Written by Keveldri.
Oskar Broodale is the child of a
Bhaevorian casino magnate (
Orsek Barrelchin) and a prostitute (
Kathra O’Dundrin). His early fate was intertwined with his mother’s, who lost her employment when she became pregnant, which in turn drove her to working odd jobs in a much poorer district in town. Oskar was raised in the squalor and chaos of the slums of Bhaevor until he was twelve. During this time, his childhood was dominated by the severity and desperation of his environment. He grew up engaging in petty theft and fleeing city guards in order to survive. At age twelve, he sought out his father, and presented himself to ask for work. Orsek found the boy a curiosity and, though he doubted his story, was amused enough to comply. He got Oskar a job at a tavern connected to the
The Emerald Plume Casino, just one of many he owned, and considered the matter settled. Indeed, it was the last time Oskar saw his father face-to-face.
Oskar’s childhood had already led him down the path of crime and subterfuge, and he found such impulses impossible to control even after securing legitimate employment. Within a few months, he met a pair of brewers whose side business involved making cheap knock-offs of the expensive alcohols being sold in Bhaevor’s high-roller casinos. They offered Oskar a modest cut of their earnings if he would agree to act as a deliveryman, or, as the Kingdom of Achana would come to view it, a smuggler. Indeed, Oskar already possessed a useful set of skills for such work. He knew intimately the secretive routes one could take through the city to avoid the bulk of unwanted attention. He had connections in town he could call in for a favor if he found himself in a difficult position. He himself was skilled in observing his surroundings, reading people’s reactions, and sniffing out the best way forward. In short, he took to the work very favorably.
Over a few years he became a more valuable member of the moonshiner’s ring, picking up the profession of making the products himself, which essentially involved mastering brewing, and then mastering a cheap shorthand version of the same skills. He also became involved in more long-distance and high-risk operations, including evading maritime patrols and outsmarting the sometime quite-aggressive border agents in the areas his employers operated. While his criminal skills increased, Oskar profited greatly in those days: it was the closest he has ever come to living the kind of lifestyle his father seemed to lead. He was also able to send money to his mother to allow her some means of comfort. She had very fortunately found a relatively stable job as a maid in a lord’s home, but it was Oskar who kept her from living simply hand-to-mouth.
Justice eventually caught up with Oskar, and it was swift and merciless. A nighttime delivery of several heavy casks of makeshift Bhaevorian rum and wine was interrupted by a virtual fleet of soldiers. Someone had tipped the authorities off, and Oskar and his comrades were sentenced to long sentences at hard-labor camps.
Seventeen years of backbreaking labor in a salt mine alongside enslaved
Dragonborn,
Tiefling, and
Half-Orcs certainly had a roughening effect on an already-hardened young
Dwarf. While his physical health flourished under the conditions, he struggled to maintain his sanity in confinement. The isolation he suffered was far greater than most other prisoners, as Dwarves were very rarely imprisoned or enslaved in Bhaevor. His position was seen as especially dishonorable, and as a result he was treated particularly badly by Dwarf overseers and most of the other slaves. Eventually he did make a friend, a dragonborn gentleman (
Ezleer Gaaxaak) who had been imprisoned for the same charge -- smuggling. Oskar’s skills in home-brewery were of great interest to Ezleer (and rather lucrative within the prison economy), and Ezleer’s tall tales of his many and varied successes as an outlandish pirate and people-smuggler were enough to keep Oskar’s interest. The two of them spoke of working together when they had their freedom. However, Ezleer’s sentence was much shorter, and he was released when Oskar still have five more to go. The two of them both believed they would likely not meet again.
The Skullcrushers was the unofficial name for the work group Oskar was assigned to during his 17 years in the salt mines. The mines were operated by the Sundergrass Clan, powerful spice miners with close connections to the royalty and aristocracy of Bhaevor. The Skullcrushers are typically assigned to the heaviest lifting tasks, the name coming from the immense loads of rocks and mining equipment that some members of the group carry atop their heads. One of the tattoos on Oskar’s arm is a skull with a shattered top, representing this group. Ezleer was another member of this work group as well. Oskar made himself a valued member of this group by assembling crude prison batches of liquor during his stint. He also helped organize and strengthen the group’s involvement in the paltry smuggling trade within the mines and prison system. Finally, Oskar began to study poison-making under the tutelage of an old Tiefling serving a life-sentence. Inmates in the work camp had sorted out a rudimentary technique to manufacture poison by harvesting toxins from one of the most dangerous aspects of the mines: the Salt Scorpion. The method was relatively simple, and so Oskar practiced this at the behest of certain members of the work group.
At one point, Oskar was tasked with brewing a poisoned liquor intended for an enemy of the Skullcrushers. The target was the imprisoned son of a noble house named
Fadrin Hartsend, who was serving a light sentence (mostly for show due to a casual insult to the
Church of Bane while drunk). Oskar succeeded in his task and the brew was routed to Fadrin’s cell; easy enough when the guards happily take bribes. When the day came for the fellow to drink his poison and die, he had an unannounced visitor, his sister
Aubrie Hartsend, who had bribed her way into seeing her brother for the purposes of enjoying a meal together. She too drank of the liquor which Oskar had prepared, and suddenly a gang hit escalated into a high-profile double murder. Another innocent was pegged with the crime and executed, and Oskar, as well as the rest of the Skullcrushers who knew about the job, resolved to take the secret to the grave.
When he was finally released, Oskar was exiled from the kingdom as a condition of his freedom. This was a burden too great for Oskar to bear: his whole life he had only known the terrible and impressive City at the Fork and making a life for himself outside of it was too great a task for him to undertake. Instead, he improvised: he crafted a disguise for himself, by laborious toil acquiring a fake beard, a smidge of old makeup, tattered robes, and a walking stick, he was able to fashion a poor appearance of a bedraggled old Dwarven man. With this as his new outward identity, he re-entered the city, attempting to make contact with old friends who might still support him. He had poor luck in that regard, until he stumbled upon Quarl Bandlebury, an acquaintance from his brief tenure at his father’s casino tavern. As luck would have it, Quarl was looking for someone Oskar used to know from his smuggling days. Quarl worked as a bounty hunter, and he offered Oskar a cut for his involvement in tracking the fellow down.
Oskar found the mark and helped subdue the fellow before bringing him to a courier for a powerful slaving family in Bhaevor. They had paid Quarl to return a particularly talented escaped slave, and Oskar saw that the money was very good. He asked Quarl to come on as an assistant, and Quarl agreed by offering him a position within his Bounty Hunter business known as the Nightshade Tracers.
In order to maintain a presence in the city, Oskar had to maintain the persona of the old bedraggled Dwarf which he had adopted to first return to the city. He produced the necessary papers to pass off as Karos Baywater, a destitute drunk, card reader, and petty gambler. He used his persona to gain access to the seedy underbelly elements of Bhaevor, helping Quarl track down marks who invariably think the safest place to hide is the most crime-ridden parts of town. Oskar also studiously practiced use of a poisoner’s toolset, in order to better understand the methods of poison creation, and to better detect traces of the maker’s technique when he and Quarl were trying to track a bounty down. Oskar became adept at the use of the toolset solely to help capture poisoners. He has never made poison that killed a person since the incident when he was a slave. During this time, Oskar (as Karos) hung out in low-class casinos, pleasure houses, taverns, and smuggler dens, gathering information, keeping eyes out for targets, and only very rarely having to rely on his considerable weapon skills. His preference when violence breaks out is to use two short swords which he keeps sheathed inconspicuously on his back and torso. He’s also adept at throwing weapons of all kinds and using bows when he’s at a distance.
Oskar has maintained his disguise for so long that it’s more than second nature to him within the city. In fact, going undisguised in Bhaevor is extremely stressful for him, though it has been several decades since his release from prison and exile, he knows the extremely high cost of being discovered by authorities, and his first priority when in public is to avoid close contact with any city guard or other individuals who might recognize him as a criminal.
After many profitable years of low-level bounty hunting, Oskar began to feel the uneasiness of his profession grow. He knew that he and Quarl were tracking down regular people, most of the time imprisoned by terrible means, brutally subjected to torturous treatment upon their return. The more he spent in the business, the more he learned of the terrors the slaves faced-- worse, far worse than his time in the salt mines. Oskar tried to persuade Quarl to change focus-- Oskar thought they could transition to hunting pirates, but Quarl didn’t want to leave his lucrative profession. The arrangement they had ultimately settled on was vastly beneficial to Quarl financially, and he begged Oskar to stay on as a partner. But Oskar was resolved, and he left Quarl’s unofficial apprenticeship to start his own business as a rumrat-- a bounty hunter who specializes in sniffing out moonshiners.
To make a few decades short, Oskar, still as Karos, made a living for himself tracking down pirates and smugglers, and eventually broadened out to finding document forgers and coin counterfeiters as well. Oskar finally added one more feather to his career cap: something akin to a coyote-- a smuggler who specializes in moving people over borders too dangerous for them to cross openly. Oskar has only worked a few such jobs, but always found them to be extremely lucrative.
Oskar was doing well for himself and making sizeable profits. Things seemed too good to be true, however Oskar’s fate was about to take a turn for the worse. One night, Oskar met with Quarl for a night of drinking, something that the two did from time to time to stay in touch. That night, however, Oskar made a fateful mistake. He confided the circumstances of the accidental murder of the brother and sister of House Hartsend during his stint with the Skullcrushers to Quarl. Oskar believed Quarl to be somewhat of a mentor and a brother and felt the two had known each other long enough and had built a firm foundation of trust. Unfortunately, Quarl viewed their relationship differently.
Quarl had started to grow weary of Oskar as his rumrat business was starting to cut into Quarl’s profits. Unbeknownst to Oskar, Quarl had wanted to use the evening of drinking to try and convince Oskar, through intimidation if necessary, to leave Bhaevor and close up shop. Fate is not without a sense of irony it seems as Oskar unwittingly handed Quarl the information needed in order to solve all his problems. Quarl went to House Hartsend and notified them, along with the authorities, of Oskar’s involvement in the murder, and also informed them of Oskar’s true identity and the fact that he was disobeying his exile. The punishment for such an offense is death with no appeal. This was fortuitous for Quarl, as House Hartsend had recently started eyeing Quarl’s business interests and had been making life difficult for him. With this information, Quarl effectively earned the good graces of House Hartsend. Their sights turned off of Quarl's business and moved in on Oskar's established rumrat business with a host of City Guard. Under law, all property of Oskar now belonged to House Hartsend, and as a result, Quarl received a sizable reward for his effort. Oskar fortunately caught wind of his exposure and betrayal and escaped the kingdom with nothing but the clothes on his back, his disguise kit, and a paltry bag of coin.
What’s Now: Oskar is travelling as far from Bhaevor as he can possibly go, to the western-most edge of Abios. There, he’s hoping to find a place for himself doing the sort of work he used to do: working bounties for local authorities, forging documents for shady people, creating alcohol (legitimately or illegitimately), or, if he’s really hard pressed, stealing or killing professionally… provided he can find that kind of work in an unfamiliar environment where he has no connections.
Although he doesn't show it, Oskar is truly scared about his situation, since the uncertainty surrounding who might be seeking him will most certainly lead to paranoia. He also is so deeply connected to his home that he feels very uncomfortable in a place he doesn’t know, with people he doesn’t know, trying to find his way in a culture he doesn’t know. All of this contributes to a kind of animalistic state of being for the dwarf; he’s operating on instinct right now, in survival mode, with very little coin and no apparent means of securing a future for himself.
Kasek Bonebrewer: Oskar's newest identity is that of an ambitious hunter traveling to Estrya. Kasek comes from a line of Dwarven Brewers, the legends of their family name as numerous as the clan's progeny (two examples: the clan is said to possess a magical recipe for a superb ale brewed of troll bones, another that the family's patriarch once ensured his family's survival through a horrible winter by brewing a stew and beer using nothing but old beef bones). Kasek is a humble hunter, specializing in simple beasts like wolves and crag cats that threaten small villages and towns. Kasek has heard of (invented) a story of Vishi, the largest wolf in Abios, who leads a massive pack of wolves that terrorize the woods near Breghdel. His stated goal is to track down this creature, slay it, and so establish for himself a reputation upon which he can anchor a new offshoot of the Bonebrewer business.
Kasek's appearance: He wears long-sleeved tunics and leather armor pieces, so as to cover his tattoos. Dresses like a "fancy-ish woodsman", I.E., high quality, unsmudged clothing and equipment. He lightly "salts" his eyebrows, facial hair and head hair to give himself a late-middle-aged appearance. He also wears a fake beard on his chin to conceal his mutton chops. He wears dark, small shades over his eyes, to create an inscrutable appearance. He does "pack" blades, but takes extra precautions that they are not noticeable-- he casts himself as an archer by trade.
Social
Birthplace
Bhaevor
Current Residence
None