Player: Tucker
Race: Dwarf
Appearance
Gor is what you get when a pirate legend and a man on permanent holiday end up sharing the same body. He is stout and barrel-chested and gone comfortably soft in the middle, with a mane of bright copper-red hair and a heavy red beard worn in thick oiled hanks, mutton chops running unbroken into a drooping moustache. A faded blue kerchief is knotted over his skull, sun-bleached along the folds and, by the look of it, never once washed. A heavy gold ring hangs through his septum, and a short cigar is clamped in his teeth more often than not — lit about half the time.
His eyes are a clear pale green, and one of them is glass. It sits a fraction off true in the socket and points wherever it likes, so nobody talking to him is ever entirely certain they have his attention. He has never volunteered how he lost the original, and the story changes every time somebody asks.
Old ink shows above his collar: a bare, branching tree in blue-black lines gone soft and blurred with age, spreading up his throat and down across his chest, the work of some harbor tattooist several decades and several countries ago. Under his coat he favors a loud flowered shirt in reds and golds, worn open at the neck — nothing anyone in the Gloaming has ever seen the like of — and over that a weather-beaten blue-grey coat with an olive shawl collar and a pair of gold epaulettes that were certainly never issued to him. A crossbow rides across his back. It is the only thing on him that is properly maintained.
For Count Demetrius’s party he swapped the kerchief for the hat: an enormous black felt tricorne, brim cocked and pinned with tarnished silver, gold braid frayed at the edges, worn like a crown by a man who was never given one.
GM note: Tucker’s description arms Gor with a crossbow; the Session 2 log has him choosing his bow and arrows out of the kitchen cage. In Session 4 he fought with a shortbow and then traded it for an oak longbow, so in play he is a bow man — the crossbow in the description is the one detail still to reconcile.
Origins
Captain Gor is a dwarf of minor renown and cunning — though notably lacking in wit and responsibility. He’s best known around taverns for his tall tales of past glory, chief among them his claim to have once captained the dreaded ship known as the Leviathan, before being forced to walk the plank some years back over a money dispute.
The Leviathan is real, and its reputation is no exaggeration: a ship of near-mythical status, leaving every harbor and vessel it encounters burned to driftwood, with rarely more than a single survivor left to tell the tale. Those few witnesses describe its captain as something like a devil — smoke pouring from his nose, fire in his eyes. Surviving an encounter with the Leviathan at all is considered a miracle. Gor was never its captain.
What actually happened: after washing up on shore some time ago, Gor was taken in by a beach hermit named Jason and his dog, Argo, who healed his wounds and taught him to hunt and use herbal medicine. He stayed with Jason for a time, using his new skills to steal from the rich and — sometimes — give to the poor. Though he’ll never admit it, this was the happiest period of his life.
Gor claims to have once stolen treasures from a temple of St. Terragnis purely to spite a local preacher, and is, by his own account, wanted in several countries for it. The truth is darker: after Jason was executed for poaching on the king’s grounds, Gor sacked and burned the temple down in a rage. He has been a man without a country ever since, evading authorities on land while, in the back of his mind, waiting to cross paths with the Leviathan again — the one thing he fears most, though he’d never admit that either.
He also claims to have once seduced an elven sorceress in an ancient wood. This one is probably not true.
The Gloaming
Like the rest of the party, Gor received one of Count Demetrius’s black, wax-sealed invitations — though where the others were collected by carriage, his came to him twice, the second time in person. After being shooed out of the Crayfish Tavern by Ysolde Brack for one too many whiskeys, a drunk and whistling Gor wandered down to the docks of Marin’s Hold, where a mist rolled in and a gaunt, hooded pilot was waiting with a final written warning from the Count and a plate of bread, cheese, and wine. Never one to pass up free food, Gor tipped the pilot a silver and let himself be ferried across the river at unnatural speed to Castle Ravenloft.
He arrived to find the feast already well underway — masked guests standing over the bloodied bodies of an earlier course, and Strahd inviting the room to one last digestif before the crowd turned on him. Gor blacked out from a sharp, cold pain in his neck before he could react.
He woke sometime later caged in the castle’s kitchen, strung up alongside rotting cuts of meat hanging from hooks around him. He wasn’t alone for long: not much later, a slime-touched halfling named Morgy was caught sneaking up through a floor grate and thrown into the same cage, still groggy from a bite of her own.
He has not yet formally joined the party in session, but with his own invitation delivered, his own trip to the castle behind him, and a cellmate to compare notes with, his path into Strahd’s dungeon now runs directly alongside Morgy’s — and, likely soon, the rest of the party’s.
That path finally crossed the rest of the party’s in Session 2, when Brielle cut Gor loose from the kitchen cage alongside Morgy and a goblin newcomer everyone insists on also calling “Cap.” Given one item to keep from his old life, Gor chose his bow and arrows. Over the course of the night he came away with a small fortune’s worth of found treasure: five gold from a bookshelf, a golden censer taken off a murdered priest, a mysterious silk cloak — found draped over an empty throne on an exterior balcony — that grants him Misty Step (which saved his life the first time he used it, teleporting him to safety mid-fall off a rope partway down that same balcony), and, in a neat bit of poetic justice, the Mother’s Icon: a glowing silver holy amulet pulled from the crypt of Strahd’s own late mother, said to ward off the undead.
Gor missed the party’s last night in Ravenloft and rejoined them in Session 4 on the road home, loudly. He salved Enki’s ooze-burnt feet, killed the risen wolf with an arrow through its ear, and insisted they burn every carcass on the poisoned farm in case the cows got up too. When the others burned their ruined finery he gave up his jacket but kept the hat. He sold the golden censer and the silverware to Finch Three-Fingers and split the whole haul evenly among the party, traded his shortbow to the village’s young dwarf smith for an oak hunter’s longbow, and declared the rager at the Crayfish that ended with everyone fleeced at cards by a stranger nobody could afterward describe.
In Session 5 Gor guided the party down the Fairy Path, reading the woods the way Jason taught him. He eyed the stack of old coins on the river-folk shrine under the bridge and, with the weather turning in their favour, left them alone. It was Gor who knew that web-spinning spiders wait rather than hunt, and so kept the party from picking a fight with them. His first stew came out a burnt grey paste. In the wolf fight he put an arrow into the pack leader’s haunch, and afterward salved Ulfgar back onto his feet. He skinned the hares, dressed the wolves — keeping the alpha’s soft white winter pelt — and pounded the meat into pemmican, then went hunting and brought down a bull moose whose antlers he carries. At the Hangman’s Tree he hurled a moose haunch at the trunk to see what would happen (a toothed vine took it) and then shot a rope-tied arrow into the tree’s huge red apple and reeled it in. He reckoned the Giant’s Playground the leavings of an ancient river of ice, and when Brielle was swept down the river clinging to a log, he sank a rope-arrow into the log and hauled her ashore.
Attendance Log
- Session 2: The Bells of Ravenloft August 23, 2026
- Session 4: The Withered Homecoming September 26, 2026
- Session 5: The Fairy Path October 11, 2026