I didn’t finish out the game but I did have two OCs who did pretty well.
Gianna’s staff-given secret was that she had a feeling there was magic in music. She was told repeatedly that she was not a spellsinger but basically she didn’t accept that and went HA HA I WILL SHOW YOU ALL. She saw a niche that wasn’t filled and made the Bard’s College, which was decently successful. Also, she sang magic but never Crossed Over or whatever because I wasn’t active at that point. Basically she sailed into Arx a street rat who had once impersonated nobility and gotten caught and then made herself rich and famous by sheer force of will and acting like she deserved it. Later, she came up with the insane idea to learn Wolf’s Song, and did that, too, though I didn’t get to take as many people along for that ride as I wanted. Sorry about that.
Once, she nominated herself for Radiant Whisper and got exactly one vote. She was the one who cast said vote, and it was hilarious.
When I made Oswyn I wanted him to have glasses but was told that was Not a Thing he could have. I had a line about squinting in his description stemming from that and when I asked for a secret it turned out he had bad eyesight because he could see magic (or was it magic’s potential?) and the poisoned Primum was why his eyesight was shitty. That is why he was miserable at recognizing people at a distance. Somehow, he became Archscholar. His greatest achievement in my opinion was basically making public libraries across Arvum. The Queen told him he was unusual because his soul tended to reincarnate with ability to do magic. He also never Crossed Over. This one time, Skald hugged him.
Oswyn once wrote to Copper asking to help the Red Wardens and she was like ‘lol who the fuck are you no thanks’. Well after she died, he became a Red Warden anyway. SUCK IT, COPPER!
I’m sure I didn’t fully figure out my secrets. Gianna would have been disappointed if she was some famous person’s reincarnation, though. The Bard’s College had a backstory where it had existed once before but been forgotten that I meant to dig further into. It was a very cool result of me being very lazy and just saying ‘uh I guess she finds a building that’s perfect because I don’t want to play out building something for a million years’.
Mostly I just did the best I could with characters I had figured weren’t ‘special’ for the majority of the time I played them, but the magic was inside me all along.