Full Name: Tristane ad Camlanbec Age: 25 years Gender: Male Race: Ailor-Breizh-Drahl Sexuality: Heterosexual Preferred Weapon: Arming sword and shield Proficiency Limits: Cavalry Combat, Command Tactic Skill, Athletic Training Skill Information (Required) Total Points: 25+5+10 (Hobby Points)=40 +10 Cavalry Combat +10 Command Tactic Skill +5 Athletic Training +3 Historical Knowledge (Ailor) +7 Perception Training (+2 Proficiency, +5 Bird's Eye View) +5 Musical Arts (Hobby Points) +5 Literary Arts (Hobby Points) Body Shape 23 Muscular Average Languages Common Picaron Special Traits/Spells/Mutations Stalwart Companion (Cully the Goshawk) Bird's Eye View (+5 Perception) Swift Strike (Once per day companion attack) Visual Information (Required) Eye Color: Grey Hair Color: Brown Hair Style: Military crop Skin Color: Fair Clothing: Breizh lower nobility Height: 5'11" Visual Information (Expansion) Welsh accent Personality (Required with Choice) Option One: The Question List How would your character express Happiness and Contentedness? He would smile and sit back, glad to be rid of trouble for a little while. How would your character respond to experiencing Fear? Push his charges behind him, sword drawn and ready to face the fear. How would your character respond to experiencing Stress? Try to work through it as methodically as possible. How does your character view Law and Authorities? He views the law with deference, and those above him with respect, until they prove themselves to be less than respectable. How does your character feel about Races other than their own? He is slightly racist.He has respect for them, but he doesn't consider them as fully personal as other humans. But he would never say such a thing to their faces, and his viewpoint is such that it can be changed. How does your character feel about Religion for themselves, and other faiths? He is a strict Unionist. Other religions distress him, and he doesn't understand how anyone could possibly live without the light of the Holy Emperor. How does your character feel about the Arcane and Magical in the world? He views it with great wonder, and a bit of fear. How does your character feel towards their family? If his father were still alive, he would treat him with strict deference, and reverence due from a son to his father. Same with his mother. What is your character the most proud of about themselves? His victory at the Battle of Camlanbec. What motivates your character to move forward and better their life? The fact that he was a knight in Kintyr, and he seeks to live worthily of that status. What is your character's biggest insecurity? That he is not good at much other than warfare. What is your character's biggest fear? That he will be forgotten--or worse, remembered as a warmonger. Weaknesses (OPTIONAL) Warlike Defers to authority too readily Personality (Expansion) He tends to speak in a more elevated form of language than most people are used to, which makes him a little less approachable. He tries to mitigate this by reassuring those who are close to him that he feels as strongly for them as they do for him, and that his language does not make him less personable than the next person. He sometimes cuts off in the middle of a sentence to stare into the middle distance not really having any look on his face that is readable, and not really speaking. He usually snaps out of it, though, and comes back to the conversation. Sometimes he forgets what he was talking about halfway through a sentence because he wasn't really paying attention, and his brain just then caught up with him. Is generally of a good-humored disposition, but when things look bad, he tries to take command of the situation, as is his wont in wartime. Likes Music in particular makes him very happy. If you give him a harp or a lute, he will play as best he can, and be transported to a realm of pure joy as he does. The adrenaline of battle is the only thing he likes more than all the things listed above. As much as he would hate to admit it, war and battle is where he felt most at home, and most excited. Knowing that death was around every corner was frightening, but rising to the challenge of the fight and coming out victorious was a feeling like none other--both fearful and powerful at the same time. Reading is his one real passive hobby. Particularly if he finds a book of legends of old or of the stories of faeries and their dealings with mortals, he could probably sit on the harshest stone floor in the coldest weather and not move for hours. Dislikes He hates injustice in every form. He doesn't always see injustice for what it is, but when he does, he does everything in his power to correct it. It takes a while for this dislike to come out in him, but people who repay kindness with hostility time and time and time again earn his ire. "These goodly folk are doing everything in their power to extend the kindness from their overflowing hearts to you," he would say to such people, "and you haven't enough charity to simply say 'well met, friend; you have my thanks,' and be done with it? What wicked stone has wormed its way to where your heart used to be? Show me a heart of charity and acceptance of that which is good, and I will show you a man who may be charitable in return!" He despises those who are violent without reason. "To what end," he may ask someone, "do you make these poor wretches lives so miserable? Are you so insecure in your humanity that you feel you must prove yourself a man by the effusion of lesser blood? O, horrid deed! Act whose stench pollutes the very name of 'human'! Yield, cur, or like to one proud of destruction, defy us to our worst. For as I am a soldier, a name that in my thoughts becomes me best, I will not leave you to your own devices until this foulest of deeds has been repaid in full! Do you desire violence? Then violence you will have--at mine own hand! Stand and fight, unless your legs carry you to further wickedness!" Life Story (Required) Tristane ad Camlanbec was born into strife. His father was a rebel against his lord, but when their rebellion was put down, their lord, instead of execution, sent them into exile, to be repealed after a penance of seven years. At this great mercy, Tristane's father was cut to the bone with remorse, and on the first night of their exile, his wife gave birth to their first and only child. She desired that his name should be a derivation of the Picaron word for Mercy, but his father would not hear of it. Instead, in the penitent state of his heart, he named him Tristane, for the sorrow into which he was born. For seven years, Tristane was brought up in relative obscurity, and taught the absolute importance of loyalty, courage, and honor. His father had a major role in his upbringing, making certain that the boy knew how to fend for himself, and how to act with courage and honor. In the fifth year of their exile, Tristane's father received a letter from their lord, reminding him that his exile would only last another two years, and that he should be preparing himself to be gradually reinstated to his old standing of knighthood. This letter opened up a flood of correspondence between Tristane's father and their lord, as the former made every effort he could to reassure his lord that his heart was truly penitent, and that he had changed. The lord believed him, and over the course of the two years, they even became friends. In the sixth year of their exile, Tristane's father asked his lord for a favor: to take Tristane on as a page, to become a knight one day. He told him that he had taught the boy to be loyal, brave, and chivalrous, even when it posed no benefit to him. On his seventh birthday, Tristane arrived at their lord's court, where his lord made him a page. He would rise through the ranks of chivalry over the next few years to become a knight at age eighteen. Already strong, brave, and active, Sir Tristane was poised to make an excellent knight. And he did, proving utterly loyal to his lord, even on the man's deathbed. When the lord ordered everyone, even his own son, to leave the room, Tristane stayed. "Sir Tristane," Lord Theodwyn said, "I ordered you to leave the room. I am to die soon, and I would not be seen in such a sorry state by anyone." Kneeling at his bedside, Tristane responded, "O my lord, you have my undying loyalty, but honor and love demand that I stay by your side to the bitter end. This will I do, and by your son's side, through fair weather and foul, until I die by his side in battle." Lord Theodwyn sighed. "O loyal knight! You know my son is wicked. Would you remain at his side, even if he were to destroy himself?" "For your sake, my lord," Tristane replied, "I would remain loyal to him, were he the wickedest man in the world." Theodwyn groaned. "I fear... o, how I fear... the folly of this oath will haunt you, knight. My son is already an aging man, with a son of his own. What if he should betray him, and you remain loyal? That were dreadfully unseemly!" "Yet thus have I sworn," Tristane replied, "and that not lightly." The knight held his lord's hand as he passed away, and to this day holds the secret of his dying words, as per his last command to him. Lord Theodwyn II ascended to his father's position, and as his father said, he was wicked. He dispossessed many of his knights, and made prizes of those who flattered him. In Theodwyn I's time, Tristane had become the lord of many lands, and gathered in a salary second only to his lord's (though the margin between was still wide). A castle at Camlanbec housed his servants, his charges, and himself. In the lordship of Theodwyn II, he did all he could to mitigate the disastrous things his lord would have done to his lands. Instead of taxing his peasants more heavily, he taxed them exactly the same amount he used to, and picked up the slack from his own wealth. Due to this, many more people began to move to his lands, and he was called "Lord Tristane," though he fervently denied ever having accepted or taken such a title. If ever someone called him that to his face, he had them set in the stocks for about an hour per offense. He would accept no title that was not his by right, and the title of lord, by rights belonged to Theodwyn II and his son, Theod, with whom Tristane was the best of friends. Yet circumstances soon made his regret the oath that he had made to Theodwyn I. Theodwyn II, who had heard the rumors that Sir Tristane's title was being made more lordly by the peasantry, summoned him to his castle and asked him whether this was so. In response, Sir Tristane prostrated himself at his lord's feet, saying that he would not dare accept such a title, since he had no right to it. But Theodwyn would not hear it, and stripped Tristane of all his lands, forcing him on pain of death to abdicate. Tristane, stripped of everything but his honor, the clothes on his back, and the money in his purse, left a man of no means. But the lords who saw this did not think so. To them, he was still Sir Tristane, and many of them were beginning to like the sound of "Lord Tristane." So a coalition formed against the king and rode out to Camlanbec to meet Tristane as he said his goodbyes. They dismounted before him and knelt, crying all, "Hail, Lord Tristane!" But the gentleman made them rise, asking wherefore they addressed him so, since he was now bereft of title and land. "Richly bestowed in both, if justice had its way," claimed one Lord Mordtyr. "Aye," a man named Lord Barretot, "this false lord has wronged you, sir. And he has wronged many others. Is it truly justice letting him live on in his decadence?" "We all know you to be a man of chivalry above all," Lord Alpinbec interjected. "But where is the honor in following a bloated devil?" Though he did not join them immediately, Tristane thought long about their words. Eventually, he realized that they were correct; Lord Theodwyn II had wronged him. So he joined with them, but desired to resolve the matter peaceably. That did not last long, though, as one of the knights of the coalition attacked an outpost that held some of Theodwyn's troops. And so the war began, with Tristane at its center. After many victories and many defeats, Tristane and the coalition trapped Theodwyn in the castle of Camlanbec, Tristane's old home. Due to this, the knight knew the castle inside and out, and knew every weakness it had. In a move of tactical brilliance, Tristane made a double diversion: a nighttime frontal assault on the castle gates occurred first, along with the creation of a breach in the wall by a trebuchet, which seemed to be distracting the garrison in the castle from a second attack mounted at the postern gate. But the real attack was made by ten brave knights who went upriver of Camlanbec, and who filed through the grate that led from the castle well to the river, climbed up through the well, entered the castle tower, and captured Lord Theodwyn. In an equally-stunning act of mercy, Tristane refused the lordship offered to him by Theodwyn. He said that it was not his by right, and he had not the right to take it. He threw down his sword and walked away. Booking passage on a ship to Regalia, he made the decision that Lord Theodwyn's fate was no longer in his hands, and that if the coalition killed him, that would be on their heads. Done with the power politics, scheming, and plotting, he left for Regalia, plenty of money in his coffers and his father's sword at his side.
