Kingmaker — Sunday

Full name Bevrak Skinker — though no one has called him that for years. Raised in Oprak, his mind ran to gears and gunpowder rather than the rigid discipline of hobgoblin soldiery. During the Ironfang Invasion he served as an engineer: building fortifications, experimenting with black powder mixtures that were equal parts brilliance and hazard. His superiors valued the results and never quite understood the enthusiasm.

After the war, he travelled to Alkenstar and apprenticed under Marcellus Draeve — a grizzled Dwarven gunsmith whose steady hands and sharp wit shaped Bevrak's path. Marcellus taught him the art of the gunsmith, the philosophy of precision, and the elegance of the pistol over the rifle. Locals began calling him Bishop after he misunderstood the term in a barroom conversation, believing it meant "one who sends souls to the gods." The nickname stuck once people saw how calmly he could end a fight with a single, measured shot.

The war left marks that don't show in scars. His detachment once released a group of Nidal soldiers after they had surrendered. Years later, Bishop rode into the encampment of his close friend Marrad — and found the same soldiers had been there first. The adventuring party was gone. So were their families, who had believed the camp was safe. Bishop executed every last one of the Nidal soldiers and rode out carrying a small, blood-soaked doll he recognised as Marrad's child's. He has not spoken of it since.

Now thirty, a letter from Jamandi Aldori has offered him a place among the pioneers of the Stolen Lands. With his favoured pistol at his hip and a mind full of gunpowder and ambition, Bishop rides toward a future of his own making — one careful shot at a time.

The first thing Jovan saw when he awoke was her — teary-eyed, with an exasperated smile, surrounded by blood and bones arranged in meticulous ritual fashion. The relief on Evelynn's face was clear. Everything else was horror.

In life, Jovan was an Aldori swordlord of modest fame and comfortable means. He had the name, had sworn the swordpact, and had built a quiet life as a sellsword alongside his wife Evelynn — an elven witch, his opposite in almost every way, and the person he trusted most. His death was sudden. He doesn't remember it. Evelynn refused to speak of how it happened; only of what she did afterwards. She beseeched her patron for the power to bring him back, and it answered with a vile ritual and a cost she has never fully accounted for.

He awoke to find himself dead, hungry in a way he had no words for, and owing that fact entirely to her. He held no anger he could justify and a quiet resentment he couldn't shake. She simply wanted things to be as they were. Rather than stay and keep hurting each other, Jovan left their home near Mivon and shed the Aldori name with it. He could still wield the sword. He couldn't find honor in the swordpact as he was.

He took Freddie with him — Evelynn's familiar, a large bullfrog with a red pattern painted on his head. A way of keeping the connection without staying in it. He journeyed the Stolen Lands, sword and frog in hand, until a summons to the manor of Lady Jamandi Aldori put something new on the horizon. He doesn't know what he's looking for exactly. But he knows how to follow a road.

Spud was born into the Marrowgnaw tribe — violent and crude even by goblin standards. He has yet to learn his true name. At age three, a once-in-a-century storm swept him from his family and carried him downriver for days. He spent weeks surviving on instinct and stubbornness, a toddler goblin alone in the world, until the sailors of Daggermark pulled him from the River Dagger during storm rescue operations.

The sailors kept him out of pity. Captain Ard Seagrim found it economical and entertaining to keep his stomach full of the cheapest available foodstuff. That became his name: Spud. Coming from a tribe where violence was the default state of existence, meeting humans who did not want to kill him was a culture shock of the highest order. Under Seagrim's patient direction, Spud learned the Common tongue and — more importantly — that not every interaction needed to end in biting.

He spent his childhood earning his place aboard ship. Celestial navigation, landmark reading, currents, tide cycles, rigging, caulking, bilge pumping. By age ten he was gainfully employed under Seagrim, assisting with smuggling, customs evasion, and the occasional cheeky bout of gambling. To sailors across the region he was Spud. To his friends, who adored his chaotic nature, he was Fuckass. Even criminals have codes. That was already better than what the Marrowgnaw could claim.

A mercantile trip to Restov introduced Spud to magic, and he was immediately, irrevocably hooked. He spent every last copper seeking a spellcaster willing to teach him — combing libraries and magical shops across Daggermark and the Stolen Lands. Eventually a talented woman named Pyra Vorn took him under her wing and made a discovery: the power had been inside him all along. Not learned magic, but a kinetic gate — a conduit to the Plane of Fire woven into his body. The storm that took him from his tribe may have cracked it open through sheer trauma. Years at sea, close to elemental forces, had widened it further. Pyra simply taught him to listen to what was already there. His Charhide heritage suddenly made sense.

Spud does not search for the Marrowgnaw, but he would wager a thousand pounds of potatoes they are still out there. In preparation for the day he meets them again, he has spent long hours in libraries studying philosophy — virtue ethics, the social contract, stoicism, existentialism. He intends to demonstrate the true strength of civilized society when that day comes. He explains these concepts to his companions as needed, illustrated primarily through sailing metaphors.

There is a meadow at the southern edge of Rostland where farmland gives way to the Stolen Lands. The soil is poor. Nothing of consequence has ever happened there. A rabbit lived in that meadow — not a special rabbit. It dug shallow warrens, ate clover and wild sorrel, and fled from hawks like every other rabbit in the field. It had no name. It had no thoughts worth naming.

The meadow, however, was not ordinary. Beneath the grass, the border between the material world and something older had worn dangerously thin. Spirits of growth and rot, of old battles and broken fey bargains, threaded through the earth. They were tired of having no one to talk to.

It happened on an autumn evening. The rabbit was foraging in a patch of rue — the bitter herb with pale yellow flowers — when something in the earth shifted. Not physically. But the rabbit felt it the way an animal feels a coming storm: total, electric, wrong. One moment it was an animal with an animal's mind. The next, it understood that it was a rabbit in a field, and that the field had a history, and that the history was very, very long.

The first spirit to speak was the Custodian — an ancient presence tied to the wild places of the Stolen Lands, a steward of growth who had waited centuries for an interlocutor. It opened the rabbit's mind the way sunlight opens a seed, and waited to see what grew. What grew was a small, confused, suddenly sapient rabbit sitting in a patch of rue, thinking its first real thought: "Oh. This is going to be a problem."

The name came from the herb. The herbal knowledge came from the Custodian — which roots heal infection, which bark reduces fever, which mushrooms should never be touched by anyone who values their liver. Speech came gradually; Rue's mouth was not built for Common, and the first attempts were, by Rue's own account, somewhere between a sneeze and a threat. Within a year he had become a quiet fixture at the border villages: a strange small creature at the tree line, willing to trade cures for root vegetables, never explaining what he was.

The spirits were not content to leave him there. New presences arrived — fiercer, more urgent. Visions of a kingdom rising from mud, a crown no one wanted but someone would have to wear. When word reached the villages that Restov was issuing charters south into the Stolen Lands, Rue recognised the difference between a request and an inevitability.

"Fine," he said to the empty meadow. "But if I die down there, I'm haunting all of you back." The wind, he could have sworn, sounded amused.

Manon arrived on Golarion after a calamity destroyed her home world. The details of what happened, and how she crossed between planes, she keeps to herself. She carries the weight of it without drama. What drives her forward is simpler: somewhere on this plane, she believes her brother survived. Until she finds him — or finds proof that she won't — she keeps moving.

Full name Billanderwick "Emberquill Bill" Puddleflame Emberquill Vaelrath of the Infernal Oopsie — born beneath a lantern-lit mushroom ring on the edge of a fey-crossed glade, sparks crackling in the air as if the night itself approved the joke. His gnomish kin raised him among clockworks and woodland secrets, yet candle flames bent toward him when excited and ink smoldered at his quill-tips when angry. The truth, revealed in careful contractual language, was that one parent was a devil of the diabolic courts — a broker of mortal desires who traded ambition and desperation for souls. From that parent, Bill inherited a silver tongue edged with embers and a mind attuned to the hidden clauses beneath every promise. Rather than despair, he met the revelation with a grin and a notebook. He apprenticed himself to diplomats, archivists, and revolutionaries — learning how societies are stitched together by law, fear, hope, and habit. He came to Alkenstar to study its advanced technology and aid the common folk, working with protest groups fighting for minority rights. It was there he met Bishop over drinks — an unlikely friendship forged in cheap ale and shared outrage. He publishes under the pen name "Emberquill Bill."