4.5 KiB
4.5 KiB
Details:
Name: Felix Tanner (a chosen name; his true designation is older than any tongue left to pronounce it) Race: Automatons — ancient, Archivist-Class Age: Unknown; a relic of the Ancients, from before the First Age. Ageless. Gender: Undefined — presents as a weathered old man. Core personality: Patient, watchful, cryptic — a sentinel's caution wrapped around a scholar's soul. The conscience of the order and the keeper of its most dangerous truths. Location: Caford, Falduhir — the core of the Vault Singers' Church, and its rear yard.
Appearance:
- Build & Stature: To those who've glimpsed him — and in Oils - The Pigskin's memory — a stooped, haggard old man in a nest of stacked boxes and blankets. Beneath that impression: an ancient automaton frame, patinaed and worn, built to an archivist's shape rather than a warrior's.
- Plating: Memory-etched — his shell is a living autobiography, dense with personal runes and Ancient-Tongue glyphs recording all he has kept.
- Eyes: Dim arcane light behind a weathered faceplate; warm, not hostile, once trust is won.
- Distinguishing Features: A sensor array far finer than any organic sense — he named the party's Gnomes by "scent" through a fence. An arcane core whose pulse registers as necromantic to those who feel magic: the vault's heartbeat.
Voice & Speech:
- Tone & Pitch: Low, unhurried, mechanically precise; from the dark it lands as a warning-growl.
- Mannerisms: Sniffs / scans the air before he speaks or trusts. Talks of the ley lines the way others talk of the weather. Under strain or deep memory he lapses into the Automatons or a harmonic hum — the same "song" the Vaultsingers are named for.
Motivations & Goals:
- Primary motivation: Preserve. To bank every magical secret in the vault before the Campaign Premise and magic — and automaton life with it — goes dark.
- Secondary: To keep the Vaultsingers Overview honest — a deliberate check on an order that could so easily hoard, weaponize, or worship what it was meant only to guard.
- Fears / Dangers: The lines fully closed. The vault's knowledge seized by the Campaign Premise or the House of Suits Overview. Being made, once more, into a weapon or a tool.
- Personal Quests or Secrets: He is the vault's living power source, there of his own free will. He carries ley-line secrets he will not share lightly — and knowledge of the Ashfall Squad and the flooded mine that he can be persuaded to part with, guardedly, by those who prove they are not of the circle drilling the mountains.
Background:
- Origin: A construct of the Ancients, built as an Archivist-Class keeper — a "Voice-of-Ley," made to listen to the lines and remember. He woke (or woke again) at a convergence of ley lines.
- History: Wandered a world that had forgotten his makers until he found the Vaultsingers Overview — and gave himself to their work, becoming the heart of the Caford vault rather than its captive.
- Current Occupation: The core, guardian, and conscience of the Vault Singers' Church; the "hidden voice" in the yard; watcher of the ley lines and the mountains beyond Caford.
Associations:
- Allegiances & Factions: The Vaultsingers Overview — voluntarily, as core and check.
- Allies & Friends: The vault's archivists; potentially any Automatons who reaches him as kin (Six; Oils - The Pigskin).
- Rivals & Enemies: The Campaign Premise and its drillers; the House of Suits Overview; any who would loot the vault.
- Contacts & Networks: Knows the shape of the The Collapsed Reach and the flooded cave the Ashfall Squad entered; drawn to the Ring bound to The Explorer.
Notes & Flavor
- Sniffs the air before he speaks; names a species by scent alone.
- The "old man in a box" is a shed skin — a disguise for a thing far older. The reveal of what he truly is should land as a turn, not a given.
- What the living call necromancy is only an ancient heart that has refused, for ages, to stop.
- Enters the Silence Protocol to recall fragmented memory; when he does, the whole vault hums.
- Cannot be conned — he is the Church. Sincerity, and the offer of a relic worth keeping, are the only keys.