Marlo Quince

Overview

Marlo Quince was a bard, adventurer, confidence trickster and, in the later years of his life, one of Earin’s most experienced hunters of supernatural entities.

According to Marlo, he was born into near-royalty as the son of a lord and lady of Caelmourn. Raised around the royal court and educated by the finest tutors available, he supposedly went on to attend the prestigious Caelmourn Bard School of Eloquence, where he graduated with distinction as a Graduate Exemplary. He claimed straight A’s, personal mentorship under the legendary Professor Elarion Vint, and authorship of an extensive library of works covering history, philosophy, music, culture and numerous other subjects.

Almost none of it was true.

Marlo was orphaned when his parents were swallowed beneath Ashmere and was subsequently raised beneath the canvas of a travelling circus. He became one of the most accomplished confidence tricksters of his generation, then slowly became almost everything he had once pretended to be.

Early Life

Marlo was raised among travelling illusionists, musicians, knife-throwers, fortune-tellers and performers after the loss of his parents at Ashmere. The circus taught him to entertain, but more importantly it taught him to understand people. He learned early that the best lies were rarely complete inventions; it was much easier to discover what somebody already wanted to believe and simply give them permission to believe it.

As he grew older, he began constructing an entirely new history for himself. Marlo Quince became, at least on paper, a gentleman of Caelmourn. Academic certificates appeared, along with letters of recommendation, fabricated connections to noble families and references to books Marlo had supposedly written. Whenever challenged on some obscure subject, he could confidently explain that he had discussed the matter extensively in one of his lesser-known publications.

He became exceptionally skilled with accents, disguises, forged documents and false identities, but his greatest talent remained understanding what people wanted. Marlo could enter a situation, identify the desires of everyone involved and reshape events until they believed they were getting exactly what they wanted.

Usually this worked remarkably well.

Occasionally it resulted in thirty horses landing on an elderly woman.

Marlo maintained that this particular incident was entirely attributable to substandard tri-frontal pins of the underdrawn carriage lintels. No recognised engineering text has ever confirmed that such components exist.

The Ruins of Ashmere

Marlo later returned beneath the ruins of Ashmere. There, exposed black stone cut his hand. His blood entered the stone, and something within the stone entered him.

At the Grey Vow’s final confrontation, the Undercrown claimed that it had opened the ground to swallow Marlo’s parents, left him alone in the circus and scarred him beneath Ashmere deliberately. It described the persuasive force in his voice—the talent that silenced suspicion and opened doors—as its own gift: the silver tongue.

The boast does not make every word Marlo spoke an act of possession. His wit, performance and understanding of people were skills he practised for years. It does establish that the supernatural weight behind them was tied to the Undercrown long before Marlo knew its name.

The Caelmourn Safehouse

Marlo eventually established a safehouse in Caelmourn, stocked with disguises, documents, seals, maps, false credentials and a small printing press used for both “self-publishing” and rather less legitimate purposes.

The property was cared for by an elderly woman named Margery, who maintained Marlo’s clothing, kept the house in order and invariably made tea whenever he returned. She was also remarkably capable with a regional passport, some adhesive tape and Marlo’s printing press.

For a man who had spent most of his life pretending to belong somewhere else, the safehouse became home. Margery became the closest thing to family he had known since childhood.

The Grey Vow

Marlo eventually joined the adventuring company known as the Grey Vow, travelling with them for almost a decade. Throughout those years he maintained that adventuring was temporary. There was always one more contract, one more treasure or one final job before he could retire somewhere pleasant in the countryside and become respectable.

He was perpetually almost there.

Among the Grey Vow, Luthain came closest to discovering the real Marlo. He uncovered much of Marlo’s fabricated history and became the only member of the group to visit the Caelmourn safehouse and meet Margery.

Marlo initially decided that a detective who already knew everything was considerably safer as a friend. Over the years, inconveniently, the friendship became genuine.

The Undercrown

The events that changed Marlo’s life began when the Grey Vow were drawn north to the ruins of the Temple of Velnarath. Within the supposedly abandoned temple they discovered evidence that someone had previously attempted to destroy it, along with a strange black-metal object known as the Codex.

Before they could understand what they had found, the temple erupted with orcs. Dozens emerged from concealed passages and overwhelmed the party. With the explosives hidden throughout the structure ignited and escape rapidly closing, Luthain remained behind and held the horde back while Marlo escaped with Sil Dray and Fizz.

The Temple of Velnarath exploded behind them.

There seemed no possibility that Luthain could have survived.

For the next three days, Marlo and the surviving Grey Vow were relentlessly pursued by burned and twisted orcs that had somehow survived the destruction of the temple. Those desperate days marked the beginning of their struggle against the Undercrown.

The consequences eventually followed Marlo home.

When danger reached his Caelmourn safehouse, Marlo initially assumed that the surviving orcs from Velnarath had finally tracked them down. Instead, the Undercrown had taken possession of Luthain’s corpse and was using the body of Marlo’s dead friend as its instrument.

Possessing Luthain’s memories and knowledge, it knew about the safehouse.

It knew about Margery.

And Margery was killed.

For Marlo, the Undercrown ceased to be merely another adventure. It had taken one of his closest friends and then used his body to murder the closest thing Marlo had to family.

The Undercrown attempted to use the Grey Vow to reach the passages beneath the Sealed Citadel, through which it intended to escape and spread its influence across Elaris and ultimately Earin. In the final confrontation, the Grey Vow set its black stone throne aflame. The stone screamed in agony—fulfilling the warning ‘When Black Stone sings… swing true’—and Gorran the Chainbreaker brought his axe down, splitting the throne that anchored the Undercrown in the mortal world. The parasitic god was cast beyond the Shadow Veil.

The campaign was over.

Its consequences for Marlo were not.

The Books

After the defeat of the Undercrown, Marlo returned to Caelmourn and buried Margery. Afterwards, he went back inside the safehouse and found himself surrounded by the accumulated evidence of the person he had spent years pretending to be: false qualifications, forged credentials, academic robes and shelves of books he claimed to have read or, in some cases, claimed to have written.

Marlo picked one up and began reading.

Then another.

Over the months and years that followed, he worked his way through history, philosophy, theology, languages, magic, geography and the cultures he had previously claimed to understand after barely visiting them.

He had spent his life pretending to be educated, so he educated himself.

It marked a fundamental change in Marlo. For the first time, instead of rewriting the story to fit the man he already was, he began changing himself to become the man in the story.

The transformation took years and several further adventures. Marlo remained theatrical, occasionally deceptive and hopelessly fond of unnecessarily elaborate explanations, but knowledge became something to acquire rather than imitate. Travel became an education rather than merely an opportunity, and companions became people he cared about rather than useful associates.

The aristocratic childhood remained a lie. The qualifications remained forged.

The knowledge became real.

Ellie

Later in life, Marlo met Ellie.

He fell in love with her, married her and finally abandoned his former criminal life. He promised Ellie that his lying days were over, and for once Marlo meant every word.

The retirement he had joked about for years finally became something tangible. It was no longer about acquiring enough money or disappearing before somebody discovered his latest scheme. It meant having a home and someone he wanted to return to.

For a time, Marlo had the quiet life he had always claimed to want.

The Undercrown, however, had not forgotten him.

Ellie’s Death

Years after Marlo believed the Undercrown had been defeated, strange events began occurring around the countryside. Livestock were found torn apart, travellers disappeared, and wolves began gathering in numbers far beyond ordinary packs. Their movements seemed coordinated, as though something were directing them.

Marlo recognised enough of the signs to know that something unnatural was happening. When the wolves drew close to his home, he went after them.

That was precisely what they were intended to make him do.

The wolves were a distraction. While Marlo hunted them, a servant of the Undercrown went to his home and murdered Ellie.

Those who served the parasitic gods could be rewarded with extraordinary power, particularly for acts of exceptional cruelty or devotion. Such gifts came at a cost: the greater the power granted, the further the recipient was stripped of their mortal qualities, their bodies becoming increasingly deformed reflections of whatever they served.

The precise details of Ellie’s death were closely guarded and known only to Marlo. What is known is that he eventually found the creature responsible, and by the time he did, whatever humanity it had once possessed had been twisted almost beyond recognition.

Marlo killed it.

But killing it changed nothing.

Ellie’s murder was the Undercrown’s revenge upon the man who had escaped its design and found a life beyond it. Marlo carried the belief that a man with his experience should have recognised the trap. Years later, when he wrote his final letter to Ellie, his first instinct was not to rage against her murderer but to apologise:

“I’m sorry I let my past ruin our future; sorry I wasn’t there when you needed me.”

Margery’s death had shown Marlo what lurked behind the world.

Ellie’s death gave him a reason to hunt it.

The First God He Killed

Marlo did not stop with the creature that murdered Ellie. He pursued the power behind it: the Undercrown itself, still imprisoned beyond the Shadow Veil.

In forgotten records he found a long-lost ritual intended not merely to kill a god, but to tear it from reality beyond recovery or resurrection.

As he performed the ritual, Marlo sang the Song of the Undercrown—the prophecy of Verris that had once guided the Grey Vow—back to the parasite almost mockingly.

The destruction was brutal and absolute. The Undercrown, which had spent Marlo’s life claiming to have made him, became the first parasitic god he killed.

The Hunter

After Ellie’s murder, Marlo began pursuing the beings he came to understand as parasitic gods, together with the servants and cults through which they exerted their influence.

What began as revenge gradually became a vocation.

Years of adventuring had already made Marlo capable, while the education he had undertaken after Margery’s death had given him the knowledge necessary to understand what he encountered. He now devoted both to the study of possession, occult rituals, forgotten religions, ancient ruins and the weaknesses of supernatural entities.

Marlo learned that such creatures rarely yielded to the same methods. Some could be killed with steel, others required magic or ritual, while still others could only be harmed once their relationship with their followers or the mortal world was understood.

His former life proved unexpectedly useful. Where a cult would reject an investigator, Marlo could become an initiate. Where a noble patron would refuse to speak, Marlo could become a fellow aristocrat. Where an archive was closed to adventurers, Professor Marlo Quince, Graduate Exemplary of the Caelmourn Bard School of Eloquence, could usually produce an impressively sealed document explaining why he was absolutely authorised to enter.

The lies remained useful.

The difference was what Marlo now used them for.

By the later years of his life, the former confidence trickster had become a formidable scholar, investigator and hunter of gods.

The Heart of Earin

When the Civil War of the Gods erupted and its destruction began to fall upon Earin, Marlo’s years of research led him to an ancient object known as the Lantern.

The Lantern lay deep within the Underdark and contained something far greater than any conventional artefact. It was called the Heart of Earin, though it was not a literal organ: Earin possessed no mortal anatomy.

Marlo became convinced that the Heart could still save the world, but he could never reach it alone. So he broke the promise he had made to Ellie and told three companions that the Lantern granted wishes. It was one last lie, and he knew eventually he would have to confess it.

Before beginning the expedition, he wrote one final letter to his wife.

Marlo’s Letter to Ellie

Dearest Ellie,

I’m sorry. Sorry for everything. Sorry I let my past ruin our future; sorry I wasn’t there when you needed me; sorry I broke my vows and slipped away in the middle of the night.

I should have seen it coming. After everything we endured, I suppose I thought I was owed some small scrap of peace, some tiny piece of what everyone else seems to have in abundance. I was wrong. And it cost us everything.

I write this knowing you’ll never read it, but if I fail, or die, or lose myself along the way, maybe it will guide me, or someone else, where they need to go. Down. All the way down into the dark beneath this world, where the people have forgotten that light ever existed.

I can’t go alone. I’d never make it. And I can’t finish this without what they carry.

That’s where they hide the brightest lights: in the dark, where no one would think to look.

When I met you, I promised my lying days were over. I’m afraid I’m going to have to break that promise.

They’d never follow me into the depths for some forgotten chapter of a book they’ll never read. Not when they believe their own battles up here are more important. So I told them a lie. One last lie.

I’ve lied thousands of times; for money, for love, for fame, to steal the spotlight from better people. I’m done with that. Truly. But some things are worth fighting for. Worth dying for. And if they’re worth dying for, then they’re worth lying for. Just once more. One last lie, to save the world.

I need the wizard. And the cleric. And the cleric doesn’t come without the devil these days, so I suppose I’m taking him too.

I told them the Lantern grants wishes, that I’d give them anything they could ever dream of. I’m not looking forward to disappointing them, and I’ll apologise when we get there… but I need them. We all do.

The Heart of Earin is in those tunnels. And it can still save us all.

I hope to see you in the next life, to do it all again properly. But until then,

All the love I have left,

Marlo

The Underdark

The Marlo who led the Expedition to the Heart of Earin was not the man who had once fled Velnarath. He descended with Erynd Solen, Vorstag and an infernal companion remembered only as the Devil.

After their identities were stripped by nhalis and restored by an elderly Fizz, they crossed Stillreach, the Drow fortress and the black sands to reach the Lantern temple. There Vorstag—empowered by Merynn's final intervention—destroyed the ancient beholder guarding the Heart.

Marlo used the feedback generated by Erynd's silver bracelet to awaken the Heart. After he and Vorstag wrestled the bracelet back onto Erynd, the Devil remained behind and bound their spectral horses to his own true name. His permanent death carried the other three clear of the collapsing temple.

The End of the War

Marlo, Erynd and Vorstag reached the surface beneath the Heart, which hung in the sky like a new star. Across the battlefield the gods ceased fighting and knelt, believing Earin had returned.

The expedition did not resurrect Earin, but it halted the immediate divine conflict and saved the world below it. Marlo lived to see his last great lie become one of the defining mortal acts of the age.

What happened to Marlo afterwards is unknown. Some say he rebuilt the home he had shared with Ellie. Others place an ageing, impeccably dressed bard in distant towns where cults subsequently vanished. None of the stories has been confirmed, which is perhaps appropriate for Marlo Quince.

Legacy

Marlo Quince spent much of his early life inventing a better version of himself. He fabricated an education and later educated himself. He pretended to be worldly and eventually travelled enough of Earin to become so. He claimed expertise in history and theology, only for that knowledge to become real enough that he could hunt beings worshipped as gods.

Most importantly, he spent years pretending to be the hero in his own story before gradually becoming one.

Two deaths defined much of that transformation. Margery’s death made Marlo want to become better. Ellie’s death made that better man dangerous.

When Marlo eventually returned to deception for his journey into the Underdark, it was no longer to enrich himself, escape punishment or impress an audience. He lied because he believed something greater depended upon it.

His final fate remains uncertain, but perhaps that too suits him.

The aristocratic childhood was false. The qualifications were forged. Much of the legend was invented.

Yet somewhere along the way, the man beneath all those stories became more remarkable than the character he had created.

Marlo spent half his life pretending to be a better man. Then he became one.

Notes and record

This article combines campaign record, spoken lore and the mythic account preserved in the Earin archive.