Name: Gadwall
Age: 14
Gender: Female
Appearance: a somewhat tall girl for her age, bit of an early bloomer, with quite a lot of freckles dotting her face and curly red hair tied back in a neat ponytail. Not particularly good-looking, and she has somewhat bad teeth, but that is really to be expected in this day and age. Has the beginnings of a statuesque build, and tends to wear unassuming, loose, male-appropriate clothing, complete with a field laborer's shade on her head.
Backstory/Personality: being known as a merciless murderer, consummate sadist and the most wanted man in the Four Kingdoms is quite the feat for any individual, let alone for someone like Gadwall, who is as even-tempered and reasonable a 14-year-old girl as you could ever hope to find, and who has in her life only really killed three people (her parents, most regrettably, being two of them, and both of their deaths were entirely accidental, she would like to add), albeit the amount of people she's non-fatally stabbed, maimed or poisoned may be quite a bit higher. In retrospect, maybe if she had killed most of the people trying to pick a fight with her in the beginning, she probably would have remained anonymous for far longer, since, let's face it, people get murdered all the time. But a trail of maimed, poisoned and whining survivors, now that's how rumors truly spread. A shame Gadwall finds the very idea of killing people rather repulsive, and the sight of blood slightly disheartening, or she probably would have done that ages ago. What is also unfortunate is that she utterly despises murderers (or at least such is the belief that she tends to endorse in her own mind and to any who speak to her), considering such people to be feeble-minded twits at best and moronic degenerates at worst. But, knowing all this, why is Gadwall out on the road, you may ask? The short answer is that she has nowhere better to be presently, as her reputation, despite her best attempts at manipulating it, seems to spread further and faster than she can run. That, and ever since early childhood she has wished to attain the powers that magic provides, a naive dream of an undeveloped mind that, after her parents died and she, suspected of being a demon child due to the details of the event, was driven out of her home, bloomed into an academic obsession that she had to develop a most dangerous set of skills to pursue, partly due to external hazards and a need to survive, and partly due to a fear of having nothing else to strive toward now. And so she has ventured for several years, defending herself from harm, occasionally engaging in theft and fraud to cover her living expenses, and trying her best (though often failing) to remain unknown and unobtrusive.
Goal: to obtain the ability to work actual magic.
Skills:
Knife [Proficient]
Poisons [Proficient]
Trap making [Proficient]
Deception [Proficient]
Lore [Psychology] [Able to see through bluffs and lies.]
Name: Skeegle of Buart
Age: 41
Gender: Male
Appearance: a balding, physically quite unattractive man, about 1.55 meters in height, with a slight pot belly and a thick, graying beard. Only a few real features of him are visible when he has his full plate armor on, however - his small stature, his rather wide and muscular frame, and his eyes. His eyes are large, green and most often half-closed in what may or may not be contempt of his fellows, which he most certainly feels much of the time.
Backstory/Personality: Skeegle, if you stripped him of his armor, probably would not look quite like a warrior - this is because he most certainly is not, and would chop you in half if he felt like it at the moment you even dared compare him to a lowly barbarian wandering the countryside in search of wenches and violence. Skeegle is a scholar, thank you very much, schooled in the finest philosophical traditions of the Tower of Buart, a beacon of intellect in these dark times, the very forefront of post-apocalyptic philosophy. Or so Skeegle once thought. Before the turning event, as he likes to call it (though he most certainly hates talking about it in any sort of detail). And if you haven't guessed already, Skeegle was quite deeply involved in that event. The event in question, in case you were wondering, was a particularly heated debate on the nature of the the psychosomatic sub-realities of the human mind and their subsequent implications, with Skeegle representing the Natural Complicationist side, and Hattrin Fedskuul opposite him spouting his antiquated Reenlightened Pseudorationalist nonsense like the volcano of steaming excrement he was. Points were roared through the Great Hall of Debate as mighty voices sought to prove their rightness, and emotions were suppressed with the greatest of difficulty as Fedskuul refused to give in to Skeegle's reasonable assessments of his position, dubbing them strawmen, while blatantly misrepresenting Skeegle's words and twisting them to his own heart's desire. Tensions rose, fell, then rose again as the debate grew less and less civil. Voices were raised, and the moderator became increasingly irrelevant. Skeegle was beginning to take the lead, making increasingly bold and logical assertions at the shrinking Fedskuul, until the bastard, in his ratlike wiliness, threw in a question edgewise. At that moment the answer seemed obvious, and Skeegle gave it freely, but it took him only seconds to realize from the shit-eating grin on Fedskuul's fat face that he had made a most unfortunate admission. An error, a slip of the mind and the tongue in the heat of the argument. But the damage was done, and Skeegle knew that even now the half-brained literalist's mind was afire with millions of comebacks that would absolutely destroy Skeegle, and make him look like a complete fool, like a twit amidst geniuses, a worthless demagogue in this place of learning. He tried to say something, but could only sputter dumbfoundedly as his entire train of thought had been derailed. And as Fedskuul began to loom forward, Skeegle began to shrink, but then an entirely different emotion overtook him - a hatred more intense than anything he had experienced before, fueled by his immense anger and the sheer opposition that Fedskuul's ecstasy over the opportunity provided, and he went immediately for the Sacred Axe of the Maiden of Sweet Truth, the rather blunted, gilded axe in the hands of the moderator (typically used to point to the declared winner of the debate), tearing it out of the aging, meek moderator's hands and swinging it with a furious scream at Fedskuul, who was rewarded for his bastardry with a messy horizontal attempted slice that merely crushed his trachea as it struck the front of his neck after a failed attempt on his part to dodge. And so Fedskuul died, a stupid expression on his blue, asphyxiated face. It was only within the next moment that Skeegle realized that, by stooping to violence and killing his opponent, he had not only killed someone, which even the moral relativists of the Tower of Buart strongly frowned upon, but also had made himself look even more foolish and wrong, which he could plainly see in the more unfazed eyes among the audience. Crushed and defeated to such a degree for the very first time, Skeegle surrendered to his base instincts and ran, the moderator's axe still in hand. This was five years ago. Since then, Skeegle has... improved a little. Not a day passes when he does not practice his debating techniques in solemn silence. But even now he fears that he may never find someone reasonably intelligent he can intellectually humiliate to regain status, even to himself. Especially since most people he meets on the way are hardly even worth acknowledging as human beings, let alone arguing with as a rough equal or mild superior.
Goal: to prove beyond a doubt to someone, anyone who believes themselves to be intelligent or clever, that they are deeply, deeply wrong on an intellectual level, to see them driven and cowering before Skeegle's intellectual might, to obliterate their philosophical position and practically hear their confidence shatter before him.
Skills:
Axe [Proficient]
Heavy Armor [Proficient]
Fighting [Proficient]
Horse riding [Proficient]
Lore [Fighting Techniques]
Name: Nakary "Mother o' Pearl" Dobbs, sometimes known as "Pearly"
Age: 32
Gender: Male
Appearance: just shy of two meters tall, lean and wiry, with a consummate alcoholic's face and a grayish skin tone in addition to possessing the facial scarring of a pox victim, sharpened, bright white teeth and quite a few scars covering parts of his face. His head is shaved, and his eyebrows are unusually bushy and tend to twitch quite expressively while he speaks. Very tactile in nature, and tends to place his hands on people while he speaks with them, with a great affinity for hugs and handshakes. Also has a proclivity toward gesturing in what some would describe as an overly expressive manner when he speaks. His voice is fairly quiet and weak, and he doesn't usually pay attention to what he himself is saying much of the time, and tends to run his mouth quite a lot as a result.
Backstory/Personality: Pearly isn't what you'd call Crimeboss material under normal circumstances, since he's not exactly your typical breed of criminal. Sure, he tends to dabble in thievery and extortion at times, and it's not all that rare for him to kill someone at the drinking establishments he tends to frequent (though that's as indicative of his choice of establishment as his character), but he's not really a consummate criminal, or a very good earner, or even all that frightening. Pearly is, instead, two things in equal measure - a sociable drunk with few equals and a firebrand unmatched by any other in the business. Other criminals are out for money and/or power - Pearly's remarkably humble in that respect, and lives pretty austerely, and isn't a big fan of telling people what to do, since if they can't figure things out themselves, he's "hardly entitled to be their fuckin' mother". Instead he tends more toward the political side of things - he can talk about a great number of governmental things at length, and not a day passes without him contemplating with his cadre of loyal thugs that maybe it's time to get people really going, you know, get the populace riled, get them to go out there and fuck things up, depose kings, loot castles, burn temples, make a new order of things. Turn those dirty thieves and whores in their castles and temples out into the streets, and let the honest people take charge for a change. His tendency to ramble on passionately and at length about this sort of thing when he's drunk as well as fight anybody who tries to oppose him has served him well, turning him into a veritable pub politician, and despite his tenuous connections with the messier elements of the underworld, he does have quite a few supporters - at last count they number in the low hundreds, as many flocked to him after the death of the big boss himself, when the bigger fish were too busy killing the shit out of each other to pay much attention to a bunch of drunks and their pub revolutions. And here he is, at the head of a growing criminal revolution, which seems to be picking up steam as of late.
Goal: to lead a horde of so-called 'criminals' into the quarters of the royals (or temple officials) of a region, and teach those bastards a lesson they'll never forget. On a longer timescale, to establish proper anarchy.
Skills:
Sword [Proficient]
Leader [Proficient] [Two followers]
Bartering [Proficient]
Bribing [Proficient]
Lore [Kingdoms]
Okay, that's three different sheets. Hopefully one of them will prove compelling enough to include. Will possibly add a Headhunter as well if I have a compelling idea.
Kingdom: Blightport
Author
Topic: Unlikely Heroes [Post-Apocalyptic/Fantasy] [0/4] (Read 1193 times)