PMyrrh's Characters

Dolf of the Ravenwind tribe grew up living with his fellow tribespeople in the forestlands bordering the Wild Coast. It was a hard life, but a good one. Days were spent hunting and nights listening to tales spun by the tribe shaman. Protective of their lands but not overly aggressive to strangers, they strived to live by teachings of Badhbh Kothos.

A nomadic people, they skirted the edge of the wild coast, hunting, fishing, and occasionally trading their catches with towns for supplies and tools they could not make themselves. Of note, some of their finest warriors, The Red Hands, were known to shrug off injuries that crippled lesser men, making them a force to be revered and feared.

One day, when Dolf was 12, he met his first goblin. Or rather, his axe met his first goblin.
He was out with a hunting party (brought along by his Father now that he had reached the age of manhood) when they found a doe and her fawn torn to pieces. On closer inspection, the wounds were done by no forest predator, but dozens of jagged knives. This was not right by the law of the forest. The hunting party followed the tracks of the dozen small humanoids that they found leading away from the corpses and eventually came upon a group of vile goblins. Dolf was enraged as he saw them, seeing them laughing and joking after killing the deer, not for food, but for their own wicked pleasure. He charged in, headless of the warnings his brethren threw his way, and carved a bloody path through the goblins. The engagement lasted but a minute, the goblins routed by Dolf and his companions, though Dolf was struck down, or so his friends thought; he had taken several vicious blows before he finally fell. As they came up to collect his body they saw, with shock and aw, that the wounds he took were not but shallow gashes on his muscled body. They quickly rushed him off back to the village to be tended by the Shaman. It was for this show of courage and tenacity that Dolf was named a Red Hand.

This was the beginning of what the tribe elders came to call the "Troubled Times", a span of 3 years. Dark creatures and evil men began appearing in the tribe lands, killing game and attacking the tribe. Eventually the tribal elders began to argue back and forth on how to respond to these increasing threats; the groups of goblinoids were becoming too large for their tribe to handle, the evil men too well armed and organized for the tribe to ignore. Would they leave their ancestral forest home to hide with the slaved men behind their stone walls? (The tribe called and civilized people with monarchical governance slaves)

Dolf had been very torn during this argument, he wanted to protect his people, and that would be easy if those who could not fight could be behind the safety of a city's walls, but, and he would never admit it, cities scared him, stones pulled on top of each other waiting to fall, wood held together by tiny metal spikes instead of strong rope, and so much writing everywhere; the tribe believed that writing was only used by wizards.

No, the tribe eventually decided, most of the warriors arguing against changing their ways. This would be their downfall. The foragers began bringing back less than nothing, hunters finding no game, and pestilence killing many of the very young and very old.  The situation of the tribe looked bleak. It was decided by the chieftain that the tribe would move further south into the Marshes of Nulb to try and find food. Dolf did not like this idea much, as it would be harder to fight in mud than on dirt, but that is where the game seemed to be headed.

At first the going went well and nothing troubled them. They even set up a small settlement on a few of the dryer islands. That is where they found the tribe, hundreds of goblins and kobolds. They came in the night, wave after wave, a tide of knives and teeth, arrows and fire.
The tribe fought tenaciously, but eventually they had to run from the creatures, the few left alive. Dolf remembered the next few days vaguely, running back north, catching scant moments of sleep before snapping up to the sounds of an attack. He tried to protect his people, but when they finally emerged from the forest, their number had fallen to ten and two and the rest of the fighters later succumbing to infections, festering wounds that no fire would burn away, poison that no amputation could stop.  With no real tribe left, the few survivors went their separate ways.

The loss of his tribe was devastating to Dolf. He knew not what to do with himself, and went through cities and towns of the north in a haze of grief and depression for several weeks, staying in the stables to keep away from the strange men and stranger buildings. One day he heard cheering in town and learned that the northern realms had broken the evil powers. This snapped him out of his haze and he realized what he needed to do. He would go out into the world and spread the name of his tribe, making them legend.


Dolf participated in many an adventure after the through his life.  Clearing forests of goblins, routing keeps of undead, even a fight with the very evil that caused the destruction his tribe.  

A demoness from the abyss, the dreadlord Ruzzalphoy, had called to her followers to poison his land, the beginning of a ritual to bring her to the physical world.  Dolf, along with several cohorts, had hunted, tortured, and killed several of her cultists, and ultimately learned the location of the desecrated temple deep in the swamps of Gorlan, and went there to put an end to her desecration.

The chamber was dark but for the otherworldly glow of several mushrooms.  The group entered, breathing in air filled with spores and moisture.  A giant mound of decaying organic matter was at the center of the chamber.  Draped in mycelium, veiled in lichen, the utterly inhuman thing had taken the general shape of a woman, a headdress of fungi around her head.

"The fertilizer has finally arrived." A woman's voice said to them, but the voice was that was everywhere and nowhere, within their minds and reverberating off the chamber pillars.
   
"Remove the gnome, my new gardener" she said and suddenly Milla, the pirate captain, stabbed Grazden the tiny wizard, through the throat.

Korric, the group's leader, began saying something, but Dolf was past reaching.  He had heard the voice in his head, and knew some fell magic was coming. He brought the images of his family, suffering, dying to the forefront of his mind, and charged ahead, screaming "RAVENWINDS!" and swung his magic great axe, Bellzok Karzu, into the abomination, trailing acid in its arc.  

His vision blurred, his blood pounding in his ears; he was pain, he was death, HE WAS VENEGENCE.  The fight could have lasted for an eternity or a blink in time; he could not tell, but when he came to, he was kneeling in the center of the demon's filth, undeniably nothing but a corpse.  He looked around him and saw fire, acid, and death.  

His love Suerte, the elven priestess, was praying over Elara, using her goddess's magic to heal the druid.  Of Milla, Grazden, and Korric, he could see nothing.   That's when he saw the blood trailing from his mouth.  He tried to take a breath but the act was prevented by flem and puss.

The demon's spores must have finally found their way into his lungs, he realized.  As the ground rushed up to meet him; his eyes caught sight of the head of the demoness.  The last sight he saw was the remaining half of the demon's wicked face, smiling.

Those were his last memories as he awoke in the Convergence.