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Name: Heinrich van Hjaalreich
Age/Race/Gender: Male human, 45 years.
Physical Appearance: Tall, imposing man with a pointy face and icy blue eyes. His hair is black as a winter night flecked with hints of grey. He is clean shaven. His eyebrows are thick and bushy, and naturally set low so that it looks like he is perpetually frowning. His skin is a pale white, almost yellowish color, as if he were showing the first signs of frostbite. One of his hands was actually lost to it, revived by magic and fully functional, but still black, blue and misshapen.
Armor/Clothing: As a witch hunter hailing from the farthest reaches of the north, Heinrich knows that his armor must do four things: protect him from the cold, protect him from magic, help him to avoid detection and protect him from blows. As such, he dresses accordingly. His steel plate covers a thick quilt of brigandine armor, with plenty of fur between all of the plates to protect against the cold and silence any sounds caused by metal clinking together. His plain steel helmet is also padded with fur to help against the cold. He normally also wore a bandana and a strip of oak with a single slit to see for when in snowstorms in the north, but he quickly ditched it when he came down south, as there weren't any snowstorms.
Heinrich's plate is engraved with many symbols that supposedly protect against magical attacks. Most of them are just superstitious symbols for show, but his chest plate and gauntlets are enchanted to spread the damage of a direct magical attack more evenly, making curses specific to one part of the body useless and reducing the deadly potential of magic missiles aimed at the heart.
Weapons: A longsword and a crossbow. The longsword is his go-to weapon, steel with a silver hilt, and he never goes anywhere without it. It too has runes and symbols on it, like his armor, but they do not protect him from magic. Rather, his sword acts as a dowsing stick. When there is magic around, the hilt will grow hotter. This is an unreliable way to hunt down magical creatures though, as it reacts to any form magic, including magic weapons. So sometimes it can go completely haywire and detect itself, even though it was enchanted not to do so. It's a fairly standard sword from his order, but his had this particular defect in it. Heinrich never cared enough to get it fixed anyways, as it provided heat for his hands occasionally.
His crossbow is really very simple. It's a plain old crossbow. It can shoot bolts at high speed. Better yet, it can shoot silver bolts and stakes, which makes it perfect for ridding the world of werewolves and vampires. Unfortunately, it is very heavy, takes forever to reload and silver bolts are costly, so Heinrich often leaves it behind unless he knows exactly what he's hunting.
Other Items: Expelled from his order, Heinrich has become a wanderer now and usually keeps many essentials with him when travelling. Most of his spare clothing and food remain in his saddlebags along with books on sorcery, witch-hunting and wilderness survival, herbal medicines, his sleeping pelt and his dual icepick/hatchet.
In the pouches by his belt he keeps string and bait for traps and fishing, his skinning knife, a map or two with a compass, two days rations of dried meat and vegetables, a striker and a smaller selection of medicines than he has in his saddlebags.
His horse herself is a strong dapple named Mold. The name stems from the fact that in Heinrich's language, the word for dapple and mold are exactly the same: Schimmel.
Skills: Heinrich is greatest talent is sword-play. Where others of his order were excellent shots with a crossbow, or masterful arcane blood-hounds, Heinrich was a swordsman before joining and still considers himself primarily as one.
After joining the guard at Rivenspire, (The Order of the Magus) he learned how to shoot with a crossbow as it was part of his mandatory training, and while it took him five years, he reached a point where he could shoot ten times and hit eight. He still can't hit a moving target and fumbles with reloading, so all he ever uses the crossbow for is when he is hunting a target which has no idea it's being hunted, so that still shots are likely. He can't hunt game with it though. He resorts to trapping for that.
He also knows the basics of survival as well. He can start a fire if it's not too wet out, build a lean-to with wood if it isn't too rotten, set up noose traps and crushing traps, and fish. He knows first aid well enough to use the medicines in his bag and a few herbs back home, but he could not cure a disease or stitch a wound if he had no medicine. He's fairly proficient with a hatchet, being able to cut fairly thin trees in a matter of ten to five minutes, and can pick out a chunk of ice for water in about the same time. Not that there'll be many frozen lakes this far down south. He's decent at orientation in unfamiliar lands, yet his language skills are not brilliant and his accent in English is thick and his grammar broken.
Abilities: His arcane talents are what made him become a witch-hunter in the first place. An anomaly, not having any magical reservoir himself, the gap inside his mind where the magic of others would normally be acts as a vacuum, taking magical force and storing it away. This doesn't mean he is immune to spells. A fireball will still burn him just as much as any other. But if you throw a fireball at him, you are giving him a weapon; you are giving him the chance to cast a spell of his own. Now, not having a magical reservoir himself, it was obviously difficult for him to learn spells in the first place. But he does know a few.
Heinrich's arcane affinity is lightning. While it took him several years, he learned to infuse his sword with electrical charge using magic he stole from another. If he strikes the right nerves, this can cause temporary paralysis. He can also simply channel electricity through his hand as a "magic missile" form. It works better with his frost-bitten hand, for whatever reason. Probably because it was cured with magic. Must make it more attuned to magic. Lastly, he found out how to manipulate electrical fields in the air to create shields against metal projectiles; it's fairly complicated, involving the use of an electrical field to create a magnet to push away metal. It's very useful against other warriors, or witches who resort to knifes, or metal-tipped arrows, but when dealing with creatures who use organic material such as claws to fight, it's useless.
Lastly, Heinrich is an excellent witch hunter. Well, what I mean by that is that he is very good at tracking down essences of magic left behind. It's an ability he gained from the lack of his own magical reservoir as well as the training he received from his order. It makes him better than most average spell-sniffers, being able to sense a spell cast a week ago, the presence of a magical being two days past, what kind of magical being it was and what spell they were casting. He isn't the best in his order; some of them can tell you exactly what the spell-caster looked like, who was with them and what they were doing in the 12 hours before and after the act. Heinrich cannot do that; but his abilities are already far beyond average as it is.
History: Heinrich hails from a tiny clan village in Friesland, on the southern border, where there are still trees, the land is flat and one can occasionally see mud beneath the thick blankets of snow during warmer seasons. It was here that he learned all his survival skills; the clans of South Friesland are largely hunter-gatherers when it comes to meat, and while Heinrich had no skill with a bow at the time, he could set up small game traps with ease. Heinrich's parents were hunters of little note; they played no significant role in his childhood. He was effectively an only child (He had a half-sister whom he met but once, but she lived far to the south in the forest of Darkwald) and his parents were busy and thus often left him in the hands of an old friend of theirs, the head of guard at the village. The head of guard, Jornharl, who used to serve in the army of the city-holds in the north, was Heinrich's true father figure. While his parents would stay away for weeks on hunting trips, Heinrich would stay with "Uncle" Jornharl, who would teach him the art of combat and taught him the virtues of loyalty, endurance and honor. These life lessons from his youth had a big impact on his current personality.
Heinrich served as a guard in his village for seven years, starting at the mere age of thirteen, until at age twenty clan law stated he could travel abroad as a journeyman. His first instinct was to go further north, to see the city-holds of which he had heard Jornharl speak of. He started by heading west to the clan roundhouse, which served as the clans' seat of power, from which he took a cart north to the city of Rivenspire, a sprawling coastal city composed of towers which make you dizzy looking up at them, never mind looking down from them.
He started his life there working as hired muscle, or as a farm-hand in the cold, icy fields outside the city where there was hardly enough dirt under the permafrost to grow things, yet somehow, farmers found a way. It took quite a while before he found the group of warriors he would devote his life to.
It happened completely by coincidence.
The Order of Magus is a well-known witch-hunter order which was comprised of high-ranking military officials, higher ranking guardsmen, skilled individuals and talented magicians. It started out as a simple mages' guild in a small yet growing town. Yet as Rivenspire grew larger, so did the ambitions of men inside the guild. The third leader of the original guild made the first reform which led to the current state of the order. It was to "Guard the good people of Rivenspire from any arcane threats existing within the city." From that, it escalated into an Order with multiple outposts in the north, dedicated to hunting down any arcane threats in the whole of the Northern Regions. Yet at its core, it's a group of guards protecting the city from magical threats, and it was still commonplace to see members of the Order within groups of ordinary guards.
Heinrich had been hired to protect a very paranoid noble who had recently come into possession of some old relic. Standing guard at this man's house was boring, but it paid well enough to merit doing. Unfortunately for Heinrich, the man he was protecting had every right to be paranoid. The man had "acquired" the relic from a hag, who wanted it back. Heinrich, not knowing this, had no idea what the old hooded hunchback wanted from him until she had placed her bony hand on his arm and let a curse loose to incapacitate him. It didn't work. Not entirely at least. The hag fainted as the magical void in Heinrich sucked in every last bit of energy she cursed him with. She had been too open with her spell casting, leaving her reserves open for anyone to steal them. She hadn't reckoned with them being sucked out of her. Heinrich, hit by the delayed curse and growing dizzy from the amount of magic filling his brain, fainted a few moments after her.
Those few moments were enough for the guard (Who coincidentally happened to be a prominent member of the Order's guard) who had recently crossed into the street to see what had happened and draw the necessary conclusion.
The very next day, after coming to, Heinrich received a private invitation to join the Order. And by none other than the Grand Master himself.
The next 23 years of his life was spent under the roof of the great hall of the Order of Magus. He started out as a simple guardsman, undergoing routine training for swordplay and magic tracking. He was supplied with a very standard, plain sword and leather armor which could protect him from some of the smaller-scale magic, like illusion, as illusionists are the most typical sorcerers found in cities.
He spent the first ten years rising from guard to the rank of Witch-Hunter, at which point he was trained in the use of a crossbow and sent out to hunt terrors which plagued the land: be they werewolves, malevolent sorcerers, vampires or other magical creatures of stranger origins. He was given the gear he has now; the enchanted steel armor, the faultily enchanted sword which he never repaired because it never really bothered him and his crossbow. It took him five years to get shooting under his belt, but he managed.
In his journeys hunting werewolves and the like, he almost never encountered serious injury. The frostbitten hand he gained from an ice wraith was nothing compared to what others went through. One of Heinrich's best friends at the Order was stuck in a comma for fourteen years, and awoke to find his entire family murdered several fourteen years ago by the witch he had been hunting. He killed himself shortly afterwards. Yet another ha been driven mad, thinking himself a bird and jumping off one of Rivenspire's largest towers. Another one, perhaps one of the best wizards among the order at the time, had been trapped within the body of a pig, losing all magical potential and the ability to make himself understood. All in all, a black and blue hand which can still function thanks to magic is the least of anyone's worries.
Heinrich excelled in the order, and even came as far within the Order to be nominated for a potential Grand Master. Unfortunately, due to a grave mistake, that never happened.
Heinrich wasn't the kind of man to devote all of his life to solely his career. He had a family as well, a wife and three children. And the tenants of the Order forbid any kind of relationship with werewolves, vampires, etc. Sadly, when Heinrich was 43, his wife was bitten by a werewolf. And unfortunately, she survived to be infected. A year after her first transformation, she finally lost control of the bloodlust and devoured all but one of her children in one night, publicly in the middle of the town square. The guard quickly put her down, and almost saved the youngest from infection, but he too became a werewolf, and was put down.
When Heinrich returned from his hunt, he was notified of his expulsion from the order. Sickened by grief and fueled by anger, he hunted down the man who had killed his last remaining daughter for being infected and murdered him.
He left the city in shame as an outlaw.
Heinrich had nowhere left to go. His parents were long dead by now, as was uncle Jornharl. His family was dead and purpose in life left with the note of expulsion.
He aimlessly wandered the countryside for half a year, dazed with how the world had deserted him and slowly sinking into despair.
It took him half a year to realize that his half-sister in the south had written to him two years ago, having heard of his deeds in the north and kindly asking if he could help with problems of an arcane nature in Darkwald as a family favor. She said she owned the apothecary in Blackwater, and that they could use some help with beasts in the woods.
Heinrich saw this as his last refuge in a world that was abandoning him. And so, he headed south for Darkwald.
(At the beginning of the RP, he will be just before the entrance to the forest.)
Phew! That took a while, but I feel satisfied with this character. Hope ya like him!
< Message edited by Legendium -- 12/9/2014 15:58:52 >
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