84 lines
5.6 KiB
Markdown
84 lines
5.6 KiB
Markdown
### Details:
|
|
|
|
**Name**: Hobb Tallow, scale-master of [[Brefield]]
|
|
**Race**: [[Halflings|Halfling]]
|
|
**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|Suits]] 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|Hale]]) to wave **equipment caravans and dig crews through manifest-free, by night**, bound up to [[The Collapsed Reach|the 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|Suits]] money routed through [[Magistrate Corvin Hale - Brefield|Hale]] and brokered by the keeper [[Wren Maddox - Brefield|Wren Maddox]].
|
|
- **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|Hale]] (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|the 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.
|