Gunnar Skaldaspiller
Main: Middenhjem
| Gunnar Skaldaspiller | |
|---|---|
 ... | |
| About | |
| Born | Klofningar, Middenøst |
| Residence | none |
| Race | Mennesker |
| Occupation | Mercenary Captain |
| Appearance | ... |
| History | |
| Known For | ... |
| Title | Captain, Ninth Child of a Forgotten Thane |
| Family | Disowned by family as he refused an arranged marriage. Family has been overrun and dispersed. |
Background
In Middenhjem, life is often nasty, brutish, and short. A noble lord needs a large family, as many do not survive to full adulthood: when all able men must to fight, too often they are heir today and gone tomorrow.
The trouble with a large family is when too many survive. Once you have enough sons to promise an heir and dispatch some to serve the king in war, the rest become unnecessary. As the ninth child, Gunnar's education was less structured than that of his brothers. The Skaldaspillar family had achieved some degree of success holding the border and conducting raids (in legend, a forefather brought back works of art from their "neighbors," hence the "Plunderer of Poets" family name) and could afford good training for their children. Legacy of grander ambitions that never came to pass.
Gunnar was sickly in youth. Although subject to the same combat training all his brothers faced, they despaired he'd ever be useful in a fight, so he was directed to more academic matters in the hopes that he'd still be able to provide some use to the household. This led to an academic understanding of combat and a penchant for tafl (a strategy game loosely related to chess), where his tutors recognized a certain natural talent for juggling many possible outcomes in fields like strategy, tactics, and administration. It also led to a basic grounding in many other theoretical areas, which never truly blossomed.
As he grew older, his placelessness in the household made him restless, and he'd sneak out - he was not often missed. He spent time with the huntsmen and the guards, learning to get along outside his (irrelevant) station. As adulthood came, he was dispatched with his brothers to serve the Jarl's army. While he visited home after that first campaign, he never truly returned.
Gunnar spent several years in various military posts, either as part of a formal army under the Jarl or filling slots in raiding parties, as a guardsman, or whatever else came up. As he returned time and again to campaigning, he filled a variety of roles, from sergeant leading small units of men, to support roles. His talents for pattern matching was eventually recognized, and he began to fill many unffocial 'advisor' roles to the high ranking noble-born leaders of the campaign du jour. Some were good, some were bad. He learned to guide bad commanders to do the least harm; learned to support good commanders with everything he had. He still fought, still took charge of the lives of men, but more and more he learned to appreciate good planning and a damned good medic over a two-handed axe.
In later years, he refused an arranged marriage his father insisted on - something about an alliance. The refusal basically meant exile from the family, which may have been just as well. The family home was eventually overrun and the family dispersed, now largely irrelevant.
Truly without home after the sack of the family home, Gunnar became a permanent fixture of the army, even in nominal peace time. He took roles training and advising, developing some connections in the northern cities. He spent some time fighting in the desert and didn't care for it, returning promptly to the north and the Skyggemen. After nearly 25 years of military life (formal and informal) he joined another major campaign in the frozen "north," under an impetuous, wealthy, favored noble son.
They wrote songs about what happened. Wrote poetry. They had to; there weren't enough survivors to construct an oral history, so legend had to do.
The campaign was to penetrate deep into the tundra and hunt down a particularly troublesome Skyggeman: a prince, or shaman, or who knows what - someone had been raising Hel. Maybe it was supposed to be prophecy, maybe it was just good oratory. Whatever the reason, the attacks had become bigger, and stronger. Over weeks, the army reached what they believed was Mørkgren, a Skyggeman city buried in an icy mountain.
Gunnar was attached to an infantry company, having been ousted from an overall advisory/strategic role due to the usual noble politics. He advised his immediate leader as best he could, but followed orders. He was given command of a smallish unit of 30 men in the siege; little happened for a few days. The Skyggemen refused battle, knowing the army's resources would eventually run out and the men would starve or freeze. In the end, the order was given for a direct assault into the maw of the mountain. Gunnar led part of the charge.
An hour later, Gunnar's song rung out in the icy caves. He tied a short rope around his waist, and the other end to an ice-ax, which he drove into the icy floor. He couldn't run, now. He ordered his men to fall back, to hold the cave entrance for five more minutes while the army routed. They'd been drawn into narrow, winding caves, picked off in detail. Gunnar was pretty sure the noble lords were dead or gone; they led bravely from the front, a hard spot when things go this way... In the narrow paths, he could force the enemy through him, and buy the troops few precious seconds.
The eerie advance of the Skyggemen halted when they saw him. An eternal moment stretched out before Gunnar, into which stepped a Skyggeman of a sort he had not seen before. The "Prince"? A shaman? Just some caste he didn't know about?
The battle began with a small bow. Gunnar couldn't move much, tied to his sacrificial ax. He could have cut the cord, but stood his ground - stood his promise. The Skyggeman was faster, but fell into a pattern. Gunnar delayed, fighting for seconds more than survival. He saw an opportunity and struck, but didn't do more than mar his opponent's armor. The Skyggeman retaliated viciously, shattering Gunnar's shield - and cutting his rope tie. Intentionally? The fight was a little more ... honorable? now. Did that concept even apply here?
In the end, exhausted, Gunnar held his blade high above his head: he knew he was inviting a blow he couldn't defend against, but he'd get one good strike in for the balance. The Skyggeman took it, striking. Gunnar put his last into the downward blow: he isn't sure if it landed. He was struck through, and memory fades here.
The next few days are unclear. He believes he hit his opponent. He remembers being hit, and seems to recall being impaled against the wall ten feet away, his ribs shattering. He vaguely remembers waking up in a snowy field, a Skyggeman standing over him. He isn't sure if it was who he had fought - similar, maybe the same, yes. Maybe another? What he does remember is the Skyggeman leaning over and chanting, drawing the sword from his chest and lying it on top of him. He knows a little about their language and cryptography... but the best he ever got was that it was a curse, or a blessing, or both:
"Til the end of the world, know not home nor peace, Warrior."
He's confused about this point. He thinks there was more, and maybe this wasn't even it. He didn't really understand that part until later. Either way, he fainted as the sword was removed.
Some time later he woke outside the battlefield. The engraved sword lay on top of him, along with an oiled bear skin. His injury had been bandaged, and stuffed with one of the northern herbs he'd studied. He got up and starting walking, following the footsteps of his fleeing army.
---
Gunnar rejoined the army in its rout and found, indeed, the leadership was dispersed or dead. He organized what was left, rounding up as many men as he could. A surprising number of men ultimately escaped the buried city, many telling of being ejected from the city unceremoniously after they had been injured and overrun or captured.
Gunnar's men made it back, saving the losses from cold, injuries, and starvation. Another force fled and was lost entirely. Upon returning, Gunnar found that his injury would not heal, and grew regularly worse. He sought out everything he could about the Skyggemen and the campaign, and about his injury. Eventually, he shared parts of the story with a wise man, and showed him the Skyggeman's sword. Although the full text is encrypted, the wise man believes the sword does bear several passages: the only one he could read was a stanza beginning,
"'Til the end of the world, know not home nor peace, Warrior."
--
In time, Gunnar found he could arrest the advance of his injury by binding it with a specially prepared potion distilled from a plant grown in the tundra, known as "razorweed." It is a fairly common substance, related to tobacco. It's a bitch to collect and only the undried variety works for the potion, but he largely conceals the need by carrying large amounts of the stuff concealed in his pipe tobacco.
He came to believe he was cursed that day. He finds that while the razorweed potion prevents the wound from growing worse, he only finds comfort when he travels, or is on a job. He thinks he can't heal from his injuries if he finds "home," spending more than a couple of weeks in a city without a job. Several wise men have assured him this is nonsense.
In his months with the Skyggeman's sword, he has tried to decode more of the text. After months of research, the mounting nightmares about his ordeal and cryptic clues from the runes have driven him to conclude that the blade must be bathed in the fresh blood of an enemy every quarter, or the spirit of its true master will be reborn to hunt him. He wonders if he's quite alright after his ordeal in the mountain, but doesn't dare risk finding out.
Driven by his injuries - physical, mental, emotional, spiritual - he finds he's useless in the army and even worse as a civilian. Doomed to roam, he sets out to join, or found, a mercenary company. This will let him escape from home, deliver to him enemies, let him exercise his talents, and may let him wander until he finds a way to cleanse his curse.
("Curse"?)
---
Still needs some work. I like the lack of clarity; he was restless as a youth, and is now. Is it really because of some magic, or is it part of his personality? What happened with the Skyggeman "Prince"? Did he kill him and that's why they let him go, or did they honor his bravery alone? How cursed is he?
What do the runes say? Was it a curse, or a blessing for warriors?
I see him as famous for surviving and leading the exodus. I see him as infamous because only his group survived, and his men saw him go to die. Some people think he made a pact with the enemy, others think he was just a hero.
I'm planning to take the sword as a defining inventory item, whatever that perk is. I don't think it needs to be anything special, just a high quality longsword-ish thing. Maybe it has Skyggeman voodoo on it, but I'd assume if the story goes that way I'd be buying it with CP post-character-creation.
