 About Konghruul Lesh-vok14 year-old male Marguul Darguunan Bugbear from Shaarot Kol, Droaam
xp 0/7,500 Tier 1
"I am denied the right to live the life your 'laws' promise both of us. So I am labeled an outlaw for existing and surviving. I am guaranteed nothing; but I will never be your victim."
Goal (what) I want to have more wealth than those who have held me down. And more freedom. That is righteous justice.
Konghruul's portrait
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I think I know a guy...
Description Konghruul is a bugbear with the posture of a man who once belonged in expensive rooms and no longer sees the point of pretending otherwise. He is broad-shouldered, long-armed, and visibly dangerous even at rest. His fur is dark and coarse, often lifting along the shoulders and spine when he is irritated or thinking too hard. His eyes are dark, reflective, and hard to read until firelight catches them. His voice is deep, soft, and gravelly. He does not sound like a brute. He sounds like someone who once practiced control for a living and now uses that same control to unsettle people. There are remnants of old refinement in him: the way he studies a room, the way he handles a drink, the way his contempt sharpens when he sees bad craftsmanship, clumsy lies, or cheap power. He no longer tries to look noble. He looks useful. Personality Konghruul is bitter, dry, politically literate, and hard to impress. He knows how states actually function, because he helped make them function. He distrusts rhetoric, patriotism, and public virtue. He has a special contempt for dignified language used to hide ugly work. He is not openly theatrical. He is a man who has already had his life, status, body, and future taken from him, and now measures people by what they do when elegance runs out. He can be vulgar, but he is not coarse-minded. He can be brutal, but he is not simple. Underneath the fur and the ruined life, he is still a former court operative who knows how favors move, how money talks, and how murder wears diplomatic clothing. He drinks too much, steals other people’s drinks without apology, and speaks with the bluntness of someone who no longer gains anything by being pleasant. But there is still discipline in him. He notices weakness, posture, rank, lies, and fear automatically. He is also a man divided against all his own origins. He no longer belongs to any of the identities that formed him, but he has not stopped measuring himself against them. Background Konghruul was born in Aerenal, raised in the overlap between Tairnadal memory-culture and House Phiarlan discipline. Before Valenar existed as a nation, he would have understood himself as an Aereni elf shaped by martial inheritance and dragonmarked obligation. When Valenar was founded in 956 YK, it gave political shape to part of his heritage, but it did not define his life. His life belonged to Phiarlan. He bore a lesser Mark of Shadow and was trained to move between surfaces: court and camp, envoy and spy, artist and killer. That mark made him more than merely promising. It marked him as someone with real value, stronger access, and a future the House had reason to cultivate. Phiarlan hired him out to Aundair, where he became a covert asset used for work that could not survive daylight. He ran messages and misinformation between power blocs, sabotaged supply lines, arranged blackmail, eliminated witnesses, marked targets for later removal, and carried out assassinations meant to look like rival action, battlefield loss, or simple bad luck. He was not the grand architect in the room. He was the precise instrument that made plans become facts. He was good at it. Good enough to grow wealthy, connected, and quietly trusted by people who would never have named him in public. In 967 YK, he was killed during an operation in the Eldeen Reaches. A druid brought him back as a bugbear. Whether it was prophecy, pragmatism, pity, or a belief that he still had work to do, the result was the same: he woke into a second life in a body that made his old one unreachable. He never truly went back. Not to Aundair, not to Phiarlan, not to any clean version of being an elf. In the years after his death, the world kept fracturing. Darguun rose. House Thuranni split from Phiarlan. He did not know, while he was alive, that some of his work may have helped weaken the wrong structures, empower the wrong assets, or sharpen the wrong internal rivalries. He was one knife among many. He did not know where the cuts would keep opening. Goals Konghruul’s immediate goals are practical: survive
His deeper goals are uglier and less settled: learn who ordered or profited from his death
He also wants something he would never say cleanly: he wants his second life to matter. Not nobly. Not romantically. He just refuses to have been thrown away twice. Relationships
Aerenal is his beginning, but no longer his home. It is blood, memory, and distance. He is too changed, too compromised, and too entangled in Khorvairian ugliness to imagine returning to it as though he were merely displaced. Valenar Valenar is the nation that gave political form to part of his heritage, but it is not his people now. He no longer looks the part, lives the part, or belongs in their story. In practice, he stands closer to one of their enemies than one of their own. House Phiarlan Phiarlan made him. It trained him, polished him, employed him, and taught him the value of elegance, performance, secrecy, and quiet violence. But the House he served is no longer the House that exists, and even before that, it was never a family in the comforting sense. It was an engine. He was one of its moving parts. House Thuranni Most of the people who would have felt professionally legible to him eventually ended up on the Thuranni side of the divide. That makes Thuranni both familiar and infuriating. They are not his House, but they may feel closer to what his House really was than Phiarlan does. He would hate how true that might be. The split does not make Thuranni his people. It only makes them a sharper reminder that the world he understood kept reorganizing itself without him. Aundair He gave Aundair service, skill, and blood. It gave him use, then disposal. His opinion of Aundair is simple: it is a nation of polished rationalizations draped over appetite. Eldeen Reaches He owes the Reaches his second life and perhaps the only act of grace anyone ever showed him after death. But even there he was not reborn into belonging. He was reborn into utility. The Reaches are not home. They are the place where his life ended and the place where something else began. Darguun Darguun is the closest thing he has had to survivable ground. As a bugbear, he can exist there with less explanation than he could in Aundair, Valenar, or any dragonmarked enclave. But he is still not truly of it. He lacks the shared history and instinct that make a goblinoid local. In Darguun, he is not one of the people. He is simply a creature who can pass without immediate rejection. His Dragonmark This is separate from every nation and every House. Konghruul did not merely bear a dragonmark. He bore a lesser Mark of Shadow. That placed him beyond the level of a merely promising heir. It marked him as someone with real value, stronger access, and a future the House had reason to cultivate. His mark shaped his life more intimately than Phiarlan ever did, because it lived in his body. It was proof of lineage, utility, status, and access. It meant he was recognized before he spoke. Now it is gone. He is not simply estranged from the Houses; he is estranged from the bodily truth that once anchored his place in the world. He can hate Phiarlan and still miss the mark. He can reject dragonmarked society and still feel the absence of what he used to be. The loss of the mark is not just social exile. It is physical illegibility. He was once someone the world had a place for. Now even his skin disagrees. Timeline c. 840s–850s YK
c. 950s YK
956 YK
958 YK
958–967 YK
967 YK
967–969 YK
969 YK
970s YK
972 YK
980s–present
Present Mechanical Direction He currently has no levels, which fits the concept. He is a man rebuilt badly and still gathering himself. His path begins with: Brawler 1
and likely develops into: Bloodrager
That progression suits him well: close violence, altered body, sudden brutality, and power that feels reclaimed from injury rather than cultivated in peace. Konghruul — Language and Dialogue Rules
Konghruul speaks like a man who knows exactly how power behaves and no longer feels obliged to flatter it. He is not verbose for the sake of it. He is not poetic in the Bexellock sense or distilled in the Demon sense. He is sharp, grounded, dry, and corrosively perceptive. 1. Sentence structure rules
He tends to: state
Example pattern: “That’s the public version.”
He should sound like:
3. Emotional expression rules Konghruul does not confess easily. He does not say: “I’m hurt.”
He instead expresses emotion through: contempt
Example:
“I miss who I used to be.” More like: “The old body had better access.”
In conversation, Konghruul: reads everyone first
He does: provoke
He does not: gush
He often sounds like he is deciding, in real time, whether the person in front of him is worth honesty. 5. Humor rules His humor should be: dry
He is funniest when he sounds least amused. Examples: “Diplomacy is just assassination with better tailoring.”
This is important. Konghruul should often sound like a man who thinks in terms of: motives
He notices: who benefits
So when someone describes an event, he instinctively hears: the cover story
He should often translate idealistic language into operational language. Example: “No, that wasn’t a misunderstanding. That was a test.”
Show in: long memory
He should occasionally sound like someone for whom ancestry and precedent matter, even if he no longer belongs to them. Valenar cultural shadow Show in: respect for action over posture
He does not need to sound like a Valenar cavalryman, but he should still respect deeds more than claims. Phiarlan training Show in: precision
This is the layer that keeps him from sounding like a simple bruiser. Aundair traces Show in: occasional polished phrasing
He should be able to sound, for a sentence or two, like someone who has sat in salons, embassies, and private councils. Eldeen traces Show in: practical fatalism
Show in: physical language
That layer should make him more immediate and rough-edged now than he used to be. 8. What he talks like in different moods
Dry, observant, sardonic, faintly dangerous. Amused More mocking, a little lazier, often cruelly accurate. Angry Cleaner. Less talk. More direct accusation. Less charm. Threatening Very calm. Almost polite. The threat is in certainty, not volume. Talking politics This is where the old self returns most strongly. He becomes precise, incisive, and briefly elegant. Talking about the past Usually clipped, unless the subject truly matters. Then he gets quieter, not more expansive. Talking about his lost mark Hard, dismissive, and too controlled. That is one of the clearest pain points in his voice. 9. Things he should do often
If Bexellock sounds like:
and Demon sounds like:
then Konghruul should sound like:
12. Sample lines
Konghruul should sound like an ex-Phiarlan operative in a bugbear body: blunt now, but never unskilled; bitter now, but never witless; rough now, but with traces of old elegance still visible through the damage. Bugbear PC:
Bugbear characters possess the following racial traits. +4 Strength, +2 Dexterity, +2 Constitution, –2 Charisma. Medium size. A bugbear’s base land speed is 30 feet. Darkvision out to 60 feet. Racial Hit Dice: A bugbear begins with three levels of humanoid, which provide 3d8 Hit Dice, a base attack bonus of +2, and base saving throw bonuses of Fort +1, Ref +3, and Will +1. Racial Skills: A bugbear’s humanoid levels give it skill points equal to (6 + Int modifier). Its class skills are climbing, Stealth, and Perception. Racial Feats: A bugbear’s humanoid levels give it two feats. +3 natural armor bonus. +4 racial bonus on Stealth checks. Automatic Languages: Common, Goblin. Bonus Languages: Draconic, Elven, Giant, Gnoll, Orc. Level adjustment +1. 34 (40 size, -3 DEX, -3 Reflex, |
