Gudrun Steelvein - XERES LIVE!

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Basic Information

Full Name

Gudrun Steelvein

Nickname

The Iron Grin

Race (Grade)

Waveforged Dwarf (E)

Class

Fighter

Height

4'6"

Birthday

Frostmoon 28, 1266

Age

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Birthsign

The Frostfire Salamander

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Bloodline Ability

🔮Unknown

This Bloodline ability has not yet been unveiled to you.

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Physical Description

Gudrun Steelvein, forge-warm and unbothered by it

Appearance

Gudrun is built the way most Waveforged are built: broad, dense, and clearly capable of things her stature shouldn't allow. Her hair is a deep copper-red, worn high and full at the crown with the sides shaved close and braided tight against her scalp, each braid finished with a small band of hammered metal in the old Waveforged fashion. Her eyes are a striking sea-glass green, sharp and quick to narrow in either amusement or challenge, and her skin carries the permanent weather-tan of someone who has spent decades standing over an open forge. She goes beardless by choice, a fact she will tell you unprompted and without the slightest self-consciousness. Her left shoulder and arm are marked with an intricate tattoo she has been adding to for over two decades, a running record inked in her own forge-mark style.

She dresses in heavy leather and burnished metal plating, functional armor she made herself, layered over broad shoulders left bare to the shop heat, with a thick fur mantle she wears more out of habit and status than any real need for warmth. Bracers etched with old Waveforged sunburst work guard her forearms, and a scatter of necklaces and rings mark small personal victories she doesn't explain unless asked twice. She rarely stands still. Even at rest, her hands look like they're already halfway through the next task.

Unique Characteristics

The tattoo on Gudrun's left arm is not decoration in the ordinary sense. It is, in effect, a ledger: every weapon type she has personally forged, marked in a small private glyph the moment she completes her first working example of it. The tattoo now wraps her shoulder and half her upper arm, dense with symbols, and she has genuinely lost count of exactly how many are on it, though she is fairly certain there isn't a weapon a person could name that she hasn't already made at least once. She never mentions the leatherworking. She is very good at it. She would simply rather you asked her about literally anything else.

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Personality & Temperament

Gudrun loves being alive, loudly, constantly, and without a shred of apology for it. She laughs with her whole chest, argues the same way, and has never once in her adult life pretended to be smaller or quieter than she actually is. Most people who meet her for the first time land somewhere between delighted and slightly overwhelmed, and Gudrun considers both reactions a fine start. She is crass more often than not, forward to a fault, and has never met a piece of unsolicited feedback she didn't feel entitled to give. This reads as abrasive to plenty of people, and she has made her peace with that a long time ago; the ones who stick around past the first impression tend to find out that underneath the volume is someone who means almost everything she says exactly as kindly as it isn't delivered.

What she is, unambiguously, is loyal. Once Gudrun decides you're hers, ally, friend, whatever the word ends up being, that decision does not move again for any reason short of genuine betrayal. She has walked away from paying customers, comfortable arrangements, and at least one entire city on behalf of people she'd decided were worth it. She would very much like you to know she's a weaponsmith first. Everything else about her, including a leatherworking skill she rarely mentions, is a distant second in the story she tells about herself.

Positive Traits

Loves life loudly and completely, no apologies
Ride-or-die loyal once a friendship is earned
A genuine master of nearly every weapon type
Impossible to discourage once she commits
Generous with her time, her coin, and her forge
Refreshingly, disarmingly honest

Challenging Traits

Crass, forward, and often deeply abrasive
Says exactly what she thinks, invited or not
Holds a grudge like a hammer holds a nail
Impatient with anyone slower or quieter than her
Downplays her leatherworking to protect her image

You only get one trip through this world, so I intend to be loud about mine. Boring is a choice. I did not make it.

Ask me what I make and I'll tell you weapons, every time. I can tan a hide as well as any leatherworker in Stoneharbor, but that's not the name I want on the blade.

She let this city think she was dead so her children could have a real life. I've known men who killed for worse reasons than that. I wasn't about to walk away from a friend brave enough to do it.

Likes

The ring of a hammer against good steel
Loud taverns, louder songs, cold dwarven ale
A weapon type she hasn't forged yet
Old friends who show up when it matters
Sea storms watched safely from a stone balcony

Dislikes

People who mistake her manners for her worth
Cowards who talk tough and then dodge a fight
Being told to tone anything down, ever
Cheap steel sold at a craftsman's price
Secrets kept from people who deserve better

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Background & History

Forged in Stoneharbor

Gudrun was born into a clan of smiths in Stoneharbor, the shining jewel of the Waveforged, and was standing close enough to a forge to feel it before she could properly walk. She apprenticed young under a clan master smith with a reputation for taking no apprentices soft enough to flinch at burns, and Gudrun, who flinched at very little even as a child, thrived under it. Forty-ish years is not a long life by Waveforged standards, and her E-grade means she still looks like she's in her twenties, but she has spent essentially the whole of that time at an anvil, one way or another, and it shows in exactly none of the ways people expect and all of the ways that matter.

One of Every Kind

Somewhere in her thirties, Gudrun set herself an open-ended, half-serious challenge: forge one working example of every weapon type she could think of, name, or have described to her. She did not expect it to take as long as it did, and she did not expect to actually finish it, but she has, at this point, made an honest example of nearly everything a person could swing, throw, fire, or stab with, from the humble dagger to siege-scale ballista bolts to at least one weapon she had to invent a name for afterward because nobody could tell her what it was already called. She has forged in every metal Stoneharbor's mines and trade routes can supply, and has a running, working knowledge of leatherworking besides, gained mostly because good weapons need good grips, sheaths, and harnesses, and she got tired of waiting on other people to make hers.

The Quiet Trade

She does not advertise the leatherworking. It isn't a secret exactly, anyone who spends real time in her shop figures it out, but she has spent her whole career building a name as a weaponsmith and has no interest in diluting that reputation with a second craft, however genuinely good she is at it. When customers ask about a scabbard or a harness, she'll make it, charge fairly, and change the subject the moment it's finished. She has strong opinions about people who spread themselves thin across too many trades and call it versatility. She would simply rather be excellent at one thing that people specifically travel to Stoneharbor for.

A Friend in the Palace

During Hana's brief years as Queen of Stoneharbor, Gudrun was one of the few people in the city who treated her exactly the same as a queen as she had before the crown, loud, familiar, and entirely unimpressed by the title. The two became genuinely close, close enough that when the city was told Queen Hana had died in childbirth, Gudrun grieved her the same as anyone else who'd actually known and loved her. It was one of the harder losses Gudrun had carried in years, made worse by how little sense it made against the woman she remembered, tough enough to survive an Ogre kicking her through a wall, gone from something as ordinary as childbirth.

The Confrontation

Gudrun was in Goodberry on unrelated business, sourcing a shipment of southern-forged steel, when she saw a woman crossing a market square who had absolutely no business being alive. She did not politely approach. She did not consider, even briefly, that she might be mistaken. She marched directly across the square, said Hana's name loudly enough that half the market turned to look, and demanded an explanation on the spot. Hana, to her enormous credit, did not try to deny it, deflect, or run. She told Gudrun the truth, all of it, quietly and without excuses, in a back room of the nearest tavern. Gudrun does not repeat the full account to others; it isn't hers to spread. What she will say is that she understood immediately, agreed with the choice before Hana had even finished explaining it, and has not once considered it her business to judge a mother for what she did to protect her children.

No Looking Back

There was no real debate in Gudrun's head after that conversation. Stoneharbor was her home, her craft, her clan, and none of that changed the plain fact that the friend she'd mourned was alive and living quietly in a city that had never once made her feel like an outsider for it. Gudrun packed up her forge tools, sold what she couldn't carry, and relocated to Goodberry within the month. She has been here only a short while, but she has already found a workshop, made herself loudly known to most of the neighboring shopkeepers, and shows no sign whatsoever of missing the harbor she left behind.

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Goals & Aspirations

A Forge Worth the Name

Gudrun intends to build her Goodberry workshop into something with the same reputation her old Stoneharbor forge carried, a place people travel specifically to visit. She's under no illusions that this happens quickly in a new city, and she's entirely fine with that; she has never been in a hurry about anything except the next weapon type she hasn't tried yet.

The One She Hasn't Made

She swears there's still one weapon type out there she hasn't gotten her hands on, something obscure, foreign, or simply new enough that Stoneharbor never carried word of it. She hasn't found it yet. She fully expects Goodberry, sitting at the crossroads it does, to be exactly the kind of place where somebody finally shows her something she's never seen.

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Current Status & Relationships

Residence

Goodberry

Role

Weaponsmith

Friends

Hanabyrn Hammerbraid

Close Friend, Former Queen

ATTENTION!

Do not mistake Gudrun's crude humor and forward manner for a lack of danger. She has personally forged and trained with nearly every weapon type known to exist, which means she understands their weaknesses as intimately as their strengths, and there are very few weapons that can be brought against her that she hasn't already spent years learning how to counter. She is exceptionally strong even by Waveforged standards and does not bluff about a fight once she's decided to have one. She also knows the true circumstances behind Hanabyrn Hammerbraid's disappearance from Stoneharbor and has chosen not to repeat them to anyone. She will not discuss it, will not be pressured into discussing it, and anyone who pushes the subject too hard should expect the conversation to end considerably less politely than it began.