Player: Manny
Race: Dwarf
Class: Priest (Seeker)
Deity: Ord — god of balance, equilibrium, magic, knowledge and secrets
Also recorded in the Session 3 notes as “Kegsbreath.” Canon spelling is Kegbreath.
Appearance
A dwarf who smells, at all times and from some distance, of ale — the residue of it dried into his beard. He carries a small canteen of his favourite bourbon on his belt and is rarely without it; the first thing he does on waking anywhere is check that it is still there. He fights with a longbow and, since Session 3, a heavy morningstar cast in the shape of an inverted cross.
Backstory
Home: Orlaine
Ulfgar remembers almost nothing of his parents. What he has instead are the remarks the elders of Orlaine used to make — that he had his mother’s face, that he had his father’s naivety — and none of those elders are left to make them. Old age took them, as far as he knows; he was a boy, they were old, and that is how it goes. Whether all of them went that way is not something he has ever had cause to ask. He says he would trade a cask of the finest whiskey to hear those comments again; they were his only evidence that he ever had parents at all.
The farm went first. Raiders — he names them only as Mugdulbulb — came down on his parents’ land when he was small and took the fields, the livestock and his parents with them. Orlaine itself was never touched. The village went on exactly as it had, and Ulfgar went into its markets, an orphan swiping produce and picking pockets, badly. It was one of those failures that got him caught by Valos, a retired priest known better by his actions than by the few words he spoke. Valos took him in, taught him by practice rather than sermon, guided him just enough to understand the way things are and sparingly enough to leave him to discover the rest, and supported him as well as any second-hand father could.
That continued when Ulfgar entered the order of Ord: he attended the order’s teachings and spent his days off with Valos. He was never the most pious member — nobody’s first choice to read their last rites — but he was committed in the same wordless way Valos was. He ran remedies to the sick as a courier and chaperoned the orphans the order took in, the second of which he felt keenly, remembering what he had been.
His drinking was as well known as his service. A few missing bottles a week the order overlooked; when the communal depository came up several barrels short, the eyes turned to him at once. He was blamed for it and banished from Orlaine.
What He Doesn’t Know Yet
Orlaine still stands. It is one of Marin’s Hold’s primary sources of food, and something is currently taking it apart — people vanishing, crops failing, cows drying up, and now the food shipments stopped and a messenger who went out and never came back. The job board at Marin’s Hold has carried a bounty on it twice. Nobody has taken it.
Valos was living there when it started. Ulfgar has been in exile the whole time and has heard none of this.
Origins
Ulfgar holds the title of Seeker in the faith of Ord, and earned the name Kegbreath as a moniker rather than a birthright. He came to Count Demetrius’s masquerade among the other guests and got bored of the ballroom almost immediately, wandering down into the larder in search of the good wine. What he found there was a cellar stocked with vintages from other lands, other worlds and possibly other planes — and he drank his way steadily through the Count’s prime stock until he ended up unconscious on the floor of the catacombs.
The Gloaming
The party found him face-down in Strahd’s own crypt at the start of Session 3, surrounded by empty bottles, already bearing the Count’s mark without having noticed it. He got up, established that his flask was still on him, declared all was well with the world, and joined them.
He opened the plain pine coffin of the third bride and took the inverted-cross morningstar leaning inside it. In the courtyard fight against the corrupted Sister Geraldine, her unholy aura cut him off from Ord again and again — the sight of the burning priest on the cross filling his mind every time he tried to pray — until he finally forced a prayer through and turned the risen dead out of the desecrated chapel, the air filling with the singing of a congregation dead for centuries. You might have forgotten, but I have not forgotten my God, he shouted after them. Moments later, two skeletons closed on him and his drunken stagger carried him aside at exactly the wrong instant for both of them, so that they destroyed each other.
Swept downstream while crossing the river below the castle, he was saved by Enki diving in after him — and then saved Enki in turn, hauling the half-stunned elf up onto a rock in midstream after they collided with it. Later, at Christine’s forest banquet, he drank from the endless goblet of blood and gained the ability to take the form of a bat, using it to shriek and circle over Randoah’s discarded witch hat and pull the hunt off their trail. He then went back for the hat, crawled under it along the forest floor, and hid in a shrubbery while the entire hunt passed him by.
In the mist, Strahd offered him as much of the finest drink in the universe as he could ever want, in exchange for his companions. Ulfgar asked for a figure, considered it, and answered that the good thing about drink was never the quality but the company — and he had found better company to be around. Strahd called him humble and wholesome, said he would have had no place in his court anyway, and left.
In Session 4 Ulfgar read the dead cattle on the road home with a healer’s eye — poisoned or diseased, not starved — and learned the hard way that the green ooze eats cloth, cutting a piece of his clothes away before it spread. His prayers would not take in that corrupted ground while Randoah lay dying, though his morningstar burst an ooze-rat and his healing came through once the fight was done. At the refugee camp outside Marin’s Hold a woman from Orlaine knew him on sight, and said she had never believed what they said he’d done: people have been vanishing from Orlaine, many of its folk now camp at the gate, and Valos came away with them and is somewhere among the tents. Her own husband and son went off days ago as guides to a friendly medicine woman with a colour in her name, paid in two chickens, and have not come back. After the party’s feast at the Crayfish he woke in the stocks in the main square beside Enki, both of them branded arsonists for burning down someone’s house while testing how far a fire arrow would fly, and spent two days there. Once out, Ulfgar asked Ysolde Brack to look for Valos in the camp and paid her for the trouble. The party left for the forest before he could find him himself.
In Session 5, at the old stone bridge, Ulfgar poured a splash from his canteen onto a river-folk shrine beside Ivek’s offering. His snares fed the party on the first morning, and on the second night he found them a bed inside a huge hollow tree. When wolves came out of the dark he was torn down in a single rush and lay bleeding out until Ivek’s blessed water held him and Gor’s salve brought him round. The next day he packed his own bites with an herb poultice, then cooked a wolf-and-berry stew with turnips and potatoes that was the best meal of the journey, and that night told the story of the wolf fight to the people who had been in it. He climbed for a view of the Hangman’s Tree to mark the way, found the party a dry, defensible hollow up a rocky hillside south of it, and foraged hazelnuts and blackberries above the Giant’s Playground.
Attendance Log
- Session 3: The Mists of Ravenloft September 5, 2026
- Session 4: The Withered Homecoming September 26, 2026
- Session 5: The Fairy Path October 11, 2026