Camulous Smithson

[Camulous Smithson]

This is an admin controlled character and does not represent a standard starting character.

Player Name: Phil

Name: Camulous Smithson

Age: 33

Race: Human

Height: 5'11"

Weight: ~170lbs

Physical Description: The captain of the Marn City Guard is himself a template of what it means to be a leader of Marnian citizens. He is built like a fighter, toned and well muscled. Dirty blond, short, wavy hair sits atop a handsome face with a strong jawline, fair skin, and powerful, thoughtful eyes.
His presence carries with it the weight of a leader. Be it the way he composes himself, or the fact that nearly everyone in Thar Shaddin knows who he is, people notice him and are inclined to listen to orders he gives in his heavy voice. Most of his men find something inspirational in his stoic, fearless demeanour.

Possessions: The standard armour of the Marn City Guard. He has access to all the weaponry other guardsmen do, which includes both traditional and exotic weapons as well as gnomish machinery and artillery.
Camulous often carries a multi-shot pistol around with him which has proved itself to be the most reliable gnomish device he's ever seen. It holds 17 rounds, is accurate to 20 meters, and can fire as fast as he can pull the trigger. However, it is likely to jam or explode one of these days, so he tries not to use it.
He has a modest home on the eastern edge of the residential district and personal savings of around 800 bishani.
He also has a healthy stallion named Argus who has a penchant for snacking on people's gardens and misbehaving, but is otherwise a reliable friend.

Powers or Strengths:
Trained to Lead: Camulous can bark orders like a pro. His field voice is loud enough to carry over the ruckus of a fight, silence a room, or get the attention of an unruly crowd. He knows how to share time and bond with his men to gain their loyalty and respect. Anyone who has served with a military company can see that he knows the ropes.

Steadfast: His devotion to his job and the city give him the strength to turn down temptation. The man is simply impossible to bribe, and very difficult to manipulate in any fashion.

Desensitized: Camulous has seen and been responsible for many deaths. Some of those who have died were innocent, some were his men, and those men were often his friends. The sight of death, suffering, or atrocity does not immediately affect him.

Resistant to Magic: Camulous has a very strong, forceful and rational mind. His willpower and convictions surpass the influences of deceptive magics, making it very difficult to trick him with spells. So strong is his refusal to accept magic as a part of the world, and his acceptance of the puradynic beliefs that reality is truth, that the seal separating him from the astral realm is actually strengthened. The benefits of this are always indirect unless a spell targets his mind, however most mages find it more difficult to warp reality while he's watching. Often their spells are moderately less effective or take longer to execute. This is a conscious ability (although he is unaware of it) and requires his attention.

Military Training: Camulous has spent his entire adult life working hard to be a guardsman. He has mastered all the essential weapons and martial arts. His skill with a sword and buckler are unmatched in Marn, and it has been years since he lost a duel with another guardsman. He is extremely proficient at hand to hand combat, and specifically trained to quickly disable opponents by grappling and dislocating limbs. His archery skills are good, although he leaves most of that work to the elves. He knows the ins and outs of working with crossbows and assorted gnomish contraptions and artillery in use by the guard. Finally, he is experienced with small group tactics and has good situational awareness.
It goes without saying that he's healthy, strong, and as dexterous as a well trained fighter should be.

Captain of the Guard: The guardsmen do what he says. Camulous is the effective leader of one of the two opposing political factions in Marn. Oslun may officially run the guard, but Camulous leads the men. He is an icon to the people and despite his obligation to accept the influence of the judges, he has a lot of untapped political power.

Weaknesses:

Stubborn: Changing his mind is a difficult thing to do, not because he is blind to logic or reason, but because he chooses to stay his course lest manipulative criminals take advantage of indecisiveness. The same reasoning that makes him hard to manipulate can be detrimental when he's wrong.

Emotionally Introverted: Camulous keeps his words simple and few, but is a well read and thoughtful individual who is not oblivious to the difficult moral questions of his position. Much of his time alone is spent thinking about these things, and his mood is often dark as a result.

Married to his Job: The most important thing in Camulous' life is his job with the city guard and the wellbeing of the city. He will serve the wishes of the city of Marn to the ends of Pal Tahrenor, even when these wishes contradict his own opinions. He follows a strict code of ethics which is directly tied to the laws laid down by the First Settlers and he gives in to the whims of the judges and bureaucracy in Marn whenever the laws say he must. He has no friends who he holds above the law. If his job were ever taken away from him, it would be traumatic.

Hard: It is difficult for Camulous to connect with people who expect kind gestures and softness. Many end up viewing him as cold hearted or even cruel. Making friends outside of the city guard is nearly impossible for him and most citizens have only seen one side of the man.

Isolated: Camulous has never left Thar Shaddin and knows little about the outside world. Many of the things he hears about Pal Tahrenor are stories about how awfully twisted and corrupted the world is. He speaks only the common language of Marn and would be lost in foreign lands.

Nightmares: Frequent, horrific nightmares plague the captain. Faces of dead friends, the innocents he knows he's sent to the judges, and the victims of monsters he's hunted haunt him in his dreams. Lack of sleep can influence his duties during the day.

History:

Camulous Smithson, Captain of the Marn City Guard and fourth generation Synevive, has spent his entire life in Thar Shaddin. Son of Haguin and Esa Smithson, he was born in Marn in 155 PW in their home in the residential district of Marn. True to his family name, Haguin was a hard working blacksmith who proudly held on to generations old secrets for crafting fine weaponry and who planned to pass these secrets onto his only son of whom he was immensely proud.

Unfortunately, the economic recession in Marn had reached its peak when Camulous was born. The city guard began commissioning standard weaponry produced in gnomish facilities, and the average citizen chose to go with the cheaper swords as well. Haguin was forced to seek extra income working as a farmer in Shim for a friend, accompanied by his son who was too young to wield a hammer.

Camulous spent his days studying in school, and his evenings daydreaming while he worked in the fields. A boy clever beyond his years, he memorized the tomes and mulled over them while watching his soil covered hands work the field. Turning their stories around and around in his head, the tomes became his world.

When he looked out across the red horizon of the sooqui plane, he saw a world of mystery and adventure that needed to be saved from its own twisted path. When he looked at Marn, he saw an army of men dedicated to this cause and as pure as the sun. Working the farms in Shim became a way to help those men, not a menial task to earn extra bishani. It wasn't long before he dreamt of joining them. He had visions of crusades across the lands, purging the evil demons and witches and slaying dragons of the past that haunted Pal Tahrenor.

When Camulous was 14 his mother Esa became pregnant again. She died in labour, and Camulous learned what grief was. With the help of his father, who remained strong and full of hope despite his loss, and the tragic stories he knew from the tomes, the young man found his strength.

At 16 Camulous told his father of his intention to join the guard. It was a noble profession, worthy of praise, but Haguin wanted his son to learn the family trade. The economic recession would pass and the Smithson swords were things of beauty and value to all of Marn, used by those guardsmen in years past. Even tempered and thoughtful, even in the turmoil of his teens, Camulous reluctantly agreed. When he finished his schooling at 17, he spent the days with his father and learned how to work with metal.

More important than crafting swords was the bonding the two men had with eachother then. They spoke little in the fields, but in the gruelling confines of the smithy the two traded their stories and thoughts while hammering away or working the kiln. Camulous learned all about his father and his mother, about life and women and things the tomes didn't begin to touch on. Haguin learned that his son had grown up faster and smarter than he ever imagined, and his pride and respect reached new heights. They gave eachother hope, and became best friends. Both were confident that they could make the business work again.

In 135 PW, when Camulous was 20, fighting broke out in Marn. Some say a rogue mage began a rampage by taking over the minds of citizens and making them riot. Others say the riots were a response to government corruption and the execution of a dozen innocents. Whatever the case, the city erupted in violence.

Marnians, no strangers to combat, responded in force with the guard. Main Street filled with armoured men and battlemages searching shops and alleys for spotty gangs of rioters and looters who knew they could never take the troops head on. Magic was used on both sides. Houses burned. Dozens died.

Camulous and his father were in the smithy that day, hammering away on one of Camulous' first successful pieces. Both were proud and excited to see how it was shaping out. Words between them were few, and when the door to their private room burst open, neither man knew what to make of it. A group of three men and two women dressed in the poorest rags of peasantry, clearly from the shanty town, forced their way inside. One of the men had stony gray skin, and one of the women had the yellow eyes and pink skin of some sort of fairy.

Gripping a hammer, Haguin demanded that the group explain themselves. Whatever robbers or thieves they might be, he was brave, especially in the presence of his son, and not about to let them destroy his business. The group responded by telling him they would kill him if he interfered, and started searching the smithy for weapons. When one of them reached for a sword Haguin's own father had given him, Haguin took a step forward. Before he could say a word, an arc of lightning from the fairy woman caught him in the chest and he fell to the floor.

Camulous would never forget the sound his father made when the lightning hit him. The air rushed from his lungs like a weak hearted grunt. It was the last of his voice he ever heard.

Rage and desperation overtook the young man. He had his sword, barely finished and only as sharp as a butter knife, it was still red hot from the waning fire of the kiln. He swung at the closest one, trying to get at the fairy. It was the man with the grey skin, who was ready for the attack with a stony hand upheld to block the sword.

Something in the sword, perhaps the heat from the fire, caught the grey man off guard. It sliced his hand in two despite whatever magical skin protected him, and carried on to cleave through the top of his head. He burst into a mess of ashes and clothes, and the enraged Camulous continued on for the woman.

He wasn't trained to use swords, but he wielded the thing more effectively and efficiently than anyone there expected. Another man dropped, and the fairy found herself with two feet of metal piercing her gut soon after. The others tried to take him down, but their punches and even the blows of a cast iron rod were not enough to stop him. He beat each of the remaining three in turn with his strong, work hardened fists, crashing them into the stone walls of the room until everyone there except Haguin was a bloody mess and only Camulous was conscious.

He never asked who they were or why they came to his place. After the guards took the survivors, they were executed for their crimes.

Without his father, without a business or prospects for the future, Camulous joined the city guard within a week of the incident. Stories of his bravery and instinctive prowess circulated among the men who quickly became the young man's new family. His instructors became his new fathers. They harnessed his strengths and unsurpassed dedication to teach Camulous how to fight with the best of them. He already knew the laws of the tomes as well as any scholar, and without any other of life's distractions to slow him down, he inevitably rose in reputation and rank.

At 29, he stepped into the rank of Captain to fill the place of a man fallen in battle. The youngest to ever make Captain, there was no argument and no competition. Camulous could best any of the men in a duel and had a singled minded dedication to the city and his job that surpassed any priest's devotion to his god. His reputation remains unblemished to this day.

( may need some proof reading, which I'll do later. )