Bastard Son of the great-grandchild of the sister's gibbon's friend of the nephew of the Campaign that Would Not Die, now in 3.75e Møøse Trained By: Hugh Foster

Ruby

Ruby

For over a hundred years, orcs formed the first-in shock troops of the legions of the Erlyid empire. While orcs and half-orcs provided some of the leaders of the people, a significant number of the lesser officers of those units were drawn from the race of hobgoblins. 

While orcs served the Empire for battle, plunder and the chance to kill, the more orderly hobgoblin race were very taken with the order and structure of the Empire. Still treated as inferior by the Erlyid, they were nevertheless more trusted to lead orcs than the orcs themselves. They took far more readily to the Imperial armour and weapons, being nearer to human size and shape for example. 

When, in 1602, the orc people abandoned their treaty with the Empire and were returned to their ancestral holds in the Erean Mountains, the hobgoblins largely did not go with them. Living in a purely orcish society - unless they could rule it - did not appeal, and they made their own way, heading south in numbers and disappearing into the Ndrall mountains. There, they found hill dwarves, and made a point of avoiding them where possible, aware that they were not likely to survive if they provoked them. Instead, they cheerfully raided into southern Nhased and the southern Empire. Slowly their numbers increased, and they spread across the south of the world.

All this was completely unknown to Cotella, daughter of Banith. Banith was a brewer in Longvale, a small village near Reyfram in eastern Stryre. In 2138, a band of hobgoblins fell on the town. No-one knew where they had come from, or why they chose Longvale. They simply arrived and started methodically killing and looting. Banith had been a warrior in his youth, and fought desperately to defend his home and family. He could not be everywhere at once, and of them all only Cotella survived, brutally beaten and raped but alive.

The little town set its’ teeth and set to rebuild, Banith among them. His brewery was just about up and running again when Cotella gave birth to her daughter, a strange, tall child that she named Ruby after her father’s most successful beer. Many people would have cast out such a half-breed, but Banith and Cotella kept and cared for the child. Ruby grew up tall and strong, learning the brewer’s craft from her grandfather, but also an eager student of the fighting skills he could teach. Eventually, it was apparent that she was unlikely to settle down to be a town’s beer maker. Things came to a head when she encountered the strange dwarf Borax, hunting for bandits who had killed his master, and aided him in taking them down. With a heavy heart, Cotella and Banith bade her farewell, sending her off to seek her fortune with her grandfather’s sword and what money they could spare.