Agnes Aleguzzler

I'm playing in a new Pathfinder game and as I was making my usual halfling rogue, it struck me that I wasn't excited about my character.  I always play a halfling or a rogue or a wizard and I wanted to play something completely different this time.  One of the other guys had already chosen to make a fighter and we also had a ranger and a summoner for the party.

The DM rattled off several suggestions for me but none of them really seemed exciting and I loathe paladins because it's just not in my chaotic nature to play one.  That left me with cleric - a class that I really don't like to play because all they do is heal people and that's boring.  In fact, I had already declared to my new group that I absolutely did not want to play a cleric or paladin.  So imagine their confusion when I announced that I didn't want to play the halfling rogue that I had spent most of the evening creating.

My friend Rob & I used to joke about playing a cross-dressing Dwarven Battlerager (imagine Thibbledorf Pwent in drag!) and whenever I see the picture of the half-nekkid dwarf in the Pathfinder book, I imagine him in a pink and frilly dress.  That's when I decided that I was finally going to make my cross-dressing Dwarf PC and since fighter was already taken, I figured I could play a cleric who prefers to break heads rather then mend them.

I like the idea of the hierarchical Dwarven society as in The Dragon Age games and that if a Dwarf leaves their underground home for a life on the surface, they are forever banished.  So, while it may not be "canon" for the Pathfinder realms, I'm going to say that this is the type of Dwarven society that Agnes grew up in. (So if the area that I say he's from doesn't match up with what you know of Pathfinder & Dwarves, this is the reason.)

Agnes Aleguzzler hails from the Mountains of Kodar and he was born into the Smith Caste.  Both his mother and father were smiths of some renowned and it was expected that he and his older siblings would follow in their parent's footsteps.  Alas, while the work that Agnes produced could far outstrip that of a human smith it was poor by Dwarven standards.  Agnes loved his family but his mediocre crafting skills were often a bone of contention amongst them and stirred up quite a bit of sibling rivalry.

Agnes' oldest sister, Gretchen, was a master crafter in record time and often taunted Agnes about his poor smithing abilities.  She used to tell him that he would be cast out of the Smith class & sent to the mines to labor until he was too old to hold a pick axe.  Brunhild, the middle child, had a kinder heart and she would defend Agnes to anyone that would listen.  "He's still young," she would say, "give him time to hone his skills and one day he will rival the greatest of our Smiths!"

The truth of the matter was that Agnes did not care to be a great Smith.  He liked women, wine, and song more than anything and he longed to travel.  He would spend his days in the local ale houses and listen to the tales that the rare surface visitors were telling.  Agnes tried to dull his wanderlust with drink and spent most of his time drunk.  One time Agnes confided his secret desire to a woman he though he loved but the wicked wench spread word and Agnes was labeled a trouble maker and a deviant.  What self-respecting dwarf would want to visit the surface?

Agnes kept his head down and his whiskers close after that debacle but things were never quite the same.  Women were no longer interested in him and by the time he was old enough to leave his parents home, he had no marriage prospects - not even from the lower castes.  He was employed to create only the most basic of everyday items - pots and pans and the like, and the only friend he had was his sister Brunhild.

During his lowest point, he was approached by another dwarf of the Smith caste - Rhudighar Ironfist, and he was asked to sabotage his sister Gretchen's work.  Rhudighar wished to humiliate Gretchen because she was a better smith than he was and he thought that if Gretchen was brought low, she would submit to his marriage requests.  Rhudighar offered to pay Agnes very handsomely to do this awful deed but even though Agnes disliked his sister, she was still his family.  Agnes refused and told Rhudighar that he was going to inform his sister of what Rhudighar had planned.

The next day, Agnes fortified himself with a great deal of whiskey and then went to Gretchen's house but when he arrived, he found her dead with an axe planted between her eyes.  Agnes rushed to his sister side and tried to find a spark of life but it was too late.  Of course, that's when the guards arrived, to find Agnes with his hands on the handle of the axe, one foot planted on Gretchen's chest as he strained to pull the axe out.  Everyone knew of their sibling rivalry and so Agnes was arrested on sight.

As he sat in a jail cell, receiving no food or drink, he prayed to anyone who would listen to help him set the situation right.  That night, as he lay in a fitful slumber, he was awoken by the sounds of his cell being opened.  It was a halfling that he had met a few days earlier and she was accompanied by another dwarf that he didn't recognize.  The halfling identified herself as Bubbles and her grouchy companion as Squeak and then she threw a dress at him and told him to put it on.

Bubbles and Squeak were able to smuggle Agnes out of the jail cell and out of his mountain home but as soon as he took one step on the surface, he felt the queerest sensation of falling.  Agnes began to panic and would've bolted back into the mountain but Squeak knocked him on the back of the head & put him out.  When Agnes next awoke, he was lying in a ditch in a strange city, still wearing the lacy dress that he had been smuggled out in.  When he sat up he began to experience the strange falling sensation again and as he groped about, he found a wineskin at his feet.  He quickly drank it down and as the feeling of drunkenness engulfed him, the falling sensation faded away.

Agnes has wandered around the area for several months now, not really sure what the names of the towns he is visiting are.  He does odd jobs for anyone who will pay him and spends all of his coin on strong drink.  He has found himself praying to Cayden Cailean, although he's not really sure who that is.  All that he knows is that when he whispers his prayers to this strange deity, he feels a lightening in his soul that he's never felt before.  The floating feeling is not as strong anymore, even when he is sober but he has found that even though he is living his dream and traveling on the surface, it's not as grand as he imagined it to be.

He longs to go home and explain to his family that he did not kill his sister.  He longs to revenge his sister and find her killer.  But mostly, he just wants to go home.  He spends his days getting drunk to dull the pain and homesickness and he leaves the dress on to remind himself that he is a coward who could not stay to face his peers, even when he knew they wouldn't listen to him and that they were going to execute him despite his innocence.