Conner Steelheart

Human / Artificer

Submitted character story

Conner is 5'5, foul mouthed, and missing an arm. He built the replacement himself out of wreckage and demon magic and spite. It's the ugliest, most important thing he owns.

Quick version of why. He was born with a demonic mark in his left eye. Red iris, black where the white should be, the whole deal. His birth parents took one look at that and left him to die in the wilderness. A Minotaur couple found him instead. Blacksmith and carpenter. They raised him in a village called Marren's Eve, this little community of centaurs and minotaurs and all the creatures the rest of the world calls monsters. Conner grew up happy there. Learned to build things. Learned to talk to creatures most people would run from.

Then a group of Paladins showed up on a holy quest and burned it all down.
His parents died in the attack. Conner lost his arm and nearly bled out in the wreckage of his own home. That's when Baphomet came to him. The Demon Lord whose mark he'd carried since birth. Offered him a deal. Power, knowledge, and enough magic to make sure this never happened to anyone else. Conner said yes. He forged his prosthetic in the flames of Marren's Eve before they even cooled.
So yeah, he has opinions about paladins.

The arm is the whole character if I'm being honest. His adoptive parents taught him to craft. The raid took his real arm. His patron gave him the means to build a new one. Every major piece of his story lives in that one chunk of scrap metal and demonic energy bolted to his shoulder. There's a ram skull on the pauldron because Baphomet, and the gaps between the plates glow a faint red because it's not entirely a normal prosthetic. It's bulky and loud and kind of ugly. He doesn't care. He made it himself.

Everything else about him is simple on purpose. Brown coat with the left sleeve torn off. Work goggles holding his messy hair back. Fingerless glove on his good hand. Cheap cigarette. White scarf that doesn't match anything he owns because it was the last thing his parents gave him and he will absolutely fight you over it.

If you've ever played Final Fantasy 7, think Cid Highwind. That's the energy. Crude, sarcastic, talks like he doesn't care about anything, and then you watch him throw himself between a scared owlbear and a party of adventurers who wanted to kill it for XP. Our group figured out pretty fast that the quickest way to get Conner to do something reckless was to let him see someone with power pushing around someone without it.

We ran him through Dungeon of the Mad Mage. Everyone else was there for the treasure. Conner was there because he saw the monsters trapped in the Undermountain as victims, not encounters. He wanted to guide them out. He also wanted the gold, but only so he could build a new Marren's Eve somewhere safe. A home for the creatures nobody else would protect.

He's the best character I've ever made because nothing about him is complicated. Angry guy, big heart, fake arm, dead parents. That's it. But at the table it turns into something more than the sum of its parts. Every session I'd find a new reason he mattered to the story.