NPCs of note (Bara Gairo)

Continuing my description of Bara Gairo, a small seaside town near to and associated with Porto Liure that is a good, small environment in which to start a DARK•HERITAGE game.  This post is on a handful of important local NPCs around town that the player characters might wish to interact with.  Clearly, its not meant to be exhaustive.

Alfonso Galland — A middle-aged, sturdy fisherman.  He owns a boat that he operates with his son, Éttiene.  He's widowed and also lives with his daughter, Vittoria, who is an accomplished tracker and trapper of small animals, preferring to avoid the company of the village-folk for the solitude of the woods.  Despite his rather taciturn children, Alfonso himself is friendly and kind, and among the villagers, is the most likely to be convinced to help in a tough spot.  Bring danger or trouble to his children, though, and you'll see a dark, ugly side of Alfonso.

Braz Vargas — Owner of the Lima's Spirits, the inn, tavern, and general store for Bara Gairo.  Braz is a large man, who displays a degree of wealth unusual for this small village.  His common room is nearly always full, while his rooms rarely are.  In addition to running the inn, he also is the local brewer, and most of the folks in the island drink small beer brewed by Vargas as their day to day drink.  Friendly on the surface, Vargas is also notoriously untrustworthy and cowardly.  The locals like to hang out in his common room and drink his spirits, but otherwise don't trust him with much.

Inés Peixoto — Although she purports to be a simple assistant and serving woman at the Lima's Spirits; a distant relative of Vargas' taken in by his charity, it's a fairly open secret that Inés is actually an agent of the Castiada crime family.  Rumors are thick in town about how Vargas got saddled with her, the most popular being that he was deep into debt with the mafiosos.

Cesar Gonzalez — An extremely skilled crafstman, Cesar claims to be able to fix anything that comes through town, and make most of what else is needed.  His skill with his tools makes him a popular person in town.  Idle talk around town occasionally refers to rumors that he honed his skills working with the Castiadas, and has "retired" to the country--with a head full of secrets.

Jaufré Marcuçez — The "mayor" and semi-official town leader, Jaufré is notorious for being somewhat indecisive, and its no secret that Camilla, his sturdy farmwife and a highly religious person, actually calls the shots.  She is greatly respected, but has little patience for fools.

Evike von Rajecz — As a Tarushan "Gypsy" Evike is one of the most exotic townsfolk.  She lives simply, long having given up her roaming days, but is famous for her fortune-telling—which is only taken half-seriously by the townsfolk.

Kemal Hajdari — This brusque wildman is the town's primary source of non-seafood meat, furs and leathers.  In addition to hunting and slaughtering, his house doubles as a small tannery and leatherworking facility.  He's taken a liking to the similarly taciturn Vittoria Galland, calling her his "little niece."  He knows more about the islands nearby—once you're beyond the beach, anyway—than anyone else around.

Gisati Tahhi — A middle-aged hamazin woman, who lives in a large house with a bunch of children, none of them her own.  Most of them are orphans—or presumed to be—who shipwrecked with her eleven years ago just north of the harbor.  They were brought into the town, the house made for them with the wreckage from their ship (mostly by Alfonso Galland and Cesar Gonzalez), and her services as a small orphanage were seen as good for the town.  A few more children were moved in after a bout of plague swept through the town.  Curiously, she claims no knowledge of who her charges were or what the mission of the ship was that brought them.  The captain was killed in the wreck.

Although I haven't yet committed it in writing, I'm also developing a number of secrets associated with most of these characters.  Giving campaign elements secrets is one of the best ways to keep a campaign setting feeling rich, robust and alive, as well as being a potent driving force for the campaign overall—assuming you drop enough hints that the players start getting curious enough to investigate them.  I'll either commit those in writing in another post, or in the comments section of this post, and I'll write a FRPG post about secrets sometime in the future.

Bara Gairo

Bara Gairo is a small farming town on the island of Cala Gairo, just a few miles to the northeast of Porto Liure.  There's about half a dozen such small towns located near Porto Liure, and Bara Gairo is representative, in many ways, of what all of them are like.

The inhabitants of Bara Gairo are Liurans, mostly, but they live in a kind of self-imposed exile of sorts.  While Gandesa--the island on which Porto Liure sits--is fairly large and contains a fair amount of arable land, Cala Gairo and its sister-villages provide much of the agrictulture that keeps Porto Liure fed; Gandesa by itself and the Liuran city-folk are incapable of doing so on their own.

There are about fifty homesteads on the island, and probably 350 or so people who live in Bara Gairo.  Ten of the homesteads operate small fishing boats that plough the shoals near the town for fish and shellfish.  These boats tend to be fairly old and somewhat rickety, although reasonably well maintained.  They are slow and adequate for the two day long milk runs to Porto Liure required to sell their stock, as well as prowling the local waters for fish.  At any given time, seven or eight will be in the area, while the others will be in Porto Liure or en route.  Another thirty to thirty five homesteads are farmers who grow olives, peppers, figs, grapes, and other crops, or who tend sheep and goats for wool, milk and meat.  The remaining families tend to gravitate towards other crafts--there's a blacksmith, an innkeeper, a couple carpenters, etc.  The basics required to keep a rural town operating reasonably self-sufficiently.

Bara Gairo harbor

The population rarely grows or shrinks significantly.  While plenty of children are born to the families in Bara Gairo, only a few of them will remain to take on their family's occupations, while the others will make their way to Porto Liure to find their fortune, apprentice to a craftsman of some kind, or take to sea on the crew of a merchant or pirate ship.  Since many of the adults are retired old sea dogs, this is seen as not only acceptable, but even desirable.  This also means that at any given time, a substantial portion of the population are veterans of some kind of combat experience.  They keep themselves relatively well armed and trained, just to ensure that an eager or desperate pirate crew doesn't find them easy enough pickings to be tempting.

A number of the people in Bara Gairo can also be seen as retired or reserve members of the Castiadas crime family.  Castiadas smugglers occasionally stop through the town, and Castiadas agents who find Porto Liure getting too hot temporarily occasionally hide out in Bara Gairo, living a quiet, unassuming life until it's safe to get back into town.

So, despite the fact that Bara Gairo is fairly sleepy and quiet, it's not completely cut-off or insular.  About 20% of the time, there's a non-local boat in the harbor, usually a semi-regular visitor from Porto Liure, but sometimes other traders or sailors with different motives.  And at any given time, probably 8-10 people will be in town who do not normally live there, two or three of which will be strangers; the rest of whom will be semi-regular.  Lima's Spirits is the inn in town; the largest building, and place where the farmers, fisherfolk and strangers alike are likely to congregate in the evenings.  And there's a small but cozy stone chapel maintained by Pare Haśteu, an Easterner with a strong accent despite having lived here now for decades.

Just outside of town, amongst the farms, is a run-down old stone building which has been sealed shut for years.  Nobody lives there, but it's commonly believed to be haunted, and strange lights and sounds can occasionally be seen after dark.  Local urban myth suggests that a sorcerer, looking for isolation, came to Bara Gairo years ago and somehow managed to curse the building, or was perhaps himself cursed to haunt it in some manner.  In fact, the haunted Osini house has become locally famous, and is the subject of a number of urban myths in Porto Liure itself.

Bara Gairo is designed specifically to be the kind of relatively quiet and quaint starting place so many RPGs like to begin in, but unlike some of the other such examples of the genre, there should be a slightly sinister cast to it.  Since many of the inhabitants are former gangsters or pirates, there are still ties to both coming through regularly--although quietly and discreetly, since it's also an important supply point for Porto Liure itself, and official notice can be brought to bear qiuckly if things look bad in town.  Furtive strangers could therefore be smugglers, assassins, hiding crime bosses or cultists--or they could merely be Liurans looking to escape from the ragged urban lifestyle, if they can manage to get away.  Some of them, in fact, are former residents who left as youths, but who return later, occasionally matured to unrecognizability, to see what has become of their former homes.

Aside from the village of Bara Gairo (and neighboring farms) itself, the island is rocky and steep, and covered with thick forest.  While it's a small island, and therefore doesn't hold very much in the way of large game, but some small white tailed deer and javelinas do make their way through the brush, hunted by rare cougars and some feral dogs that have lived untamed on the island for generations.  Occasional sightings of weirder things are reported, and in general, those of the village who like wandering the woods are looked at in askance; the villagers turn their faces towards the sea and away from the forest.

Deep in the interior, nestled among volcanic stones and hills, are the remnants of some past mysterious inhabitants--small stone cairns and carved standing stones, with brooding, weathered features and unreadable runes.  Disquieting half-heard noises can be heard near them on occasion, and there are persistent rumors of villagers who have disappeared near these standing stones, never to be seen again.

Coming soon: More specific hooks for things to have happen in or near Bara Gairo, and some discussion on how a campaign could start there, where it could go from there, and which themes and tone elements it would best serve.