So I finally stopped putting off rewriting this and finished it off. I'm reposting all of it for easy access, the new parts are labelled as such and at the end so they're easy to find.
It should be obvious, but I'm going for a future Berserker path walker here.
Name: Gorma
Ancestry: Orc
Gender: Male
Age: 22
Build: You have an average height and weight.
Appearance: You are ugly. You have thick tusks jutting from your broad jaw, a sloping forehead, and tiny eyes set deep in your skull.
Background: The Gods of Blood and Iron visit you in your dreams. You start the game with 1 Insanity.
Personality: KILL!
Professions: Peasant conscript, Mercenary
Size: 1
Speed: 12
Wealth: Getting By
Damage/Health: 12
Strength: 12
Agility: 10
Intellect: 9
Will: 9
Healing Rate: 3
Defense: 10
Perception: 10
Insanity: 1
Corruption: 1
Weapons and Equipment:
Dagger
Staff
Basic clothing
Backpack
A week of rations
Waterskin
Tinderbox
3 torches
Pouch of 2 cp.
A medallion depicting a hideous woman’s face.
LEVELS
--Fill this in as the group level increases. List the paths you take (if any) and your bonuses.--
Relevant rolls:
Background: The Gods of Blood and Iron visit you in your dreams. You start the game with 1 Insanity.
Personality: Kill!
Professions: Peasant conscript, Mercenary
Gorma doesn't know when he started having the dreams. Perhaps he has always had them. For as long as he can remember he's had nights where he's been intruded upon by gruesome images and terrifying voices, filling his dreams with blood and violence, with brutality, savagery, and war. Neither does he know where the voices come from or who they belong to, but they hold his sleeping mind in an iron-handed grip. Sometimes they show him feverish visions of death and murder or whisper to him malevolent secrets, at other times they rise to a crescendo of commanding and demanding shouts. In his dreams he has killed a thousand men in a thousand ways and died a thousand deaths. When he wakes, he wakes in terror; sweat pouring from his skin, blood still racing through his veins, his muscles tense and strained, and always exhausted, as if he'd had no rest at all.
During the days the voices are quiet, but the their words and images still linger, like the rumblings of a faraway storm or a headache he cannot be rid off. When he looks to other people he sometimes sees them as they might have appeared in the dreams, dead and broken before him, many times by his own hand. The voices, he knows, even when he can't hear them, wants blood on his hands, commands him to make the visions reality, demands that he revel in the slaughter. But while he is awake he can deny them, and they respond by sending him dreams filled with scorching anger and indignation.
Gorma was born to a household outside of the emperor's enslavement of his kin. Not that this meant they were free people -- the tiny settlement he belonged to were beholden to a local lord, receiving the right to their miserable little plots of land in exchange for military service. His days a child was framed by fighting and violence; when he wasn't being prepared for service he'd spend his time quarrelling and scrapping like dogs with his peers over any and every thing -- what you couldn't defend, you couldn't keep, be it food, valuables, or any other possessions. He hated the village and his life there, and though he were to young to understand it yet, he wished for a place he could call his own, where others wouldn't boss him around and he wouldn't have to spend every moment guarding everything that was his, lest any moment somebody else would walk in and take it from him.
-----Readded part starts here -----
In that way it was somewhat of a relief when his military service began, with the imposement of routines, rules, and regulations. Most of the handful of young Orcs who entered service at the same time had trouble adapting and were punished harshly, but for Gorma it came easier. He already made a considerable effort to resist his nature as it was, and finding himself in a society which rewarded that suited him just fine. Of course, it was by no means a peaceful existence -- the regiment existed to do combat, after all, and to intimidate and awe people with combat in mind -- and Gorma was despite his demeanour far from a cautious fighter. Whether in training or in actual combat, fighting was the one time Gorma let the voices guide and it showed that he had learned from their lessons. At times he even lost himself in the fight and had to be pulled off his own comrades, not knowing how to put and end to his bloodlust himself. He built a reputation for ruthless and cunning battler, with no scruples or regard for his opponents.
It was as such he was noticed by the captain of The Blackened Banners, a mercenary company temporarily contracted by his lord. As the sellswords prepared to move on, the captain made Gorma a simple offer -- desert and join their band, and they'd guard him from repercussions. It was an easy choice, and he left with them the very next day without looking back. He served with them for several years, and they kept their end of the bargain. Then, of course, everything changed, and with the emperor's death he was no longer in need of any protection. Having been far to the north of his childhood home when it happened, he never knew how things had played out for the people there, but he wasn't exactly curious to find out. Instead, he reneged on his contract with the Blackened Banners and set his eyes on the even further north. The place where it was said you could be truly free.