Factions of Interest
Roual and the War Refugee Board
Roual is a civil engineer who lost his wife to the battle of Mishaka and his son to a wasting disease. He is an elder man who dresses in somber, well worn robes. Messy silver-gray hair, ears studded with nondescript jewels, and angry, sad, wounded blue eyes.
Roual has been recruited by the Minister of Other Matters to lead the War Refugee Board, a secret commission appointed by the Talespinner himself. The mission of the War Refugee Board is to secure refugees through the City without intervention by the pro-Thorns agenda.
One of the first steps for Roual was to place spies within the bureaucracy of the Minister of Diplomacy. This was to covertly speed up the process of acquiring proper documentation, and planting fake reference documents to help in the falsifying of papers. A few of Roual's spies have recently been placed on supervision after some dubious behavior in the offices, and so the leader of the War Refugee Board has called for his spies to slow down with the busy work and merely keeping an ear out for him.
Another much more decisive move by Roual has been to purchase slaves, and tobacco and qat fields. Its one thing that the WRB now has dummy locations to send their refugees to where they can hide out and then flee onward into the Hundred Kingdoms. More importantly, Roual has realized that it is a hell of a lot easier to ship slaves as property rather than obtaining proper documentation for refugees. The WRB has been establishing lines to the Guild to further this line of thinking, and is also about to expand its operations.
The Ministry of Other Matters
This Ministry has a thankless job. The Ministry of Other Matters is technically set up as a tie-breaker/catch all Ministry but in reality it has become the a re-occurring scapegoat that gets thrown to the sharks whenever something unexpected goes wrong in the City. The current Minister, Vandereth Senzak for example, only gained his seat after the battle of Mishaka was blamed on his predecessor.
This risky expansion in operations by the War Refugee Board will be in the care of the players at the start of the campaign, and it is also your characters first real test as Roual's trusted inner circle. You've done some good work for him in the past, but things are about to get crazy, and dire times call for dire measures.
I am looking for ties into the War Refugee Board for your PCs. Either you can have a shared history with Roual, or even Vandereth Senzak. Another possibility for a maximum of one character would be that you have been chosen by the Talespinner himself to represent him on the Board. You don't necessarily have to know anyone in particular to be accepted onto the Board either. You can have gained your position through hard, earnest work.
