Deanna Leimert

Deanna Leimert is a gnome cleric. She is played by Aabria Iyengar.

Description


Deanna is a middle-aged gnome with dark brown skin and round cheeks. She wears golden heavy plate armor with a symbol of the Dawnfather around her waist, and a pale pink knitted shawl around her shoulders. Her boots are described as looking like Ugg boots.

Personality
Deanna is friendly and prefers to keep things cheerful, remarking multiple times that the conversation with Bells Hells was getting very "heavy". She however does hold a grudge against Chetney, years later, for breaking up with her. She also has complicated feelings about being resurrected many years after her death.

Deanna knits as a hobby, and made Chetney's hat.

Before Campaign 3
Deanna and Chetney Pock O'Pea had a brief fling hundreds of years before 843 PD. The relationship ended sooner than Deanna wanted. She met her husband Dustel afterward and had children with him. During a festival in the mid-600s, she was attacked by a creature and killed. Her husband became an adventurer and, two hundred years later, found a cleric of Pelor to resurrect her.

Campaign 3: Bells Hells
FRIDA and Deanna encountered Chetney, FCG, Fearne, and Imogen in a cave in the Flotket Alps, fighting a frost salamander. They decided to travel together back towards Uthodurn, though Deanna's first action post-combat was to slap Chetney. She told the party about her past, and about how her resurrection many years after her death shaped her beliefs regarding the gods. After a day of travel, she and Chetney reconnected, and she admitted that her feelings had gone on beyond the initial fling; meanwhile, Chetney told her about his time in Uthodurn after their relationship ended. He began to tell her about his lycanthropy but she interrupted him with a hug before he could; he then immediately was overtaken with the urge to shift into his werewolf form and ran off. The rest of the Bells Hells members present told her about Chetney's condition.

After Chetney attacked FRIDA, Deanna was extremely angry.

Gnome abilities

 * Darkvision
 * Gnome Cunning

Cleric abilities

 * Spellcasting
 * Channel Divinity (2/Rest)
 * Turn Undead, Destroy Undead (CR 1)
 * Divine Domain: Life Domain
 * Bonus Proficiency
 * Disciple of Life
 * Channel Divinity: Preserve Life (45 hit points)
 * Blessed Healer
 * Divine Strike

Behind the scenes
The idea for Deanna came from the concept of the "fridged wife" in tragic male backstories. She specifically noted the Women in Refrigerators, a website by Gail Simone that coined the phrase.

Illustrator Hannah Friederichs said that Deanna's character portrait came together quickly in a way that amazed her. Her husband attributed this to Aabria Iyengar creating "a minimum of five characters a week, so you can’t be that surprised". After some details in Chetney Pock O'Pea's hat made it technically impossible to knit, Friederichs aimed to make the shawl featured in Deanna's portrait possible to physically knit. Both the front and back of the stockinette stitch are illustrated where they would be visible. She pointed out that the front side of the stitch faces outward on both ends, which is incorrect even for a Möbius loop and requires either a seam or a second twist. She prefers to think there is a second twist, even though one is not reflected in the shape. She said if she was doing the portrait again, she would turn the stitches perpendicular for a Möbius loop, even though circular needles that large would be difficult to find.

Appearances and mentions

 * Campaign 3: Bells Hells

Trivia

 * The animation on her stat card features vertical rays of light.