Veris Imilar was the name used by the halfling scholar and storyteller Quoemin Diggle, who joined the Brass Blades during their expedition beneath the Kenai Mountains. An anthropologist by inclination, Veris was fascinated by communities that received little serious attention from conventional scholars and spent much of his life collecting stories, customs, and firsthand observations.
Runswick
Quoemin was born in Runswick, near the southern end of the Kenai Mountains. His parents, Conver Diggle and Trynalyn Dale Diggle, operated the Silver Oak Inn. As an only child growing up around travelers, he heard stories and music from people moving through the region and became fascinated by the different ways communities understood themselves.
He was bright and ambitious but had neither the resources nor the opportunity for the kind of formal magical education he once imagined for himself. Instead, his interests developed toward anthropology, history, and storytelling. As he grew older, the confidence that had sometimes made him arrogant in his youth became a more disciplined belief that cultures dismissed as primitive or unimportant deserved to be studied on their own terms.
The Black Blood Clan
Veris spent time living among a group known as the Black Blood Clan as part of his research into communities rarely represented accurately in outside accounts. During his stay, he witnessed a ritual involving a talisman that the clan treated as important. Afterward, Veris began hearing a voice or compulsion associated with the object and eventually stole it before fleeing.
The talisman carried or contained a sentient undead presence, but Veris never established the precise nature or origin of that presence during his time with the Blades. He knew enough to understand that the object was dangerous and that the Black Blood Clan wanted it returned. Rather than lead pursuers toward his parents in Runswick, he fled toward Entwood.
The Brass Blades
Veris encountered the Brass Blades at Gorneduhr while they were searching for Shriekstone to help defend Entwood. He joined their expedition through the abandoned dwarven city and into the Underdark, eventually traveling with them to Terl’Narquel. What began as another extraordinary culture to observe became a lasting association with the company.
He remained with the Blades through the later conflicts in the Kenai Mountains, the crisis surrounding the Cult of the Stars, and the Harrowing. The danger connected to the stolen talisman did not simply disappear when he joined the company, and people associated with the Black Blood Clan continued to search for him during his travels.
Later Years
After the Harrowing, Veris traveled widely, telling stories of the Brass Blades and the people they had encountered. He also began opening branches or “franchises” of the Brass Blades in places he visited. These were not initially authorized by Davrek Valzorwyn, Phelps, or the company’s leadership, and in some cases the original Blades did not learn of them until after they were already operating. The practice was characteristic of Veris: part scholarship, part storytelling, part institution-building, and not always constrained by whether the people whose name he was using had formally approved the project.