Ketil Vetarson

## Early Life

Ketil was born into a small village located on the Vestrian Sea. He was raised by a lowly tavern keep, waiting tables and serving food. He didn’t enjoy this job, in fact the only point he tolerated were the few opportunities he got to cook when his mother and father were out. When he grew into his teens, he began to cheat the patrons he served. He would ask them to wager some coin on if they could guess which platter of cheap mutton was theirs. Covering the plates with cloth sheets, he would notify them which one was theirs and begin to shuffle them. He would only do this with plates of the same meal, and while lying through his teeth tell them no matter which one they chose they got it wrong. This worked mostly since almost everyone there was drunk, but would only get him a small sum of coin at most.

## Higher Stakes

Ketil’s avarice knew no bounds before his adulthood. From gambling to street tricks, he did it all. Out of everything he did in this time though, his favorite was simply cheating at cards. He spent his first winnings on a scarf to hide his face, making sure his poker face was indistinguishable from his tell. This didn’t matter mostly however, since every opportunity he could he would try and be the dealer so he could rig the deck. He got decently good at it too, but that was before his father decided his time would be better used training him. Maybe it was paranoia, but Ketil’s father began to spend all of his time off from the tavern training him to use a seaxe and other weapons of self defense. This infuriated Ketil, since he was making almost half of the families wealth from his schemes that he had no time for now. This training came to an end when his father accidentally but deeply cut his hand with a partisan. Ketil angrily grabbed the weapon from him and stormed off from the tavern. Without direction or reason, he began just began walked west. He trudged on roads of dirt and stone, crossed gorges and valleys, until he reached a new town.

## Strondholm and The Shuffle

Ketil was unfamiliar with this new city, with its bustling streets and shining towers. As he stood on the border, he decided it was time to begin his normal routine grifting. From simple card tricks on the street to games in the pubs, he cheated at it all. In this time, he built a nice reputation for himself. Words about him ranged from obvious cheat to skilled professional. And one day, he pushed his hubris to far.

Ketil was not a smart man, nor a humble one. This was never more apparent than when he appeared in front of strondholm’s jarl on the street, coaxing him into a game of cards down in the local pub. And surprisingly, the elder agreed. Joric played well, and at first Ketil played fairly too. Joric won, obviously, but Ketil begged for one more round while sliding all of his coin onto the table. The Jarl could not refuse and sat down once more. Round one passed without a hitch, no one saw a thing. But as the night dragged on, the Jarl began to grow suspicious of Ketil’s increasingly slow shuffling. On the final round, when Ketil had almost all of his money won back, Joric ordered two of his men to stand by the charlatan. Midway through Ketil’s shuffle, the Jarl bolted up from his chair and seized the conman.

## Current year

Ketil was imprisoned, fettered for a seemingly indefinite amount of time. That was when a man called Beiner suddenly paid his bail, standing tall as he escorted Ketil out of his shackles. He was confused at the mans generosity, but without much of another choice he accepted. As Beiner loaded Ketil’s things into a horse-drawn carriage he began to explain. The man wished to create a fortune on trade, and who better to help with that than a notorious conman. When the two arrived at the site of the new trading center, all that was left there was a broken corral, a rotten stable, and a dried skeleton.

Ketil saw this as an opportunity for to go clean, to stop his grifting. Ketil saw this as a future to strive for.