Rodrigo

Rodrigo was a guardsman in the city of Carlion when Lord Artemis Boone was mayor. The reason that, unlike most people in that area, he had only one name was that he was a bastard, born to a poor woman of dubious virtue in one of Carlion’s worst neighborhoods. He would certainly have had a life of grinding poverty had he not had the good fortune to be employed by the City Guard. That knowledge made him an exceptionally loyal officer, who trained hard and did his best to carry out each and every task with which he was entrusted. He rose steadily through the ranks, and shortly after he made sergeant, Lord Artemis personally assigned him to provide leadership and protection for the adventuring party to be nominally headed by Garrett von Marck, then an inexperienced and naive scholar. Rodrigo was less than delighted with an assignment to nursemaid a party of incompetent civilians, whom he saw as certain to get themselves killed within weeks if he didn’t impose some military-style discipline and common sense upon them. The remainder of the party in turn saw him as a bullying hardass. As they faced danger in their travels, they began to learn by experience what he had been trying to teach them, and eventually Garrett assumed full leadership, allowing Rodrigo to take on his preferred role, serving as a simple warrior. At some point during their long campaign against the Dargothian Empire and associated evils, Rodrigo fell in love with and married Maureen, the party’s mage. Rodrigo was the bearer of two legendary magic swords during his adventuring career. He carried one of the Hammerfall blades for a time, before passing it on to another bearer. He also acquired a nameless black sword that contained an unknown magic in an ancient ruined city on the Isle of Mists. Some time later, while wielding the black sword in battle, Rodrigo fell mortally wounded. As his comrades gathered round soberly to mourn him, he awoke screaming. His wound had closed, leaving a patch of black scales. Magical investigations later determined that the sword collected the souls of those whom it slew, and that when the sword resurrected its owner it did so by consuming one of those souls. Plainly, this was an artifact of great evil, and even though the sword saved his life several times, when it passed from his hands, he accepted its loss with a certain relief. After the conclusion of their adventures, Rodrigo’s wife Maureen had to return to Aragard Reach to help rebuild the badly damaged mage school, and Rodrigo went with her. She had him employed there as Captain of the Guard, in which capacity he improved their watch-keeping and physical defenses and hired and trained a small force of guardsmen, arguing that since magic alone had not successfully defended the school, they had better invest in steel as well.