Braggum

Braggum was a player character in the Skyfire Chronicles (campaign 1) and one of The Fatemakers, the heroes of The Skyfire.

Origins

Bragg grew up an urchin in a mud village north of the river, in the muddy lands between The Burg and The Dottenland. His father was said to be an orc chief; his mother, from Shade Hollow, had been taken as tribute during a war, and the human side of his family spent their time in that town. He survived by hard work and brawling, dreaming of joining the army, crushing the orcs and ruling over them. The army never took him. It was in Shade Hollow that he was shanghaied, dragged off through the tunnels beneath the tavern where Bill One Eyed Murgatroyd keeps his prepper stations.

The Fatemakers' journey began when Braggum "the indomitable" was pushed through a trap door, a spot now on a guided tour (see Campaign 3 : Intro Vignette). In Bill One Eyed Murgatroyd's telling, Bill missed recruiting him by mere hours before Braggum was press-ganged by another captain.

In the Skyfire Chronicles

Bragg is a barbarian (a Zealot early on, later a Berserker, fighting in a frenzy) with the Tavern Brawler feat, and the running joke at the table was that "Bragg cannot die". He began his seafaring career in the ports of The Dottenland and wanted a boat to the far continent. He married an orc "only because of actually dead orc's shoes"; she leads a tribe that took in humans and lizardfolk, and once fought off a dragon. Bragg became warchief at the moot, founded the Bragglands, wanted to unite Bosia under them, and was patron of Luktow.

He was knocked out by a unicorn, a mace thug and a triton monk in his first weeks. He died in October 2019 leaving Tucker's kobold castle; Cirella revivified him, and a ritual the next week brought him fully back. In a vision he saw an eye in the tundra and flipped off "the Red Eye of all Consumption". He was scried on through his amulet, and only he heard a dying gelatinous cube say "finally we can burn down the world".

Gear: the cursed sentient greataxe Last Rites (left in the Thrice Scarred's cell in November 2019), then Ruin's Wake (July 2020) and the thunderous artifact greataxe Bedlam; the giant's glove Titan of the North Ice; The Fork of Bees; wings, Gond's Airfoil; a sabre-tooth-panther trophy cloak; trophy skulls and a dragon tooth; a split-axes tattoo.

Deeds: the conquest of the barbarian tribes of The Burg; the death of Sim; the Lizard Liberation; making Summers End a major trade port; negotiations with the Duke; the toppling of the Diregraph Colossus; saving Waves End. In 2021 he planned a liquor business distilling water from the Elemental Plane of Water (see The Grand Muffty). He turned the orc Rexy into a T-Rex, inspired Ced'ric, the First Acolyte of the Bragg, and in the last days before The Skyfire doubled his size twice and "telefragged" the big bad with the party's ship.

After the Skyfire, Bragg went up into the northern mountains of the Bragglands and was never heard from again. Adventurers have since reported glimpses of a huge figure in the high snows, and he has become the region's bigfoot or yeti: often sighted, never confirmed.

Bragg's player titled the campaign's "books": A Fateful Shipwreck, Goodbye to Sex Island, The Bragglands and War Averted.

In campaign 2

Bragg and Morgaine both fought in campaign 2's final mass battle, The Siege of Talonkeep (1034 PC, played 2023-07-19).

In campaign 3

Twenty years on, Shade Hollow on the Burg–Potenxia border, his mother's town, celebrates itself as Bragg's birthplace ("Bragg the Undying"), though he was born in a mud village north of the river, with a garish shrine to "Bragg'um, the town's legendary Fate Maker" and walking tours of the sites of his youth that end at the trap door in the Rusted Anchor tavern.

Plot hooks (party notes, 2019)

The Fatemakers' shared notes list Bragg's threads: to burn down The Burg, raising armies to do it; the Bragglands, then made up of Luktow (whose chieftain, Lurpak, he had married through trial of combat), a human village and the lizard islands of northern Bosia; visions of a tentacled god with one red eye and one yellow, which spoke of "that which endures" and told him to consume (he flipped it off, and wondered whether he had to eat a god); a trek north through the Burg to find the source of the visions and kill it; that he "cannot die" by falling to 0 hit points; and Last Rites, which he counted as stolen by Morgaine and marooned in a pocket dimension with the Thrice Scarred.