Horace the Burglar | Character Profile

Horace

• Race: Half-Elf
• Gender: Male
• Class: Thief
• Age: 36
• Current Experience Level: 1
• Hair: Black
• Eyes: Brown
• Weapon of choice: Steak knife

Horace was an orphan, born to a poor mother out of wedlock and spent his early years in an orphan workhouse on the banks of a river-based city. It was a life he despised from the beginning, and it wasn't long before he was scavenging with a group of boys that bared more resemblance to the river rats than the privileged children in an economically diverse city. They sneaked aboard ships, taking their bounty and sneaking back home to the orphanage.

Though their group was notorious in the city of Kolas, where every river-boat captain knew that they may lose something to this small band of children, it was rare they took things of true value. It was an unspoken rule that as long as the children were stealing sweets, small bits of cloth, etc; they were to be left alone. It seemed to be a charitable response on the part of the rivermen, to allow a group of boys and girls whose fathers were probably the same sailors who came in and out of port each day, to profit off of their trade in some small way.

A smaller group of more unscrupulous tradesmen tolerated the behavior for a more self-serving need, they saw it as a training ground for men and women to grow up in dock life, where they were able to pick the streetwise children up as cheap labor when they reached a seaman's age.

Such was the case for Horace when at age 19, his half-elven blood making him more like a 12 year old child, was picked up by a smuggler named Benny "Ol'B" Brownstone. Ol'B masqueraded as an honest ship's captain, but moving and fencing stolen goods was Brownstone's true profession. Throughout the remainder of his upbringing with Ol'B, Horace learned to refine what small skills he had learned as a pilferer on the Kolas Docks. Ol'B would send him ashore at night to pilfer things of higher value from storefronts and shops in whichever city they visited, bringing it back to his ship before they departed to sell the wares in the next city.

Despite this sordid past, Horace does have a moral compass preferring "victim-less" crimes vs. true villainy, so when Ol'B started smuggling women and children for a series of slave traders, Horace planed a mutiny. Horace attempted to bring the crew together under his charge and overthrow Ol'B, but the crew proved faithful to their captain, and triple-crossed Horace.

Perhaps out of repayment for the amount of profit Ol'B had made off of Horace's efforts, Ol'B extended Horace a mercy, and threw him overboard tied to a stone instead of gutting him on the spot. Horace was able to escape, and crawled ashore to begin a life not controlled by his former patriarch. From then on Horace lived his life vagabonding, from ship to ship, from thief group to thief group. For another decade or so, Horace had been on a cycle of pulling himself up by his bootstraps, building some success, having a morale crisis, trying to live a more moral life, backfiring and sliding back down to thievery. His goal, like almost any thief, is to score a big payout and go legit.