Fredrik is a Goliath, Cleric, priest of the competition. To make ends meet, he’s a traveling salesman. The mountains of his elders are dimly remembered after one of his uncles decided to challenge a purple worm that lived in crevices below their mountain slope, destroying a village of hundreds. His parents did not stay together long after becoming refugees: his mother was recruited by a band of Dragonborn, his Father got into a fight going down into a large mine pit and picking a fight with some Drow. Oh, but that selfish father of his did not just get defeated in the mines…running back to the surface, he was chased by three Drow warlocks, cloaked in shadows, riding jet black floating disks, easily being lead back to the makeshift Goliath camp…

Fredrik woke up from the panicked escape, having run through the night, in a sparse forest in the foothills over 20 miles west of the gravel pit. Dawn was clawing the horizon. No one was with him. He quickly swung to the right as the claws of a jay scratched on a branch above him. The only thing louder than the feathers of the jay beating the wind was the pounding in his head from days of heat and dehydration. But the soil…wow! Not gravel, talus, or clay nodules or broken rock…actual soft soil, specked with pine needles. A hint of moisture….the scent of water. Down-slope was a large rock, cut rectangular, with a series of glyphs, and a mossy mat below it with a small puddle of water trickling through!

Eighteen years later, whiskers on his face, fitted in banded mail glittering with hammered stamps of Kord, the deity of the challenge, leading two mules by a rope and enjoying the loping trot of his short haired dog, Muddy, sniffing the desert ahead of him…he gives praise that he never needed to prove himself to his uncles or whomever bitter relatives might have been left of his village. No, selling weapons from those dwarves he found in the hills years ago has provided him both all the challenges he could ask of Kord, and none of inevitable shame of his birth community, which would have continually challenged him to show them up…or be humiliated.