Karawan's page

About Karawan

Darkness and Madness Domain Cleric of Groetus

Karawan Talbot, loyal harbinger (though definitely not servant) to the divine deity of end times, was born in the undead kingdom of Geb to his human mother and deceased father, who conceived Karawan before dying in an accidental uncontrolled burst of negative energy. Karawan's father never left Golarion, however, as he was so in tune with the undead and negative energy, and so worried for his unborn baby son, that his soul was bound to Geb in the burst of energy, and remains to this day a ghost. Karawan spent the first fifteen years of his life working with his father at the Temple of Urgathoa in Mechitar. He spent nearly every waking minute keeping the temple in perfect condition, dutifully sweeping every inch of the temple's floor and repairing even the most minor of chips or dents to the temple's sacred walls.

Karawan most likely would have still worked at the temple if not for a mentally unstable cleric, who was infamous for frequent burn outs of divine energy due to his constantly fluctuating states of mind. Though the cleric primarily worshipped Urgathoa, he would occasionally spout babble about a final god, the god Groetus. After having to endure one too many of the madman's rants, Karawan spent any time not spent cleaning in the temple's holy (or unholy for all of you closed minded folk) library, searching for any information on the mysterious bringer of the end. Sure enough, he found two scrolls worth of accounts detailing the god. The more he read of the scrolls, the more the mad cleric's words made sense to him. The meaning of good and evil, or lack thereof. The end that will inevitably follow the beginning. As a forgotten temple turns to dust, the current reality would one day be the discarded remains on which a new and glorious reality would be built. And Groetus would be the great one to herald in the new era, by being the one to sweep out the tattered, hollow remains of a spent world. Before the dawn of the coming day, Karawan had made the decision to preach to the world of the forgotten deity Groetus.

...

Three years passed.

Due to a rather heated argument between Karawan and a temple priest, Karawan had spent the previous two years performing odd jobs on the rather dangerous (at least for a flesh and blood creature) streets of Mechitar, returning to the home that he shared with his mother at night. Nightly tea became a cherished time between the two. Their bond grew exponentially. Mrs. Talbot's one worry in life was about her son's rather unconventional focus of worship. It had gotten him booted from the temple, after all. Her fears grew all the more real when Karawan stepped through their small house's door late one night, bleeding from a horrible, bloated burn wound on his neck. Karawan had been preaching of Groetus's return to a mass of both humans and ghosts, when an eerie black light emanated from around his raised palms before exploding violently and consuming the crowd of panicked onlookers. The burst left many of the humans gasping for air, but every undead entity within the blast's range glowing with power.

Karawan had been chosen to be Groetus's herald in a manner that could only have been conceived by the god of destruction himself. He vowed to wear the scar into the afterlife; to heal it would be blasphemy. It was the print of his patron. A warning of what was to come. The next day, Karawan set out on his journey to spread Groetus's word.

He joined the Dark Archives with the hope that he could discover a sacred artifact of his patron deity.

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On the whole, Karawan can only be described as odd. He appears cold and intimidating, and is constantly spreading the word of the rapture, but has many interests that appear childish to any onlooker. For one, he keeps a pet rabbit named Fluffy in a cage with him at all times, and takes the rabbit out of the cage to pet whenever combat is unlikely. Karawan is extremely protective of Fluffy, and vows to brutally slaughter any creature that dares to hurt her. (He typically expresses the concept of "slaughter" very colorfully, relaying his exact methods in gruesome detail.) No one save for Karawan actually knows where Fluffy is from, and Karawan uses this to his advantage, creating legendary war stories that always end with him obtaining the rabbit. Occasionally, he bluffs his way through the stories so well that the onlookers believe his pack of lies completely.

Karawan also has a taste for tea, and carries his mother's ceremonial tea set in his backpack. He refuses to drink alcoholic beverages. He thinks that the alcohol will corrode his most powerful weapon, his wit, in combat, and greatly looks down upon those who drink themselves into stupidity. Karawan is also highly superstitious, a trait that was impressed upon him by his mother. He loathes and fears arcane casters, believing that gods are the only beings that should be able to bestow magic upon mankind. Any creatures that doesn't have their spells granted to them by a god could be "unworthy" of their power.

Many consider Karawan to be a living, breathing oxymoron, and it isn't hard to understand why. He believes in a god of destruction and End Times, yet embraces some of the most pure and innocent elements of life. Though he usually keeps his beliefs on the topic to himself, he occasionally shares his views with those that he has learned to trust. He believes that, even though Groetus will eventually end the world, people should still try to make the world a good place to live, as the new reality will be built upon the ruins of the old one. He isn't as steadfast in this belief as he is in others, though, as he can't find a text that invariably claims it to be true. Sometimes he wonders if he only holds the fact close to him in order to avoid falling into a complete state of nihilism and madness. He also constantly struggles with depression, and occasionally experiences suicidal ideation, but once again masks it so well that not a living soul (save maybe for Fluffy) knows.