In "A History of Ashes," you'll be introduced to a wide cast of misfits, troublemakers, heroes, anti-heroes, and outright villains. The complicated part? For many of these NPCs, which of those roles they'll end up playing will depend on how the PCs interact with them. One such character is the mysterious Cinderlander, a man whose family was slaughtered by the Shoanti, leaving him with nothing but a burning need for vengeance. He abandoned his former life and walked into the Cinderlands, where he became a figure of legend—many Shoanti believing that the Cinderlander can't be a living man, but rather a spirit of wrath fueled by men slain during these raids into the southern lowlands.
After years of hunting and killing Shoanti, the Cinderlander gradually achieved two cynical epiphanies—first, no matter how many Shoanti he killed in his lifetime, there would always be more; and second, that the Shoanti were already a doomed culture, gradually being crushed between civilization to the south and more brutal orcs to the north. His righteous fury largely exhausted, the Cinderlander now rents himself out as a guide for those who seek to cross the Cinderlands in safety, facilitating the inland travel of southerners. He secretly resents the paradox that over the years he has gradually become far more like the Shoanti he hunts than the Chelaxian heritage he thought he was defending, yet he knows little else.
