Biography: Sigmar Pedersen aka Siggy Seven-Ales (Patreon)

When you grow up in the Land of the Linnorm Kings, you pretty much have two options - do what your father did for a living and have a safe, quiet life or go off to try and win fortune and glory only to end up dead fighting other people's battles. For Sigmar Pedersen, by the time his story is written, there's a good chance he'll have done both. His mother was a hard woman, a farmer by trade and often the only woman in the fields, but she could swing a scythe with the best of them and any man that said otherwise would be short an ear if she ever heard him say it. She spent her days in the fields and her nights at the alehouse and Sigmar always found it ironic that the only person who could drink any Ulfen soldier under the table could die of something as simple as a cold. The Oak Quarter of Kalsgard is no place for children with sailors and strange travelers carousing about, but his father did the best he could to raise Sigmar on his own, instructing him in the craft of carpentry as his father did before him. “There are no shortage of shipwrights in this city, but you don’t have to know how to build a boat to be useful here,” he’d tell Sigmar. “Build a man a boat and the boat dies with him. Build a man a house and his family with have a home for generations.” Thankfully, he died long before he could know that the son he tried so hard to raise right had more of his mother’s genes in him than his.

They called him Siggy Seven-Ales because it was always around seven drinks in that the fighting would begin. Accidentally brush up against him, best him in a game of hnefatafl or just look at him the wrong way, Siggy was known all over the Fire Quarter as someone not even worth befriending as he’d just as quickly turn on his friends as he would a stranger. One night, a man made the mistake of mentioning that perhaps his mother wasn’t just out drinking all night but whoring as well. That poor soul was on his way to Valhalla while Siggy was on his way to jail. This wouldn’t be a normal night in the box though, as Siggy soon found out that guards don’t take kindly to killing one of their own. As it often does, fate would intervene that night in the form of a kindly stranger who found Siggy clinging to life in a gutter. He took him back to the temple of Irori where he lived and worked, and for the next three months, Siggy became accustomed to a new kind of drinking, as he took three meals a day through a straw.

Not being able to talk does funny things to a man, especially one who spent most of his life boasting and spouting off nonsense instead of looking within. The kindly man would always tell Siggy it was not he, but Irori himself who saved him that night. “I am but a simple servant here Sigmar,” he’d say. “I keep the temple clean in exchange for giving my daughter and I a home, but even I have felt the power that Irori can bestow upon you when you commit to seeking absolute precision in all that you do.” Whether it was the forced sobriety during recovery or the hand of Irori himself, Siggy Seven-Ales was laid to rest in that temple so that Sigmar Pedersen could be reborn as a child of Irori. It didn’t hurt that the kindly man’s daughter was the most beautiful woman Sigmar had ever seen and brought more joy to his life than drinking ever had. They married one year to the day after his fateful brush with death, and soon after, she bore him twin daughters, Irina and Lilly.

If love hadn’t fully changed him, fatherhood certainly did, but Sigmar knew that the life of a mere carpenter would never be good enough for his second chance at life. He worked hard all day earning the best living he could and trained even harder at night while his family slept to try and take his innate abilities as a fighter and use them for something greater than barroom brawls. He quickly learned that maybe his mother’s alcoholism wasn’t all that he inherited, as he could wield a scythe with deadly precision. Solveig never felt right about him joining the Pathfinder Society, but she also knew if it was part of Irori’s plan for them, then it must be the way. Sigmar’s only hope is that he can continue to find enlightenment on the path to mental and physical self-perfection, win fortune and glory not for himself, but for the family he loves so much and make it back alive to see them after every mission to the home that he built with his own two hands.