Dervil Piton

“Name’s Dervil. You’re still alive. That’s… promising. I’ve got siege gear that needs field trials and I think you might just be the sort of people I need. Heck, maybe we can save Portaland and earn you a fancy title along the way? You help me test my inventions from this side of the veil, and I’ll help you level whatever the other side spits out. Deal’s simple as that.”

• Logical: Speaks in formulas and probability, often interrupting others to "correct" them.
• Know-It-All: Assumes everyone else has a learning curve to climb.
• Calculated: Impossible to fluster, but impossible to please.

Dervil dreams of creating the greatest siege engines in Renna’s history. The chaos of the Melding presents a rare “live testing environment.” He wants to go down in history as one of its greatest inventors, one massive siege engine at a time.

• Scientist
• Personal Ambition

Dervil is a technological perfectionist and inventor. He is always seeking to solve things using data and research. The only thing that clouds his judgement is his desire to be remembered by history as a brilliant inventor.

• Tinkerer - Dervil can't help himself when he comes across a new device or design. He is immediately overcome with a desire to take it apart and see how it ticks.
• Smoker - He knows it's bad for him but he does it anyway. Dervil can often be seen taking a break from his work and smoking his pipe, thoughtfully puffing away.

• Grants access to the Siege Workshop
• • Players may hire or operate ballistas, catapults, or trebuchets during large-scale encounters.
  • Siege equipment can soften encounters, control crowds, or even alter terrain.
  • Particularly useful during battles near the city, moat, or against large creatures like the Castle Crab, Hydra, or Dragon.
• Can potentially supply the PCs with back powder weapons and ammo(at narrator's discretion).

• Is the premiere siege engineer of Portia and is somewhat famous for his designs.
• Likely operates out of a repurposed forge, bristling with unfinished war machines.
• Keeps a logbook of Riftguard performance to “evaluate gear stress tolerances.”.

• Dervil speaks in technobabble and may appear emotionally detached.
• Offers tactical insight, but rarely sugarcoats. (“Your sword’s dull and your armor is trash.”)
• Can provide experimental weapons(such as black powder) or imperfect contraptions if players build rapport.

Dervil Piton looks like a man who’s spent more time with iron than people. He’s compact and wiry, with a thick neck, square jaw, and a constant tightness in his shoulders. His skin bears the bronzed tone of forge heat, peppered with burn marks, welding scars, and small soot freckles.

His hair is short and thick, often slicked back with grease or caked with dust. His beard is neatly trimmed but often half-singed at one edge. He wears a pair of round-rimmed goggles perched permanently on his forehead, leaving pale circles around his eyes from disuse.

He rarely makes eye contact, often working while he talks. His voice is dry and low and he often mutters to himself in public, speaking his thoughts aloud. His breath smells faintly of peppermint.

Dervil’s attire is a fusion of workshop readiness and military practicality. Everything he wears is designed with a mechanical function or purpose.

• Apron: A heavy, sleeveless leather apron fused with a tool harness and multiple deep loops for pliers, drafting rulers, folding compasses, and socketed wrenches. It’s blackened with soot and chemically stained.
• Shirt & Pants: A simple gray, high-collared tunic and soot-brown trousers. His shirt cuffs are leather lined for heat resistance.
• Footwear: Knee-high iron-toed boots.
• Accessories:
• • Magnifying monocle on a hinge he can snap into place this mounted to a medieval-style welding mask he wears flipped up on his head.
  • Always carries at least one mechanical “project” in-progress, a model of a new trebuchet or cannon.

Dervil Piton rarely speaks first. He listens for the flaw, the inefficiency, the missing variable. Once he’s found it he’ll explain to you in great detail in a way that most people can barely comprehend.

He doesn’t care about politics, reputation, or fashion. But he cares deeply about systems. About precision. About the kind of legacy you build with modern machines. To him, the Riftguard are a siege platform in human form.

• He Once Sabotaged a Prototype That Killed a Rival: Early in his career, Dervil's design was stolen and turned into a flawed steam siege crawler by a rival. When he realized it was going to be deployed, he snuck into the shipyard and altered the compression valves to prevent mass casualties.

It exploded during a test and killed the rival inventor that stole Dervil’s design and destroyed the device and stolen blueprints.

Dervil told no one. He considers it a "correction of a corrupted design." But the military inquiry was never resolved, and his sabotage could still be traced.

• He Keeps the Blueprints to a Weapon That Could Level Portaland: In a locked brass vault beneath his forge is a half-finished schematic for a siege weapon he calls the “Boomb”.
• He Believes the Riftguard Are Part of a Larger Pattern: Dervil’s been tracking Riftguard injuries, portal locations, and enemy types. He’s begun mapping them like a sequence, a pattern of energy, something repeatable. Something designed.

He suspects the Riftspawn are being intentionally released in test waves, and that someone inside the city is triggering them. He just hasn’t built the model to prove it yet.