Volstrucker

In the great cities of the Dwendalian Empire, people lower their voices when they speak of the scourgers. Most believe they are a story told to frighten children and agitators: shadows who come in the night for anyone who speaks against King Dwendal, and who leave nothing behind but ash and silence. The truth was worse. The scourgers were the Volstrucker, the secret arcane enforcers of the Cerberus Assembly, and they answered to one man: Master Trent Ikithon, Archmage of Civic Influence.

You were one of them. Trent found you among the gifted students of the Soltryce Academy in Rexxentrum, as he found all his agents, and he chose you because something had already broken you. In his tower on the grounds of the Vergesson Sanatorium, his "awakening" finished the work: memories rewritten, loyalties burned away and rebuilt, until you were a weapon that never asked why. Crystals of refined residuum were set into your forearms to sharpen your magic, and black, maze-like glyphs were inked around them to mark you as a graduate of the order.

Then the order fell. Trent was arrested and sentenced to life in a dungeon beneath Rexxentrum, and the Cobalt Soul's investigation dragged the Volstrucker into the light. The Assembly would rather its secrets stayed buried, and some of those secrets walk around in people like you. Whatever you do now, you carry the order's training, its scars and its enemies with you.

Its feats take their name from the order's training, the awakening. This background also grants two feats that carry its choices on D&D Beyond: Volstrucker: Ability Scores (your ability score increases) and Volstrucker: Tragedy (the loss that set you on this path).

Ability Scores: Intelligence, Dexterity, Constitution

Feat: Volstrucker Awakening (see that feat)

Skill Proficiencies: Deception and Stealth

Tool Proficiencies: Poisoner's Kit

Equipment: Common Clothes, a black hooded cloak, a Poisoner's Kit, and a pouch holding 10 GP

Suggested Characteristics

Agents of the Volstrucker are groomed to follow orders without question and to kill without mercy. The trauma that brings one into the order can fester even more strongly against the darkness of a Volstrucker agent’s assignments. Since the order was exposed, its former agents live with what was done to them and what they did, and with the people who know their faces.

d6	Personality Trait
1	I prefer to keep my thoughts to myself.
2	I indulge vice in excess to quiet my conscience.
3	I’ve left emotion behind me. I’m now perfectly placid.
4	Some event from the past keeps worming its way into my mind, making me restless.
5	I always keep my word—except when I’m commanded to break it.
6	I laugh off insults and never take them personally.

d6	Ideal
1	Order. The will of the crown is absolute. (Law)
2	True Loyalty. The Cerberus Assembly is greater than any power, even the crown. (Law)
3	Death. The penalty for disloyalty is death. (Evil)
4	Determination. I cannot fail. Not ever. (Neutral)
5	Fear. People should not respect power. They should fear it. (Evil)
6	Escape. The Volstrucker are pure evil! I can’t atone for what I’ve done for them, but I can escape with my life. (Any)

d4	Bond
1	The job is all that matters. I will see it through.
2	My orders are important, but my comrades are worth more than anything. I would die for them.
3	Everything I’ve done, I’ve done to protect someone close to me.
4	If the empire falls, all of civilization falls with it. I will hold back chaos and barbarism at any cost.

d4	Flaw
1	I drink to dull the pain in the back of my head.
2	I go a bit mad when I see blood.
3	I can hear the voices of everyone I’ve killed. I see their faces. I can’t be free of these ghosts.
4	Fear is a powerful motivator. I will do whatever it takes to prevent those who know what I am from seeing me fail, and from those I care about from knowing what I am.