Gianna the Orc - A Skyrim Character Back Story

This is a little back story I came up with when I recently designed my Orc Character in Skyrim. One of the beautiful things about Character Creating RPGs is that we writers can write our own stories for the characters we create. Ya know, like fanfic. It's a wonderful and magical feeling. So, here is Gianna's Story.

Gianna is the daughter of a chieftain from the Dragontail Mountains, also known as Upper Craglorn. She had a pretty good childhood and loved her home until she became a teenager.

Gianna loves knowledge. She wants to learn as much as possible, with maybe a few possible no-no's like magic. She’s not sure about wielding magic but she’s not completely opposed to it if she has the right teacher.

As a teenager, expectations were placed on her as a female but also as the daughter of the chieftain. These expectations were not what Gianna wanted for herself. Her father started enforcing that she only learn one craft and he decided that craft was going to be Smithing.

Gianna knew her father was doing this so that she could be married off but she thought she would have more time to convince him to let her learn multiple skills.

I made my first Gif!

What her father didn’t know is that Gianna was always learning from the time she was 10 years old. She was always picking up axes and daggers to learn how to use them and to dual wield them. She would practice this in secret, behind one of the barns where no one could see her watching the warriors spar. She would mimic their moves and learn pretty quickly

Gianna also showed an interest in the bow and arrow but loved the crossbow. She had a more difficult time learning this because she couldn’t shoot an arrow without someone noticing. Sometimes, she would sneak off to the woods and practice shooting arrows into trees.

Gianna wasn’t just interested in weapons training though. She also loved watching her mother use alchemy as that was her trade. She learned as much as she could just by watching her mother. Her mother believed as her father did - that Gianna was to learn what her father told her to learn. So, Gianna could only observe and try to remember some of the things her mother did.

Enchanting was another skill Gianna picked up from another person in the hold but again, was something she could only observe. All of these things, she knew would get her into trouble but she really believed they would come in handy someday.

Because of all these expectations, and things changing so much for Gianna in the hold, life started to feel constricting. It felt like she could barely catch her breath as the pressures of being the chieftain’s daughter started mounting on her shoulders.

Then one day it all came to a head as her father pulled her into his chamber and announced to her that she would be sent away. He had found her a husband and she was to move to another stronghold to take the role of the chieftain’s second wife, the forgewife.

This was too much for Gianna to handle. She wasn’t going to be stuck for the rest of her life married to someone she didn’t know and didn’t want to know. More than that, she wasn’t going to be stuck doing only one thing and carrying one title. How very boring.

So, Gianna packed her things while her father and mother were sleeping. She snuck out of the hold, going through the woods that kept many of her secrets, and left for good.

Now, after taking many odd jobs from hunting to Smithing to even doing some mercenary work, Gianna finally has enough saved up to buy her very own home just outside of Falkreath.

It is called Lakeview Manor and she loves it! She has a stable for her horse and her own little garden. It is equipped with everything she needs to begin a whole new life full of adventures and excitement.

This is a short back story and not in first person view or filled with descriptive language like I usually write but I really wanted to share this because writing her story got me so excited to play her in Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. I didn't actually know a whole lot about the Orcs and their culture so I had to do some research. Next, I plan to research more on the Snow elves as well as the Dark Elves. Fun, fun!

I hope you enjoyed it and thanks so much for reading!