Dead Lee "Dudley" Hammernsickel[]
Introduction[]
Dudley joined the Company around the same time as Sammy. After Ar-Raguel introduced Rocco and Val to a heretical Olferb growing operation in the eastern Ekvatora foothills of the Northlands, the Sisters of Mercy who ran the farmstead encouraged the O'Dale brothers and Ar-Raguel to join them as they delivered a recent harvest to one of the few safe and stable port-towns in the region, Eventide. Along the way, the burgeoning Company and their Merciful new friends helped thwart a slaving raid on a halfling caravan also on its way to Eventide. Dudley had been visiting Eventide for both the upcoming carnival and olferb market. He made fast friends with the motley crew of a halfling, humans and elf who shred his taste for olferb.
Recognizing a unique kindness among these four new friends and misfits from their respective homelands, Dudley also related. After a week of bards, booze and buds, Dudley invited the crew to join him on the trip back to his adopted hearth and home, Mt. Egaleca. A long abandoned Dwarven mountain-kingdom and mine, hundreds of displaced folks from myriad species and all over the Northlands slowly resettled the mountain inside and out over the decades of Civil War. The earliest settlers of Egaleca adopted the sacred manifesto of the God, Kalmax the Redistributor and established an egalitarian society throughout the the former kingdom. Such an arrangement could not have been more different than the monarchy of Dudley's native-homeland from which he had been banished for years.
The Company spent weeks at Mt. Egaleca, their time there changing forever their perception of what a community could be. Their experiences, and the communal village in the Cornucopia where Rocco and Val grew up, would inform how they later decided to arrange and govern, "Killington Keep and all that lies in the shadows of its mountain."
Life Before The Company[]
Dead Lee "Dudley" Hammernsickel spent over a century as a sworn shield and highly respected engineer of the Dwarven Mountain-Kingdom, Gottesgnadentum. By the time he was 100 years old (perhaps mid-twenties for a Dwarf), he had earned a position among the Master engineers who determined the fate of Mt. Göttisch and was received well by the Kingdom's royalty.
But never as an equal.
Dudley fell in love with Pfifferling, a granddaughter of the King. Her Father, third in line to the throne, refused to let his daughter marry a 'common soldier and technician'. This typical proclamation from a royal resulted in an atypical reaction. Dudley was no 'common soldier' but a Holy Knight, a Paladin and commander in the mountain-militia. Additionally, as part fo the Council of engineers, he knew the tunnels of Gottesgnadentum better than dwarves three times his age. Pfifferling wanted to leave Gottesgnadentum with Dudley and so Dudley's most loyal squad from his platoon attempted to help him and Pfifferling leave the mountain-kingdom in secret.
The plan was found out and Pfifferling's father-prince challenged Dudley to a duel over the insult to his family (Dudley was accused of kidnapping a princess). Dudley knew well he could easily vanquish a bloated royal who had not lifted an axe in years, but could not bring himself to harm the father of the person he loved most in the world. Instead, he accepted banishment.
As a Ronin Paladin, Dudley fell from honoring the Gods of his homeland and in his wanderings discovered the sacred manifesto of Kalmax the Great Equalizer, a moral and pragmatic scripture that offered a path to economic equality and justice for all of Gaearth's peoples. Soon after, he heard of a community around Mt. Egaleca dedicated to Kalmax's teachings and would find a new home there for several years until meeting The Company.