The Boblin Brigade

Boblin

Cast out by a warband of orcs and found loitering outside a dwarven excavation, where he demanded the party answer his riddles before passing. His most famous is what's brown and sticky? The answer has been a stick, then rice, then something considerably worse. He has never once given the same answer twice.

Recently came into a pair of spiked gauntlets and uses them with a viciousness nobody expected from him. This has not made him brave. He still soils himself at the sight of real danger, then swings anyway.

Nivek Pai Ji

A decorated officer who came home from the Titan's War and never picked up a weapon again. He fights with open palms only, and has never explained why. He does not need to. Anyone who has watched him work knows a closed fist would be excessive.

He came back from that war marked. The tattoos run the length of his body, and nobody in the Brigade can say what they are or who put them there. When his temper goes, they seem to move. Twice now he has come out of a rage with no memory of what happened and a look on his face that suggests he would rather not be told.

He counts Boblin and Gimble as friends. Since Vashal's death, he has spoken of the Zhentarim the way other men speak of a debt.

Gimble Guternik

The only responsible adult in a company of seven. Gimble holds the Brigade's coin, does the talking when strangers are involved, and can usually be relied upon to say the sensible thing roughly four seconds before somebody does the opposite.

His hammer is, by every honest account, nearly harmless. It has never mattered. He keeps the party standing, keeps its spirits up, and keeps faith with Lafander through all of it. Nobody in the Brigade has a bad word for him, which is remarkable given how freely they insult each other.

Octavia

Born to a noble house with real power behind it. She was leading an investigation in the Starmetal Mountains into her own brother's death when the trail turned somewhere she did not expect. She has not said aloud what she found. She has said that her father wants her dead, and that she believes him capable of arranging it.

She travels with Sunny, a baby owlbear she pulled out of a trap and healed. Her methods raise eyebrows and her explanations rarely satisfy, but she has not once acted against the Brigade's interests.

Silver

Responsible for most of what has gone wrong that a dragon cannot be blamed for. He robbed a woman the Brigade had just finished defending, and saw no contradiction in it. He would rob a line of orphans if the line were orderly enough to make it efficient.

He challenges everything that stands in his way regardless of size, and has squared up to Nivek more than once, which says something about either his courage or his judgment. For all that, he has appointed himself Octavia's shield, and on that one subject he has never wavered.

Mariella

Dispatched by her church as a missionary and has followed that charge with a single-mindedness the rest of the Brigade finds difficult to be near. She wants nothing else. She asks for nothing else. She is quiet in a way that reads less like calm and more like listening to something the others cannot hear.

After one job she simply was not there. The Brigade found her days later, deep in a forest none of them had marked on any map, wrapped in vines and moss and grass as though the ground had been growing over her. She was bruised and covered in blood. It was not hers. She has no memory of any of it, and has never asked what they think happened.