Bradley Stortwortle, human majordomo

Stortwortle is a tall man with a stern demeanor and a nice suit. He is the archetypal butler, taking care of the place when the Master is away and gently chiding the Master’s excesses when they are at the estate. He has two young children, and he is trying to raise them on his own.

Jocelyn Fitzvasser, human majordomo

Fitzvasser is a short woman with sharp features, raven-black hair, and a suit that seems to repel any dust or dirt. She uses a cane when she walks, and that cane has a sword in its shaft, which she regularly alludes to when staff aren’t living up to her standards. She grew up in an orphanage and has worked very hard to become the prim and proper upper-class woman she is today.

Sarlamane Oakmind, elven majordomo

Sarlamane is an old elf with a good mind for mathematics and interpersonal relations alike. He has spent most of his long life running the households of nobles of various species, along with the occasional guild or other company. He wears a pair of green-tinted half-moon spectacles, and everyone he speaks to feels like he is judging them in some way. They are right.

Khart’thruun, dwarven majordomo

Khart’thruun is a dwarven woman with a lush red beard. She speaks quickly, especially when rattling off facts and figures. She is not great with people on a personal level, but in the abstract, she has a keen sense for who’s good for what duties and how many workers a Bastion needs.

Grah, kobold baker

Grah is a skittish kobold who enjoys using his claws to carve intricate patterns on pies and pastries. Her signature pastry is a blueberry pie with whimsical flower motifs cut into the top crust.

Qimyar Sunbread, elven baker

Qimyar is a relatively short elf with red hair. He has built an oven that relies on sunlight for heat, allowing him to bake many tasty pastries without burning coal or trees. His signature pastry is an apple fritter with plenty of cinnamon.

Sandra Palacio, human baker

Sandra is a short woman with pale skin and brown hair. She wears a shark tooth necklace, which is a memento from her homeland. She loves seeing how happy her treats make everyone. Her signature dish is churros, and she would prefer if you didn’t use her frying oil on attackers.

Kasvyn, gnomish baker

Kasvyn is a pale gnome with blonde hair and bright blue eyes. He talks constantly, but his low voice and mumbling speech makes it hard to follow what he’s saying. Just as you think you have a grasp on the current topic, he will say something that throws you right back to square one. His signature pastry is a chocolate eclair.

Tiff Cooper, brewer

Tiff is a short half-dwarven woman with blonde hair that she keeps in a simple braid. She grew up in a dwarven mountain-fortress and knows many of the secrets of dwarven brewcraft. She can often be heard singing dwarven work hymns in the brewery. Her signature drink is Blue Brew, a sour but pleasant ale made with blueberries, giving it a bluish tint.

Tamar Ilyaso, brewer

Tamar is a tall trans woman with black hair and tan skin. She comes from a farming community and is deeply familiar with the minute differences between various types of grain. She keeps a journal detailing the processes and results of each batch of alcohol she makes. Her signature drink is Dragonspit, a mildly spicy and potent beer made with a species of wheat that only grows in volcanically active areas.

Khu’var Starchild, elven brewer

Khu’var is an agender elf with short, black hair and a wiry frame. They hail from one of the elven tribes native to the swamps in the foothills of the mountains, where years of intermittent contact with the local dwarven population have led to a unique tradition of brewing. They like to make small wooden carvings in their downtime. Their signature brew is Karba’na’thayn’t’t’hal the Fenwalker’s Draught, more commonly known as just “Fenwalker’s Draught,” a bitter brew said to heighten one’s senses if drank before going on patrol. There are no studies backing up this claim.

Ozla, rabbitfolk brewer

Ozla is a rabbitman with gray fur and a very fancy blue jacket. He speaks in short, clipped sentences as he hops around from task to task. He is cheery to the point of being grating. His signature drink is a corn-derived hard liquor, distilled repeatedly until it reaches 90% purity. He calls it Corn Alcohol. It’s awful, and flammable.

Vibren Madhammer, dwarf mason

Vibren is a muscular dwarf with dark brown hair and a deep, gravelly voice. He and his crew work slowly, but the resulting work is so precise that not even an ant could fit between the stones. When he’s not working, you can usually find him in the local pub, complaining about the quality of the alcohol.

Banzeer, goblin stonemason

Banzeer is a squat, green goblin with large red eyes and floppy ears, like a beagle’s. He and his crew of goblins use treadwheel cranes to move huge pieces of stone into place. The efficiency gains from these cranes are outweighed somewhat by the tendency of the goblins to sneak off somewhere to nap while they’re supposed to be working.

Alexa Kott, human brickmason

Alexa is a short woman with reddish-blonde hair. She and her crew use kiln-fired bricks to build durable walls and structures. She smokes tobacco heavily, and many of the ashes end up in the mortar. She claims it helps with the structural integrity. It does not.

Komi, half-orc stonemason

Komi is a six-foot-tall woman with pale green skin and long, black hair. She specializes in making walls out of natural stone and mortar. In the evenings, she can often be heard playing a harmonica while she sits by a campfire.

Nifan Tol’mon, elven shipwright

Nifan is a blond elven man with dark skin. He comes from the seafaring elves of the southern coast, and while his experience largely consists of building seagoing haulers, he would love to try his hand at building a ship designed for speed. While most of his advice is quite good, he often suggests simply planting some slow-growing tree and waiting a couple of centuries for it to mature, then using planks of it for the hull, forgetting that his non-elven compatriots simply do not live that long.

Naldish “Nal” Loudheart, dwarven shipwright

Nal is a dwarf raised in the deepest depths of the fortress K’ta’raun, where the fortress meets the shores of the Underworld Sea, a body of water in an unfathomably extensive cave system. She only recently came to the surface and is still adjusting to light that isn’t provided by torches, but her Underworld Sea ship designs work just as well for surface rivers.

Miller, human airshipwright

Miller is an unusually practical-minded wizard who has applied his natural talent for summoning beings from beyond the Material Plane to the most important discipline of the civilized world: Logistics. He uses his magical powers to bind fire elementals to the crystal cores of gargantuan airships, harvesting their power to lift and propel the machines. This would work just as well for waterborne craft, but that hasn’t occurred to him yet. He can often be heard saying, “Good thing these elementals aren’t sapient, or there’d be some real ethical implications we’d have to deal with!” while working.

Frasb, goblin airshipwright

Frasb is a bright green goblin with red eyes and no sense of self-preservation. He carries a wrench that he gestures with, often coming perilously close to striking somebody else as he does. His airships rely on smoke-belching engines fuelled by coal, alcohol, or lard to spin propellers and heat the air in balloons.

Bartleby, human wall-crawler

Bartleby is a rail-thin man with an incredible knack for climbing up buildings and cliffs. Some say he was trained by some shadowy order of assassins, but washed out when he found out that he faints at the sight of blood. He keeps his black hair covered with a hood, and plays the fiddle when he’s not “working.”

Julia, the Woman of One Hundred Faces, ??? master of disguise

Julia usually portrays herself as a human woman with silky brown hair and an upper-class accent, but what she actually looks like is a secret she keeps close to her chest. She specializes in confidence games and distractions, using makeup, prosthetics, and clothing to look like whatever kind of person would be advantageous.

Alabaster, half-dwarf thief

Alabaster is a short woman with some minor magical talent. She grew up on the streets of a major city and quickly learned to use her magical gifts to detect traps, alarms, and the like. She can’t resist stealing a sweet treat, even while on the job, which occasionally gets her in trouble.

Lockpick Lori, angel-blooded thief

Lori is a skinny woman with nimble fingers and a strong mechanical sense. She has blonde hair and is missing her left upper canine, which causes her to occasionally whistle as she talks. She has a box of “interesting” locks in her room, all stolen from places she has broken into. She is unaware of the celestial blood in her veins.

Ryan, porter

Ryan is a muscular teenage boy with short, blond hair. He can carry a shocking amount of stuff in his metal-framed pack. Unfortunately, he never shuts up, talking at length about his family, relationships between people he knows but his employers do not, and so on.

Myla, porter

Myla is a short woman with dark skin and curly black hair. While she herself is not very strong, she owns a four-legged machine that can haul as much as any porter, and is quieter than some. She controls it by playing notes on a flute. She calls the machine Myla’s Universal Logistics Engine, or MULE for short.

Thakk, lizardfolk porter

Thakk is a burly lizardman with brown scales and yellow eyes. He is incredibly strong, even by the standards of the lizardfolk, which he credits to a diet of raw meat and powdered swamproot. This diet would kill someone of almost any other species. He also spends almost all of his off-time working out by lifting any heavy thing he can find, which may help.

Addamund Trunkleg, dwarf porter

Addamund is a squat, black-haired dwarf with a patchy beard. He assumes nobody else knows dwarven profanity, and swears constantly in dwarven while he works.

Toby Falun, human acrobat

Toby is a circus performer who contorts his body in unbelievable ways to make his living. While some of his tricks rely on quirks of his ancestry (hypermobility, mostly), many can be taught to others, and he is willing to do so for decent money. His favourite discipline is aerial silks, but that is not in high demand from adventurers or the public, so he mostly sticks to contortion and acrobatics. He can teach adventurers Acrobatics, Athletics, or Performance.

Heather Brakk, human sword instructor

Heather is a red-haired woman who has spent years honing her swordsmanship against monsters and men alike. She is a strict teacher and makes sure that her students perform stances and forms perfectly.

Tom “the Tenderizer” Terrington, human unarmed combat instructor

Tom the Tenderizer is a retired professional bare-knuckle boxer. His knuckles and forearms are covered in layers of scar tissue, and his voice is gravelly as a result of taking several punches to the throat. Training with him primarily consists of punching mitts and then getting punched in the face repeatedly by Tom.

Alvaneth Ky’nit, elven linguist

Alvaneth is an elderly elf who has dedicated her life to studying the many and diverse languages of the world, from Undersouth Dwarvish to the Dead Language of the Crimson Valleys. She can give crash courses in specific languages in a specific context, but fully learning a language takes months.