The Black Marsh Rats are a powerful crime family that operates throughout mainland Sondor. In the story of The Nine Empires, they provide a great deal of trouble to Arcadian ambassadors seeking to create some sort of peace agreement, inadvertantly starting a war between the two empires. While the Rats hold a great deal of wealth, along with the influence that comes with it, they are not known for being particularly smart, and their plots are frequently thwarted by rival crime families and the Sondorian government. Then again, what do expect from a bunch of lavkins?
The Black Marsh Rats owe their name to the fact that they have no hair on their tails, so they resemble rat tails. Most of mainland Sondor is one big marsh, which is where they operate, and they are a bit on the swarthy side. "Dirty rat" is also an appropriate description of a good number of them, so the name works on several different levels.
This particular Rat is well-dressed, as is common for the wealthy gangsters. Still, during their day-to-day activities, they don't typically wear fur coats. Usually, they wear oily black trench-coats instead, since mainland Sondor is the realm of eternal rain (hence the marsh).
This Rat is also wearing a cape, which is not something I originally intended for these guys, but I have no way to hide the tail underneath the coat. For characters with shorter tails, I can simply remove the tail to hide it, but lavkins have such long tails that such an approach would work only on a character wearing a floor-length dress.
This angle accentuates the hunched appearance of the character, which simply screams "ill repute." Seriously, the Black Marsh Rats, while dangerous, are basically comic-relief villains of my story. They are two-dimensional characters who exist mainly to provide a bit of a break from a story that (I hope) is more intellectually demanding.
Those aren't rings on the Rat's right hand, by the way, those are brass knuckles. I will probably make more versions of this character, this way it might be possible to create a mini tabletop wargame involving the Black Marsh Rats and... I don't know, the Sondorian police? I don't really have this area of the story quite as well fleshed-out as the war in the north, so the only conflict-within-a-conflict that I have any specific game ideas for is Factory № 17.
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