1. Characters

Azimuth Andrea Almanac Caspian Kelshplotter

Security Overseer

Azimuth Andrea Almanac Caspian Kelshplotter belonged to the Kelshplotter Clan, whose name carried considerable weight among the rock Gnomes of the Murkmire Marshlands. Generations earlier, when a great quake had destroyed the ancestral homes of the gnomes, the Kelshplotters led the survivors through the Deepways and found them the caverns that would become Little Lockford. In the centuries since, the clan had built a reputation as the foremost guides and architects of the Undermire, prized for an ability to fuse the natural contours of a cavern with the structures raised within it. By Azimuth's time, however, the family's fortunes had faded considerably, and the clan's once-celebrated business had dwindled to a fraction of its former standing, leaving considerable debts behind it that showed no sign of being repaid through legitimate work alone. 

Azimuth himself carried on the family trade as a cartographer and Artificer, and was known for a diligence that many of his peers considered promising well beyond his years. His work centered on the Deepways surrounding the settlement, a labyrinth whose passages shifted with enough regularity that no map of them could be considered permanent. He made it his project to chart these changes as they occurred, updating his almanac with each expedition and cross-referencing new findings against decades of prior surveys, rarely without his Mastiff, Bunson, at his side. Less openly, Azimuth had begun putting his family's inherited knowledge of caverns and structures to less reputable use, taking on work of a criminal nature that traded on his understanding of hidden passages and vulnerable buildings in an effort to keep the clan's debts from overwhelming it entirely.

Azimuth's personal life was no less complicated. He had fallen in love with the artificer Tixie Taffebeser Tockworth in his youth, and learned from her the basics of Artificial Infusions. The two were for a time considered one of Little Lockford's more promising pairings, before Tixie ended the relationship abruptly and without explanation, returning a locket he had given her as a token of his affection. Azimuth kept that locket regardless, carrying it on every expedition thereafter with her picture still inside it, and never courted anyone else in the years that followed.

By unfortunate circumstance, Azimuth was away on one of his surveys of the Deepways when Tixie initiated the Big Little Lockford Lockdown and sealed the settlement's gates behind her. He returned to find the town closed against him and joined the survivors' encampment beyond the gates.