"Life is hard, my son, so you'd better enjoy it anyway. Be true to your word, your loved ones and the fine edge of your sword. Be fair where life is not."
Those were the last words of Gryfford's father, Marsus the Strong, while he laid on his deathbed, blood slowly seeping from multiple arrow wounds. Marsus, a retired gladiator, was a man of countless battles, many of them fought in the famous arenas of Tymon, one of the city-states of the peculiar River Kingdoms.
Gryfford grew without a mother, raised by his father and an old half-orc servant woman named H'arka. Death was a thoroughly acknowledged part of his life: quite a few of his father's friends, men he grew up around, perished in the arena.
But Death need not be sinister, his father taught him, if it is received and given with honor among honorable men and humanoids. If your enemies are dishonorable, though, then they deserve a dog's demise, and should be content if you are so kind as to swiftly impale them with a merciful thrust of the blade.
Gryfford took to heart the moral lessons of his father as well as his martial training. Growing up, he enjoyed himself and the company of steadfast friends and amicable women (many of them in the bordellos of his home town), and living the somewhat haphazard and disquieting life of a gladiator's son he found a focus in his falchion sword.
While the world around him was perhaps a little wild, the smoothness and the edges of his falchion blades - gifts from his father - were fixed and reliable, and at the same time flexible enough to accommodate his moods. He even took to speaking to them (his falchion blades), something which he finds quite soothing to this day.
He has called all of the falchion blades he has ever had "Sharpest", and he consider them variations on the same essential spirit.
Marsus was forced to flee Tymon after a disagreement with "Togs" Evard, a powerful local moneylender. His debts caught up with him in Varisia, after a long flight, when he and his son were ambushed by thugs rented by Togs. Gryfford doesn't know the exact nature of his father's debt, but it seems the agreed upon back payment was not money, and that Togs flew in a rage the day Marsus showed up at his lavish house and reimbursed him with solid gold, flatly refusing to repay the moneylender in any other way.
Gryfford will get revenge on Togs one day, but he figures his adversary is too powerful for him right now. Better to enjoy life, make some friends, train so as to become fearsome with his falchion - and then Gryfford will return to Tymon and will stick his blade in Togs in some suitably gruesome fashion.
For now, he can't flee farther away, this little town in which he arrived bordering the sea. So he will stay and find something interesting to do with himself and his Sharpest.