[Bio] Lina Cowl

[logintime]

This is my first RP character, so any comments or suggestions are more than welcome!

Name: Lina Cowl
Age: 27
Race: Human
Gender: Female
Class: Rogue, with some hunter influences

Languages: Common, rudimentary knowledge of Dwarven

Personality: Lina is quite reticent. She tends to use gestures rather than words if she can get away with it. Yet despite her quiet demeanor, she has a reckless and daring streak in her which is both an asset and a major vice. She is quite intelligent and highly idealistic. She also values loyalty to an abnormal degree for a member of the Syndicate and inspires it in others, but like most Syndicate members, she is skilled at manipulation and has a strong hatred for the Alliance.

Appearance: She is dark haired and very pale, but also very graceful in movement due to her training as a tracker.

History: For as long as she can remember, Lina has always heard about what a great nation Alterac used to be. Her parents would tell her about the times before the Second War, when their nation ruled over the mountains and commanded the respect of its neighboring nations. For all her life, these stories have been nothing more than that- stories. Born several years after the Second War, Lina knew nothing but poverty growing up. Her family, like so many others, lost everything upon Alterac's betrayal of the Alliance in the Second War. The nobles her parents served were exiled for their crimes, and the Cowls lost their main source of income. They were able to purchase a small plot of farmland in the Uplands, but bandits became a regular problem and the threat of wandering ogres, orcs, and trolls became ever harder to deal with. Lordaeron had occupied the lands but was hard-pressed to provide any security for the people, something she quite resented.

Lina was in her early teens when Lordaeron fell to the Scourge and the Burning Legion invaded. The exiled nobles, led by Aiden Perenolde and now part of a crime organization known as the Syndicate, moved to take back control of the lands that used to form Alterac. In a matter of months they had established themselves throughout the region and brought stability back to the foothills. The ogres which had plagued the region were pushed further back into the mountains and the Syndicate claimed it had prevented the Scourge from devastating their lands in the way it had done to Lordaeron. Lina was impressed. More than impressed, actually. She wanted to be a member.

The nobles her parents had once served, the Lacrose family, accepted her offer to serve under them. At first that meant housework and working the land on their sizable estate, but soon the second Lacrose son, Geren, noticed her skill with an axe and suggested she might make a fine addition to 'the family'. In no time, the Lacroses' Syndicate gang was teaching her, molding her. She gained experience with hand-to-hand weapons. She quickly excelled at archery, stealth, and tracking, becoming a skilled rogue over the years. They taught her the history of Alterac, of how the Alliance (and Stromgarde in particular) turned on them, on the violence of the Horde, and on how important it was that Alterac be reestablished. Their beliefs became hers; soon she had become a dedicated member of the Syndicate.

Under the Lacrose family, she and her fellow initiates collected the village taxes and plundered any foreign caravans foolish enough to cross the Uplands- usually refugees from the west. Eager to prove herself, she joined in on a raid of Tarren Mill... only to discover the town full of Scourge. The leader of her band fell in the ensuing retreat and she took control of the surviving members, leading them back over the mountains and to the Lacrose estate. While the raid had been a complete failure, her actions resulted in a quick rise in the ranks for her. Her reputation as a tactician and a rogue would be further cemented when she led a successful raid two years later on a Stormpike supply caravan heading to Alterac Valley. It had been a risky operation, but that was part of the thrill. She wanted to take ever-bigger and better steps in the name of the Syndicate, and in the name of Alterac by proxy.

But her eyes soon became open to the greater corruption within the Syndicate. The nobles squabbled too much amongst themselves to organize effectively. True, they managed to help bring down the city of Stromgarde, but they were much too divided to actually hold it. They couldn't even organize a force to drive the ogres out of the ruins of Alterac City, though Lina knew they had the numbers to do so. She began to realize the dreams the Syndicate had given her of a reborn Alterac were nothing more than the same stories her parents had once told her. The Forsaken and the Alliance began striking at Syndicate forces and devastating them, but the nobles were too busy trying to get the upper hand on each other to provide an effective resistance. Aiden Perenolde was assassinated. The royal family died with him and the Syndicate began fraying at the seams. Lina's ideals began fraying too. The Syndicate had taught her loyalty to no one but the cause. Now the cause was disappearing. Who should she give her loyalty to then?

While the Alliance and Horde were busy in Outland, Lord Lacrose gave her an order to lead the gang and assassinate a neighboring Lord whom he had been feuding with for years. Disillusioned and feeling reckless, she refused on principle. Lord Lacrose ordered her fellow bandits to arrest her for this betrayal. Initially no one moved, for while she was often quiet and emotionally distant from her peers she had long since earned their trust. Finally two of them took her by the arms and moved her into a barred room in a cellar. When one of them visited her that night to bring her a meal, he reluctantly informed her that Lord Lacrose was planning to have her executed for disloyalty in the morning. Such was the Syndicate way.

Yet strange- the morning came, and no one came for her. She waited in dread for hours, until at least she realized that the execution was not to come. When the door to the cellar opened, down came Geren Lacrose, the same son who had brought her into the Syndicate all those years ago. He said nothing but smiled at her and unlocked the door to her cell. She was free to leave.

Outside, she eventually learned the truth. During the night someone had stabbed Lord Lacrose to death in his sleep. There were no suspects. His guards on post claimed they had seen no one come or go, but their stories seemed inconsistent. With Lacrose dead, his eldest son stepped aside and let Geren take charge. His first act was to pardon his father’s guards for their lax security, and the second to pardon her. His third was to banish the title of Lord and proclaim himself a Regent of Alterac. The nobles were corrupt and should be overthrown, he had said, and it was the commoners themselves who should strive to re-establish their great nation. To that end, he would lower the heavy tax burdens on the villages in his lands and provide better security for their homes. Lina grinned in amusement when she heard this news. She knew a coup when she saw one.

She and Geren shared something in common: a strong sense of nationalism. That, as much as her reputation, led him to offer her a position as joint commander with another leading member of the gang, Nathan Lasenth. They were to lead his Syndicate branch while he navigated the region’s treacherous political waters. She and Nathan made a strong team; their first goal was to rapidly change their gang’s organization and training, molding it into a more professional unit. Then they worked to stamp out the family’s abuses against the villagers. Meanwhile, Geren began striking deals and offering the services his suddenly-quite-effective forces to neighboring Lords who were beset with ogres and Forsaken- for a price, of course. The extra income was split between developing his lands for the population and better equipping his fledgling army.

Later many of those same Lords would be overthrown by their own gangs, who were soon accepted into Geren’s ranks. They had become to believe in him, both as a man of the people and in his cause. Lina knew him well enough to know he was certainly not a man of the people, but that was fine with her as he did very much believe in Alterac. So what if he had been borne with a silver spoon? He was an appealing option to a long-suffering people, and he was using that to expand his power and deliver on some of the promises he had made. People were moving to his territory, his army was growing, and she was there in the thick of it to make sure he kept on the path toward nationhood and away from Syndicate-style decadence.

While the overall Syndicate has been crumbling from mismanagement and infighting, Geren’s branch is only strengthening. He has begun to fill the power vacuum left by Aiden Perenolde's death. With a sizable portion of the Uplands coming under Geren’s control and an organized force of over three hundred Syndicate soldiers at his command (mostly warriors and rogues, but with a small number of magi), he has become positioned as one of the major players in the Syndicate- and one of only three who could feasibly lay claim Perenolde's place as the head of the organization.

And Lina is right there to serve at his command. She knows he is not fully trustworthy, that he was the one who murdered his father and may yet prove to be a despot. That may or may not happen in the future. For now, he is a leading voice for Alterac and its people, so she’s willing to be a steadfast and loyal part of his forces. She has a cause to believe in once more- a Syndicate without corruption- and she is in a position to further it greatly.

Now, with the Alliance and the Forsaken driving toward war and Geren’s rivals in the Syndicate continuing to squabble amongst each other, she senses an opportunity to make real the dreams she had been given all these years. There's a fighting chance for her family to unite the region and truly bring the nation of Alterac back into being. That is, if they plays their cards right. Whether that will happen remains to be seen...

[The Madgod]

Okay so firstly, welcome to the RP forums!

Secondly, the Faction section is reserved for user-made factions only, not factions that appear in-game. :P

Thirdly and probably the meat of my critique here... so she's now one of the premier powers of the Syndicate and she holds a great deal of territory? That seems rather overpowered to me. If she was a senior member with people under her, yes, that's plausible. We don't really know about the people who are under the kingpins, so to speak. What isn't plausible is that she is one of the leaders, not one of the commanders, but one of the leaders, and that she has tracks of land under her control. At this point, you're basically calling your character canon. That's probably not the BEST way of explaining it, but think about it, if your character was one of the leaders of the Syndicate and she controlled that land, wouldn't she be mentioned in quests or lore revolving around the Syndicate? That's probably the biggest, and only problem I have with this character. Otherwise, it's pretty well written and a fairly enjoyable read.

[logintime]

Yeah, you're definitely right. I went a little too far in making her prominent. It makes more sense for her to be a senior commander as her particular family rises to prominence. I'll rework the history section when I get home from work to tone her position down a fair bit.

---------- Post added 2011-11-09 at 04:41 AM ----------

Okay, I've changed her position to bring her back to a more reasonable level. Hopefully that works a lot better than the first draft did?