Role: Governor of Neefox
Location: The Governor’s Mansion
First met: Session 1: The Last Chain
An orc with very large tusks, gruff-voiced, in an extremely fine suit, silk with a puffed cravat at one table and frilled down the chest at another. His mansion towers over the humble town, with velvet on its walls and whiskey in crystal glasses. He keeps the books, trades the silver and collects the taxes, and leaves the mine itself to Ashton. By his own account he basically just counts the money.
The silver, he explains, is what keeps the pirates off the town’s back. About a fifth of the mine’s output goes to a list of pirate captains, and every payment is itemised in his ledgers as a bribe. If the silver stops, so does the tribute, and the pirates’ only other currency is violence. So when the mine fell silent he would not send more miners after the lost rescue crew. He hired adventurers instead, at 450 gold apiece, and made getting the silver flowing the job, with rescuing miners a welcome extra.
At every table he insisted, usually without being asked, that there were definitely no cultists: any such rumour was made up by miners who didn’t want to work. At every table it turned out there were. To make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs.
Some of the parties who answered his summons had worked for him before. They had once rescued his daughter from cultists on the other side of the island and handed him a logbook of every missing person. She is fine now, he says, though she kept to her room for a while.
At each table
- Session 1 (Table 1): He told the six newcomers that the miners’ own rescue crew had vanished and that they were the first adventurers he had hired. He swore it. He dismissed the cult rumours as workers’ excuses and said that to make an omelet you have to break a few eggs. Told that people are not eggs, he answered: It’s an expression. To Professor Simley’s petition for hermit-crab rights he said only Sure. As the doors shut he was muttering about writing for more adventurers in case these ones died horribly.
- Session 2 (Table 2): He greeted the four as old employees and apologised again about his daughter. He insisted there were no missing people at all: the miners were trapped, not missing. He gave them a writ, though they had one already and duplicates cost extra, and paid them gold or a lesser purse and a magic item on their return.
- Session 3 (Table 3): He offered 450 gold each to reopen the mine. The two gnomes were usefully compact, he agreed, good for cracks and crevices, and the job was definitely not cultists. Never work for free. Hank judged him slimy.
- Session 4 (Table 4): He poured whiskey, called the miners peasants who didn’t want to work, and told Brendan he simply had a bigger view of things. Adam audited his books and found them honest, bribes and all. While he watched the gnome he lost his silver letter opener to Argo, and never found it. He thanked them warmly at the end for dealing with the definitely-not-cultists.