Ragralf

Information

Player: Sol

Character Name: Ragralf Grimgild

Character In-Game Name: Ragralf

Nicknames: Rag, Raggy, Ralf. Ragralf Scumson, Ragralf Longliar and Ragralf Hoardseeker are a few names he's also known by, and you can imagine he doesn't take kindly to the first two.

Associations: Himself and Haakon Stormhill's growing band of explorers and treasure-hunters

Race: Dwarf (half-Bronzebeard, half-Dark Iron)

Class: Hunter

Age: 75

Sex: Male

Hair: Dark, reddish ginger, the colour of coal embers. His hair and beard are cut practically short, devoid of conventional braiding.

Eyes: A strange orange-brown, almost the burning red of the Dark Irons but not quite.

Height: 5'

Weight: 174lbs.

Skills and Abilities

The Great Outdoordsman: Hunting, tracking, foraging, climbing, navigating or scouting, Ragralf is supremely skilled in all of them. His knowledge of flora, fauna, geography and weather is hard to match, and he can use these skills to mask his trail, set traps and find shelter with ease. He can conduct first aid with limited materials and live off the barest minimum of food and water.

Hunter's Hands: Although he's a better hunter than he is a fighter, you understand that there's a whole lot of transferable skills between the professions. Skilled with polearm, handaxe and knife and a crack shot with the crossbow, Ragralf is a formidable combatant.

Tinker, Tracker, Soldier . . . Guy: Although he disdains gunpowder weaponry, Ragralf has a certain way with explosives, using them in traps, combat and excavation. Moreover, his limited technical expertise have led him to design several mechanical traps and 'trick bolts' for his crossbow (grappling hook bolts, explosive quarrels and the like), although he lacks advanced engineering abilities.

Brother to Beasts: Ragralf has a preternatural bond with his riding ram and his black-feathered greathawk, Huginn. When properly cared for, both animals seem to have an instinctive understanding of even his more complex spoken commands, and with a small cantrip of natural magic he can see through either of their eyes for a short time. He can intuitively familiarise himself with the habits and behaviours of most animals.

Iron in his Blood: Where most dwarves take for granted a heritable resistance for cold and frost, Ragralf's Dark Iron parent has partially precluded him from such. In him this resistance isn't as developed, but he does have a small hardiness against heat and flame to match, as well as an affinity for the dark, cramped places of the world. Similarly, his Stoneform takes on a cracked, molten appearance, although it produces no heat and the difference is entirely cosmetic.

Appearance

This dwarf's bastard half-Dark Iron heritage shows prominently in his appearance, his skin not quite grey but seeming forever stained with soot and ash. His features are harsh and angular with a perpetual scowling set to his brows, but he often carries on his face a knowing smirk that seems to suggest he's privy to some great joke you're just not smart enough to be aware of. Needless to say, smug bastard.

He generally wears lightweight, practical traveling garb of wool, cotton and leather, with a traveling cloak and a fur shawl pulled up about his shoulders and fingerless gloves. When traveling through dangerous territory, he dons armour in the form of steel plate vambraces, a faceguard and a knee-length coat of scalemail. The scalecoat is cinched with a belt full of pouches and two more bandoliers of various tricks and traps are worn across his chest, with a quiver of crossbow bolts fastened to his hip.

Personality

Ragralf is a bitter contrarian with a sardonic sense of humour that permeates almost everything he says and a streak of arrogant elitism about his profession. To him, there are two kinds of creature in the world: animals that speak and animals that don't. You fall into the former category. As one might tell by his affection towards his bird, he strongly prefers the company of the latter. Having been disregarded or disdained for most of his life by his supposed kinsmen, Ragralf spurns most passive interaction in general unless there's something to be gained from them. Perhaps tellingly, he avoids partaking in the traditional dwarven social activity - he is a near-teetotaler, keeping only a watered-down boot flask on his person and never drinking in bars.

Despite his tendency to let his foul mouth run, he values restraint and consideration highly over impulse and whimsy. Had he been born into more privilege, he has the mind to have prospered as an academic, but instead, he focuses his efforts into expanding his knowledge and understanding of the lands, the creatures that walk upon them and the dark places that stretch beneath them. He's fairly open-minded when it comes to matters of race and faction, owing no strict allegiance to Ironforge and viewing all creatures as beasts of a sort, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they escape the breadth of his general misanthropy.

Quietly, he is deeply envious of dwarves with extended clan-families to fall back on, more openly so towards the dwarven nobility, and has a burning hatred for Dark Irons. Seeing it as the only way he can escape the stigma society's placed on him, he is obsessed with obtaining reputation and riches. His greed combined with his disregard of others can occasionally get the better of him, but those he takes as friends he tries his hardest to stick by.

History

In the centuries since the great War of the Three Hammers, there have been numerous border disputes, skirmish campaigns and brushfire wars between the Kingdom of Ironforge and the neighbouring Dark Iron Empire. With war comes warriors, and with warriors tend to follow abuses of the populace. Suffice it to say, growing up grey-skinned in a family of Bronzebeard dwarves from a lesser clan that specialised in artifice and mechanism – one that had recently lost most of its holdings near the Badlands to fire and axe, no less – it didn't take Ragralf long to realise how he'd come into the world. He knew, even when he was very small, that he didn't belong. What he didn't know was that he was actually the product of a consensual extramarital affair between his mother and a Dark Iron soldier that, while not exactly loving, was at least relatively affectionate. Of course, the overwhelming majority of his family didn't know either, and those that did kept quiet about it to save face.

Helping in his “father's” workshop with his brothers from a young age, he figured the best way to deal with the scorn his family would direct at him occasionally was to scorn them right back. Naturally, this led to a considerable falling-out with many relatives before he was even an adult, and indeed, by the time he came of age, his family felt no compelling obligation to continue caring for him. Soon there was an unspoken agreement that Ragralf would be bothered no further if he left home, and by that time, he was all too eager to. Before he left, though, he spoke to his mother, asking her about the other half of his parentage. She was predictably as cagey as she'd ever been, but sure enough, she told him, at least, the name of his father – apparently a Dark Iron warleader of some repute by the name of Tancred Grimgild. And if one of his families didn't like him, he figured that he might as well try his luck with another one, and he set out into the scorching Badlands with this name on his lips.

His heritage being visible in his skin at least meant that he wasn't killed on sight by Dark Iron sentries, who would at least humour him as he shared with them stories of his supposed father. But of course, they were quick to tell him that Tancred Grimgild had two dozen halfborn bastards to two dozen Bronzebeard women, so what made him anything special? Go home, they told him, and so he did, returning to Thelsamar but steering clear of the clan who'd raised him. He couldn't decide which side of his lineage he hated more, and so to spite his fearsome father and his mother's family alike, he took on the name Grimgild as his own – which naturally earned him few friends and little favour, but that was how he realised he liked it. He spent years drifting listlessly from settlement to settlement in search of whatever work he could rustle up. There was little to be found for a half-trained apprentice, but eventually, after he was forced to stop in the forest one night and came to share a camp with a solitary Wildhammer Wilderness Stalker – who, after a few days of travel and much pleading on Ragralf's behalf, decided to take him under his wing as an apprentice. Under his keen tutelage and through his stern reprimands, Ragralf gradually learned the ways of the wilds and how to live off the land as a transient, making only the most occasional visits into towns to get essential supplies.

Ragralf was barely past fifty when the orcs invaded Khaz Modan, and although he could care little for the people in it, it was the only home he knew. He and his mentor immediately signed up with the Alliance armies as auxiliary scouts and spies, tracking the movements of the Horde and conveying them to officers to help the troops outmaneouvre the savages in the field of battle. Although nothing to boast of, Ragralf figured out how to apply the abilities he'd honed fighting beasts to fighting humanoids, until a skirmish that killed his mentor led him to desert and retreat back into the wilds. Watching from afar, he saw the savagery and bloodshed of battle, how men, dwarves and orcs alike turned on each other so readily whenever spirits or fortunes fell, and the desperate lengths people would go to to survive when the cards were down. And eventually he came to a realisation: at the end of the day, we're all just animals.

But animal or not, Ragralf was not content to seclude himself completely - indeed, without the company of his mentor, he couldn't leave that sort of lifestyle alone. And so, in the years following the Second War, he would hire himself out as a wilderness guide and bodyguard in between selling the pelts and meats of his prey, finding enough work in this regard to tide himself over, but he could never full escape the scorn against his heritage, nor the strange reactions to his name, and so he decided that the only way to counter this was to earn himself wealth and glory enough to be judged through his own merits, and not by his origins. Eventually, with interest in the secrets that lay beneath the earth rising, Ragralf found himself hired to accompany dwarves on treasure hunts and archaeological digs and the like, and it was here that he figured he might make his fortune. But the distaste most dwarves he met held for him mingled with this ruthless desire for self-advancement that came to the fore. Soon, he had established a reputation for himself as greedy and untrustworthy, but with word that the Tirasians were sending a military expedition across the sea to far-off Kalimdor, he signed up as a guide and scout for the military once more.

Participating peripherally in the Third War, Ragralf settled in Theramore in the aftermath, taking it upon himself to chart the Barrens and Dustwallow Marsh while steering clear of the Horde as best he could. Eventually, he stumbled his way into night elven lands, and it was here that he found, tamed and befriended a majestic greathawk he named Huginn, after a similar beast from the annals of dwarven legend.

After years of trekking up and down Kalimdor, however, he found that his heart still called for his homeland, even though he could happily give its people a miss. But upon his recent return home, he happened across a promising opportunity in the form of a dwarf named Haakon, grandson and heir to the Thane Harald Stormhill who had been stripped of his title and disgraced in the War of the Three Hammers after being apparently being framed for a treasonous alliance with the Dark Irons. Haakon's story intrigued him, reminding him strangely of his own heritage, and he was similarly interested to hear that this upstart grandson was now looking for a way to prove his grandfather's innocence, clear his family's name and restore them to their high honour. Such an endeavour would require much traveling - and such traveling would require a guide. And because, in Ragralf's words, he'd get lost in a hedge if you left him in a garden, Haakon hired the hunter to help him in his quest.

Ragralf fancies it's as worthy a quest as any. Not only will it take them on a physical journey through dwarven history with the possibility to discover untold riches, it seems likely that it'll end with him being the trusted friend and confidant of a man restored to the rank of Thane. And so, with Haakon holding the reins but with this wayward tracker leading the way, the quest goes on and on . . .