Balazar Getts

“Beware the fury of a patient man.”

― John Dryden

Balazar Getts

Balazar enlisted in the infantry, just like his father Ezekiel, and father's father, Aelfric, etc. He expected to remain there. He did not. The infantry was less about finding glory than marching hither and thither, and standing footsore for hours on end, guarding gates and doors and passages that nary a soul ever showed the least interest in. It was different in da's and grandda's times, when the Lortmils were tamed, and the Hateful Wars waged. Balazar's stint was little more than prolonged drudgery.

Trade caravans were more to his liking. He woke each day in a new town up and down the Low Road, haggling here, rubbernecking there.

Others might think such a life would be dull, plying the same subterranean rivers and lakes, and carting where the waterways did not course, but those who thought that were wrong. There were dangers, to be sure: rapids, nuisance goblins and the like here and there; and on occasion, frightful beasts that lurked in the shadows of the less trafficked routes. But he was blessed with friends along the length of the Road, in each of the Ulek states, in the Gran March, in Bissel and Keoland, even in Celene. He thought he would ply that Road till his dying days.

Until his father's unit was dispatched to help the humans in some border skirmish. They were late returning from patrol, so another unit was dispatched to find them, Aelfric among them. They found Ezekiel and his unit butchered to the last man. Horribly butchered.

... a hideous figurine

They found two curiosities on Ezekiel's body, the last seven pages had been ripped from his diary, those days just before he and his unit departed for the border, and even more curious still, a hideous figurine clutched in Ezekiel's fist.

Aelfric summoned Balazar. And handed him those curiosities. And commanded him to find out what happened, and why Ezekiel and his unit had ventured so far from where they had been posted. "I'm too old for this sort of thing," Aelfric said. "This is a task for the young. This is duty of a son."

He pressed the figurine into Balazar's palm, and closed Balazar's fist around it. "Find out who killed my son, and why." A tear rolled down the old man's cheek, soon lost in his silvered beard. "And then kill the fuckers responsible."

Balazar unfurled his fist, and gazed upon that hideous figurine. Its eyes seemed to glow.

That night Balazar began to have nightmares.

“Revenge may be wicked, but it’s natural.”
― William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair

Backstories.

They are fun to imagine, fun to write. Aren't they?

Yes they are. They are the stuff that dreams are made of.

My rules?

Relatively short. A few names, a few moments that will define his origins. And how he came to shrug off a normal, meaningful, and likely fulfilling life, to take up a dangerous road, one fraught with peril, and horrors beyond reckoning.

There needs to be a driving force that the DM can use to lure the character into even further danger. Call it a quest, a vengeance, whatever.

Most importantly, there needs to be a mystery, one that can be woven into the campaign, and separates him from sociopathic reavers.

One must always give credit where credit is due. This piece is made possible primarily by the Imaginings of Gary Gygax and his Old Guard, Lenard Lakofka among them, and the new old guards, Carl Sargant, James Ward, Roger E. Moore. And Erik Mona, Gary Holian, Sean Reynolds, Frederick Weining. The list is interminable. 

The Art:

Dwarf by manzanedo

Rotten-Bone-Ugly-Blade by dugstanat

Sources:

9025 World of Greyhawk Folio, 1981

1015 World of Greyhawk Boxed Set, 1983

11743 Living Greyhawk Gazetteer, 2000