Rutt
I spent the past hour or so putting together screenshots of my new DnD character, Rutt. Where better, I figured, to show him off than here?
Rutt grew up with no last name. His mother - a prostitute from the slums outside the castle - died in childbirth and he did not know his father. He grew up in an orphanage and on the streets. What little he got from the orphanage he learned to supplement by nipping food, clothing, and any other items he could find from street merchants and passersby. He got caught by the guards often, but the Captain of the guards took a liking to Rutt and frequently - instead of throwing him in a cell for 24 hours - spent Rutt’s incarceration playing games, teaching Rutt to read and write, and - as Rutt got older - training him in the subtleties of combat.
Always naturally athletic, Rutt found this training easy. He also found himself respecting the Captain not just as a mentor but as a man. He began to learn aspects of chivalry - doing what is right when it’s right to do it. He never lost his love of snatching trinkets from vendors, but he found himself stealing from the wealthier merchants and leaving those in more dire straits alone.
He even began sticking up for those in need. In his later teens, he started targeting gangs of thugs and groups of vagabonds. Ever outnumbered by stronger foes, he used his dexterity to take them down from the side, from behind, or by using their own strengths against them. He built up his own gang, and met with some success. His mentor the Captain visibly shined with pride whenever Rutt told him of how he had saved a merchant form a shakedown or a lady from a mugging. The Captain had retired from service, but Rutt still never called him by any other name.
Then a new group of thugs - a small traveling band of disreputable vagabonds - arrived in town. The guards ignored them because they were smart enough to stay far from the castle. They hit small targets. Easy targets. The exact targets that Rutt had avoided when he had first started learning from the Captain. The targets that could least afford to be hit.
Rutt and his men - if you could call a gangly group of teenagers “men” - took the group on, hoping to scare them and drive them from the town. But the band was far stronger than their choice of victims had led Rutt to believe. Of his seven followers, 3 were murdered in the street. The other 4 ran. Rutt - who had never before seen someone die in battle - fled as well, terrified. The men pursued him to the Captain’s home, where they set fire to the hut, burning it to the ground with the Captain inside. Rutt again escaped with is life, but the Captain did not.
It was only then that the evildoers were run from the town by the guards, but it was too late. Rutt had lost his friends. He had lost his gang. He had lost the closest thing to a father he had ever known.
That night, he sifted through the ashes of the Captain’s house to find his weapons. along the way he came across a handful of gold and a lock-box that the Captain had always kept by his bed. The guards, who had been absent while the vagabonds had murdered the Captain, chased Rutt off before he could find the box’s key. He fled to the nearby woods and used a rock to shatter the box’s lock.
Within the box was a book, written in the Captain’s hand. It was his diary. Within the book, the Captain had detailed how he had discovered his son - the child of a whore - was an orphan living on the street, and how he could not reveal the fact lest he lose his job serving the king. Near the diary’s end, the Captain wrote of how he had finally saved enough gold to retire, and how he was going to reveal to Rutt on his 18th birthday the true reason why he’d been so kind.
As the sun was rising after the longest, most terrible night of his life, Rutt remembered.
Today was his 18th birthday.
Rutt swore to track down and kill the man who had murdered his father. He had no idea how. He had no idea where. Or when. But it would happen.
