The People of Sandpoint
Sheriff Belor Hemlock
Grace's father. A Shoanti, a widower, and a stern, undemonstrative, strict man who is bad at saying softer things out loud.
He has been holding the line in Sandpoint since the Late Unpleasantness. When it became clear the town might need real soldiers, he went to Magnimar to get some — which was the correct decision, made against an enemy who was still waiting to open a door. He left his daughter minding the store.
He came back over the Market Street Bridge with a column of soldiers and Roland beside him, after the fighting was over, and resumed the post. He is "very pleased," which from him is a great deal.
He has now had the battle three separate ways — the fighting from Deverin, the dead from Zantus, and the plan from Roland, who came down the road at a gallop and found the column on the march. He asked Grace for it anyway, in his office, with the report to Magnimar face-down on the desk.
"You were told to mind the store while I was away. You did more."
"Start at the North Gate."
Mayor Kendra Deverin
Elected mayor, of one of the founding families, and the reason Sandpoint still functions. She is a businesswoman and not a soldier and has never pretended otherwise — she spent the whole siege on supplies, shelter and keeping people calm, and sending them wherever the party said.
She was standing beside Grace at the North Gate at the worst moment of the battle. She
leaned in over the map as though pointing something out, and said it quietly enough that
nobody else heard:
"Keep it together. Everybody's looking at you. If you panic, they'll panic. If you don't panic, they won't panic. I don't know what the hell I'm doing in this situation either. I'm just trying to stay calm."
She has since put a captaincy of the Sandpoint militia in front of Stone — forty gold a month out of a town purse thinner than that sounds, drill twice a week, the roll, and standing in the square telling men where to be. The council passed it with the Scarnettis against, which she notes is how most things go through.
Somebody also owes her a conversation about Ameiko's succession.
Father Zantus
Priest of Sandpoint Cathedral, and the closest thing the town has had to a moral authority since Father Tobyn died.
He raised the cathedral out of the ashes of the chapel that burned in the Late Unpleasantness. He is a healer first, and has spent this entire campaign patching up whatever the party drags in.
He backed Lucian publicly, from the cathedral steps, and that is a large part of why
the party could requisition loggers, take apart a bridge and lean on shopkeepers without
anybody calling for the sheriff. A stranger shouting about goblins gets a crowd. A stranger
shouting about goblins with the town's priest standing behind him gets a militia.
He has come to Stone about a funeral, and he is carrying it rather than performing it himself.
Ameiko Kaijitsu
Runs the Rusty Dragon. The last surviving heir of her family — her father Lonjiku is dead and her brother Tsuto is in a cell under the garrison. Flightless's adopted sister.
She put on her leather armour and drew her sword the day before the siege, and Bethana came running to the garrison to get somebody to stop her. Persuasion did not work, and her case was good:
"This is my town. My family's been here from the start. If it's in trouble, I'm going to fight. It's not like I haven't fought before. It's not like I don't know what I'm doing."
She is proficient with the sword. She also had a concussion from two days earlier.
What moved her was Lucian offering to fix the actual problem — get the mayor to arrange a legal succession, so the Rusty Dragon and the glassworks survive her whatever happens. She took the deal, ran food, shelter and the sick through the whole battle, put every non-combatant in town into her own family's tunnels — and attached a condition:
"Afterwards, I've got a sword and I'm proficient with it, and you're going to need all the fighters you can get."
Assume that next time she ends up in the fighting regardless of what she agreed to.
That succession has not been arranged yet.
Bethana
The halfling maid at the Rusty Dragon, who does most of the actual work around the place. She came to the garrison frightened about Ameiko, hugged Lucian's leg when the party agreed to handle it, and went straight back to cooking.
"People need to eat if they're going to fight."
Brodert Quink
The town's antiquarian, and quietly the most important person in Sandpoint.
He is sixty-eight, his hip is bad, every shutter on his house has paper pinned to it, and he has spent forty years telling this town that the stone underneath it is older than the town. It has mostly got him not invited to things.
He gave Thalanadil his field guide to Thassilonian runes — perhaps five thousand words of a language that had hundreds of thousands, everything one man could recover in a lifetime. That book is why we know the word greed.
He also turned out, at exactly the right moment, to have engineering drawings, which is why Sandpoint has a scorpion.
He has now heard the words wrath and greed in the same sentence, gone completely quiet, let his kettle boil dry, and taken a satchel off a hook by the door.
"Forty years I have been telling this town that the stone under it is older than the town. One ruin is a curiosity. One ruin is an old man's hobby and a reason not to invite him to things. Two is a pattern."
"I am coming with you. And before you are kind about my hip: it is sixty-eight years old, that is a fact, and a fact is not an argument."
He can read more Thassilonian than Thalanadil can, and he will not say what, in front of anybody, until he has stood in front of the wall himself.
Orik Vancaskerkin
A mercenary from Riddleport, on the party's payroll at a gold piece a day.
He was hired in Magnimar by a woman who told him she would be dealing with some unsavoury sorts and did not specify. "Goblins would have been all right. I'd have kept her from getting killed by goblins. But bugbears and fiends and the rest of that weren't really on my to-do list."
He surrendered at Thistletop the moment the fight turned — threw his scimitars on the floor,
said "I surrender," and immediately started giving the party reasons to take him with
them. Then he told them everything he knew about Nualia's plan, unprompted, in one
breath, and predicted exactly how she would react to losing her bugbear. He was right about
all of it.
Stone hired him with a gold piece and a threat in the same sentence. Thalanadil checked him for compulsions and found none, and checked his sincerity and found him straightforward, honest and entirely logical.
He then fought through all three stages of the siege. He took two hits and got grappled by a zombie at the bridge, and he held. He stood at the postern gate with Stone at the North Gate. He never once wobbled.
"I prefer to fight goblins than with goblins anyway."
His employer is dead and the war is over. Nobody has asked him what he wants to do next, and he has not raised it.
Shalelu Andosana
An elven ranger who works the Nettlewood and the Lost Coast, killing goblins — not for a bounty, but because it wants doing. Both Hemlock and the mayor value her judgement, and she stays with Ameiko when she is in town.
She fought the whole battle. She was out past the wall with the forward scouts running the
fighting withdrawal, she was blown off her feet by the thunderwave that started the North
Gate collapse, she got Stone back on his horse, and she shot from the wall for the rest of
the night. She is an elf, which is why she could still see anything at all once the fires
started.
The DM's assessment, in full: "Shalelu is pretty badass with that bow."
She has been hunting the bugbear the party killed at Thistletop for years, and does not know he is dead.
Aldern Foxglove
A nobleman of the area. The party met him briefly after the goblin raid on the market square — the one before the recordings begin. He thought they had done splendidly, liked them enormously, and invited them all out on a boar hunt.
Nobody took him up on it.
Then, at the North Gate, at the worst point of the worst night of the siege, he turned up
at the wall to help.
"He's not really armoured. He just has his rapier. He's a noble guy."
An unarmoured aristocrat with a duelling weapon, volunteering for a wall fight against a goblin horde, for a town he does not live in and a party he had met once.
He is alive because of it, and he knows exactly who to thank. He was sitting in the Rusty Dragon before the shutters were open, with a cold breakfast and three refills of a cup he had not drunk, waiting for Lucian.
"You saved my life at the north gate. I was standing where I had no business standing, in a coat, with a duelling sword, and I should have died there."
The boar hunt invitation is still open.
Everyone else
Das Korvut — the blacksmith. Made the metal parts of the scorpion. Has never built a siege engine before and said so.
Daverick — a dwarf in his forties, which is young for a dwarf, and immaculately groomed. Wants schedules, written roles, a proper support unit and designated fallback positions, and started a shouting match outside the cathedral about it. Lucian put him on collecting status reports from every work crew, and the pedantry that made him insufferable in the square made him the only man in town who knew whether anything was finished.
Sarah — a Shoanti woman in her early thirties, acolyte of a nature god, impulsive, and on the other side of that argument. She wanted scouts north immediately. She got sent east into the woods and became the town's early-warning system.
Joran — an acolyte with a longbow who "looks like he knows what he's doing with it." Went scouting with Sarah, and is the one who fetched Lucian to break up the argument.
Ven Vinder — the general store. Refused to leave his shop for the stone fallback
positions, and others started agreeing with him, until Stone leaned on him and then talked
him round.
Jargy Quinn — the Hagfish. Same argument, same night. He is dead. His widow has asked Father Zantus to ask Stone to speak the funeral rites, on the grounds that Stone is the man who talked her husband into fighting.
That is not quite what happened. What Stone actually did was talk him out of sitting in his tavern while it burned. Nobody in the room knows the difference except Stone.
Sirdack — owns the theatre. Likes having Flightless around, because she is very proficient with the flute.
The two riders — boys of fifteen or sixteen who volunteered to warn the outlying farms and had the sense to ask for a writ first.