"Tirin I", Prologue, Turn 110Prologue: Baron Bembul and the Ballad of the Belarded. Things were going as well as they had for many decades, thought Baron Bembul Whipseason of Keyconjure. The being known as Moldath Mournsaints was a complicated character, not of this world, not really a dwarf. The Rot that had plagued him for two centuries was now working more in harmony with his other fractured fragments in as much was possible for a death magic psychic construct, and together they had settled into a nice routine. For thirty years he had resided at The Eternal Citadel in a spectacular living complex with a temple dedicated to the Lord of Blight, Ala.
The Rot itself seemed quiet, dormant even. There were no roiling clouds of miasma and he hadn’t needed a trip to the legendary surgeons in many years. Part of this was due to his habit of very, very rarely leaving his marble sepulchure. The feeling of safety that Moldath/Bembul gained from this solemn sanctum was more directed at... the other dwarves, safe from the primal urges of his vampire personality.
One fly in the ointment, a splinter in his rotten mind, was the fate of his illegitimate bastard son, Stukos Orbshaken.
Moldath couldn’t really remember why he had so desired to have a son. Perhaps some way of feeling like a real dwarf? Someone to carry on his legacy.
Regardless it was clear that Stukos was a massive disappointment.
Stukos was 29 years old, enormously obese, and rolled around the fortress aimlessly with a glazed expression on his face. It was a poorly kept secret that he was the child of the Baron and that afforded him the luxury of no shifts in the smelting halls or glass furnaces, or hauling gorlak corpses, or the thousand other jobs that kept The Eternal Citadel thrumming away.
In fact, he had not gained a single scrap of skill in all of his life. 29 years of supping on apricot wine and devouring masterwork
☼grizzly bear heart roasts☼ had produced a spectacularly corpulent frame.
The other dwarves giggled as he wheezed slowly past them on his way to the Inn.
Moldath knew that someone had to whip his boy into shape, but he was reluctant for that person to be him. He would devise a plan.
He sent words and rumours to various agents around the world in the hope of ensnaring some poor adventurer to come to the Citadel and take Stukos under his wing.
Soon enough, his plan started to reap benefits, as he received word from an elf chieftess in the far north that some bumbling idiot had been convinced to steal from his personal vault in Northmanor.
Moldath grinned a long-toothed grin. Leverage.
OOC:
I initially had planned to use Stukos as my adventurer but on loading him up in adventure mode I was horrified by how utterly useless and slow he is. His base gait was 0.149 as he waddled across the map, and he had literally zero skills.
So my plan for this adventurer was to find someone to mentor Stukos, and then in Fortress mode, build him up into someone who could survive a fight with a dingo.