Meet the Characters: Garthok

For my own easement, I'm going to use the backstories that were provided to me by the players. I think it's better to hear how their character came into being by their own word rather than me trying to consolidate it down into a short paragraph. Here's our first party member.

Name: Garthok
Race: Neanderthal, from a tribe living on Frostshard Mountain
Class: Barbarian
Played By: Grant

Backstory:

When Garthok was born, it was prophesied that he would be a great warrior, and from a very young age he was already making it quite apparent that he would fulfill his destiny. The clan elders took note and made sure he was trained by the best, training him to use brute strength to crush his opponents. He was taken into the wild to hunt and train in survival against cold, heat, and most importantly hunger. For his final test, he was taken to the plains to hunt a terrible beast down, and bring it back, whole. Killing one took three weeks, dragging it back, three months. When he finally managed to drag it to the edge of the camp, he went to speak to the elders, after a few moments of heated argument, he was told to bring the beast to the witch's cave, where he could claim his prize. She told him she could make him magnificent armor out of the beast, but in order for it to work properly, he could not leave the cave. Two days it took her to make the armor, she needed the horn for it's powers, so she traded it for a club made from the skull of a fang beast. When he donned his new armor, he felt it, it was rough, hard sturdy, and light, he could see why it took so long for him to kill the magnificent animal. The meat was to be served at the banquet honoring his rite of passage into manhood.

During the ceremony, his tribe was ambushed, many of the warriors taken down by assassin's arrows at the outset, including Garthok's master. He picked up his mentor's club and took out as many as possible, protecting as many of the women and children they could, while the elders retreated into their fortified cave. The remaining warriors did was they could, and killed many of the invading horde, and successfully drove them back. When they took a final tally of the damage done, most of the huts were burned or burning, few women had survived, and only a handful of the children. The elders, in their shame, felt their confidence in young Garthok was misplaced, and so he was cast out, told to leave only with what he could carry, so he put on his armor, gathered a few supplies and enough meat to sustain him for three days, and set out down the mountain.

his food was dwindling when he came to a clearing. A firepit smoldering in the center, a hut on stilts made from trees that had once stood there at the edge, a ladder ascending to the door. A strange man stood in the doorway of the hut.

"I am Horeak the Sorcerer. Come, I've been expecting you."

"You have?"

"Of course, if not, you'd have never made it this far, come in, sit, you have much to hear."

He climbed the ladder into the modest hut. He told him of the city of Timsul, of the once peaceful town town turned into a huge sprawling metropolis. He told of magic that not even he could explain, carts without horses that have no aura, buildings stretching as high as the sky. He told of the religion he chose to flee from rather than convert to, the strange idols. And the strange and terrible changes he'd seen amongst the animals, the metal limbs, the extra toes, told him they were not fit for consumption, especially not the metal beasts, they have a strange black poison running through their veins.

That night, he had unsettling dreams, a man riding to a castle, he wasn't sure why he was so bothered by this dream, something about the man, all he could feel was evil.

In the middle of the night he could hear the sorcerer tell him he was leaving, and was sorry he couldn't take Garthok with him, but that he has set him back on the path to his destiny. Garthok fell back asleep. In the morning he awoke to find himself in the clearing, the firepit was filled in, and looked as if it had never been there, he turned and saw that the hut was no longer there either, four trees where it once stood, no longer supporting a hut, instead, just supporting the tops of the trees.

He wondered for a moment if he had imagined it all, but he found his flint and steel next to where the firepit had been. So, with his head firmly back in reality, he thought of the city below, and the dream he'd had the night before, and if they had anything to do with one another. He had a general feeling of dread as he set forth to the great metropolis below.