Wilgrim

Wilgrim was a short, stout gnome.

Wilgrim

Relatives	Unknown
Place of Birth	Levinkan (presumed)
Species	Gnome
Gender	Male

Early Life

Wilgrim grew up on the streets of Zobeck, orphaned. He doesn't know what happened to his parents, who they were, or why they abandoned him. They were gone before his earliest memory. But as is often the case, he grew up playing with the other orphans and surviving off the 'cuteness' generosity of the locals. As they grew up and cuteness vanished, survival started to mean theft. Naturally, some of his friends were nabbed at various intervals. He tried to earn honest money when he could, but mostly he survived by stealing what he needed and hiding from the law. And as the orphans grew more cliquish gang fighting also ensued. But one by one, over time his friends either left, died, or were incarcerated.

Discovery of Talents

But during this time, he discovered a talent for mechanical things, invention, and animation of constructs (as a rock gnome do). So he practiced making small toys and trinkets, most of which he would leave with random orphans he stumbled upon so that they would have something to play with. But he knew he had a talent and was something special, but nobody would allow him to ply his trade.

Pirate King Ambitions

Once he was old enough, he decided he'd had enough being crushed under the boots of authority and hiding from the heat of his previous actions and decided he would forge his own kingdom. Unfortunately, most land was already claimed by some organization or another that had more influence than himself, so he would take to the seas and become a pirate king. To get some supplies to kickstart his plans, he scoped out a barracks and stole a bunch of discarded armor and weapons no longer fit for use as training tools, put them in a wagon, and left the country.

The Pirates Campaign

I don't remember when exactly the Pirates campaign was set (691 PR comes to mind).

The opening of the campaign involved Wilgrim using what starter cash he had to essentially get as far as he could from Zobeck and the Levinkan Kingdom. It was not far; Wilgrim only made it to Capsicum, arriving in Scoville. But a pirate king without a crew is no king and Wilgrim recruited a bunch of locals to join in his plans. Initially they were suspicious of his lack of a ship, but Wilgrim convinced them to follow and that a ship would be easy to procure. And it was--the group convinced a local lovestruck attendant to let them borrow a ship in exchange for helping him get a date with his crush. The date was secured, the ship was borrowed, but due to inexperience in operating a ship they caught the attention of the local port authority who moved to apprehend Wilgrim and Company. A scuffle ensued. Two guards dove into the water to escape and two were knocked unconscious. As the military vessel seemed more fitting for the job, Wilgrim and Company moved their supplies to the new vessel and moved the unconscious guards to the old ship. Wanting to send a message, Wilgrim torched the old "borrowed" ship and burned the men aboard. This proved too much for one of the company and they decided it best to part ways here.

Building Allies

In an attempt to curry favor with locals (see irl example of mexican drug cartels) the company decided to find key individuals to befriend and get to know. One such individual, and one that Wilgrim personally liked, was the tavernkeeper in Scoville. She had adopted several orphaned children after their parents had mysteriously disappeared. Wilgrim would later continue to ensure she was more than adequately funded, although given the nature of events to come Wilgrim would do so in secret. The tavernkeeper relayed that her brother, the shipwright whose boat the party would later steal, is generally considered a bit mentally deficient but that it wasn't always so. And hinted that he started asking certain questions that people know not to ask. This, of course, made Wilgrim ask those questions and revealed something of a secret society operating in the pepper isles. It was about this time that Wilgrim finished construction of Eureka, his Steel Defender. Eureka was large even by wolf standards. The pristine, metallic beast (with ruby eyes) followed Wilgrim everywhere as a silent guardian and, at last, a friend that would never leave Wilgrim. Interactions between Wilgrim and Eureka might be seen as offputting, as Wilgrim projected a persona onto the machine as though it were a living, breathing, thinking animal.

Journey to Ancho

Through information gathered, the party also learned of the Lost Colony of Ancho. They agreed to do the tavernkeeper a favor and check out said colony. Arriving in Ancho, the party discovered that the coast had been ruined by weather events of some kind and that it was being routinely harried by a ghostly pirate ship and its ethereal captain. Not liking the idea of competition and being particularly fond of the idea of having local allies, Wilgrim and Company engaged the pirate captain at their next landing, routing the pirate and bolstering morale of the locals. Having had their spirits lifted, the Ancho locals relayed the information that a ruined lighthouse used to protect the colony, but it was sabotaged and no longer functional. Of course, this necessitated a look. Inside the lighthouse several anachronistic individuals, who were initially hostile through no fault of their own, seemed to be living in the past. Daily journals had no updates in decades, daily routines and locations were covered in broken stone and a layer of dust and sand. Rescuing these individuals from their fugue state seemed the humane option, but they had little additional information, except that a crystal of some kind should have been present in the beacon of said lighthouse, but that the crystal was missing.

Tracking information on the crystal led to the discovery of an individual known only as The Encyclopedia, who lives in a tower at the College of Saisan. The tower was viewed with suspicion and mystery by the area residents but surprisingly welcoming to the group. They were given a tour of the location, which appeared to be predominantly staffed with near-zombie-like people constantly transcribing things into books. At the end of the tour, select members of The Company had grown restless and began prodding with both question and action, only to be promptly teleported out of the tower. With only a few people left and under intense scrutiny of their tour guide, the last few members (which included Wilgrim) scrambled and grabbed whatever they could get their hands on before being teleported out themselves. Wilgrim managed to grab a book--a journal of some kind but filled with mundane entries such as:

• 07:41 - Wake up
• 07:43 - Use the restroom
• 07:49 - Make breakfast
• 08:25 - Clean up after breakfast

The journal, which was hundreds of pages long, had no more information than that. This seemed below the mystery, prestige, and power of the Encyclopedia so Wilgrim continued to prod and discovered that it was a layer of protective magic to make the contents look mundane, but that something else lurked 'beneath' the words.

The Visions

This revelation, and the continued investigation, led Wilgrim to begin to have apocalyptic dreams and visions. He saw the land devastated and barren. His own body disintegrated. Nobody and nothing was around to survive--except Eureka. Eureka always survived. This led Wilgrim to believe that the only way to survive this apocalypse was to replace living creatures with synthetic ones--though at the time he had no way of doing so. Back to the tower; the party had assembled, but one of their own was missing. Everyone was present except their navigator, but someone else noticed something wrong with the geometry of the horizon. As though an illusion was hiding something in that location. Feeling a bit frustred and headstrong, they went toward the illusion. Surely anything worth hiding was something worth discovering. Their arrival surprised the Company as behind the illusion was an entire island, cloaked from the outside world. Exploration revealed that the island was where the lost party member had been transported but that the island had other prisoners. In particular, a ghastly banshee had been imprisoned below the surface. After the Company defeated the banshee, it reverted to the form of a malnourished, tortured woman (who would later turn out to be the mother of one of the Scoville Tavernkeeper's orphans--an orphan that had snuck onto their ship and was on the island with them, unbeknownst to the Company at the time). Reverting the banshee caused the area to collapse, forcing the Company to flee the caves back to the surface, in the process dismantling the illusions separating the island from the surrounding land.

After the Pirates Campaign

Wilgrim serves as the protagonist (or antagonist to others) in the War of the Forged. Decades after his pirate adventures, Wilgrim ended up receiving funding from the Levinkan Kingdom. This would not have been a happy arrangement and more of a necessity. Levinkan would have had no choice but to rely on Wilgrim's expertise and skills and would probably expect Wilgrim to build them an army. Wilgrim would have accepted their funding and sought to build an army, but would never turn it over to Levinkan. Supplies, money, and manpower would have been useful though, so as long as Levinkan kept it coming Wilgrim would have played nice especially as his own resources started becoming limited and difficult to acquire.

Snow, being a fully sapient synthetic lifeform (something Wilgrim had been struggling with) who has allied with other fully sapient synthetic life forms, would have captivated Wilgrim initially. To fulfill his goal of replacing organic life with synthetic life, he would need to study how these machines worked and build similar models of his own. But as the number of enemies began to rise and his freedom to move around the world and operate according to his own agenda declined, Wilgrim's methods would get increasingly barbaric and less clean. The good guys in the war would see Wilgrim as a tyrant, monster, and barbarian. But Wilgrim sees himself as trying to save the sapient species of the world by implanting their minds into robot bodies and sees himself building an environment where people can't leave him anymore by including methods to ensure they can't rebel against him.

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