Gribblit - XERES LIVE!

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Basic Information

Full Name

Gribblit

Nickname

"Mudfoot"

Race (Grade)

Kobold (F)

Class

Mushroom Farmer

Height

2'10"

Birthday

Mistfall 3, 1280

Age

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Birthsign

The Mist Chimera

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Bloodline Ability

🔮 Unknown

This Bloodline ability has not yet been unveiled to you.

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Physical Description

Gribblit, with the morning's harvest

Appearance

Gribblit is short and round even by kobold standards, a little under three feet tall and built more for crouching than climbing. His scales are a soft moss green, freckled across the cheeks and snout with small rust-brown speckles, fading to pale cream along his throat and belly. A crest of short leafy frills runs over the top of his head between two stubby horns, and bits of real moss and greenery tend to catch in it and stay there, because he rarely notices. His ear frills are wide and tinged pink at the edges, and his eyes are huge, round, and warm brown, the kind of eyes that make people want to apologize to him before he has said a word. He smiles easily and with his whole face, usually with the tip of his tongue showing. He dresses for damp, dark work: a cream hooded shawl draped over his shoulders, a long green work smock, and a patched canvas apron stamped with a faded brown mushroom. His belt is crowded with a trowel, a small knife, a gourd flask, a leather pouch of spore papers, and bundles of drying herbs, and he almost never puts down the wicker basket he carries on one arm. His feet are muddy. They are always muddy.

Unique Characteristics

Gribblit is clumsy, and he knows it. He trips over roots that were not there a moment ago, knocks things off shelves with his tail, misjudges steps, and has fallen into more streams than anyone in Burrowbough could count, which is how he earned the name "Mudfoot." He has an odd, careful way of moving because of it, testing the ground with each foot before trusting his weight to it, and he will reach for a wall or a railing even on flat ground. None of that clumsiness follows him into a mushroom grove. Among the beds and logs he moves slowly, quietly, and surely, the one place in the world where his hands always land where he means them to. He talks to his mushrooms in a low murmur while he works, mostly encouragement, and he smells permanently of damp earth, cut moss, and something faintly sweet he insists is a good sign. He can identify almost any mushroom by its smell alone and has never once been wrong about which ones are safe to eat.

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Notable Equipment & Companions

Mister Man

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Personality & Temperament

Positive Traits

Patient enough to wait a whole season for a crop
Knows every mushroom by smell, and never guesses
Gentle with anything small, scared, or growing
Laughs at his own falls once nobody else does
Shares every harvest before he eats any himself

Challenging Traits

Trips, drops, and knocks over almost everything
Apologizes for things that were not his fault
Shrinks away from crowds, noise, and attention
Quietly disappears for days if he is laughed at
Forgets to eat or sleep when a crop needs him

Mushrooms don't laugh when you fall down. They don't do anything when you fall down. That's what I like about them.

That one's for soup. That one's for fevers. That one will stop your heart before the soup boils. Please don't touch the basket.

I dropped everything that night. My lantern, my knife, my shoes. I didn't drop the jar. I don't know how. I'm glad.

Likes

Dark, damp, quiet places where nothing moves fast
The first pale knobs of a new flush breaking soil
Mushroom soup shared out of one big pot
The glow of luminous caps along a path at night
Friends who help him up without saying anything

Dislikes

Being laughed at, even when it is meant kindly
Ladders, stairs, and anything high up
Big-folk furniture with corners at his head height
People who pick mushrooms without knowing them
Dry weather that lasts more than a few days

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Background & History

A Clumsy Kobold in a Village Built Up Trees

Gribblit was born in Burrowbough, a kobold village deep in the Geldergreen where every home began in the roots of an old oak and climbed up into its boughs. For most kobolds, that was the best of both worlds. For a kobold who could not cross a branch without slipping off it, it was a daily embarrassment. Gribblit fell off ladders, fell out of perches, fell into the stream below the meeting hall so often that the other children started calling him "Mudfoot," and every time he fell, somebody laughed. Kobolds are kind folk and they rarely meant anything by it, but Gribblit heard every laugh and kept all of them. By the time he was ten, he had found the one place in Burrowbough where falling did not matter: the mushroom cellars dug among the roots at the bottom of the village, where it was too dark for anyone to watch and too low to fall very far. The old kobolds who kept the cellars let him stay, and then let him help, and then, when they grew too old to bend over the beds, let him take over. The mushrooms never laughed at him. He grew up among them and, by every account, grew the best mushrooms Burrowbough had ever eaten.

The Climb

On the night of Goldenleaf 26, 1307, Gribblit was down in the cellars turning the beds when he heard Kobbin hammering on the meeting hall's rain gutter overhead and shouting for everyone to get up the trees. He came out of the roots to find the dead already in the village. Every kobold in Burrowbough was climbing, and the clumsiest kobold in Burrowbough had to climb with them, in the dark, with the dead underneath. He dropped his lantern. He dropped his knife. He lost both his shoes. Halfway up the old oak beside the meeting hall, his foot slipped and he fell, and he would have gone all the way down if Kobbin had not been on the branch above with his tail hooked around it, reaching down to catch him by the wrist. Through all of it, Gribblit never let go of the one thing he had grabbed on his way out of the cellar: a small clay jar of living mushroom spawn, the mother culture of Burrowbough's oldest strain. It is the only thing from the cellars that survived the night.

Everything Is the Wrong Size

The big-folk towns at the edge of the Geldergreen were hard on all the survivors, but they were hardest on Gribblit. Everything was built for someone twice his height: steps he had to climb like ledges, chairs he had to scale, tables with corners that lined up exactly with his forehead. He walked into those corners. He tripped on doorsteps. In a shop he knocked a shelf of jars to the floor with his tail, and the shopkeeper made him pay for every one of them out of the little coin he had, while a line of big folk laughed behind him. It was the worst week of his life, and the laughing did not help. When word came that there was a kingdom called Haven where kobolds were welcome, he did not need to be asked twice. When Kobbin said he was going to the forest town of Silmarithil instead of Goodberry, Gribblit asked, very quietly, whether he could come too.

The Town That Grows Mushrooms

Gribblit walked into Silmarithil beside Kobbin on Harvestide 4, 1307, and he did not know yet what he was walking into. He found out that evening, when the luminous caps along the town's paths began to glow. Silmarithil lives under a canopy so thick that its forest floor stays cool and damp all year, and it grows mushrooms the way other towns grow wheat: in groves and cellars, along the walkways for light, and on nearly every table. Gribblit spent his first night in town sitting in the dark beside one of the cultivated groves, not touching anything, just smelling it. He said afterward that it was the first time since the night of the climb that he felt like he was home.

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Goals & Aspirations

Into the Groves

Gribblit wants to work in Silmarithil's mushroom groves more than he has wanted anything in his life, and he is far too shy to ask. He has walked past the groves eleven times since he arrived and has made it as far as the edge of the beds twice. He has already noticed which logs are drying out, which beds are being picked too early, and which of the luminous caps along the paths are running short of shade, and it is taking all of his courage not to quietly fix them in the night. Kobbin has offered to come and ask on his behalf. Gribblit is still deciding whether that would be braver or less brave.

The Hearthcaps

The jar Gribblit carried up the tree holds the last living culture of hearthcaps, the small, warm-brown mushroom that Burrowbough grew in its deepest cellars and cooked into every winter stew for as long as anyone could remember. Without it, the strain would be gone with the village. He means to start a bed of hearthcaps in Silmarithil as soon as he has a patch of dark, damp ground to call his own, and once the first flush comes in, he intends to send baskets of them to every Burrowbough survivor in Goodberry, so that their first winter in Haven tastes like home.

Someone Who Doesn't Laugh

Gribblit has spent his whole life being laughed at for falling down, and his quietest goal is to make sure nobody who works beside him ever feels the way he did. When he has a grove of his own, he wants to take in the children nobody else picks first, the clumsy ones and the shy ones and the ones who cannot sit still, and teach them the one thing he knows how to teach: that there are places in the world where falling down does not matter at all.

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Development

Boon Power +25%

A +25% Boon Power boost raised Gribblit's mushroom boon from 50% to 75%.

Talent: Mudsnout Trainer

Gribblit has a special connection to Mudsnouts. He has advantage on any roll involving a Mudsnout, and once per Mudsnout he can teach it a new trick.

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Current Status & Relationships

Residence

Silmarithil

Role

Mushroom Farmer

From Burrowbough