Kaelen Thornwood

An example character to show what dndplaybook can do — remix him, rewrite him, or delete him and build your own.

Kaelen Thornwood stands just under six feet, all lean angles and ropey muscle earned from years of climbing roots and running patrol routes through bracken. His posture stays low, like he's listening for brush to snap. Sun and wind have worked his skin to a warm tan and scoured it back down; faint freckles cross his nose and cheekbones, and a thin scar runs from the outer corner of his left eyebrow toward his temple, pale as dried sap.

His face is half-elven in the jawline but human in the wear of it. His eyes are a stormy green flecked with gold — the way moss looks when it's wet. He keeps his hair short for the trail, dark brown threaded with ash-grey, the front combed back and tied with a narrow leather cord, the sides shaved close except for one wiry lock that falls forward when the wind catches it. His left ear bears three clean notches along the rim — each a deliberate mark, not a tear. He has never explained any of them.

A mottled cloak — too many greens to be natural, dyed to match lichen — hangs from his shoulders over fitted ranger leathers scored with old repairs. A blackened wyvern-hide sheath rides at his right hip, holding @Whisperfang with its dull, practical-looking edge. At his collar hangs a small wooden charm stained nearly black. When he moves, the air seems to notice him last.

Everything that walks leaves a story in the ground. I just read slower than most — and twice.

— Kaelen Thornwood, to a nervous client

Kaelen was a warden of the Thornwood before the Thornwood burned. For a decade he tracked poachers and worse through its understory, until the night something vast and hungry tunneled up beneath the heartwood groves and the forest floor swallowed half his patrol. The survivors called it @The Marrowmaw and stopped going into the deep woods at all.

He brought his evidence to the city and was laughed out of the magistrate's court — all except one magistrate, @Magistrate Corvin Hale, who did not laugh, and whose interest in the creature has never quite smelled like justice. Kaelen takes Hale's coin and Hale's intelligence reports, and trusts neither.

Kaelen is quiet in the way of people who have learned that noise gets patrols killed. He is generous with practical help and stingy with his history, keeps his promises to the letter, and holds a poacher's contempt for anyone who hunts what they do not intend to eat, wear, or avenge.

He is punctual, honest, and entirely unclubbable. I trust him with my life — never with my ledgers.

— Magistrate Corvin Hale