Commodore Gauram Gunmay


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Description:

Commodore Gauram Gunmay is a dashing brown and silver hair canis man, dressed in the well fitted and severe uniform of a Commodore of the Order of Ancinette. At 32 years, he is getting on in age for a canis, but he is sharp and determined as he ever was. As a bold sea captain, a courageous leader, and a fierce warrior, the Commodore is driven by a maddening thirst for revenge against the Great Families of Cairgherd who murdered his own family and seized their assets.

The Commodore's right eye has been replaced by a metallic golden sphere. This magic eye allows him to see through the eyes of his clockwork falcon at will as though he has cast the Share Sense spell on its vision. His falcon is always nearby, either circling watchfully overhead or perched on the Commodore's leather and mail gauntlet. By some unknown mechanism, the falcon is totally loyal to him, and understand and obeys all of this commands.

Backstory:

Gauram Gunmay was born in 1392 in Cairgherd, Waeyron. As the eldest child and heir to the canis Gunmay family's lands, titles, businesses and wealth, Gauram was raised a prince, and had access to the best of everything. At the age of 7, he was sent to study at the University of the Seven Spheres in Shahaifor, where he excelled in Arts, Sciences, Engineering, and especially Economics. He was also an exceptional athlete, distinguishing himself in fencing, wrestling, and track and field sports.

Returning home to Cairgherd in 1403, at age 11, Gauram began working directly with his parents to prepare to take control of the family business. At the time, the Gunmay family was embroiled in several land disputes with the increasingly affluent and powerful human Mellish family who controlled huge pastures to the west of Cairgherd, and had upstream control over rivers and waterways coming out of the Hills of Taeves, upon which the Gunmay family's businesses were dependent.

Reaching amicable relations with the Mellish family proved to be complicated, and as the dispute wore on, the other Great Families of Cairgherd became involved. Too much was dependent upon smooth operation of the major businesses of all the Great Families for them to allow significant disruption. After months of economic and trade pressure, combined with long negotiations, the halfling Upjohn family, who controlled most of Cairgherd's port (and much of the organized crime in the city), put together an agreement that would be ratified by Cairgherd's five Great Families and the Mellishes to resolve the ongoing and costly disputes.

At the beginning of 1405, the Gunmays, the tauran Marwari family, the canis Rhees family, the Upjohns, and the Mellish family convened, with the avian Lowri family deciding to boycott and abstain, but agreeing in principle to abide by whatever terms were agreed by the others. The meeting, however, was a trap, with the Upjohns organizing the assassination of the entire Gunmay family. Everyone was killed in a single evening; with only Gauram Gunmay escaping.

The four Great Families that had participated in the purge each claimed a share of the Gunmays' holdings, and a share was given to the Mellishes also, who were then named as a Great Family of Cairgherd to replace the Gunmays.

Gauram Gunmay escaped, stowing away on a ship bound for Sekhu, where he hoped to gain support from the powerful branch of the Gunmay family there to reclaim his family's lands and titles, but the Great Families of Cairgherd easily anticipated this, and convinced the Gunmays of Sekhu to lay a trap. On the ship he stowed away on, he met another stowaway - a gnome woman who had fled her own family. She advised him his plan was foolish, and that he may be walking into a trap.

Taking the advice of the gnome woman, he stowed away on a different ship, but this time he was caught. Choosing not to divulge his identity, he was sentenced to a year of hard labour with the Order of Alcinette who shipped him to Golanicja, where we worked on a road and bridge construction project until he was released in 1406, now with a new identity.

Calling himself Gaspar Golic, he used his meagre mustering out payment to buy himself a pack and a weapon and fell in with some adventurers. In less than a year, he had connected himself to the affluent and eccentric Count Mirovan Nizic. The elven Count Nizic was an adventurer, explorer, and collector of rare treasures. The Count was in possession of a broken clockwork pigeon, and was convinced they could use it to locate an ancient gnomic ruin. Not long after, they found a working clockwork falcon and replaced the falcon's inner mechanisms with those of the pigeon, which they were then able to track to its destination - a previously undiscovered gnomic ruin somewhere in the Iron Ridge Mountains.

For a year or so, they explored and plundered the ruin, gaining considerable wealth, until one day they discovered information suggesting that there may be another ruin, on the opposite side of the world in Waeyron, and that this ruin might contain a colossus - a gigantic gnomic clockwork war machine. Gaspar became obsessed with the colossus, believing it was his key to taking revenge against the Great Families of Cairgherd who had murdered his family. Unfortunately, Count Nizic had no desire to abandon the riches that lay before them in order to circle the globe in hopes of maybe finding riches elsewhere. In the end, Gaspar took his share, stole some more, stole the falcon and all the information they had about the ruin, and in early 1408, he joined the Imperial Merchant Marine as a sailor under his original name, Gauram Gunmay.

He served in the Imperial Merchant Marine for three years, working his way up to Commander, and proving himself at sea, serving as second in command on a ship that was tasked with assessing the fleet strengths of rival naval factions. During this time, he also lost his right eye in an accident. At the beginning of 1412, feeling that the Imperial Merchant Marine were too insular, and that getting to Waeyron was not pressing enough for his superiors, he left his commission and joined the Order of Alcinette.

Gauram Gunmay quickly proved an able seaman and a bold leader, and by 1416, at the age of 24, he was made a Commodore in the Order of Alcinette and given command of a flotilla of twenty ships that worked the Great Spiral Sea, and over two dozen work camps in Ayodesh, Jumira, Inik and Sekhu.

With access to enormous resources, and considerable autonomy, in early 1417 Guaram Gunmay began in earnest his hunt for the gnomic ruin he had learned of in the Iron Ridge Mountains. He had since narrowed the location of the ruin to a remote, uninhabited island west of Bryderfert in Waeyron, known as Rhwd Island. When he learned in 1418 that Kovstepovi Archaeological Society was mounting an expedition to explore Rhwd Island, he saw an opportunity. If he could convince the Kovstepovi Archaeological Society to contract labour for exploration and excavation on Rhwd Island from the Order of Alcinette, he would be in control of a large scale operation that could potentially uncover a colossus. In pursuit of his goals, he aggressively closed several deals to land the contract with the Kovstepovi Archaeological Society, which further ingratiated him with his superiors and gave him a lot of autonomy to run the expedition as he saw fit.

Starting in 1419, the Commodore began doctoring his books, relocating the best diggers and engineers from his other projects to accelerate progress at a secret site on Rhwd Island, all while maintaining a slow, steady pace for the Kovstepovi Archaeological Society expedition elsewhere. Also during this year, he discovered gnomic secrets that allowed him to create an eye to replace his lost eye, enabling him to see through the eyes of his clockwork falcon at will.

He maintained a strict code of secrecy so that word of the discovery would not leak out. The workers he reallocated to the project would have their disappearances covered up by official settlements to the families, declaring they had sadly been killed while working to complete their sentences. Eventually, after more that a year of exploring the ruin, in 1420, the Commodore indeed located an intact colossus.

The towering 100’ tall clockwork war machine was his ticket to exacting his revenge, all he needed to do was get it working. This proved more complicated, and the Commodore was forced to slowly involve the scholars of the Kovstepovi Archaeological Society in his work, carefully and selectively dismantling his information silos to learn what he needed to learn without revealing the scope of his deceptions.

After another year of study, in 1421, it was determined that clockwork automata had critical internal workings known as fluid logic gates that enabled them to move. The one needed for the colossus had never been cast, so the Commodore and his engineers desperately searched for the plans, molds and furnaces that could cast the needed transmission. Eventually they found them, and a transmission valve was cast in steel. But the oils they had access to were not of the right viscosity to allow the machine to work.

Also in 1421, the Commodore negotiated a contract to perform major repairs on the bridge at Lowbridge near Cairgherd, including the replacement of a large section of the bridge span. This was entirely a ruse, started as a plan to justify bringing an enormous barge into Cairgherd. At the same time, constrcuction of a 120' long barge with its own sails and rigging that could be towed and guided by 6 sailing ships was begun in an inland bay on Rhwd Island. The barge would ferry the colossus to Cairgherd when ready.

By late 1422, given to their limited ability to decipher gnomic writings, the Kovstepovi Archaeological Society determined that the liquid needed to work the transmission was iron ant acid - which could only be harvested from the iron ants which were a serious nuisance across the entire island. Not only did the Commodore need to harvest dozens of litres of the acid, but he also needed over $250,000 worth of gold in order to cast a new transmission valve out of the only known metal that would not decay in contact with the volatile acid.

By early 1423, Commodore Gunmay's plan was nearing fruition and he expected to activate his colossus by summer and barge it on to Cairgherd to destroy the Great Families and install himself as King of Cairgherd. After doing so, he would give the remaining gnomic ruin and its treasures to the Kovstepovi Archaeological Society, and he would give all the contracts to rebuild the city to the Order of Alcinette in order to broker peace with both factions and solidify his position.

Commodore Gunmay's Flotilla (circa 1423):