recruitment, and this bothers her more than she admits.

Margaux Ashworth — Youngest sister

Fourteen and already terrifying. Margaux is observant in a way that makes adults uncomfortable — she notices everything, forgets nothing, and has the unsettling habit of mentioning things she should not know. She watches Vivienne with an intensity that borders on worship, and she has quietly begun spending time in the archive on her own. She is the sibling most likely to find the vault independently, and Vivienne is not sure whether to be proud or afraid. Margaux is the one who suspects the braids are a code. Margaux is right.

The World

The city exists behind walls. The walls exist because of the kaiju — vast, terrible creatures that roam the wilds and assault the fortifications with a regularity that suggests something other than animal instinct. The government maintains the walls, fields the military that patrols them, and uses the constant threat of breach to justify an authoritarian grip on every life within.

Beyond the walls, the wilds are a graveyard of ambition. Ruined settlements dot the landscape — communities that tried to exist outside the city's protection and were consumed. The kaiju move through fog and dead forest, red-eyed and patient, creatures that defy easy classification. Some are insectoid. Some are reptilian. Some are something else entirely. They are drawn to the city, and no one in power will say why.

Inside the walls, the regime rules through fear and bureaucracy in equal measure. Propaganda banners hang from buildings. Armed soldiers patrol rain-slicked cobblestone streets. Watchtowers loom over every district. The government maintains order not because order is good, but because order is controllable. Citizens trade freedom for safety, and most have forgotten there was ever a choice.

The Ashworth archive is a world beneath the world — a vast underground library carved from stone, where three centuries of stolen truth sits on shelves alongside family journals, kaiju tracking data, and, behind a cipher-locked door in the deepest chamber, the spellbooks that started everything. This is where Vivienne becomes herself. This is where the duty lives.

The resistance operates in cellars and back rooms, a network of hooded figures and coded messages. They are outmatched, under-resourced, and hunted. But they are not gone. Vivienne provides what she can — intelligence from court, resources from the family coffers, and when the situation demands it, the kind of intervention that no one in the resistance can fully explain. They know she is valuable. They do not know how valuable.

The Ashworths know the government is not good. They have known for generations. But knowing and acting are different things, and the distance between them is where the Ashworths have lived for a long time. Edmund says it privately and it costs him his sleep. Vivienne says it to the resistance and it may cost her life.

The regime does not fight the kaiju. It manages them — just enough to maintain the walls, just enough to justify its own existence. Whether this is incompetence or design is the question that Harland died (or disappeared) trying to answer.

Vivienne intends to finish what he started.

Visual Gallery

Portrait

Dark brown hair in elaborate braids, crimson and black Victorian dress, the Ashworth brooch at her collar. The look of a woman who knows more than she's saying — and enjoys it.

Kaiju Confrontation

Vivienne stands on crumbling battlements, arcane shield blazing against a towering beast. This is the third life — the one only Percy has seen. Until now.

Part of: [PRD] Bloodborne Noble Lady TTRPG Character (#98) Phase 1: Character Foundation (#200) Phase 2: Visual Concepts (#202)