The weaponsmith of the Blooded Crown
Zeraphiel Veyncrow — The Crimson Forge
“The anvil remembers every scream hammered upon it.”
Zeraphiel is the most infamous weaponsmither of Azir’Mar, a tiefling whose name is whispered in the courts of Drow matrons and assassins alike.
His reputation was built in fire, blood, and jewel-studded steel. He forges weapons that are not merely blades, but living extensions of their wielder’s soul — at a terrible price. His piercings and jewelry, famed across the Underdark, are talismans of both beauty and bondage, often infused with subtle curses.
- Personality: Cold, calculated, solemn. He hides a wounded conscience under layers of arrogance and iron discipline. He disdains weakness — especially in those he once admired.
- Weird Hobby: Collects teeth and carves them into rune-beads, which he sets into weapons and piercings. Each bead, he says, “remembers its owner’s last pain.”
- Social Role: Revered, feared, but not beloved. Nobles owe him favors, assassins owe him secrets, and even the priestesses step carefully around him.
Kaelthas Drenn — The Laughing Forge
Kaelthas is the counterpoint to Zeraphiel’s solemn menace — a tiefling weaponsmither who thrives on laughter, pranks, and irresistible charm. His creations often straddle the line between lethal weapon and practical joke, such as exploding chalices and cursed jewelry that embarrasses more than kills. He is loved and loathed in equal measure.
- Personality: Charismatic, irreverent, smirking as though life is a jest only he understands.
- Weird Hobby: Creates enchanted dice and trick items — each with a catch that usually humiliates the user.
- Social Role: Less revered than Zeraphiel but more desired. A favorite among noble women and rogues alike.
Malrik Veythar — The Crimson Jackal
Malrik is the blade that follows Zeraphiel’s forge and Kaelthas’ laughter. A hell‑scarred tiefling who turned survival into an art, he cuts problems out at their root and leaves no witnesses unless paid to. He drinks from a jeweled goblet taken during the infamous Red Auction and keeps his sister Selvara alive by fear alone: those who exploit her vanish.
- Personality: Cold, pragmatic, laconic. He values results and loyalty over theatrics.
- Hellforged Bond: Escaped Avernus with Zeraphiel and Kaelthas; their loyalty was hammered in devilfire.
- Notorious Deeds: The Silent Tavern; the Red Auction; the night he cut down a dozen devils with a blade forged by his brothers.
Selvara Veythar — The Siren of Avernus
Selvara returned from Avernus with a voice that can cradle a broken heart and a hunger that can break a city. She haunts velvet lounges and sacrilegious chapels, trading songs for secrets. Her charms are honeyed but her nights are a carousel of indulgence — wine, flesh, wagers, and whispered blasphemies. To nobles she is both salvation and ruin; to commoners, a legend of wicked beauty. Zeraphiel avoids her — he knew the bright mind she had before hell’s touch. Kaelthas accepts her without judgment, often joining her for drinks or playing wingman. Malrik, half‑brother, keeps wolves from her door — and sometimes cuts the door off the hinges.
The Arena
Kolth Marran — The Quartermaster
Kolth Marran once fought for the roar of the sands; now he listens for the softer clink of coin. A retired arena champion who traded glory for leverage, he runs the quartermaster’s books, the stores, and the quiet doors that lead to the subterranean vaults. He sells “maintenance passes” to those who can pay and watches those who pay too little. Everything is for sale, and every sale becomes a blade he can turn later. He collects and trades secrets with the same care he counts coins, offering morsels to new faces just to weigh their worth in the city’s shadow market.
- Tie‑in: His black ledger shows the Covenant’s arena vault was funded with embezzled money from a rival house—disclosure could collapse their claim.
- Attitude to Bribes: A generous offer earns service; a small one offends him. Offenders find their names quietly circulated among cutthroats and magistrates alike.
- Tell: Rolls a gold coin over scarred knuckles while thinking; the coin stops when he’s chosen a price.
Master Rhavess Qiln
Rhavess Qiln has laid keystones beneath half the noble vaults of Azir’Mar. For five centuries he has measured empires by the weight of their arches and the honesty of their invoices. A perfectionist artisan and ruthless negotiator, he built the Stonewrought Covenant into a guild‑covenant that owns quarries, foundries, and contracts inked in blood and basalt. His obsidian sculptures are commissions coveted by the powerful — and feared, for each captures a fragment of the subject’s soul, a practice veiled as ‘memorial resonance.’ Those fragments give Rhavess leverage, insurance, and, when necessary, currency.
- Business Acumen: Flawless ledgers; understands cash‑flow, patronage, and legal warfare. He wins trials before they are filed.
- Voice & Bearing: Slow, resonant speech; pauses like a mason checking a plumb line. Rarely repeats himself.
- Guild Title: Arch‑Stonewright and Keeper of the Vault‑Oaths of the Stonewrought Covenant.
Kavress the Unbound
Chains once bound Kavress; now she wears them as trophies. Her skin is mapped with sigils carved off by her own hand, scars that refuse to take ink or brand again.
Promoters call her a barbarian—she calls herself a professional. She signs nothing enchanted, refuses geasa and blood oaths, and keeps score only in coin and favors owed.
Her reputation is clean: she’ll take the ring for anyone who pays, but she never throws a fight and never breaks consent.
That integrity makes her dangerous to fixers… and valuable to anyone who can outbid them or outmaneuver their schemes.
Nobles
Lord-Vaelthir-Drosk
Vaelthir Drosk is a rarity among drow nobles: a gym‑forged physique layered under embroidered plate and an earnest desire to impress. His salons are equal parts fencing academy and scandalous revel — he hosts private wrestling bouts in his marble halls, almost always ending with his triumph and a boisterous celebration among willing adults. He is certain that winning a contest is the quickest route to admiration, and dreams of drawing Arynthea into one of these spectacles. For all his strength, he is politically green; a kind word or a daring challenge can loosen his tongue about family business.
Lady Yolena Drosk
Yolena Drosk wears negotiation like armor and silence like a dagger. In council halls and marble galleries she is immaculate—every filigree deliberate, every glance costed. The Drosk caravans move rare metals, forge‑grade alloys, and volatile reagents such as acetylene and ethyl acetate. Her duergar partners raid deep mushroom colonies for spore‑sacs and psychotropic fungi used in catalysts and dyes. She prefers contracts to blades, but the sword at her hip is not ceremonial.
Private Goal (the whisper that haunts her): secure an unassailable monopoly charter over catalytic reagents—and win Arynthea’s allegiance, if not her heart. When Arynthea enters a room, Yolena’s pupils widen despite herself; she buries the reaction under cool wit and perfect posture. She will never scheme crudely like Vaelthir, yet every plan considers Arynthea’s orbit. Her being house Drosk’s most significant trade partner makes everything much more complicated.
Houses
Great Houses
House Nuk — The Bone Sovereigns
Origins & Legacy
House Nuk is the oldest and most revered lineage of Azir’Mar, tracing its roots to the First Pact-Bearers of Erebos. When the founding matriarchs of the city bathed in the dragon-blooded lake beneath the cavern and signed their covenants in living marrow, it was the Nuk who claimed dominion over death, shadow, and silence eternal.
They became custodians of funerary rites, the arbiters of death-taxes, and the wardens of necropolis-vaults that stretch for miles beneath Azir’Mar. Every body that is interred, every soul that is chained to service, and every bone construct that is birthed from marrow-gardens owes its tithe to House Nuk.
Their seat, the Sepulchral Spire of Xelyth, is a fortress-cathedral carved from obsidian and gravebone, rising above the blood-lake. Its hollow walls resonate with whispered voices of the countless dead, trapped as both record and warning.
The Matriarch: Xelyth Nuk, the Eternal Widow
- Age: Nearly 900 years, kept alive through a combination of necrotic preservation, embalming sigils, and pacts whispered directly into her marrow by Erebos.
- Appearance: A husk of alabaster skin stretched thin across bones inscribed with runes. Her veins glow faintly violet, as though embalming ichor flows instead of blood. Her lips are sewn with silver thread during ceremonies, symbolizing her vow to speak only truths of death.
- Power: Commands entire legions of revenants and dragon-bone constructs. Said to keep the skull of an ancient dracolich as her throne.
- Titles: Eternal Widow, Mother of Mourning, She-Who-Speaks-for-Bones.
- Rumors: Some whisper she is no longer fully alive but a sentient embalmed corpse, animated by the collective prayers of the dead. She is rumored to have slaughtered the previous generation of heirs because they attempted to move against her.
The Heirs of Nuk
The White Lady — Seralyth Nuk
- Oversees the bureaucracy of death-taxes, the collection of bodies, and the adjudication of funerary disputes.
- Cold, calculating, clad always in veils of bone-white silk embroidered with teeth.
- Known for her unbreakable memory; she remembers every debtor, every unpaid tithe, every oath broken.
- Operates as the visible hand of the house—to cross her is to bring the silent collectors to your door.
The Red Lady — Veythra Nuk
- The military fang of the family, unleashed upon rival houses and surface raids.
- Wears armor flayed from her enemies, lacquered crimson.
- Leads the Carrion Warbands, raiding forces that butcher, desecrate, and return with carts of corpses for reanimation.
- Unlike her sister, she revels in slaughter; her laughter on the battlefield is said to cause fear checks among even seasoned assassins of Azir’Mar.
Maltheris Nuk — The Bone Artificer
- The son, famed necromancer-artificer, creator of marrow-forges where bone is shaped into war machines.
- His greatest invention, the Ossifex Colossus, is a construct formed of fused dragon bones, standing taller than fortress gates.
- Collects rare spines and skulls; rumored to have stolen vertebrae from an ancient titan corpse.
- Secretly at odds with his sisters—seeks recognition as heir rather than tool.
The Necro-Drakes & Horrors of Nuk
House Nuk maintains their own brood of drakes and necrotic monstrosities:
- Wyrms of Hollow Bone: Reanimated dragons whose marrow has been replaced by shadowflame.
- The Sepulchral Serpent: A bone serpent that coils the spire, said to awaken during wars.
- Dracolich “Atheron the Pale”: The matriarch’s throne is carved from its skull; whispers claim its spirit still slumbers inside.
Domains of Control
- Funerary Rights: No one in Azir’Mar may bury their dead without House Nuk’s tithe.
- Death-Taxes: A portion of every estate passes to them upon death, in coin or in flesh.
- Bone-Construct Breeding: They maintain crypt-farms where bone is “grown” like crops, twisted into shapes suitable for war machines.
- The Vaults of Silence: Forbidden catacombs where failed matriarchs and oath-breakers are chained in eternal undeath.
Symbols & Rites
- Sigil: A dragon’s skull crowned with thorns of bone, dripping shadow ichor.
- Rite of the Marrow-Flame: Initiates drink marrow boiled in shadowfire to bind their souls to the house.
- The Procession of Chains: Once a decade, slaves drag bone constructs through the city in silence, offering tribute to Xelyth.
- Forbidden Art: The crafting of Soul-Fetters, blackened chains that bind the essence of the dead to serve eternally.
House Nuk in Politics
- Feared as arbiters of death itself.
- Provide bone-armies to the city in exchange for eternal primacy in funerary law.
- Their enemies cannot easily strike them down; to kill a Nuk is to risk their soul being chained forever.
- Their alliances with dracoliches and death-patrons make them the most dangerous of all houses to confront directly.
Reputation & Rumors
- Some whisper that House Nuk plans to turn the entire city into a necropolis, where living citizens are merely caretakers of their eventual corpse-duty.
- It is said their matriarch keeps the shadows of past matriarchs trapped inside her ribs, whispering counsel in chorus.
- The Red Lady is rumored to feed personally on blood in ritual hunts, descending into bestial frenzy.
- Maltheris is whispered to have designed a bone-dragon capable of flight through the Shadowsea, something even the oldest liches fear.
Minor Houses
House Drosk
House Drosk is no great pillar of the Underdark’s nobility, but its roots run deep into the bedrock of Azir’Mar’s economy. Their coffers are filled not with ancient prestige but with ore-dust, slag, and the pungent vapors of chemical stills. They deal in rare metals, forge-ready alloys, and volatile reagents—acetylene, ethyl acetate, and other alchemical fuels that power the city’s forges and shadows alike.
To keep supply flowing, the Drosk have long employed dark dwarves on dangerous contracts, sending them to raid mushroom colonies, harvest spore-sacs, and haul back the rare growths needed for reagents and dyes. Trade caravans marked with their sigil are avoided by most thieves; the siblings guard their interests with ruthless efficiency.
The house is ruled by two ambitious scions:
- Lord Vaelthir Drosk, the gilded duelist, a muscle-forged noble more at home in a sparring circle than at a council table.
- Lady Yolena Drosk, his elder sister, sharp-tongued and silver-eyed, who manages the trade ledgers with a surgeon’s precision. She is the calculating mind to his flexing arm, ensuring that their fortune grows while her brother squanders attention on salons and matches.
Together they keep House Drosk perched in that dangerous middle ground: not one of the ruling Houses, but too useful in trade to be ignored. They are the smoke between empires—the forgemasters’ suppliers, the alchemists’ creditors, and the chemists’ indispensable partners.
