The captain of a small band of Vlandian mercenaries. Your mother died in childbirth, and you grew up travelling with the camp followers attached to the company fortune of which you father was a part, learning as you grew how to ride and joust and live in constant readiness for war. You father taught you from the moment you could comprehend that war was the only thing in this world which was guaranteed, so you might as well learn to make it your 
living. Just before your fourteenth birthday, he was murdered by Nerric of the Company of the Golden Boar after a dispute over uncollected taxes from your village turned violent. Aldric, the baron and owner of the land could not be bothered by so minor of an injustice as murder and in fact it seems probable that he may have even instructed the show of force himself. Your heart burns with nothing but a rabid desire to mete out revenge for you father's death, and ensure those who have so far escaped justice will finally experience it by none other than your hand.

leader of a merciless raiding party from Sturgia. You remember very little from your childhood, and what you do comes in flashes - 
the sound of boots trampling through mud, the smell of burning flesh, and the sight of pierced and bloodied corpses, crumpled and piled one atop the other. You and hundreds more like you were plucked up from the soil of villages all across the coasts, your kin slaughtered and your homes burned - those of you that survived by fate, fortune, or favor were taken as slaves, and those who then managed to survive finally into adulthood tragically became the very scourge that swept through their own villages so many years ago. You are one of these children, shaped and forged in the fires of the endless wars that burn across the continent. Violence and struggle are all you know. You are concerned very little with anything other than battle and the glory that comes from it, and you will only ever be truly satisfied once you have met your end in combat. Life is war, and there is nothing else but that. To survive a harsh and uncaring world, one's only option is to kill or be killed - and so the world finds that aspect of truth reflected in you.

A loyal and lifelong servant of the Empire.  You have toiled for Her with your sweat and bled in Her place for nearly your entire life, but you 
are aging, and your standing and influence is largely waning. Of course your words and advice are still well respected and regarded, as your accomplishments are well-recorded, but it seems an impossible task to dissuade youth to abandon ambition, or from the belief that there is glory to be found in conquest and honor in battle. You can see the unquenchable thirst for power in men like Apys, and with each passing year you become more disillusioned with both the internal workings of the Senate, the petty squabbles among the immensely powerful, and the Empire's seemingly limitless need to expand and assimilate. It is often said that the bloodshed is worth the order imposed upon the chaos of the wild and untamed, but as time has grayed your hair and ached your back, so too has it done away with any notions of war as glorious or righteous or meaningful. War is the natural state of man, it seems, and it is a wretched one. 
You are now far past your prime as an able-bodied soldier, but you can inspire those fighting under your banner like few others. If war is man's natural state, then let it be waged by a man that loathes it, for it should be a great injury to any people to be ruled by those who enjoy its terror or worse, somehow convince themselves that it is ever noble.

Running a caravan from the vast Aserai desert. You grew up missing most meals, not because your family was truly without, but because your father drank away whatever money there was. Your mother and you bore the brunt of his violent outbursts, and by the time she had finally squirreled away enough to try and escape you were almost old enough to stick a knife in his ribs yourself. Your father did not need an excuse to kill your mother though, and he strangled her to death in front of you one night without ever knowing just how close both of you had come to escape. When he could not bring himself to do the same to you, he instead found it tolerable enough to bring you to a slave market two villages over to be sold for just enough to get drunk for a few months. You passed through many hands, eventually ending up at the local castle as yet another acquisition of a young emir, Karith, another man like your father, without a single redeeming quality. You could see he favored you though, and as ill as it made you, acted exactly as was required to ensure you would get your opportunity to escape. That came when you were able to bribe a passing caravan guard to stow you away among the stacks of linens and spices. In the years since you've built your own successful trading company, and despite the hardened and loyal guards at your side, you still live in constant fear of manhunters one day catching up with you.]

A runaway in exile from your home in the great steppes. You grew up in the tavern of Chaikand, the daughter of the tavernkeeper and barmaid. 
Yours was a relatively unremarkable upbringing, comfortable and quiet until a group of masked men armed with daggers and clubs broke into your quarters in the dead of night. You had little time accept your own death before a shadow seemingly leapt from the beyond and left four men spasming on the floor before you could process the scene in front of you. That night as you rode far and fast from your home you learned the true circumstances of your birth. Years ago after a series of especially successful raids, a young warlord celebrated his conquests with even more, and drunk on his own power took whatever he thought he was so entitled. Your existence was of little significance until it became clear if discovered you could be used as a political pawn by his rivals and enemies, and that is indeed exactly what is happening. Bortu the Grey Falcon, the shadow that prevented your murder, was among a powerful but subordinate clan's most trusted personal elite guard. She has since spent nearly a decade help raise and train you in a foreign land, teaching you the skills you will need for your eventual return 
to up heave the politics of the realm for generations.

A folk-hero and legend among the farmer and peansantfolk of the Battanian woodlands. An influential merchant's firstborn son, you took to the life of the Wolfskin with such ease that you found it impossible to return to living within the confines of civil society, even as informal as they may be in Battannia. You gradually came to form your own radical philosophy, rejecting all forms of authority and insisting that no hierarchy or system of organization can be self-justified - your Wolfskin companions quickly grew tired of your long-winded espousal and fervent belief in these principles and you were soon enough cast out, but not before you were able to convince a small handful to join you. That small handful has since grown into a small army whose exploits, performed in support of 
the plights of the commonfolk and with a disdain for the ideals of the nobility are sung about in taverns all around Battania. Many tales told of you are true, some of false, and many are embellished - what can be said for certain is that you are a spark of novelty that cannot be ignored.