The Iron Manticore Mercenary Company
This is essentially a ready-made character backstory for a player who's new to the campaign or doesn't want to think up a past. It makes a character skilled while explaining why they aren't off doing something other than adventuring, while building in potential conflicts with bounty hunters, current members of the company and those the company betrayed while connecting them to other exiles who may be of help or need help in turn.
The Iron Manticore Mercenary Company is arguably the best known mercenary company in the Crushlands, both because of their brutal reputation on the battlefield and their ruthlessness towards any member who'd dare to break a contract.
Most who know of the company have heard of the famous "lost detachment," the only group of any real size to go back on a Manticore assignment contract and not be slaughtered to a man. After finding out that they were guarding what essentially amounted to a weapon of mass destruction, the company turned upon their employer to save the lives of thousands of people, including a number of citizens of Highspire. Despite that, the detachment was excommunicated, and only the fact that they may have saved the main company from total destruction by reneging has kept sufficient resources from being allocated to hunt them down.
Still, members of that detachment still sleep with one eye open, and there are said to be bounty hunters who have made sizable portions of their personal wealth by tracking down and catching the few members that failed to sufficiently cover their tracks. There are rumors that there remain those within the company who aid the detachment, sending them supplies and helping them find work under new names. If this is true, the Iron Manticore may yet decide a purge is necessary, for it cannot abide treachery of any kind.
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