You’re an experienced mariner with a keen weather eye and a favorite tavern in every port. Hard voyages have toughened you and the sea’s power has made you humble.

Were you a deckhand, an officer, or the captain of your vessel? Did you crew a naval cutter, a fishing boat, a merchant’s barge, a privateering vessel, or a pirate ship? 

You lived far from the farms and fields of civilization. You know the beauties and the dangers of the wilderness.

Were you part of a nomadic tribe? A hunter or guide? A lone wanderer or explorer? A guardian of civilization against monsters, or of the old ways against civilization?

It never hurts to be part of a team, and when you’re part of a guild opportunities knock at your door.

Are you a member of a trade or artisan’s guild? Or an order of mages or monster hunters? Or have you found entry into a secretive guild of thieves or assassins?

You were born to a commoner family, but some event earned you fame. You’re admired locally, and tales of your deeds have reached the far corners of the world.

Did you win your fame by battling an oppressive tyrant? Saving your village from a monster? Or by something more prosaic like winning a wrestling bout or a pie-eating contest?

You left adventuring for your own reasons and set up to what you long considered to be an honest profession. Whether it was tending bar at a tavern, mending broken tools at a blacksmith, or some other work, it has kept you in relatively good shape, even though you may be constantly looking over your shoulder.

What caused you to quit a life of adventure? What drags you back? What are you leaving behind?

You spent long years captive to an Underland empire, where you grew accustomed to ways that aren’t your own. You are now a stranger to your own people, having replaced their social mores with those you learned while underground. Your bizarre ways mystify them: you don’t wake and sleep with the sun, you eat strange foods, and you often use words and phrases that they’ve never heard.

There is no high king or empress of Endora— instead each demesne provides annual tithes to the Endoran Militia and becomes responsible for its command for a given year. Endoran citizens born on the third Aluday of Parra are consigned into service from birth, sworn by their parents to serve their demesne when the time comes in an ancient practice drafted from rules established in the Imperial Age long ago. As one of the children born on the fateful third Aluday of Parra, you were handed over to one of the demesnes of Endora and raised along other infant conscripts.

You have done time. Quite a lot of time, in fact; enough to fully acclimate to the life of a prisoner, whether you deserv ed it or not. Your time incarcerated has shaped you as an individual and it is highly unlikely that you bear much resemblance to the person you were before you went inside.