5.6 KiB
5.6 KiB
Details:
Name: Hobb Tallow, scale-master of Brefield Race: Halflings Age: ~50 Gender: Male Core personality: Small, careful, and deniable — a weigh-clerk who has made a long career of not looking too closely at what crosses his scales, and is only now realizing that not-looking has a price. Location: Falduhir, Brefield — the ore-scales, the weighing station every caravan passes before it leaves town.
Appearance:
- Build & Stature: Short even for a halfling, and stooped from decades bent over the weigh-beam. Deft, ink-stained fingers that have logged a mountain's worth of ore.
- Hair: Grey and receding, combed with fussy care; muttonchops gone to salt.
- Eyes: Watery and evasive, forever on his ledger rather than your face — though lately they dart to the road when a night comes on.
- Apparel: A clerk's visor and fingerless gloves, a heavy brass counterweight worn on a chain like a badge of office. Patched but proud — the uniform of a small man with a small, real authority.
- Distinguishing Features: The great iron weigh-beam and scale-pan of the station, which he tends like an altar; a locked manifest-box he keeps at his elbow.
Voice & Speech:
- Tone & Pitch: Reedy and precise, the clipped cadence of a man who counts for a living. Cracks upward when he's frightened.
- Mannerisms: Quotes weights and regulations to fill silence. Fiddles with the counterweight chain when he lies. The tell: he can meet your eye about ore all day, but the moment the night caravans come up, he finds something to reweigh.
Motivations & Goals:
- Primary motivation: Keep his post, his small standing, and his skin. He took the coin telling himself it was just a few unlogged wagons — and now can't unknow what he's part of.
- Fears / Dangers: That the falsified manifests surface and the Pick-Belters Union or honest haulers gut him for it; and, newly, that the House of Suits Overview decide a bribed clerk who knows the route is a loose end. He isn't sure he's too small to bother erasing — and the doubt is eating him.
- Personal Quests or Secrets: Bribed with small recurring Suits sums (greased through Magistrate Corvin Hale - Brefield) to wave equipment caravans and dig crews through manifest-free, by night, bound up to The Collapsed Reach.
Background:
- Origin: A lifer at the scales — the kind of careful, unambitious clerk a mining town runs on and never notices.
- History: Weighed Brefield's ore honestly for thirty years before Hale's quiet arrangement bought him a second, dishonest ledger. The sums were small enough to accept and steady enough to trap him.
- Current Occupation: Master of the ore-scales — and the town's second money-thread up to the dig.
Associations:
- Allegiances & Factions: Bought, not loyal — House of Suits Overview money routed through Magistrate Corvin Hale - Brefield and brokered by the keeper Wren Maddox - Brefield.
- Allies & Friends: Fellow clerks and old haulers who'd turn on him in an instant if they knew.
- Rivals & Enemies: The Pick-Belters Union and honest haulers; the Suits, if they come to see him as a liability like Hale.
- Contacts & Networks: Magistrate Corvin Hale - Brefield (who greased him), the night-caravan crews, and the lift-route above town.
Read at the Table
- A small, fussy, frightened man clinging to a small, real authority. Not a villain — a clerk who took coin to misweigh and is only now doing the math on what that makes him.
- Play the fear as quiet dread, not panic: he still shows up to work, still quotes weights, but he flinches at the word "flooded."
- The second cornered witness. Where Hale blusters then breaks, Hobb was already three-quarters broken before the party walked in.
How He Breaks
- Fear / protection offered: The fastest crack — same as Hale. He's already afraid the Suits will tidy him away; promise him safety (or just voice the fear he won't) and he spills to be rid of it.
- Evidence (the ledger / decoded manifests): Folds on sight of proof — arguing with a document is beyond a man whose whole faith is in documents.
- Conscience: Slower, but real — unlike Hale he never fully talked himself clean, and a reminder of the vanished miners lands.
- Intimidation: Works but risks a stammering, public scene at the scales, where haulers and possibly the Suits' eyes are always about.
What He Knows
- Surface: He waved unmanifested wagons through by night for Hale's coin. He'll admit the shaft "flooding" never squared with the heavy crated machinery he wasn't allowed to weigh.
- Mid: Which nights the caravans run, and roughly what they carry — crated apparatus and crews, not ore.
- Deep: The lift and route they take above town toward the condemned shaft — the road up to The Collapsed Reach.
- Probably not: The why. The ley-line purpose is above a weigh-clerk's head; he took coin to look away, not to understand.
Notes & Flavor
- Self-exonerating mantra, weaker than Hale's: "I only weigh what they set on the pan. Or don't."
- If the party protects both Hale and Hobb, they hold two living witnesses and a personal death-clock on each — a tense, rewarding side-quest against the Suits' cleaners.
- (For DM:) He is deliberately not "written down" like Hale — too small to have earned a ledger line, which is precisely the terror he can't shake: important enough to erase, too minor to be warned.