Deacon Rogue

Appearance

With red hair, a plump body, brown eyes and a constant scowl on his face, this muscular man wields a heavy hammer as if it were a shortsword.

History/Background
Once Charles Purcell was an honest man and one of The Priests of Mammon. He believed with all his heart in his religion and some thought he went over the top about it. Quickly becoming one of the youngest Deacons in the church when only in his mid thirties, he seemed destined for high office, perhaps to become a Bishop one day. One morning he found to his horror, that one of the stained glass windows of his church had been smashed and the grille behind it smashed upon.

Muttering a prayer to Mammon, he grimly raised his crozier and went to see what had been done.Not only did he find that the holy symbols had been stolen from the altar, but a tomb had been broken into. Lighting a lantern he set off to see if he could catch the thief in the act of breaking into the crypt below his church. He followed the theif down a stairway into the dark and then grinned when he saw that the floor had given way.

When he returned with a ladder, the one meant for the belltower, and climbed down into the dark, he found the thief had fallen to his death. Amongst the dusty coffins of the dead he also found two children from the local village who had been missing for days, and what they told him filled him with horror, for if what they said was true, then his Bishop had kiddnapped them and locked them down here, intending to sell them to slavers a few days later.

At his next sermon he denounced his Bishop in no uncertain terms as a kidnapper and slaver and produced the children to back what he had to say up. The very highest in the Church, the College of Cardinals, got involved, stripped Charles of his Deacon rank and formally excommuicated him from the Church, rather then excommunicating the Bishop and handing him over to the State to face trial.

On his way home, his promising career in ruins, he came across the Bishop who had not only kiddnapped innocent children and used his church crypt to hold them, but had got him defrocked. Angry words were exchanged on both sides, and Charles grabbed a warhammer from a nearby blacksmith's forge and slew the Bishop with a blow to the head, took his money and fled. With the law after him and nothing left to lose, he fell in with a band of brigands after helping one of them escape an attempt to arrest him.

Special Equipment

He has placed a clerical spell on his hammer so that it will hit a richer person with much more force then a poorer man.

Roleplaying Notes

The Deacon has a burning hatred for the Church that he used to belong to and takes a pleasure in robbing it's clerics. Should his band come across someone who genuinely has little or nothing to steal, he will argue for letting them go unharmed, but he dislikes rich nobles almost as much as rich clerics.