Nobwin Underbelly's page

With a head topped by sandy-colored locks and a face creased with a few more frown lines than ones made by smiles, and though the right height, Nobwin possesses little in the way of the bearing of your average halfling. His sense of style is more akin to a dwarf with durability and practicality given more emphasis then flare or comfort.

Nobwin has little of the joviality of your typical halfling though possesses plenty of the reckless abandon to his own safety that is a common trait amongst his race. He has a sense of humor like a dwarf, which is to say little unless it pertains to funny ways an orc can die.

Nobwin’s tale begins in far off Taldor, a land choking upon the glory of old and filled with frivolous nobility. Born the only child of Wenton and Jilara Underberry, Nobwin’s parents were simple folk of strong moral character. Wenton trained in the Taldan army in one of its phalanx legions but was constantly overlooked for promotion because of his size and race while Jilara served as a housekeeper for a minor noble lord. When Nobwin was only a few years old, his parents, having stomached enough of their present situation, moved the family to Lastwall.

In Lastwall, they found a land that appreciated their contributions but tragedy would strike when their village near the Kestrel River was overrun by an orc raiding party from across the river in the Hold of Belkzen. The defenders gave it their all but eventually succumbed to numbers. Most of the buildings of the village were looted then razed along with similar circumstances for most of the non-combatants.

Barely old enough to be off his mother’s apron; Nobwin was trapped in his family’s root cellar by the wreckage of their home above. After a day and a half, dehydration began to take a toll as his cries for help started becoming a croak. As luck would have it, however, just as his voice was turning into a raspy whisper, a dwarven merchant caravan, returning down the river to the Mindspin Mountains after selling their wares in Vigil, came upon the wreckage and one amongst them heard his pleas of aid.

With no family left within hundreds of miles, a dwarven couple took the young orphan into their home, raising them with their own children. Growing up in a dwarven community, Nobwin began to mimic the attitudes and habits of his adoptive family. As an affectionate joke, they called him ‘Underbelly’ as a play on his real surname and his habit of always being underfoot or in the case of the more rotund members of the settlement, underbelly.

Nobwin learned to hate orcs and the other monstrous creatures that proved an ever present danger in their slice of the world. This hatred was reinforced each time he contemplated the last bits of his old life rescued from the wreckage all those years ago; a very long sword-like polearm that a family friend from the other side of the world had gifted to his father and his mother’s soot-stained scarf. He trained with his ‘fellow’ dwarves, learning the art of war at the hands of battle-hardened greybeards and years later when the chance presented itself, Nobwin joined up with a friends to guard a caravan making a supply trip to a small settlement called Trunau in the fringes of the orc-infested Hold of Belkzen.