Our Party

Genhice Silverstrings
Elf Bard (He/Him)

Played by BJ Becker

Genhice is the youngest male scion of the Fabulous Flying Fanghorn troop, a three generation deep, long established company of Elfin performers, specializing in dance, acrobatics and physical feats of prowess. Imagine a group of jugglers, acrobats, dancers, singers, mimes and high-wire artists that make Cirque du Soliel look like a bunch of drunken morons in Care Bear costumes. That is Genhice’s family. His younger sister dances on up-turned wine goblets, including high kicks, while balancing a broadsword on her head.

Brought up in such an environment, naturally Genhice is pretty strong, fairly supple, and has good reflexes. This is handy for being a jobbing adventurer. The problem was he always wanted to be a serious performer. He wants to write epic poetry, perform heartbreaking opera, and commemorate heroic deeds of valour and self-sacrifice. The Fabulous Flying Fanghorn family is not the venue for such dreams.

An able musician and decent rhymer (as are every single member of his family, damn it,) he set off some eighty years ago to try and fulfill his dreams. Thus far he has performed in cheap dives, market squares, up-market bordellos, down-at-heel noblemen’s residences and the occasional legitimate theatre. He tries to be true to his craft, with mixed success. When asked to compose a fight song for a rural sportball team, the result was a three-year winning streak and ten post-game riots. A misunderstanding over the requirements of a small-town mayor’s wedding party resulted in a month-long incarceration in the town lockup, where he met and made friends with his cellmate, an itinerant adventurer named Thrum. Thrum looked like the kind of warrior whose adventures might make good ballad material. The combination of Thrum’s long right arm, and Genhice’s narcotic lullaby got them both out of their unjustified imprisonment. The two remained in contact sporadically over the next decade or so.

Five years ago, Thrum reached out to Genhice, requesting his help with arcane matters. It was at this point that Genhice became acquainted with the goliath rogue Nanu, and the gnome cleric Wrolin. He found himself drawn to their stories in a way he has never fully been able to account for. The four of them have been journeying together for quite some time now, and the tales Genhice has recorded are quite stirring, if sometimes a bit disturbing.

He has also, for decades, been working on a piece he cannot finish. It is the best thing he has ever written, he is fairly certain of that, and he cannot find the ending. It stops at a particular moment, a feeling he can almost but not quite name, and will not go further no matter how long he sits with it. He plays the opening sometimes without meaning to, and has noticed that it affects people in ways he does not entirely understand. He has stopped trying to explain it.

Nanu Mindcaller
Goliath Rogue (She/Her)

Played by Hiromi Cota

Nanu Mindcaller grew up in Godsknuckle, a goliath mountain village, and left it at twelve to join a thieves guild operating in the lowlands city of Ossenmark with the hopes of providing for her people and right the wrongs of a broken system. She did her best to focus her work on those who wouldn’t suffer for the loss, and those who by her estimation deserved it.

By sixteen she had been noticed by prominent figures in the underworld and was seconded to Vethara, an assassins guild with a long reach and a dark reputation. She was good at the work and quickly became known as a proficient infiltrator and bruiser. During that time, she came to know and befriend a fellow initiate, a half-orc named Motus the Wrecker. Before long, this friendship had turned into a rivalry, and then a bitter feud.

Around this time, the inner circle of Vethara announced they were opening a tenured position for an assassin to rise in the ranks. They tasked initiates with showing their capabilities. Nanu chose as her target a prince who was known for abducting vulnerable youths for his debaucherous parties. Motus assassinated a duke who refused to pay the guild.

While Nanu’s kill was the more difficult, noble, and cunningly executed one, Motus was chosen for the position. Nanu was unceremoniously expelled from the order and exiled back to her homeland. On the way there, a patrol of Pristine Knights from the Acolytes of the Pristine Saint apprehended her and held her prisoner for crimes that she was ironically innocent of.

While she was inside, Godsknuckle was raided by the Acolytes in pursuit of some sort of misguided justice. She wasn't there to protect it, or to die with the people she loved, or even to know what was happening until it was already over. By the time she got out, her village was gone and her parents with it. She has spent fifteen years since then trying to understand why and trying to make up for something she hasn't quite been able to name. The guilt is real, and the hunger for justice that came out of it is real, even if the story she has told herself about why it happened may be distorted.

She did not leave it at grief. She tracked down the commanders of the raid on Godsknuckle and made sure they understood what they had done. Most of them did not survive the understanding. One escaped. A man named Higruam Hector Ivywhisper, a commander of the Acolytes of the Pristine Saint. She has not forgotten that. Shortly after finishing this work, Nanu was arrested once again arrested by the Acolytes, along with every other Goliath in Sanctenholm, on rumors that a goliath had carried out the killings. It was here that she met Thrum and the two have been close ever since commiserating over their unfair charges.

They remained in prison for several years before a prison break was staged by the Unsainted. It was not intended to free them, but they took advantage of the opportunity and found their escape. They fled the city, but continued journeying together, finding random jobs where they could.

Several years later, Nanu and Thrum were enlisted to help a gnomish cleric named Wrolin purge a beast from their village. After the job was done, Wrolin stuck around. Before long, Nanu and Wrolin had become more than simply friends. This passionate affair lasted for around a year. They remain quite close — too close to want a life apart, but much further apart than either of them would like. It has become a somewhat torturous relationship, but it's better than nothing.

When a contract required arcane knowledge that none of their trio possessed, Thrum brought Genhice Silverstrings into the party's orbit some years back.

Thrum Goldengift
Dwarf Paladin (He/Him)

Played by Douglas Bailey

Thrum Goldengift is a dwarf who has spent most of his adult life moving from one place to the next, looking for something to fight and not thinking too hard about why. He drinks more than he should, picks more fights than are strictly necessary, and has a gift for ending up in jail cells at inconvenient times. He is also, when it counts, someone you want standing next to you.

Some years back, Thrum was at the lowest point of his life, destitute, without friends or community, his name meaning nothing to anyone including himself. He blacked out one night in the way he had many times before, and woke up in a church of the Acolytes of the Pristine Saint. The brothers and sisters there nursed him back to health, welcomed him, and eventually extended to him something almost unheard of: an invitation to join their order as a paladin. A Graum of the Acolytes of the Pristone Saint. Thrum accepted. He has not spent a great deal of time thinking about how strange that was.

He technically serves the Acolytes still, though his relationship with the institution is complicated. He may have believed in something when he took his oath. He's not entirely sure what he believes now, and he has gotten very good at not examining that too closely. He has been estranged from active duty within the Acolytes for quite some time, and has fallen into his old habits frequently, often ending up in prison for various acts of drunkenness and violence. It has never crossed his mind to use his status as a paladin to negate the charges.

He met Genhice Silverstrings in a jail cell about 20 years ago, and after busting out, the two kept in touch sporadically over the next decades. Thrum met Nanu Mindcaller in a jail cell about fifteen years ago, a pattern that says something about Thrum's lifestyle, and they've been close adventuring partners ever since. The relationship has the easy comfort of two people who have seen each other at their worst and decided to stay anyway.

The pair encountered a gnome cleric named Wrolin who needed their help dispatching a beast some years later, and recruited them to the cause after the trouble was done. Some time later, they needed some help with some arcane matters and so Thrum called up his friend Genhice, who also stuck around afterwards.

Wrolin Faeppeboten
Gnome Cleric (She/Her)

Played by Abie Ekenezar and Kyle Robinson

Wrolin does not know where she comes from. She woke at the edge of a forest with no memory of her name, her past, or how she got there. The village nearby took her in. She did not know much about herself in those early years, but she knew two things quickly. She had a talent for healing, and she could not walk past suffering without stopping.

She lived among them for some years, long enough to become someone the village relied on. She learned their names and their histories while she had none of her own. It was a quiet life, and not an unhappy one, though she never shook the feeling that she was forgetting something important about who she was. It showed up in odd ways. Knowledge surfaced without warning. She understood things without having learned them. Skills came to her hands before they came to her memory.

Then a beast came out of the forest and started killing.

Wrolin put out a call for anyone willing to help. Nanu Mindcaller and Thrum Goldengift answered it. The three of them dealt with the beast, and when it was over Wrolin found she was not ready to go back to quiet. She had felt something during those days. A pull toward movement, toward the larger world she had no memory of but suspected she belonged to. She asked if she could join them. They said yes.

She and Nanu fell in love sometime after that. It burned bright for about a year, and then they ended it by mutual decision and stayed close afterward. It is not something either of them seems to regret. They simply decided, at some point, that what they were to each other worked better as friendship than as romance. The feelings did not disappear when the romance ended, which makes things complicated on occasion. It is also a friendship neither of them would give up.

She is still looking for who she was before the forest. Part of her is afraid of what she might find. She looks anyway.