OK then, here's what I've got:
Stat: Modifier
Martial: +4
Warfare: +3
Finance: +0
Deception: -1
Espionage: +0
Seduction: -3
Charisma: +0
Command: +3
Perception: +1
Willpower: +3
Fortitude: +4
HP: 5
(This Factors in All Modifiers.)
Jharl James Ghembretton's story is one filled with tragedy and sorrow. Born the son of Earl Adam Ghembretton and Countess Maria Ghembretton (ne'-Silversham) James was betrothed to Vidame Margaret Respire when he was 12 years old. This aroused the unremitting Ire of Count Halon Mountbatten who had wanted his son Wendell to marry the beautiful and accomplished young woman. He arranged to have the youth captured by slavers while out hunting and sold in a foreign port, thinking he would be dead within the year from disease and malnutrition.
He underestimated James strength of spirit and resolve. James childhood training in weapons, warfare, and propensity to brawn made him a natural pick to be trained for the arena. Within four years James was a gladiator, and a killer. He fought his way to the top, leaving a string of broken corpses in his wake, eyes ever fixed on ONE goal, to return home and seek his revenge!
In all his time in the arenas he never took a lover, though many women were shoved at him or threw themselves at his feet. To him his betrothal was as binding as a marriage vow, and he would forsake it for nothing and no one.
Eventually he was granted his freedom, manumitted at the order of the High King of the North himself. He took his accumulated winnings and outfitted a dozen long-ships: filled them with the best sell-swords and freed gladiators money could hire, and returned. He found Halon escaped from his clutches by the ravages of old age, and worse, the woman he had waited from the age of 14 to the age of 30 for married. Not only married though, but in what he felt was the ULTIMATE betrayal, to the very son of the man who had him kidnapped to become a slave!!!
His RAGE knew no bounds. He and his men marched from their landing point at port Helm-War on the southernmost tip of Mountbatten County straight for the county seat at the Eponymous mountain in a twelve day storm of fire and blood: burning fields, butchering bull-cattle to eat, and looting the treasuries of every single village in their path. However they did it in good order, only one rape was committed by his men, and when he heard of it he personally administered the sentence of forty lashes to the five men involved and offered the girl a dowry to any convent she chose to name*.
(Interestingly, she accepted the dowry but refused to join a convent, instead saying she would wait a year and a day from the death of her rapists and then on the next full moon ask her childhood sweetheart if he would accept her hand in marriage. She and her beloved, (now husband,) now own the main tavern in James county seat, and have recently been delivered of a pair of fraternal twins, firstborn son and daughter both...)
His when they reached the open plane that ringed the mountain they were met by Count Wendell Mountbatten and his army, but James asked for parlay.
He offered terms of immense simplicity: the two armies need not strike a single blow, James and Wendell, themselves and no others, no champions or seconds, would duel to the death: winner take all. If Wendell was victorious James men would turn over all the plunder they had taken, lay down arms, and return to the port and their ships, then leave. If JAMES won, his men kept all their loot, and James would be vindicated in the sight of all as the party wronged by Wendell's father and his treachery, and forever after all the heirs of his line would bear the bar sinister of bastardy on their arms because Margaret's betrothal to James had been wrongfully annulled because he was believed dead.
The very fact that James will be the character I play in this story shows how the duel ended...
Margaret was distraught, her husband was dead, her county in ruins and beggared, and the man who she had once thought she would marry, then mourned his death, was the cause of all and had effectively MURDERED the man she had come to love and the father of her children whose part in the outrages committed against him had been non-existent! Until James miraculous return Count Halon had taken all knowledge of what had occurred in that forest to his grave, no trace of word had reached her ears that there was any possibility he could be alive, for more than 14 years he had just been a ghostly memory and a small portrait that she kept among her mementos. James had less than no sympathy and informed her that their betrothal was PROPERLY dissolved not in person and custom demanded but by a folded and sealed NOTE delivered by five of his best warriors.
The majority of his men were paid and sent back to the ships, while James and a handful of his most loyal and elite fighters made their way, paying as they went from the spoils of their victory, to James parents estate, where he was to be dealt another blow. His mother and father, heartbroken over his 'death' had pined away and left the estate in the hands of his younger brother Justin. Justin had long desired to become a priest, but had married and produced heirs as he must. The met on good terms, and over a month of drinking, crying, and talking long into the night came to an agreement. Justin would cede to his older bother's claim and become a monk as he had once dreamed, on the condition that James adopt his two sons and daughter as his heirs and never marry. He could sire all the bastards he pleased, most nobles did, but he must never have any ligitimate children.
The one thing that puzzled James was Clair, his brother's wife: where did she fit in all this?
As it turned out, Clair had originally wanted to become a nun herself, but her position as both the elder and most beautiful sister in her family meant that she was destined for an alliance match. Now both husband and wife could follow their bliss, secure in the knowledge that their children were safe with their loving (if flinty of eye and discipline...) uncle. James hired the best woman he could find to draw up the contracts of retrenchment (His brother was not abdicating, one cannot abdicate if one never was supposed to have the Title in the first place...) and made sure that it was laid down in black and white that while he could marry if he wished, the marriage must be Morganatic, their children could be given titles by his hand and would be gently born, but would have no claim of any sort on his title.
He also chose to style himself in the way of the Northmen, rather than 'Earl' he would be known as "Jharl", for he was minded to see how deep the rabbit hole went: plumb the FULL depths of the conspiracy that had him declared dead when the truth was anything but...
The Castle Manorial of the Ghembretton Earldom:
This cold and somewhat drafty old castle has stood since before the Empire. though added to many times over the years at its core is still the Black Tower, a mighty edifice raised out of many large pieces of basalt from the nearby Strogyin formation, mined and hauled up out of the depths at great expense in a bygone age. Surrounding that are two curtain walls, the first containing the castle proper and its facilities and the second holding the greater portion of the Ghembretton county seat of Ghembretton Vashnoy. (And isn't it time to expand the city's curtain wall again?)
The Gembretton "Bannermen"
The core of James banner-men is 50 former gladiators which joined him in coming south. They have each seen more combat and killed more people than any three people should ever have to, and are somewhat the worse for wear. However, if anyone tries to assaniate James... Heaven help them, because assuredly, no one else COULD.
The other Bannermen are evenly divided between the 25 Sheriffs and Deputy Sheriffs who oversee the various shires within the Earldom and James 25 'Quaestors': his highly compartmentalized network of spies and investigators working on unraveling the conspiracy of his abduction: an incredibly difficult task at what is now 20 years remove...
