Crooked Characters are detailed NPCs to slip into your adventures however you wish. Free from class and statistics, they can be used in any fantasy gaming system. Each comes with a detailed description and character motivation for you to use in your campaign, perhaps as a mere passer-by, a rumor, a confidante, or maybe as the motivation behind a whole adventure.
A thing shambles into the street. It is swathed in rags and sacks and stench. It staggers fitfully, sucking thick breaths of air through spittle-soaked lips. It grips a hefty stick ending in a cruel scythe blade. Its hefty boots clatter on cobbles, the segs tip-tapping out its approach along them like a beating clock counting down to some fateful hour. This shambolic chaos of humanity is large, perhaps six feet tall, and ungainly, its every inch of skin hidden beneath clumps of rotting cloth that hang like rags of burnt flesh dancing with lice, flies, and fleas.
He has a soul of gold, always has, with standing in the low slums of his community. His generosity, kindness, and hard work won Jebediah Leam as many admirers as his charm and good looks.
That changed when the cabal entered the lives of the low-born. To give them their full title, the Cabal of Enlightened Venoms—a trio of poisonous wizards with souls of assassins—wanted only to test their new dreadful toxins on some persons of no consequence. They chose the area where Jebediah, his wife, children, family, and friends lived, a simple slum that, one night, was choked with a foul experimental poison that unmade flesh. That the cabal were simply testing the toxin on behalf of the honest offices of the Outer Seas Colonial Company (themselves an odious set of religious fanatics determined to colonize and cleanse new lands they discovered) with some new venom to use in the future to put down rebellions in foreign lands merely tainted the whole sorry episode a shade further. Only Jebediah survived, his flesh twisted, boiled, and perverted into something altogether wrong. The rest died. Horribly. Screaming.
The screams of friends and family in his ears, he dragged himself into the sewers to lick his wounds and brood upon injustice.
Soon he had names and faces and stories of who was responsible, and now he burns with the need to avenge. It grips him like the memories of the screams of his kin, and in his sleepless nights, the yells cry only one word: avenge.