Binkette

Binkette was a player character in The Twilight Anarchy (campaign 3): a harengon bard and school counsellor at Shadehollow Preparatory College with a very large family. At the bottom of the Shade Hollow mine a ghost demanding the Source nearly killed him. He took a circlet of blasting in December 2023, and Llyana Soren taunted him about how many of his children could be turned.

Before Shade Hollow

Binkette Hutch grew up in a den of thirty-two brothers and sisters and took on much of the care of the younger kits; home was a whirlwind. His siblings found their passions, but he was never sure of his own path. He went exploring, and through a miscommunication became a merchant, travelling from town to city. The solitary road wore on him, so he built relationships wherever he went: not out of romance, but to rebuild the family bonds he missed from the warren.

The road grew more dangerous. He lacked the charm to talk his way out of trouble, but he could listen, steer a situation, or distract with music; he often tripped over his words, and luck was always on his side.

Passing through Shade Hollow on a delivery, he realised he had built the business to provide for his families but no longer enjoyed it. He sent out letters dividing it among them, promised to visit when he could, and chose a fresh start. After a night drinking at The Rusted Anchor, someone joked "if you can't do, teach"; the next day he went to the preparatory school, and within weeks he was its guidance counsellor. It was meant to pass the time while he worked out what came next. Most days he muttered under his breath, half-listened to the children (of course you should be a barbarian), and played music in the tavern after hours: a rut, but the school's bustle felt like home.

He is fifty, four feet tall, with dark brown eyes and chinchilla-coloured fur of greys and blacks blended with white, his extremities tipped salt-and-pepper. He is lawful neutral and keeps the faith of Ilmater. His merchant days left him a supply chain of wholesalers, suppliers and entrepreneurs he can still call on for goods or information.

His warlock patron is Shoshana, Crown of the Unseelie, of the Archfey.

The family

Binkette has twenty spouses, all aware of one another, and seventy-four stepchildren, none of them biological, whom he regards as his own (see Binkette's Family).

Binkette has many spouses, but only about half of the marriages are romantic. The rest come from a place of support: stepping in to help with family matters, or arrangements closer to business partnerships, where both sides agree it works better than romance. Many of his spouses are widows and widowers: some from The Skyfire, some from various other wars, perhaps fey wars among them, and the more recent ones from the plague, the same plague that took Kael's mother and Thoren's family. Those recent spouses are a little older. Others are single-parent families left behind by war deaths. Every one of those relationships is filled with love, though not necessarily romantic love. Binkette may not always know quite what he is doing, but he does it out of a wish to support people. The relationships he has lost are full of sorrow; even where there was no romance to lose, a connection was lost. A stepchild named Milo is one of the side-quest hooks on Pathway to The Cape of Serenity.

He keeps a portfolio in his bag: a ledger of relationships with more feeling than records. A page might hold nothing but a pressed flower, yet he knows exactly which family it stands for and what they went through together.

Where Binkette comes from is unclear, beyond something mildly fey.

In the Twilight Anarchy

His goals included checking on Evelina Crane and fetching a shield for a god from the dwarves of the deep mountains. In June 2024 his magic beans raised The Pyramid of Shade Hollow and saved the party from a blue dragon. By late 2024 he carried two Sources, and in December 2024 the party rescued his child from the Frog people in The Feywild and left them with the Summer Court and Emmantiensien. He lay in a coma for a time in February 2025.

He carries the Counselor's Codex, a codex of guidance whose Binkette's Burrow opens a peaceful rabbit-warren refuge. The book gave him three lives, and it grew into four versions: Father, Adventurer, Counsellor and Inquisitor.