#Nkobe | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

honourablejester · 2 months

Text

PF2e Character Concept: Mbe’ke Dwarf Investigator

Still reading ‘Lost Omens: The Mwangi Expanse’, and I really like the Mbe’ke? Just a lot. And I was thinking what kind of Mbe’ke character I’d like to make, and there’s just a couple of setting elements that I’d like to pull together here. Bear with me a bit:

The city of origin for this dwarf is going to be the Sky Citadel of Cloudspire. Initially, almost purely because of the Wellspring. The Wellspring is the water source at the base of the hollowed mountain bowl that is the city of Cloudspire, so deep that it’s rumoured to connect with the waters of the Darklands below, and blind abyssal fish often swim up into it. The Wellspring has two primary purposes: it’s the source of most of the city’s water, so fouling it has steep penalties, AND …

It's part of the funerary rites of at least Cloudspire dwarves and also possibly Mbe’ke in general. Not bodies, that would foul the waters. Bodies are cremated. But part of the funeral rites in Cloudspire involve a deceased dwarf’s family throwing a token in their name into the Wellspring, that their soul might return to the Darklands, the first homeland of the dwarves. If they’re poor, it might be just a stone with their name, but elaborate statuettes and carved liknesses are also thrown by richer families. And I thought …

Wouldn’t that would be a fabulous little thing for a dwarven adventurer to ask of their fellow party members? If I die here, will you take a stone in my name to the Wellspring, so that my soul will find home? A last request. If anyone makes it out, help guide my soul home.

So. I wanted a Cloudspire Mbe’ke. And that idea, the last request, tied up with another dark bit of history involving the Wellspring. During the War of Split Hearts, a massive civil war among the Mbe’ke a thousand years ago, the paranoid King Nkobe, believing his dead son had been poisoned instead of dying of disease, laid some groundwork and then spent nine days absolutely slaughtering everyone he believed had been involved. During the Nine Days of Blood, thousands of his people were arrested by masked enforcers, dragged to the bridges above Cloudspire, and beheaded, until the Wellspring beneath them ran red with gore, kicking off a massive civil war that only ended with cloud dragon interference and the deaths of King Nkobe and most of the aristocracy. For the last millennium, Mbe’ke society has had an elected council of kings and an elected high king, to avoid another King Nkobe ever happening again.

There’s also a fellowship … Mbe’ke society is broken up into fellowships, which are sort of like unions/guilds/electoral blocs. Dwarven society is divvied up by vocation, and the fellowships also support retired members, apprentices, dependents, and a few odd folks who are loosely connected to the profession but not actually part of it. There’s lots of loopholes so that people who need to be a part of a fellowship but who can’t actually do the profession can be supported anyway. And. There is a specific warrior fellowship that originated in the War of Split Hearts, called the Bloodmarked. Originally, they were people who survived the massacres of the Nine Days of Blood and who dedicated themselves to war in the aftermath, and these days they form a lot of the backbone of the faction of Mbe’ke’s who want to pursue the Corsair Wars against the Shackles Freecaptains to the death. To join the Bloodmarked fellowship, it’s not necessary but it is strongly traditional for a dwarf to have lost someone close to them to violence.

Now. I could make a Bloodmarked Mbe’ke. Pick a martial class and go for that. But. Another fellowship also caught my eye.

The Hall of Bells is the industrial core of Cloudspire, where most of the craft focused fellowships are found working the various foundries and forges. And among them is the Humble Fellowship. Who make pots and pans and parts, and who experiment with mass production and assembly lines. And there was a bit of me that thought …

Pathfinder has a background called Junk Collector. Which is what it sounds like. You make a living digging through rubbish and junk to find useable parts that you can recycle into something else. You’re trained in Crafting and either Engineering or Mining lore, and you get the Crafter’s Appraisal feat. So. Marry that back up to the Humble Fellowship. Pots and pans and parts, experiments with interchangeable pieces and assembly lines. And marry it also to … blood. And trash. And the Wellspring.

The Bloodmarked are the warrior fellowship. They guide national principles. They fight great causes. They’re born of survivors, yes, but their reach is vast. Electoral voting in the Mbe’ke system is weighted according to how many warriors a fellowship can bring to bear in times of war. So the Bloodmarked, as a fully warrior organisation, are powerful.

What happens to the survivors who aren’t?

Say you’re a humble dwarf, from a guild of pot makers, and you’re scrounging cast-offs for useable parts, and you find … a body. A body nobody cares about. Blood in the Wellspring, that’s only an issue because it pollutes the waters. Suppose some of those bodies are people you care about. People in the cracks, dependents on the edges of fellowships, that people do care about, but that don’t exactly have a lot of political weight behind them.

We’re not going to go for a warrior, here. We’re going to go for an investigator.

And there is … Tiny detail. Interesting detail. Mbe’ke society mostly follows the dwarven pantheon, though also, because of the cloud dragons, Gozreh of the wind and waves, and Uvuko, a draconic god. Among the dwarven pantheon, they favour Torag, obviously, and Grundinnar the Peacemaker, less typically, because the Mbe’ke are a mercantile, trading nation, and they have been powerfully allied with the cloud dragons for millennia, which they’re inclined to thank the Peacemaker for. Recently, with the Corsair Wars, the more hotblooded Angradd the Forge God is also gaining favour. But.

There is a lawful neutral dwarven deity called Dranngvit, the Debt Minder. She is considered a sour, acrimonious goddess of last resort, as she was betrothed to Torag once, only to be set aside when he fell in love with and chose Folgrit instead. Humiliated and embittered, she left Forgeheart, the heavenly realm of the dwarven pantheon, and went into self-imposed exile. She is a bitter, outcast goddess, and the goddess of debts, pursuit and vengeance. She asks retribution for contracts broken and debts unpaid. BUT. She is a lawful neutral goddess. She seeks the repayment of just debts, and appropriate vengeance against transgressions. It is anathema to her to force someone into a debt you know they can’t pay. She’s not the goddess of loan sharks, she just … would like agreements to be kept, and justice done if they are not.

So if you’re an investigator, in a society structured around fellowships that are supposed to support and take care of their members, and you have evidence, bodies, that say they don’t always do that. That people slip through the cracks. The promises are not always kept to those who don’t have force of arms to back them up. Maybe you would start to feel like the Debt Minder has some wisdom to offer?

I feel like an investigator. A junk collector, a dwarf of the Humble Fellowship of pot and pan makers. Who has found … blood in the waters. Bodies, here or there, among the junk, that nobody, or nobody with power, cares about. They’re not symptoms of a grand cause. They’re not soldiers in a war against piracy. They’re just bodies. People in the cracks. But someone should care about them. That’s what fellowships are supposed to be for. There were promises made. Maybe someone should try and make sure that promises are kept. Or that justice is done when they are not.

At the very least, someone should learn a name and throw a stone into the Wellspring for those who have no one else.

And. We could play this dwarf in Cloudspire, if the campaign is happy to do that. But we can also play them outside of it. Because, well, when you start finding bodies people don’t want found, and poking debts people don’t want to pay, sometimes you wind up having to leave to avoid becoming a body yourself. Not forever. You won’t let it be forever, won’t leave that debt unpaid, but no debts are paid by the dead. So. Survival first, and justice later. Dranngvit is a goddess in exile. If we have to, we can emulate her there, too. And thus we’re out and about in the world, in the wilds. Thus we’re asking our fellow adventurers to, in the event that we can’t, travel back to Cloudspire in our name, and throw a stone into the Wellspring to guide our soul home the only way left to it.

So. An Mbe’ke dwarf. A junk collector dwarven investigator from the Humble Fellowship of pot makers in the Sky Citadel of Cloudspire. A attempted champion, in their own small ways, of the unpaid debts and the forgotten dead.

I’m not sure what real world cultures, if any, the Mwangi and Mbe’ke naming conventions are drawing from, but there’s a Yoruba name, Ekundayo, that Behind the Name tells me means ‘tears become joy’, and I think … I think that would fit gently with this dwarf? Maybe she was named because her father never came home after conceiving her. Maybe he was a casualty of the Corsair Wars that the Bloodmarked care so much about. Maybe she could have been a Bloodmarked from the start, if she’d wanted to be. But she was named because she brought joy, even amidst grief, and that’s what she wants to be about. Or wanted. Pots and pans. Simple things, that bring simple comforts and simple joys. But, well, debts still need to be paid.

But, hopefully. Somewhere down the line. Maybe tears will still become joy. That’s … that’s a promise to work towards.

Ekundayo, a Cloudspire Mbe’ke Investigator. Heh.

I do really enjoy having a lot of crunchy setting details to build a character from.

#pathfinder #pf2e #character concepts #dwarves #investigators #mwangi expanse #mbe'ke #a little bit noir PI #also a little bit communist?#that wasn't entirely intentional #i love having setting details to play with #worldbuilding

7 notes · View notes