Character of the Week: Maxton Quill, the Grey Jedi

Character of the Week

Most Jedi we feature came up clean. Maxton Quill did not. He's a Human Jedi Guardian who fell during a war, walked the dark side for the better part of a year, and clawed his way back — and the most interesting thing about him is what he refused to leave behind. His double-bladed saber, the Equalizer, burns with two colors at once: a clean white kyber on one end, and a bled red synthetic crystal on the other. Both built, level 8, on the Character Builder.

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The build

A Guardian built to stand at the front and read the room before the blades come out — high Wisdom for the seeing, high AC and Energy Absorption for the soaking, and a Force list that deliberately holds light and dark in the same hand.

Build your own in the Character Builder →

The Force list is the whole character on one line. The top half is a Guardian's toolkit — Force Speed and Jump to close distance and put himself between danger and the party, Energy Absorption and a high AC to eat what comes back, Whirlwind for a crowd. The bottom half is what he brought up out of the dark and refused to un-learn: Force Rage, Force Scream, and Bolt of Hatred, a dark-side bolt from the recent Sith powers. He does not use them lightly. That restraint is the point of playing him.

One build note for the tinkerers: a double-bladed saber is really two blades, so it carries the dual-wield attack penalty until you buy it off. Maxton runs Dual Wielder I, which softens the penalty to −2 (hence the +7 to hit rather than +9) — Dual Wielder II, which removes it entirely, is the obvious next step on his sheet. Fitting, for a man who hasn't quite finished mastering the second blade.

His story

Maxton took the Guardian's path early — the blade that stands at the front, the one the Order sent when a negotiation had already curdled into a siege. For a while he was good at it in exactly the way the Order liked: decisive, hard to rattle, a wall between frightened people and whatever was coming for them. He believed the light held because he had never yet had to hold it with his hands shaking.

Then a campaign went wrong in a way that couldn't be argued down into a lesson. He held a line he couldn't hold, lost people he had promised out loud would not be lost, and when the grief finally reached him it did not arrive as sorrow. It arrived as heat. He knows the exact night he bled his crystal — remembers the crack running through the kyber like the thing breaking was somewhere inside his own chest, and remembers, worst of all, that for the first time in months it felt like enough. The red blade answered his anger the way the Force never had when he'd knelt and begged it to. He carried that blade the better part of a year. By every measure a Jedi Council would have used, he was gone.

What brought him back was not a vision or a forgiving master. It was smaller and more humiliating than that: he caught the look on the face of someone he'd once have stood in front of, and understood that the wall had turned around — that he had become the thing on the other side of it. Climbing back was slower and far less dramatic than the fall. There was no purifying flash of white light, just the long, unglamorous discipline of noticing the reach for the heat and choosing, again and again, not to close his hand around it. Only much later, when he trusted himself to, did he grow and cleanse a second crystal — clean white — mostly to prove to himself he still could.

He kept the red one. That unsettles people, and it is precisely the point. Maxton doesn't believe you undo a fall by pretending it never happened; you hold it where you can see it. His saber runs both blades at once because the day he stops feeling the pull of the red crystal is the day he has started lying to himself about how close it really is. He walks the line on purpose now, and he'll tell you plainly that the line is thin.

Build your own

Maxton was built entirely in the Character Builder — species, class, the double-bladed Equalizer with its two crystals, the Force list, all of it. If you want to run a Jedi who isn't sure the light-only doctrine tells the whole truth, the Playing the Dark Side guide is a good read for the grey road between the two Orders.

Open the Character Builder → and see what your own Jedi keeps.