John Blunt - Sybal Heim NPC

NPC Type: Primary

Associated Player Character: Adèle LaFlamme

Name: John Blunt (almost always goes by Blunt)

Irizima Codename: Fuller

Born: 1381

Age: 511 (as of 1891)

Physical Age: 48 (Entered the city 1429)

Height: 6’ 4”

Hair: Greying brown with skunk stripes

Eyes: Green

Faction: Insurgent

A member of the Irizima for well over three centuries, Blunt is dedicated to the cause. He’s convinced that with the right amount of leverage, they can manage to unlock the sealed city walls and allow those trapped within to escape home. The armorer of the insurgency, Blunt supplies its ranks with weapons. He also serves as a trainer, teaching recruits proper fighting techniques with the weapons they’re assigned.

Occupation: Blacksmith & Irizima Agent
Blacksmith, swordsmanship master, and collector of bladed weaponry. Has studied a variety of armed martial arts extensively and teaches them to others in his training center, The Red Lion Swordsmanship Club in Ambrotos when he’s not crafting weapons. Lesser known is his role as an Irizima agent, a role which he has funneled all his resources into for the past 300 years.

Sybal Form: The Infernal Guardian

At night, Blunt takes on the form of a great red lion with a sooty mane and teeth and claws of iron, with many iron rivets scattered throughout his fur similar to the outer surface of a brigadine. He also has the horns and tail and enormous size of an Aurochs, the dangerous wild bull of the deep forests. A fiery, almost hellish looking beast, his appearance hearkens to mind the heraldic lions so long used in his native England.

Sybal Power: Smelter’s Wrath

His sybal’s power is a form of pyrokinesis that only affects metals. He can heat up or light any metal object on fire at will, a useful skill in his work as a blacksmith and handy for rendering metal weapons too hot to handle in an opponent’s grasp. His leonine form is quite immune to intense heat so he is also capable of lighting himself ablaze, the metal bits at least.

Docile or Feral: Docile

Blunt retains his full mental faculties upon transformation and despite his ferocious appearance is quite jovial and pleasant most of the time.

Personality: A generally good-natured Englishman, Blunt is a warm, fatherly figure to everyone around him. He takes great pleasure in pushing people’s buttons, and is an incurable tease, frequently throwing around playful insults. He can shrug off most slights and is usually very difficult to provoke, but though amiable and easy to get along with, Blunt he has been known to butt heads with people whose intense personalities rub him the wrong way. And on the few occasions someone has left him royally cheesed off, it’s a good idea to turn and run because the big blacksmith packs a considerable punch on the rare occasion he feels in the mood.

History: A blacksmith by trade, Blunt was a happily married man in early 15th century England living with his with his wife Emily with whom he’d had five daughters. A maker of arms and armor for the English army, when John Talbot’s forces travelled to France to wage war in the province of Orléanais Blunt was obliged to follow. The besieging of Orléans and the surrounding region went well for the English until the arrival of Joan of Arc. The Maid of Orléans managed victory after victory for the French culminating with the English army being routed at Tourelles. Wanting to make it home to his family, Blunt fled amongst heavy English losses and suddenly found himself in the midst of the Traveller’s Forest, arriving in Sybal Heim. Rather than being grateful to escape the battle, Blunt was angry. He’d retreated to make it home to his family, not become trapped inside a city of foreigners for all eternity. Longing for his wife and children, he became determined to escape and get home, a determination that caught the eye of an Irizima recruiter. Several hundred years later and Blunt is now Irizima himself and has recruit a trainee of his own, former Jacobin Étienne Robespierre.

Additional Info: 

    Although he’s not employed by Adele, Blunt can frequently be found lurking around Le Mademoiselle, which is right across the river from The Red Lion. Adèle often returns the favor, hanging around The Red Lion to sketch and generally making a nuisance of herself. Blunt tolerates the intrusions because if he doesn’t Adele will likewise ban him from the studio.

    Beyond being just his student, Blunt treats Etienne as a surrogate son and through that relationship gradually warms to Adele as if she were one of his daughters. That does not stop the tiny Frenchwoman and the burly Englishman from butting heads on a regular basis, though.

    Although he holds a grudge against Joan of Arc for the English defeat that led to his entrapment in the city, Blunt is also inspired by her example, the power that one woman’s indomitable courage had to turn the tide of the war in favor of the formerly beaten down French.

    Blunt can often be seen wearing a collection of iron bracelets on his wrists. At night, he carries these small iron rings on his horns, and is quite proficient at throwing them accurately. Whether he’s using them as flaming caltrops or playing a fiery game of ring toss with an opponent as a target, you do not want to be on the business end of one of these flaming rings.

    "Blunt" is not a family name, it's an acquired surname, one fitting his forthright personality and ironic for a man who makes sharp objects as a profession.