Urf Rotnose's page

About Urf Rotnose

For most goblins, the first years of life are spent fighting siblings and other newborns for food, shelter, and sometimes attention. Most don't get to the next year, while those that do are usually strong enough to make it a second year. For Urf Rotnose, however, he did not have this luxury. Born from goblin parents enslaved by trolls, his first memory was being forced into slave labor as a hunter, only rarely getting a chance to eat what he captured.

At first, all Urf could hunt were mice and other small rodents, and even that was a challenge for the near-infant goblin. Over the first few years that he miraculously survived, though, he worked his way up to larger animals, like goats and cows, having started to get the hang of hunting through no help of his troll masters. With wildlife harder to track, though, he often found himself on the fringes of society, small farming villages far away from larger cities. When he was hunting horses, he would often hear conversations between villagers, and eventually, he was able to even understand some of what they were saying. During one hunt where he bagged not one, but two different kinds of cow, he had heard the farmers talking about a knight that visited them that rode a horse into battle, taking down a few bandits in not but half a minute. The way Urf understood it made him fascinated, though he was a little disgusted that anyone would use a horse for anything other than meat.

After hearing that story, Urf started to really think about what to do with his life after finally escaping the trolls, something he and a fellow goblin he didn't see as a rival often talked about. He decided that he, too, would be a knight that rides animals into combat, taking out everything in sight and being totally awesome while doing so. During hunts, rather than killing larger animals, he would attempt to ride them first. Most attempts didn't work out so well, the young goblin just simply jumping on their backs and trying to hold on rather than calming them down first. Unfortunately for Urf, he attempted this on an occasion where one troll master was attending his hunt, and seeing this as the goblin just playing around, he saw fit to punish Urf.
He was thrown into a cage with a riled-up goblin dog that another goblin slave had captured, the rodent ready to attack anything it could get at. For a while, it was all Urf could do to dodge the creature, but when he saw his chance, he hopped on the goblin dog's back and attempted to ride it. The thrashing of the creature bashed him against the sides of the wooden bars a few times, but he held fast, and eventually, the violent movements broke through the cage. Seeing an opening, the goblin dog then darted out in a straight line, and the stunned trolls took too much time to order their hounds give chase before both the dog and the goblin riding it were out of sight.

It was a wild ride, but eventually Urf managed to calm the beast with some gentle stroking, a feat made difficult by the speed of the dog's sprint, but it slowed down and became docile enough that it wasn't trying to throw off its rider. That was when Urf knew what his fearsome beast to ride into battle would be: this goblin dog, who from then on would be known as Itchy Butt, named not because he constantly scratched his butt, but because a rash would irritate anyone other than Urf when they tried to sit on him. From then on, the two of them wandered the area, foraging for food here and there. He attempted several times to enter some towns and villages, but soon found that he was reviled, almost instantly thought to be there to cause trouble, and thus shunned and tossed out, often times violently. There were more than a few times where he narrowly escaped death due to the speed at which Itchy Butt could run.

Almost a year and many cuts and bruises later, Urf and Itchy Butt found themselves in a town that didn't immediately throw them out. For the first time, the goblin could actually walk around, though he still got some harsh looks from most of the humans around. He attempted to speak with some in his broken Common, but almost all would just ignore him, one even spitting and saying that he should fall off a ravine. Almost completely discouraged, feeling like he could get nowhere just because of his race, one man eventually talked to him, saying that there was another in town that could help him learn how to become a glorious knight. Directed to a man of the Cockatrice Order, the eager and energetic Urf pestered the man relentlessly with questions, half of which were actually relevant. At first ,the man was amused, answering some of his questions, but after several minutes, that amusement turned to annoyance. Rather than sully his name by attacking a lowly goblin, he instead gave the green imp a satchel of gold and a good luck charm that he claimed was a badge of office. This was enough to convince Urf that he was an official member of the Cockatrice Order, and from what the man had told him, he knew exactly what he had to do; armor up, get weapons, and go do heroic and amazing deeds to make the name of Urf Rotnose famous across all of Golorian! More than that, though, he had to do something to make the goblin name more respectable; no longer would any of his kind be run out of town just because of their race, a strangely noble idea to have come out a goblin mind.

In a matter of days, the eager goblin used the gold to buy himself some gear, donning some armor and a lance, then rode his goblin aimlessly trying to find glory. Not really knowing where to find glory, however, Urf bought himself a map. Since the goblin couldn't read, however, he couldn't find glory on the map, so he burned it and kept searching around. Eventually, though, he started to come across some who were desperate enough to employ a goblin to solve their problems. Surprisingly, Urf wound up being rather adept in these tasks, ranging from taking care of some bandits along a trade route to settling a border dispute between neighboring towns. He didn't quite do the jobs cleanly, but they were done, and he always got his payment due, though most of the time, he took less gold in order to get some food for himself and Itchy Butt, instead.

The goblin had actually gotten a little name for himself in the small towns he could frequent, known as a very unlikely source of aid, though most considered him only a last resort. As such, when he came across a remote town, a former mining town that turned into a farming community after some incident in the past, he found himself approached to help the poor villagers out. It seemed that there were some mysterious disappearances of three villagers, and no one had any leads as to how and why they vanished. Urf knew he could handle it; after all, he could handle bears, so people that weren't even there would be a piece of cake! Doing some brief investigation, he found that the villagers that disappeared were last seen around the cave that used to be the old mine the village was built for. That was enough for Urf to know that he would have to look inside and see just what was going on in there.

What no one, especially Urf, knew, though, was that the old mine was shut down because, centuries ago, some Duergar had claimed some territory where the mining was taking place, and took many workers as slaves. Still inhabited by them, the villagers had wanted to do some exploring, despite town superstition, and were taken and enslaved by the same little community of Duergar. Urf found this out too late, having gotten ambushed and knocked out by a couple of them. When he awoke, he found himself in a pit, enslaved once more. A part of him feared that his opinion of goblins being better than a slave race was wrong, but most of him was just waiting to escape, just like he did the trolls, and show that no goblin would have to be kept laboring against their will!

But where the heck was Itchy Butt? He couldn't leave without the second-best member of the Cockatrice Order!

HP: 50
AC: 20 (22 with shield) (+5 armor, +4 DEX, +1 size, +10)
Flatfoot: 15
Touch: 15
BAB: +6
CMB: +7
CMD: 21
Fort: +7
Reflex: +6
Will: +3
Initiative: +5