I’ve been playing Barinth since the mid-1980s. He’s outlasted more campaigns than I can count on one hand, survived two total-party wipes, and managed to stay interesting to me in a way that most characters don’t.
Most characters have an arc you can see coming. You know what they want, you know what’s in their way, and the campaign resolves it one way or another. Barinth doesn’t work like that. Forty years in, I’m still not sure what happened to him before I started playing him. Asgenar doesn’t know either, and Asgenar has been at his side long enough to have earned the truth. Whatever it is, Barinth keeps it.
What I do know: he’s reliable to a fault, especially where Asgenar is concerned. He is also capable of cruelty that would surprise people who’ve only seen the loyal-bodyguard version of him. Torture for information doesn’t trouble him. Certain categories of people — rapists, anyone who touches children — he handles slowly, and with intention. These aren’t contradictions to him. They fit together in a logic I’m still working out.
There’s a concept in some corners of the lore for paladins who don’t turn evil but simply lose the divine spark entirely — hollow, cynical, still functioning, still bound by a code that’s now entirely their own. Gray Paladins. The Faithless. I think Barinth might be one of those. It would explain a lot about him: the agnosticism he wears like armor, the way he tolerates Asgenar’s faith without sharing it, the cruelty that doesn’t feel chaotic — it feels like the remnant of something that used to be righteous and is now just cold.
He had the spark once. Something took it. He kept going anyway.
That’s why he’s interesting to play. This site is part lore archive, part journal, part me thinking out loud about what that means. The journal entries are his. The blog is mine. If you’re here because you’re in one of my games — hello. Don’t read the journal if you want to stay surprised.