The Valiant Few

The Valiant Few are a rising band of adventurers working across Idir, known as much for their unconventional diplomacy as for what they can do in a fight. Circumstance threw them together in the town of Loshev, and they were entangled almost at once in conspiracies, curses and the ancient business of the long-dead Mól Empire. They have killed slavers, walked cursed ruins, negotiated trade routes and sat at table with councilors, and the line between the heroism and the politics has never stayed where they put it.

They are not world-renowned. Their reputation has grown a good deal faster than they intended it to, and so has the weight of what they are asked to decide.

Campaign Updates

The name is younger than the company. Three of them woke in Loshev with no particular reason to trust one another (Mikhail, Aldo, Koa), and worked together for most of a season before anyone thought to call them anything. Mikhail proposed the Valiant Few at S1E13 and it grew on the other two, and nobody has put up a better one since.

Three has not stayed three. Leon Yaegar, the recovering war hero, came on as military advisor and quartermaster in S3E31 and does the work the three of them are worst at. Edrick holds the Crack with better than thirty freed refugees living in it: people the company pulled out of the auction cages and then had to find somewhere to put. Around that sit Gwen, the scholar Ashanti, Captain Jack, and the Draazstone smiths Hinta and Trugs.

Much of their work since has gone into the Mól Encyclopædia: collecting the volumes, and then the far slower business of reading what is actually written in them.

They finished the thing they were built for. Three of the keeps broke within minutes of one another at dawn, and the overarching curse of Idir broke with them, though the curses on the keeps that did not fall that morning still stand and still have to be taken by hand. What they came out with was not only that. Mending Aldo’s soul back into his body took more than one mortal could bear, so Nancáro put a piece of himself into all three of them at once, and they are bonded at a soul level, for as long as they exist rather than for as long as they live. Vëné put it plainly: they are connected to each other and to this land, and when one dies the others will feel it more deeply than perhaps any mortal has, and will not be taken along with him.

What none of them can answer is what the company is for now. Aldo asked what they were doing three times before anybody would take the question, and the answers he got were a queue of unfinished business rather than a purpose: Gwenivere, Al-Sāmiyah’s mountain, Orsugo and the fires, the thing sleeping under Haudh-Gwenn, and a thesis Mikhail has not begun writing. Koa’s proposal is a guild with a base of its own, held on nobody’s sufferance and modeled on the Crack, and then, out loud when he meant to think it, he wondered what they would call it.