 | |
| Joren Jolandel | |
|---|---|
| Player Character | |
| Basic Info | |
| Race | Half-Elf |
| Class | Paladin |
| Pronouns | He/him |
| Connections | |
| Affiliations | Fellowship of the Righteous Arms |
| Locations | Chelcam,Fallevin |
CHILDHOOD
Joren Jolandel, or JoJo to his friends, was born to Baelor and Marita Jolandel in the city of Chelcam, just outside of the The Kingdom of Gadena at the base of the eastern side of Anson Hill, a mountain range north of the Barnall Forest.
Marita grew up working in the bakery that her family owned, Crumbs To You. In a city full of darkness, they tried to be the light. It was here that she met Baelor. A job had brought him to Chelcam and he left the city, completely in love. He came back a second time to marry her. And a third time, he stayed a little longer and they had a child.
But, as soon as their son was born and named, he was off again. Though he still spent much of his time in Fallevin, Baelor changed his home base to Chelcam so he could spend time with the family he had started.
JoJo didn’t get to know Baelor. The only thing he can remember is his dad leaving every so often and then one day, never returning. The man that his mother had loved was a mystery to him.
Chelcam was not an easy city to live in. For all of JoJo's life, it was a city of tricks. Crime ran rampant, the underground became the overground and the main source of income was mob run casinos that stripped the pockets of any person who came to the city. A large population of Chelcam lives in poverty as the crime families tend to pocket their money for themselves.
The only thing that JoJo had from his dad was his suit of armor. One day, when he was old enough to understand, his mother showed it to him, explaining its importance and that it had been passed down through his father’s family and would now be his when he was old enough to wear it.
DOING A LITTLE CRIME
One morning, the armor simply wasn’t there anymore. He searched the house in a frenzy, then the streets, then the neighborhood. He was asking question after question to bewildered people who had no idea what he was talking about, until he hit the jackpot.
In his frantic search for his father’s stolen armor, Joren didn’t find himself amongst the members of just any crime family but THE crime family of Chelcam: the Fouquets. The Fouquet family ruled the city, literally and figuratively. He found himself in much deeper than he had ever wanted to be.
They saw his desperation and used it to their advantage. If he wanted help, he had to help them in return. See, even unawares, you didn’t just happen across the Fouquets and then leave.
Time went by and he was itching to find his father’s armor. Every day the possibly of getting it back seemed to grow farther and farther away from him but there was no reasoning with them. They promised him they would find it, but he had to do just one more job. And then one more. And then one more. He worked within a group called The Requisition. A lot of it seemed trivial, pickpocketing and petty theft.
It was there he met Welby Underhill, already a member of The Requisition who showed him the ropes. Joren soon found out that within The Requisitionthere was a hierarchy, and they were on the absolute lowest rung.
To Welby's surprise, JoJo was pulled up the rungs of that ladder faster than anyone before him. It was less to do with his prowess and more to do with the job that was coming up. What was this job? Getting his father’s armor back. If he wanted their help for a personal job, he had to be on the team. He found that they had been working on it since he joined, waiting for the time to strike. The thief wasn’t too quiet about his antics and they knew the piece was going to be lifted onto the black market. JoJo worried that if they didn’t get it back before then, he’d lose it forever.
They got it back but what Joren had not expected was for Mirage to hold it over his head. They all knew its value and since The Requisition had completed the job, in their eyes, it belonged to them. JoJo could get it back, but they had one more job for him. The Requisition, or at least the jobs he had been a part of had ever only been theft. There were some casualties but that was never the purpose. The job they were forcing him into was to infiltrate The Velvet Skulls. They had been stepping their toes too far into the Fouquet's casino circle for comfort.
The target? Ruben Suraci, the patriarch of the Suraci Family. They hoped to dismantle them, sending them into chaos so they would back off. And, it was too late, he was too far in, when Joren realized they had set him up to die, hoping to take him out and keep the armor for themselves. There was no way that he, by himself, could finish the job. Trapped in a closet, the house brimming with guards, he surrendered to his imminent fate.
But then, to his surprise, the closet door opened and standing on the other side was Marie Fouquet, the Dom of The Requisition. Why the leader of the group would come to his rescue, he knew not and was not going to ask. They quietly escaped the house; JoJo found himself stepping over body after body of Velvet Skulls.
As promised, only one more job, and even though he hadn’t completed it successfully, they let him go. He was discharged from service, returning his armor to his care, with the warning that he could never speak about his jobs with The Requisition, to anyone, ever. The city was run on crime; there was nowhere to take the information even if he had wanted to.
He kept in touch with Welby after he left but they never spoke about it again. He knew Welby still worked for them and didn’t want to put him in precarious position. He kept the secret from his mother as well, knowing how upset she would be with him if she ever found out what he had done.
THE FELLOWSHIP
There really didn’t seem to be much left for him in Chelcam. He was nervous, knowing that even though he was no longer working for The Requisition, that the Fouquets could be watching him at all times. And though sad to leave his mother, he felt he needed to move on- for her safety as well as his.
After growing up without a father, all JoJo wanted was to know him better. The things he did know led him to finding his father’s clan. So, it was Fallevin, the City of Kord, and the Fellowship of the Righteous Arms, toward which JoJo trekked after securing his father’s armor once more.
Joren was entering new territory. He had grown up in a self-made city amidst The Broken Plains, but in order to follow in his father’s footsteps, he had to enter the Kingdom of Gadena, under whose rule Fallevin stood. It was a long and lonely journey to reach Fallevin and he arrived with only a name, Denna Djarin.
Despite her stern look, she recognized him as the son of Baelor immediately and warmly welcomed him. He learned quickly the idea he had in his head of what his father’s clan was like, had disappeared many years ago. His father had been part of a clan that worshipped The Warmonger and they had founded their own settlement in the southeast near the Varrenmar Mountains.
Fallevin was no longer just a simple town for the followers of Kord, though he is the most popular god within the city walls. And Baelor's clan has morphed over the years and though the central understanding of familial bonds and harbored trust is still at the core, it had turned into a guild of sorts called The Fellowship of Righteous Arms.
Joren had not been brought up under any specific religion, only knowing that his mother did not worship, and his father devoutly followed Kord. But seeing the true extent of the devotion that existed among The Fellowship was jarring. Just following Denna for one day was eye-opening. And if he thought that was too much, he was even more taken aback to learn that the original settlement had been thought of as cult by outsiders and that those sects still existed.
It was hard to imagine his dad as a cultist and Denna had to explain that it was a word given to them by people who didn’t understand. There was nothing dangerous about it; it brought peace.
He was conflicted. He hadn’t come to the city with a plan and once he was there, seeing all that he did, he wasn’t sure he wanted to stay. But, everyone seemed to expect something of the son of Baelor and Denna offered to take him under her wing.
She taught him the history and culture of the clan, how the guild ran in present day, and began the early stages of training a paladin. He knew that she was training a paladin of Kord, but he himself, was new to the faith and still trying to figure out how he truly fit there.
At the end of his first year within the guild, he felt like he was getting nowhere- though Denna told him he had greatly improved. He was working part time as part of the city guard, which a was made up by many of the Fellowship as well as other mercenaries. It helped him pay for his way as he continued his training.
But he still didn’t feel like he had found what he wanted. More than that, he was continuously frustrated that his father’s armor would not fit him. It seemed to have a mind of its own, even more elusive than the man who left it to him. Denna was mildly humored by this and just kept telling him that the day would come, and he would know he was ready, and the armor would feel like a second skin.
At the end of his second year, JoJo started to feel better about his standing within the Fellowship. He felt more successful in his training with Denna. He had started to begin getting bigger jobs. At first it was guiding people cross the path within the Varrenmar Mountains between Fallevin and Illeridge. It was busy work for him. There were members whose full-time jobs were to be guides or to man the pass, but JoJo knew Denna was just testing his patience.
At the beginning of this third year there, Denna called a meeting with him. And to his pure joy, that he very much tried to hide, he received his first job. He finally felt like maybe he was getting closer to understanding his father. It wasn’t anything huge. Greywick, the nomadic village across the lake, noticed that whenever they left, they came back to more and more destruction. Since they were away so often, they paid The Fellowship to send a group to patrol, scout, and figure out the crux of the problem and protect their possessions.
Upon arrival, they found that the trees closest to the encampment seemed to have been gnawed and felled, barrels overturned, doors flung wide open and houses ransacked. Early one morning they encountered the pests. Not one person in the group could say they had ever seen anything like it before, but two giant beavers who appeared to have some sort of sentience were leading a charge of beavers into the camp.
It was easy enough to take care of, and once the two largest were felled, the rest of the beavers peacefully slipped back into the lake and nearby rivers. JoJo thought that for his first job, that was quite a humorous way for things to turn out.
It was also the first year that JoJo was going to attend The Fellowship's annual festival in Cruelbasin. It took place on the Kord's holy day, The Challenging, and the week leading up was full of athletic games, the largest draws being the fighting tournaments.
One of the jobs that stuck out the most, though it was more for what they found at the end than the job itself, was when rumors of bandits among the Crownroad reached the ears of The Fellowship by way of Belleforte, a town farther east in Glasgcost Valley.
The Fellowship was hired by the Delchiaro Wine Family as bodyguards for their shipment to Gadena. JoJo was assigned to this job with four others. They traveled to Belleforte, took up positions alongside of the cart as it made its ways north, and as expected, ended up fighting off a group of bandits attempting to steal the casks of wine and sell it for themselves. The cart driver nearly lost his life in the skirmish. JoJo and the group followed them the rest of the way to the capital city of Gadena which was where their job ended.
Joren had grown up in a city, [[, and was currently living in a city, Fallevin, but he had never seen a city quite like Gadena. The mere size, height, and extravagance of the place blew his mind. It was not a hard decision for them to stay. They had not been ordered back to Fallevin immediately and there was a center for the Fellowship in Gadena where they could find lodging.
So, for a few days, they celebrated in the grand city. While in Gadena, they did have a couple jobs come their way. One being to find the lost son of a local merchant. The boy had run away and was found hiding in an alleyway behind a bakery, no more hurt than when he left. Another spoke to JoJo's background, as they were hired to find a stolen ring that was so precious to the owner though neither he nor his companions could figure out why.
Eventually a letter arrived for them, a sternly worded letter from Denna, who ordered them to stop their merrymaking and return for what was next to come.