Introduction
Klargus Gorkun is a character I developed in 2019 to play in the Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition Dragon Heist campaign, as a Bugbear Fighter with the Brute specialization, but who presents himself as a carpenter rather than a combatant. Klargus was created based on the characters and events from the completion of The Lost Mines of Phandelver campaign, which was run by the same Dungeon Master and played by mostly the same characters. As the son of King Klarg, who deposed King Grol of Castle Cragmaw during the Lost Mines of Phandelver campaign, Klargus has a fairly rich backstory that utilizes the past events to come to a cohesive and well-rounded character. This was written in first-person from the perspective of Klargus, and covers everything up to the point of the campaign starting at the Yawning Portal. I’ve omitted the character sheet for Klargus, as it is less meaningful than the backstory, and leaves Klargus more open to interpretation or use in other campaigns, or as a Waterdeep NPC.
The Story of Klargus Gorkun
The Call of Meriadar
Allow me to share the story of my humble beginnings as a young Bugbear of Castle Cragmaw. I was born as the son of my father Klarg and my mother Kloarn, two Bugbears who helped keep the order at Castle Cragmaw under King Grol. Grol was always a fool, but a likable fool, and he had the strength to back up his position of power when his father Guunlk was slain by some self-proclaimed heroes that attacked Castle Cragmaw because they heard reports from a nearby town that there were Goblins nearby. There’s Goblin settlements all throughout the forest where Castle Cragmaw is located, and there’s no way to tell if they meant to attack us or some other settlement, or simply had a commission to kill Goblinkin. The attack happened before my time, and during the battle is when Klarg and Kloarn met, fighting side-by-side to take down two of the attackers after their wolves had been slain during a failed flanking maneuver. Kloarn raised me to learn the knowledge of the world, while Klarg oversaw my training alongside other Goblinkin at the castle.
Some time after I was trained in all things a Bugbear should know, we got some less differently violent visitors. Invading Orcs and the local Redbrands gang of humans, dwarves, and the like from Phandalin, started showing up after we were visited by a Drow named Glasstaff, who seemed to make King Grol bend a knee with little effort. That fool Grol could have doomed us, as he decided that Cragmaw Cavern would now be used as a staging point for ambushes on the crossroads, a highly risky move that usually gets met with fierce retaliation compared to little payoff, and gets abandoned for years at a time after such retaliation. I was supposed to be sent there to tame some wolves that Klarg chained up near the front, but when I started heading west, I got a different feeling, and in chasing that feeling, I found myself sneaking over an unwatched wall of Neverwinter, across rooftops, into a monastery where I was patiently greeted by the monks who seemed to be expecting me.
Training in the Open Arms of Monks
I set myself to learn from them, instead of teaching some wild dogs how to bite the thing I point at, and from them I learned a great deal from the monks at the Monastery of the Open Arms in a short time. I learned about strength, I learned about peace, I learned how to swim and climb, I learned how to control and sustain my body, I learned what soap is, and I learned how to repair the aging structure as my large frame and long limbs would frequently cause unintended devastation to the pillars, roof, and decorative latticework. They revealed that it was the will of Meriadar that I was to come to them, and I eventually came to accept Meriadar as my personal deity.
Most of all, I learned that I am no monk, as the dedication to tranquility left me feeling empty rather than fulfilled. To sit in silence with my thoughts only made me want to run home and put an axe in Grol’s face for being such a stupid fool. Instead of the silence, they helped me focus my meditations by guiding me in crafting a large wooden serving bowl with the décor of Meriadar, and finally learning to treat the wood and coat the inside with a substance that made it easy to keep clean by simply rinsing it with water. It is a dense and sturdy hardwood, carved from an ancient stump from which the tree was felled to make a shelter for people in need many years before I was born, and that structure was later built up to become the monastery itself.
Coup Blessed By Grankhul
Fortunately I didn’t have to put an axe into King Grol to end his disastrous reign. The very retaliation I feared came to Cragmaw Cavern, but their warrior-stonemason Gorkus spared my father Klarg from the killing blow, rendering him unconscious instead. The goblins who were there were slain, but I attribute their deaths to the inevitable retaliation by the people of Phandalin that were losing necessary supplies, rather than those who carried it out. Instead of slaying Klarg, they captured him, and during his imprisonment, he was visited by the vision of the great Grankhul, where he learned that his captors turned out to be his allies. His allies were thought to be Redbrand spies, and they used the chaos of the ongoing situation to march right to the throne room, where Grol met a quick demise on the end of a gleaming bronze greatclub held by my father. Our losses beyond that remained minimal due to the vision of Grankhul emanating from the new King Klarg, and quick action taken by Kloarn to demand loyalty from the rest of the castle’s forces.
The newly-crowned King Klarg was advised by his allies to pull patrols in and set up walls to anticipate Orc aggression from the East and South, and it turns out they were right, as breaking from Glasstaff meant the Orcs sought the outpost for attacks on Phandalin and eventually what would have become attacks on Neverwinter. I returned to see exactly this, a wall of wooden posts being used to slow the progress of an Orc raiding party. As my kin fought with arrows, and the hobgoblins kept outer wall breachers from making it through the doors, I snuck behind enemy lines and unleashed hell. By the time they realized I was there, and tried to do something about it, they’d already lost so many that our own forces were able to rush out to save me from being surrounded by the remaining Orcs.
Legitimizing Castle Cragmaw
It wasn’t long after that when I got a chance to meet the ones who spared my father and put him in charge. One was a gladiator recruiter named Gorath, a bold fellow who liked to flex and showed me how to breathe fire with oil and a torch. He was apparently attempting to recruit gladiators to help give Castle Cragmaw more legitimacy so that it would be recognized as a peaceful settlement with recognized sovereignty and economic viability, and to that extent I was willing to participate. I was in the final round of my first tournament, and my opponent was down and beaten, but everyone was shouting for me to knock him out and beat his remains into the dirt to finish the match. I had won, he had no more fight left. The raging cheers turned to booing as my swinging fist stopped just short of his jaw, and the booing intensified when I forcefully hoisted the gate open to leave the arena. I was still credited with a win, and because it went down in the records as one of the most memorable matches they’d ever seen, Gorath was still able to help negotiate trade agreements with the castle.
The skills I learned in carpentry with the monks started paying off when I returned home once more, as the Half-Orc Half-Dwarf Gorkus of Oreton who participated in the coup had brought a cart load of stone and wood to start rebuilding the walls. Together we restored the stability of Castle Cragmaw, and it wasn’t long after we rebuilt and reinforced the walls and roof that he got a message about some tools being ready, which was the last time I saw him, but he offered me an open invitation to visit him in Oreton where he was returning with his special tools. The bards Dehret and Dygz, who travelled with Gorath and Gorkus, were helping us establish a record of our past history, and teach a few of our kin how to write a compelling or informative story for the sake of recording our actions and deeds, of which Kloarn learned greatly and became the first Bugbear Scribe of Castle Cragmaw. Kloarn chose to give me the last name of Gorkun in honor of Gorkus of Oreton being Klarg’s savior back in Cragmaw Cavern, as one was often requested for formal documents when engaging in business. I also heard about a hunter that was with Klarg’s allies, but I never met him, and was told he went East to hunt the remaining Orc invaders as soon as they finished taking down Glasstaff and the Redbrands.
Partnership with the Murwicks
Things were finally good. We had become allies with neighboring Phandalin and Neverwinter, and we even started joining the new Road Ranger initiative to make sure the Triboar Trail would never again be stricken with invaders without a rapid response to repel them. I joined with the architects Vazlo and Shlobo Murwick from Phandalin to build a roadside stop south of Cragmaw, a place where we could engage in commerce with passerbys, and to serve as a post office so messages can be more easily sent between the nearby places. It took about a year to build an inn with a tavern and a market, which was much faster than expected, and they admitted it was done so fast on account of my size and strength letting us use large pieces of sturdy wood, and less need for scaffolding to build areas I could easily reach. I was impressed by how much I learned with them, and agreed to join them on their next contract in Waterdeep.
But they’d never make it. They were on the ship ahead of mine, and gave me the address of where to show up when I arrived, as they’d have lodgings and supplies ready once I would get there. So it was quite a shock to me to hear that the ship they were on had been destroyed on the high seas by what a nearby crew described as a massive creature with precise intent to obliterate that ship. The observers didn’t turn around to see if anyone got away, as they didn’t want to lose their cargo to the beast, and the wind was perfectly aligned upon their backs to help them get away. I still held hope that Vazlo and Shlobo managed to survive, but it is impossible to know where survivors would have ended up as details of the location of the attack varied greatly across the crew.
Confirmation of Tragedy
So when I arrived, expecting a place to stay and a job to do, I was rather disappointed to learn about what happened. After chasing clues for a week, I learned of what happened, and was left without many opportunities and only the coins and gear I came with. A letter from their mother Abrin Murwick managed to make it to me, which confirmed that they may have been taken by an old family curse.
In deepest regret to Klargus Gorkun,
It is time that I told you something I never told my children Vazlo and Shlobo, and may have been what brought about their fate. The Murwick family comes from a long line of fated architects, where any first-born set of twins is blessed with the power to build an empire, but cursed in a way where they rarely get to live long enough to do as such. I was sought out by Zolmen Murwick because my family, the Pairmuns of Phandalin, have a high probability of producing twins, and my family took a wedding dowry that still pays our way today.
The blessing is that the Murwick twins have the talents, the leadership, and the ability to find the companions to build a functional metropolis, one building at a time, of which their father becomes elected the leader. The curse is that the seventh voyage they take at sea will bring ruin or death to the twins, unless they’ve built, bought, or invaded a castle that they’ll be building the metropolis around, and must inscribe both of their names upon a brick to be set into the structure somewhere. It would have been their sixth voyage to get to Waterdeep from Neverwinter, except for one fact I kept from them, in hopes that it was all superstition: they were born at sea, but I never told them of that voyage. I realize what a fool I was to keep this from them, and their father was always away on business so he never even knew of it.
The commission they were headed to was just that, it was a castle being built near Waterdeep, commissioned by some distant emperor as a way to give his disciples like the Murwicks a place to grow. The payment for the commission was provided upfront, with a promise that they would be “located by the empire” if they should simply take the money and run, and so the funds and all the supplies they packed onboard for the castle are expected to be somewhere at the bottom of the ocean now. They sought to break the curse, but because being birthed at sea counted against them, and my silence has brought ruin to us all. Even to you, Klargus, and for that I am so very sorry.
My hope is that they are still safe and alive somewhere, or else that the curse was able to put them out cleanly. Never has the curse affected twins born at sea, and I have a recurring nightmare that they live beyond death, thinking they are heading to the commission still, not aware that they’ve died, and are planning to build a castle of the dead down where the ship’s wreckage now sits. That distant empire that commissioned them has sent scouts and investigators, and I expect they’ll be looking for you at some point as well.
I hope you’ve been able to survive in Waterdeep, and that this letter finds you under good circumstances. Sadly there’s nothing more I can offer you, except to stay at the family home in Phandalin if you should ever need to, but the loss of Vazlo and Shlobo has left us to survive off what’s left of the wedding dowry unless Zolmen manages to land some work as a supervisor, as his body is too beaten from years of labor to do the work for himself any longer.
Please write back or visit anytime. We appreciate your company and the work you did with Vazlo and Shlobo, and we wish the best for you. It may do the family good to hear from the last person they worked with.
My sincere condolences,
Abril Murwick
A Carpenter in Waterdeep
And so I was alone, or so I thought. I had managed to get by doing simple repairs for the homes of impoverished folks in a place in Waterdeep that is somehow far from everywhere, yet difficult to locate without knowing where to look. The location has many goblins, kobolds, and other races looked down upon by the upper-class elites, but with them I found a place where I was welcome. I didn’t charge anyone for repairs because they generally could barely afford the raw materials, and in doing so found places to stay and be fed, and a way to build up my reputation a bit. I’m glad I brought my bedroll, as beds aren’t designed for my size in most parts of this area.
I don’t mind being in Waterdeep, it seems like quite an interesting place. On the surface, it is a bustling trade city full of constant fresh faces. After learning a bit of local history, the origins of Waterdeep as being built atop a Mithril mine make it understandable white it became a trade city, and why it has a steady influx of people willing to test their luck against the perils below. Even more interesting is that there doesn’t really seem to be a specific authority figure I can go to meet–the names of people that seem to call the shots at the highest levels are not on the tips of anyone’s tongues, only the lower leadership and arbiters seem to be accessible.
Friendly Brawls at the Yawning Portal
To keep sharp on my less-peaceful skills, I came across an aggressive half-Orc named Yagra, who I’ve been sparring with to make sure I’m always ready to defend myself. Yagra seemed to be the only person who was happy to see me when I first entered the Yawning Portal. In fact, she greeted my presence with a drink, and a request to test my strength and skill against her own. The offer was simple, win or lose, she’d cover the next round of drinks between each test, until we were both so drunk that we couldn’t even come up with another trial that wasn’t doing what we’d already done, even variants where we use only one hand or balance on one leg on one leg. These antics did get quite a bit of attention, and we were fortunate to not get kicked out, likely because the entertainment was good business that day. We’ve been acquaintances ever since, meeting at least once a week for drinks and testing one another’s physical capacities with new trials we’ve invented or had suggested to us.
Initially I was in a rush to get home, but now that I’ve been here for a few months, I’m fairly intrigued by the place. If things get too dangerous for a Bugbear in the big city, I can find a ship headed home to work on, but there’s opportunities available here that aren’t found at places near the Triboar Trail, so I might as well check them out while I’m here.
