Factol Rowan Darkwood

Most who meet the Duke in the flesh come away more impressed than they might’ve expected. The Duke’s 6-foot-4-inch frame is lean but muscular - he looks as quick as a hellcat and just as tough to hoot. His tanned, craggy face, hands and arms are marked with permanent scars, a lifelong reminder of his run-in with a lieutenant of Baator’s Lords of the Nine. Fact is, one of the facial scars went a bit too deep, leaving him blind in his right eye.   The third son of a trivial noble on Oerth (the Duke likes to claim Toril as his homeworld -Ed.), Darkwood had dim prospects for succession and took to adventuring. He became a ranger and wandered his homeworld for quite a number of years, doing well enough to set up a small fiefdom. He took a wife named Merilyn, who bore him two sons, Rory and Reuel. The pattern of his life seemed set - were it not for a minstrel who left a deck of battered cards at Darkwood‘s manor. Not knowing they were magical, the Duke let his children play with the cards. Unfortunately, the boys summoned a fiend - a cornugon named Amaggel - who tried to claim them as slaves. Darkwood struck a bargain with Amaggel, who agreed to play a single game of cards. If Darkwood won, the children would go free; if Amaggel won, Darkwood would willingly return to Baator as a slave. ’Course, the fiend cheated, hut Darkwood somehow bested him at his own trick, winning the game by a single point.   Amaggel knew he’d been peeled. Furious but bound by his word, he freed Rory and Reuel, but teleported Darkwood to Baator for a lifetime of unimaginable punishments. The Duke spent the next decade there with nothing but a desire to live that not even the cornugon’s barbed whips could quell. Over time, Armaggel developed a grudging respect for the human whose spirit he couldn’t break, and he freed the Duke. Battered and nearly broken, Darkwood eventually found his way out of Baator and back to Oerth. There he found that Merilyn had remarried and his sons were grown; with no life left for him there, the Duke returned to the planes. He became a priest of Heimdall, eventually healing body and spirit, though he still bears the scars of his captivity.   About a year ago he decided to make the City of Doors his home; since then, he’s not only joined the ranks of the Fated but vaulted into the position of factol. (And not without a bit of cross-trading, some say. - Ed.) But Duke Darkwood‘s the very image of a self-made man, from his homespun clothes to his brusque, no-nonsense attitude in the Hall of Speakers. He hasn’t the cham and persuasive abilities of his nemesis, Factol Erin Montgomery of the Sensate, but he’s as stubborn as a golistro with prey in its mouth. When the Duke takes the floor at the Hall of Speakers, a weq groan usually flutters across the room. But he’s no fool; Darkwood knows just how his personality grates on the nerves. He prides himself on being ruthlessly efficient, and he doesn’t have time for the social niceties and political courtships other factols engage in. He gets what he wants, when he wants it, and the way he wants it And what he wants now is to conquer the Cage.