James W. Bosler

Human male heroic businessman

James Williamson Bosler was born one of four brothers in Silver Spring, Pennsylvania in 1833, where he attended school with his older brother, John Herman Bosler, until both moved west in 1852. After spending two years in Ohio where he started his first business, a general store in Moultrie. After the store was destroyed by fire, Bosler moved to Virginia. In Wheeling, Virginia, he was admitted to the Bar, but the life of a lawyer did not suit him. Continuing to Sioux City, Iowa, he partnered a real estate business with Charles E. Hedges, later establishing the Sioux City Bank in 1855. He continued to expand his wealth by investing in the cattle market and spent a term in the Iowa State Legislature before returning to Pennsylvania to marry Helen Beltzhoover of Boiling Springs in 1860. The couple had five children: Charles (born 1863), Frank (born 1869), Mary Eliza (born 1871), DeWitt Clinton (born 1873), and Helen Louisa (born 1879), although Charles died in December of 1870. Still maintaining control of the sizable cattle market out west, he moved to Nebraska in 1876 when his older brother passed away and took control of the family land holdings at the B Bar Ranch centered east of current-day Bridgeport, and eventually expanding into the Wyoming Territory for over 640,000-acres. While in control, Bosler purchased Texas cattle, fed them on the Nebraska grassy ranges, and then sold his stock to the federal government and businessmen back east. Then in late 1880, Bosler abruptly sold a vast majority of his cattle and land holdings to William Paxton’s Keystone Cattle Company, moving his family near the Wyoming Territory town of Howell, setting of the Eighth of the Bar Ranch.

Cobra Savage

Unknown time travelers

Mr. Crow

Human male heroic miscreant

An associate of Mr. Hatter, who is responsible for facilitating an annual meeting with James Bosler just north of Howell; a bivouac is evidence of his presence. Although the PCs have not encountered him, evidence gathered has placed him an accessory to the continued illness of Helen Louisa Bosler, by providing Susanna Power with a bacterial agent.

Joseph Eloy

Human male veteran mad scientist

Joseph Eloy was born in September 1852, a slave on the Green Hill plantation near Long Island, Virginia. With more and more whites being conscripted to the Confederate army after the outcome of the Battle of Gettysburg, Joseph's father, Lewis, was promoted to driver, and helped organize the 81 enslaved African Americans, as they worked in the tobacco and wheat fields of the 5000-acre plantation. Although he directed his son to work in the fields during the day, Lewis indulged his young Joseph’s keen understanding of machinery and allowed him to tinker with broken devices into the evening hours. Joseph's mother, Irene, worked inside the plantation house, with her three older sisters spread across the Confederate States. With Virginia abolishing slavery in March 1870* and the Civil War ending in April 1871*, the Eloy family was set free from Green Hill and moved north, settling around the area of Summersville, WV. Joseph was the eldest son of eight children, but around the age of 21, his father died of typhoid fever, and the family moved to Pittsburgh, PA to live with relatives. Joseph became a wainwright's apprentice, but he disliked the work and returned to his family barbering business, while working odd jobs as a handyman and reading about the ghost rock discovered from the Great Quake of 1868. At age 30, he said goodbye to his family, spending most of his savings on a train ride to St. Louis (and a five-pound chunk of ghost rock) where he connected with European settlers who planned to travel overland on the Oregon Trail. Working as a scout and repairman to maintain the Conestoga wagons, Joseph made the arduous journey as far as Cheyenne, where he felt the town had enough technology and western appeal to satiate whatever desire he had going West. Unfortunately, although far from the South, he still discovered racism to be something the Civil War could not cure and found himself a low rent flat outside of town where he set up his shop. If not for his social status, his inventions would most likely have caught the eye of mass-produced gadget companies, like Smith & Robards, as Eloy’s gadgets were on par without the drawbacks which plague most ghost rock devices. Content with his quiet life, it was not until Eloy encountered Dutton & Co. and was offered an opportunity to start a new life in Howell. 

Reverend Colin "Priest" Holmes

Human male seasoned blessed

Priest Colin Holmes, Anglican minister, from Goodwick, PemBrookshire Wales, England. His wife, Frances, and their two sons, Hezekiah and Uriah, left him after accusations of misconduct during the exorcism of Katherine Thompson. Charges were later dropped, but his name was never fully restored. He had a vision to go east until God sent gave him a sign to stop. He was born in 1857 in Portsmouth, and went to seminary at Ridley Hall in Cambridge, England.

Ole "The Swede" Johannsen

Human male veteran cowboy

Ole Johannsen was born in 1858, the sixth child of nine to Gustav and Kristina Johannsen in the Gamla Stan section of Stockholm, the capital of Sweden.  As he graduated from Uppsala University in Stockholm and from the Uppsala finance department in 1833, Gustav taught economics at the university while Kristina, born in the Grand Principality of Finland shortly after the invasion of the Russian empire, stayed at home to raise their children while receiving a small pittance from a distant autocratic grandfather. Ole lived a simple life attending school when required, but spending vast amounts of time outdoors when the opportunity arose. The family lived an uncomplicated life until Storsvagåret ('Year of Great Weakness') marked the beginning of the Swedish famine of 1867. Thousands of people had no access to food or sanitation, and as a result, malnutrition and disease became widespread. Struggling to feed a family of eleven, Gustav and Kristina emigrated to the United States following other family members determined to survive. Arriving at Castle Garden in Manhattan in 1868, the Johannsen family followed the great migration to Minnesota, but fell short of their destination when Ole’s youngest sister died of typhus while traveling through Wisconsin. Not wanting to risk his family further, Gustav found work at Carroll College and the family settled in Waukesha. With his father wanting him to study theology, Ole rather further continued his fascination with dime novels of trailblazers like Daniel Boone and Kit Carson, more so than the thought of reading Scripture and continuing in school. With his mother’s blessing, Ole left home at eighteen taking the railroad as far west as he could afford, landing in Dodge City, Kansas. With his thick accent and innate stubbornness, it took Johannsen some time to realize being labelled “hopplehead” was a dismissive term further prompting him to waste away his savings with poker and landing himself in jail on multiple occasions for getting into fights. At one point of desperation, Johannsen became part of the lawlessness, stealing money for food and becoming known to law enforcement as a miscreant. Realizing he needed a fresh start after a stern jailhouse discourse from Sheriff Bat Masterson, the lawman put Johannsen on a train east to Salina, with a note helping him get a start at Joseph G. McCoy’s stockyards in Abilene, Kansas. Still a stranger in a strange land, Johannsen continued south with a group of returning Texans; cowboys who had recently driven herds of longhorns north along the Chisholm Trail. While in Dallas, Johannsen connected with veteran cattle herder Clancy Brown, who introduced the former to a young John Dutton, with the burgeoning cattle magnate offering Johannsen a legitimate job, and giving him a nickname which Johannsen has worn as a badge of pride: The Swede.

Jay Joyce

Human male veteran cowboy

A former bookkeeper from Des Moines, He and his brothers are alleged to have fled Iowa after being involved in a violent street clash in the mining town of Buxton. Jay Joyce left that life behind and headed farther west eventually coming into the employment of James Bosler. Not taking the usual path of a traditional western cowboy, Joyce quickly learned to live the life, and became one of Bosler’s most trusted associates.  Following him into Wyoming, Joyce is the one man that Bosler has supreme confidence in for tackling the tough jobs that make other men wilt. 

Frank Leaphorn

Human male veteran scout

Frank Leaphorn is a half-Chippewa scout who has ranged over the United States Great Plains from Wisconsin to Utah. Leaphorn was born in 1839 with the Chippewa name of Azaadi, meaning “poplar tree”. Although the identity of his Anglo-American father has come into question, he was raised by his mother Ominotago (“beautiful voice” in Chippewa) in the Iowa Territory of what now modern-day Minnesota. Raising her son according to tribal laws, Ominotago maintained throughout her life that her son was conceived after an American soldier forced himself upon her when she was collecting water from a nearby creek; her proof was his sidearm which she spirited away with. Recognizing he was different than most of the other boys on the reservation, Ominotago was more open than other families to the ideas of Jesuit priests educating young Chippewa about modern America. With his mother dying from measles when he was fifteen, Azaadi completed his education three years later, setting out on his own. Heading west and changing his name to a more anglicized Frank Leaphorn, he offered his services as a translator, scout, and bounty hunter to those who were willing to pay in most of the northern territories. Later he found himself in the employ of Major General John Pope where he assisted U.S. Forces in the Dakota War of 1862, although this relationship ended when Pope was appointed command to the Department of the Missouri. He further made a name for himself by tracking down and bringing in Cletus Brodie, a cattle thief out of Bismarck. Eventually, he found his way to Deadwood where he became an associate of Samuel Speirs, before moving to the Wyoming Territory.

Owly-McBeal

Great horned owl female animal companion

The Boy and this gentle creature became fast friends when the latter helped pull the struggling youth from a raging river. Now the Boy has died, the owl appears at various times to notify the PCs of great danger.

Prometheus

Secret cabal

With Lennox Roberson as their leader, this groups goals remain mysterious, even as their connections contain miscreant proclivities.

Lola Quarters

Human female veteran businesswoman

The woman who would later become known as Lola Quarters was born Hanora Moore to her mother Bridget Moore and her alleged father, Captain Declan Doherty of the Royal Irish Regiment, outside of Curragh Camp in a tent on the plains of Kildare, Ireland on May 3, 1845. Known as one of the “Wrens of Curragh”, Hanora’s mother lived in a communal lifestyle near the army camp using prostitution as a means of survival, also sharing food and belongings with other women of the camp. She was often frequented by Captain Doherty, who would appear in the camp during his off-duty hours, and after learning of her pregnancy, spoke of his obligation to provide for an expectant son. However, Moore bore a daughter, naming her Hanora after her own mother who had died of typhus when Bridget was in her teenage years. Weeks after her birth, a rushed Captain Doherty visited Bridget explaining of an accident involving himself and the death of an enlisted man, and how he intended to flee the area with or without Bridget and her daughter for fear of court martial; records later indicated an intoxicated Doherty bludgeoned a corporal for not saluting him sufficiently. Seeing Doherty as an opportunity to rise about her status, Bridget and Hanora fled with him east to Dublin, where she married the disgraced army officer as he used his family connections to collect enough funds to book passage on the S.S. Perseverance to New York City arriving in early 1846. Life in the New World was fraught with difficulties in middle of the 19th century, more so because of their Irish descent. Doherty made in-roads with local Irish families in the area, constantly talking about traveling west for free land in Oregon, but plans were cut short when he disappeared after working a late-shift at the docks. Left with some money from her husband, Bridget embarked on her spouse’s dream and traveled west to St. Louis in the summer of 1847 with a young Hanora in tow. Living in the Gateway to the West for the next months, Hanora’s mother fell upon bad times, deserting her daughter days into the westward wagon train, leaving her in the care of the family of John and Laura Buckley. Giving her the nickname Dolores after a favorite aunt, the Buckley family continued their travels to Oregon, caring for their newest family member, but not embracing her as one of their own. Arriving in Oregon City, the Buckleys tried their best to provide for their children, but money issues prompted the difficult choice to leave Dolores with John and Erin MacWalter, an Irish family of settled farmers. Life was difficult for Hanora/Dolores who was treated more as a servant girl and farmhand than a family member. In 1861, at age 16, she ran away from home for the third and final time, heading to Portland and changing for surname to Quarters (a slight change from Quarlters, the Americanized version of MacWalter). Finding quickly the Irish were despised from coast-to-coast, she also learned to hide her accent, as the city life lead her into the same occupation as her birthmother. After working the streets for several years, she became smitten and pregnant with Donald Hager from Ft. Worth in 1867, intending to marry him until she later found out about his current wife in Missouri. Breaking off the engagement, Hager sought to save face by providing Dolores (now naming herself Lola) a tidy sum from his family’s fortune, and returned to Texas, while Lola gave birth to her daughter Erin in 1868; the child later died in 1870 from whooping cough. Bereft of family and wanting a new start, she followed the Idaho gold rush, opening a brothel in Boise. Success was quick, but after working in a male-dominated society and dealing with local organized crime, she decided to follow ghost rock fever east to Wyoming where she experienced the benefits (and dangers) of being mobile, rather than staying in one place.

Lennox Oberon Titanian Roberson

Human male veteran philanthropist

Lennox Oberon Titanian Roberson was born on November 23, 1822, in a simple cabin in Camden, NJ. His father Benjamin was a Shakespearean actor working at the Walnut Street Theater with the build and chiseled features of a leading man, but who struggled with a stutter that arose at the most inopportune times during performances leading to jeering from his audiences. Roberson was the third of four children born to Benjamin and his wife Mary Wilcox, who was talented in music and enthusiastic about literature. With Benjamin's few connections to the theatre and Philadelphia society, Lennox received an education that was of a higher quality than typically accessible to others of his social standing, even overleaping his family’s lower-class status to attend the University of Pennsylvanian Carey Law School. Lacking the zeal for the theatre and the impatience for living novice lawyer’s lifestyle, Roberson jumped at the chance to enlist in the U.S. Army at the age of 23 to fight in the Mexican War. A northern Democrat who believed that the abolitionist movement was a fundamental threat to the nation's unity, Lennox left Philadelphia in July 1846, arriving in New York as part of the 1st Regiment of New York Volunteers (10 companies of 77 men) under Col. Jonathan D. Stevenson to sail to California with the understanding that they would muster out and stay in California, but also fighting alongside with General Stephen Watts Kearny during California Campaign, where he was awarded a battlefield commission as a second lieutenant. In February of 1848, Mexico and the United States signed a treaty which ended the Mexican War and yielded a vast portion of the Southwest, including present day California, to the United States. With the war over and learning his father had passed from pulmonary tuberculosis, his mother was engaged to another man, and his three sisters had started their own families, when Lennox was discharged from the military, he chose to stay out west to start a family, after meeting Gertrude Hughes (born 1828), the daughter of a shoemaker. The couple married the next year with Roberson using his legal training in San Francisco to provide for a simple lifestyle. His business became more prosperous with the discovery of gold in Sutter’s Mill and the influx of prospectors influenced his choice to focus on mining claims in the 1850s. It was at this time, the couple had three sons, all who died in childhood. Lennox Jr. (born 1854) died in infancy, while Alexander Henry (born 1857) died at the age of four from epidemic typhus, with Duncan Claudius (born 1859) dying in a natural disaster. Depressed from the loss of two children, news of the Civil War refocused Roberson’s life. At Fort Point in San Francisco, Kentucky-born Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston, then commander of the Department of the Pacific, resigned his commission to join the Confederate Army, leading a shortage of officers and permitting Roberson to achieve the rank of Brevet Major and allowing him to stay near his family. Throughout the Civil War, artillerymen at Fort Point stood guard for an enemy that almost never came until the Confederate raider CSS Shenandoah was repulsed during an attack on San Francisco in 1865. The War Between the States continued to grind back east with greater technological advances causing more death and despair, but California was relatively untouched by these issues until the Great Quake of 1868. The disaster destroyed Fort Point and most of San Francisco, with Lennox surviving only by happenstance as he was being transported across San Francisco Bay by schooner. Finding the bodies of his family was a crushing blow, even as the catastrophe left him in charge of military operation to rescue the remaining civilian population, and though he persevered in saving lives, he sunk deeper into depression. Resigning his commission from Fort Lincoln one week after the Confederacy surrendered in 1871, he traveled by horseback toward Sacramento with no intent of arriving at his destination. Struck with grief and ready to commit suicide, this was the first time....

Archibald "Archie" Smithers

Human male novice deputy marshal

Archibald James Smithers was born to Phillip Charles and Mary Harriett (nee Turner) Smithers on January 17, 1868, in Cincinnati, Ohio. He was the second of five children, following older sister, Abigail, with three more siblings to follow, Sarah Catherine, Nathaniel Joseph (who died in infancy), and Elizabeth Ann. Phillip’s father, Richard Warren Smithers, chose to settle down in Cincinnati in 1826 during the construction on the Miami and Erie Canal with the project connecting Cincinnati to nearby Middletown. Phillip found employment in the pork processing industry at the Khan’s Meat Plant working extended hours to provide for his family. It was 1876 when Archibald had his first and only experience in the meat packing industry as his father Phillip fell during work, breaking his hip, and with a lack of child labor laws, Archibald was conscripted to work for three months in place of his father to keep Phillip's job. The experience removed any desire for Archibald to follow in his father’s occupational choice. As an above average student in school and a voracious reader, the younger Smithers did not fancy himself working in his father's trade and applied himself in honing his writing skills. With dreams of being a journalist, Smithers's life profoundly changed at 11 when playing with friends near an abandoned building. Separated briefly during a hiding game, Smithers came upon the body of Carl Hamilton, a vagrant who had been dead for several days, and reported to police he had heard the man talking about his chest hurting, that he was alone and scared, and that he was calling out for Mildred; further investigation by police indicated Mildred was Carl’s deceased wife. Further events occurred as Smithers continued to hear voices when he chose to listen in the most unexpected places: the sick and aged lamenting on the outskirts of the Cincinnati Music Hall, pioneer voices struggling at the old cemetery behind Wesley Chapel, children crying at Washington Park from the 1830s cholera outbreak, etc. Unlike the traditional interacting with apparitions of the deceased that many mediums and spiritualists espoused of, Smithers found he was able to access a person's mind as it was before death, if he was close to a person’s remains or if their spirit lingered nearby. Smithers looked to capitalize on this ability financially by offering his services as a medium but found many of his customers thought him a fraud or were unsatisfied with the news they received, leaving him unpaid during most of his sessions. Word around Cincinnati began to spread that Smithers might be a crook or insane, but his worst experience came during confession at St. Peter-in-Chains Cathedral when the father confessor chased him from the church shouting Smithers was in league with Satan. However, the next day, the same father confessor and other priests from the area reached out to test Smithers on his abilities. Although unsure of his mediumship, the clergy cleared Smithers name in connection with the Devil and encouraged him to leave the area to prevent a rising apprehension about his abilities. Leaving school with the blessing of his mother, Smithers headed west with a blank journal to write stories of those who died from unforeseen circumstances. He arrived in Howell looking to find honest work, but ended up becoming deputy marshal and learned to embrace paranormal abilities.

Clara Snow

Human female veteran businessman/ Wichita Witch

Clara

Samuel Oswald Speirs

Human male veteran businessman

Samuel Oswald Speirs was born in Manchester, NH, in 1832, the oldest son of Vincent Speirs, a house painter, and of his second wife, Alice Dubois, a former Lowell mill girl and sister to the Catholic Archbishop of New York John Dubois. As with his occupation, Vincent Speirs often moved his family to different northern states searching for work to provide for his wife and children including stops in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, and Michigan. Not wanting his family to struggle, Vincent sent young Samuel away in 1850 to study in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan with the hopes he might become an educated man. There, Samuel met his future wife, Amelia Carolina Ward; born in 1837, she was the daughter of Captain Samuel Ward, a reputable businessman and shipbuilder of the Great Lakes. Samuel and Amelia were married in 1855, when she was 18 and he was 22 years old, but Amelia’s father died suddenly soon after leaving the couple with little inheritance as most of the wealth went to Ward’s nephew and business partner, Eber Brock Ward. Soon after the marriage, Speirs left school and became a clerk for his cousin-in-law at the Wyandotte Rolling Mill Company to make use of the iron produced by Eureka Iron Work’s furnaces; both companies owned by Eber Brock Ward. A few years later, the couple moved to Wisconsin, where Speirs managed the Easton mining company's production and business operations. However, while pregnant with her third child (her first two were stillborn), health problems forced Amelia to return to Michigan and live with her family. She never recovered completely after the birth of their son Richard, and she died in 1861, at the age of 24. After Amelia's death, Speirs placed Richard under the care of his mother in Ann Arbor and moved from Wisconsin back to Wyandotte to be near his son and still manage his finances. His family was concerned about his grief for his wife, and to help him, they encouraged Speirs to travel west, where he would be able to reinvigorate his life. Moving to Minneapolis, Speirs attempted to reinvent himself first in the lumber industry, then the flour milling industry, but neither venture was successful. The only enterprise which was profitable was co-ownership of the Carolina machine shop; named after his wife. However, word of Richard’s death from diphtheria brought his spirits lower, and he sold his half of the machine shop to move farther west into the Dakota Territory in 1868. Eventually ending up in Deadwood in 1870, Speirs set up a metalworks/firearms store making connections with other businesses and becoming popular with the locals. When his business burned down in 1879, along with much of the town, Speirs rebuilt his establishment to public acclaim and was married the next year to Katherine Charles, a former prostitute. To successfully rebuild, Speirs needed additional funding, leading to money lending by Al Swearengen, one of Deadwood’s most notorious citizens. After several years of struggle paying off his never-ending debt to Swearengen, Speirs sent his wife away to Michigan in late 1882 (she has since divorced him) and made plans to leave Deadwood behind without notice. Hiring Frank Leaphorn to lead his wagon train through the Sioux Territory, he abandoned his shop and his wares in Deadwood, looking to start a new life in Wyoming.

Patrick Telchar

Human male veteran nice guy

Associate with Mr. Hatter and Mr. Roberson.

James Avery Thomisee

Human male veteran politician

James Avery Thomisee, a bitter, but amiable man with a pronounced limp, is the current mayor of Howell, WY. Born on September 12, 1839, in Davenport, Iowa, he was the son of a limestone miner and helped at home with his two sisters. Named after his father, he decided at a young age to go by “Avery” when associating with family and friends. Not wanting to follow in his father’s footsteps, he studied economics at Clarke University, which led him to Washington D.C. to take a position at the U.S. Department of the Interior. In 1864, with the Union Army continuing to conscript young men for the Civil War, he was promoted to an agent of the Department of the Interior, working as a precursor of the modern-day U.S. Geological Survey, and finding an assignment in the mid-West. Soon after, he met and wed Lilly Eady, a petite beauty from Indianola, IA. She traveled with him everywhere while he was in the service of the Department of the Interior. After ten years of trying unsuccessfully to conceive, Lilly discovered she was pregnant and spent a small fortune to commission a finely carved crib that would hold her husband’s child during his first year of life. Unfortunately, Lilly had complications during the birth. She hemorrhaged, became feverish, and died a few days later. Avery was beside himself with grief but lovingly cared for the child, a boy he named Aldin. However, the child did not long outlive his mother and died before he was half a year old. Avery has never recovered from these losses. Pushing on, Avery allowed work to consume him to take away from the sting of grief, leaving Iowa behind. Avery’s connection with James Bosler, through the latter’s land dealings in Nebraska, brought him out to Howell out of pity for his age and sadness, with the hope that Avery might find purpose to overcome his grief. Backed by Mr. Bosler, Avery won unopposed for the position of Howell’s mayor. He shares his home with an elderly uncle, Carl Thomisee, who serves as his family connection and household manager, while Avery often spends his hours staring at his son’s empty crib. Later, when Simon Macht and his gang caused a commotion in Howell, Avery confronted the leader, but hamstrung by a gunshot in his right leg. Although he was healed by Priest Holmes days later, he walks with a limp to this day.

Twilight Legion

Secret cabal

The whispers began in the smoldering ruins of the Great Library of Alexandria. Amidst the scrolls reduced to ash, a lone scholar stumbled upon a brittle tablet etched with arcane symbols. It spoke of the Veil, a membrane that held back a realm of eldritch horrors that hungered for our world, and it spoke of a prophecy that an oath-bound order would be tasked with mending the Veil whenever it frayed. Thus began the legacy of the group now known as the Twilight Legion, cloaked in secrecy for fear of mass hysteria. They were alchemists and assassins, scholars and spies, bound by arcane rituals and unwavering resolve. Through the ages, they have been known by many names: the Sword That Has Been Drawn, the Veiled Echelon, the Society of the Shroud. However, their purpose remains constant: to stand between humanity and the encroaching darkness.   Over the first millennia, members of the Twilight Legion brutally for the containment of evil: battled shadow-spawn in forgotten crypts, banished rogue djinn from bustling marketplaces, and exorcised whispered madness from the minds of kings. Each victory pushed back the Abyss, but each tear in the Veil demanded a sacrifice. Countless Twilight Legion members fell, their names etched on the walls hidden within the Echo Chamber, the secret headquarters beneath the Vatican. As always, knowledge is the Twilight Legion’s shield, and the Echo Chamber is their armory. From unearthed ancient grimoires, deciphered forgotten tongues, and bartered forbidden lore from enigmatic entities, every scrap of knowledge is a weapon, but it is also a desperate gamble against the unknown.   The Renaissance brought a fragile peace. Legionnaire scholars emerged from the shadows, posing as polymaths and magi, using their influence to foster scientific inquiry, hoping reason could dispel the shadows. Yet, the Abyss, it seemed, had grown cunning. It twisted technology, birthing magic, monstrosities, and corrupted humans that threatened to become the nightmares past Legion members had dreamt of. The Legion was forced to adapt. They recruited “gifted” humans and benevolent supernatural creatures, forming a division which serves as the public face of the Twilight Legion called the Explorer’s Society, using mystical tools and technology to battle those creatures that go bump in the night.  Today, Twilight Legion faces its gravest challenge. The Abyss seems to be coalescing, and the true enemy has revealed itself as the four Reckoners, denizens of the Hunting Grounds looking to invade our plane of existence. They whisper promises of power, manipulating the disenfranchised, the angry, and the lost. Their four Servitors served as champions. A dead man named Jasper Stone served Death, Reverend Ezekiah Grimme catered to Famine, Dr. Darius Hellstromme devastated the world for Pestilence, and Raven, the Indian shaman who started the Reckoning anew in this era, was War’s avatar. Although each member has been recently defeated, none were destroyed, allowing all four to retreat to their perspective homes to reallocate resources and plan anew with their focus on the Wyoming Territory.  The Twilight Legion is stretched thin, their numbers dwindling, and their resources strained. They remain the silent guardians, the oath-bound menders, the champions of light. If a single ember of hope flickers in the human heart, they stand watch looking to mend the Veil, and keep the Reckoners at bay. 

Guinevere "Jenny" Upchurch

Human female explosives savant

Jenny.

Coy Wheeler

Human male veteran businessman

Coy Tyson Wheeler was born in Cumberland, VA in 1845 to Sadie and Clement Wheeler, a blacksmith and nail-maker. Clement later moved to his wife and six children to Petersburg, VA, where he started a blacksmith shop, and Coy was a young boy when his father died in 1856, forcing him to work in apprenticeship with his father’s competitors. With Virginia seceding from the United States in April 1861 and war fever sweeping the South, Wheeler left his family in Petersburg and moved to Richmond, gaining employment at Tredegar Iron Works, as he was still under the minimum age requirements for enlistment in the Confederate Army. Wheeler began his career at Tredegar as a puddler, learning the process of converting pig iron to wrought iron in Tredegar’s reverberatory furnace. However, youth and vigor were no match for the particulates in the air of the iron mill and when Wheeler became eligible to enlist, it was the early stages of black lung which prevented his entry into the Army of Northern Virginia in 1863. Undetered, Wheeler continued to help the South’s war effort by gaining employment at the Virginia Manufactory of Arms, installing stocks on Confederate rifles. He continued working until most of the facility was destroyed during the Evacuation Fire of 1865. With the war over and distraught over the loss of his country, Wheeler left Virginia and headed to St. Louis hoping to find a new start at the Gateway to the West, where he worked as a clerk at a law firm and with the bulk of his business being in bill collecting. In 1869, he met and married librarian Greta Stevenson, and opened a general store on the outskirts of St. Louis to outfit those who wished to travel along the Oregon Trail. Finding that managing a business was over his head, he sold what was left of his general store and joined a wagon train in 1880 as handyman, leaving his wife in St. Louis with the promise to return with enough money to settle down; they have since divorced. Traveling through the mid-West, his wagon train was set upon by raiding Sioux warriors, only sparing him when he was left for dead. Wandering the plains and ready to give up on life, he was rescued by Jay Joyce out searching for cattle after a rainstorm. Taken back to his home, Joyce introduced Wheeler to James Bosler who offered him a new start in Howell as the owner of the Tiger Saloon.

Wolflings

Humanoid monstrosities

Indian tribes of the Northwest tell of wolflings, predatory wolf-men with pure white coats that live in the lost valleys of the Cascade Range. They’re often mistaken for werewolves, but these creatures don’t change from human to animal form. They remain savage beasts regardless of the moon’s phase.  Wolflings aren’t creatures of the Reckoning—they existed long before it—but their numbers have certainly increased since the return of magic to the world. The specific tribe of wolfling encountered in the Sioux Nations were called the Pale Manes. Two hundred years ago, on the Great Plains, a tribe of humans was driven from their homes by Crow Indian raiders. The group banded together and went west into the now Wyoming Territory. One of the women, Rose (Uŋžíŋžíŋtka), was the runaway half-human daughter of Genevieve Adolphe, a patua from another world. Years later, a group of them pushed farther west and founded a settlement called Tarma. There, they attracted the attention of a group of wolflings. One year after its founding, the settlement of Tarma lay in ruins. The wolflings, having tasted the blood of humans, began moving east in ravenous packs. In three months, they had claimed over six hundred victims as far south as the Cheyenne River, and among them was Rose. Genevieve Adolphe, enraged by her loss, slew hundreds of the wolflings until all that remained were the twelve members of a pack called the Pale Manes. As Genevieve Adolphe prepared to end them, one of the wolflings came forward and begged for mercy. She told the patua that she and her comrades were all that remained of their species, and that they would gladly accept any other punishment rather than see their race extinguished. Genevieve Adolphe struck a bargain with the wolflings. She forced them to help rebuild the villages around the Smoke River Gully. Then, one by one, he imprisoned their lifeforces in crystals and stored each crystal in Maegovannen. Genevieve Adolphe placed the crystals containing the wolflings' lifeforces in a stone chamber (except for two, which she kept with her) and hid the portal to Maegovannen with a stone door. When Blue Legs’ war party found the chamber, Blue Legs recognized the arcane symbols. After breaching the portal, he opened the Hall of Crystals and removed the crystals. He broke six of the crystals, releasing the occupants, and with some careful lying, convinced the wolflings that he was Genevieve Adolphe’s envoy. He assured them that their brothers and sisters would also be freed if they helped destroy the End Village.