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Background

Mump is a Toadling, a race of diminutive toad-men (the origins of which are shrouded in ancient time) that are found in the damp dank swampy places where the other races don't bother to go -- not because it's dangerous, so much as there being nothing worth seeing there.

Toadlings are mud-bound and, if they wish to remain free, remain deep within the swamps they call home. Those that touch upon the settlements of other races often find themselves forced into slavery.

Mump is a second-generation city Toadling (which city should be determined by campaign priorities), which means he has grown up firmly aware of his position at the bottom of the social totem pole.

This affords several "advantages". Chief among them is the knowledge of how to become culturally invisible. Mump does not get noticed when he is in a room because one does not notice such things; unworthy as he is, he holds himself in a posture that only enhances the effect. This also means staying out of sight, and as a result, Mump is particularly aware of the back-ways that are used by slaves, servants, criminals, and other undesirables. Finally, when he fails to escape notice, years of practice grovelling ensure that any consequences of getting noticed are quickly averted.

Mump's parents were slaves, and he is as well, separated from them shortly after he shed his tadpole's tail (naturally, toadling infants are raised in pools). A lifetime of work-a-day menial tasks has left Mump quite capable in that area, and navigating the social and physical landscape of a master's household has required soft steps and alert ears.

Having spent his whole life as a slave, Mump knows no other way. After passing through several minor owners, he was picked up by a human who only permitted himself to be known as My Lord and Master, who was very exacting in how his household was to be run and his slaves were to be performed. Mump became even better at staying quiet, grovelling when he was found wanting, and staying out of sight in the back-ways of society as he fulfilled the instructions of My Lord and Master.

Mump was raised without religion; this actually extends deeply into the fabric of his relationship with the spiritual. Not only does he not acknowledge (or really know much about) the gods, the gods do not even make mark of Mump in their celestial books. He is, in some ways, outside of their influence -- leaving him more vulnerable to the whims of fate and circumstance. No spirits guard over Mump, nor will they. He is on his own. As such, he has learned to watch his back.

My Lord and Master was a frequent target of all sorts of machinations, spellcraftings, assassination attempts, and other issues of varying arcane natures. In Mump, he saw a tabula rasa of a sort (c.f. Godless) that he could mold into a kind of passive magickal bodyguard called a Spell-Eater. Spell-Eaters are the piss-boys of arcane practitioners, and often have a limited lifespan; their primary purpose is to suck up magical consequences targetted at (or as unfortunate side effects of spells cast by) the practitioner that crafted the curse onto them in the first place, and in this purpose they are a kind of magickal lightning-rod, largely indistinguishable from those they protect as far as the forces of magic are concerned.

Mump, as a Spell Eater, ultimately came to spend more and more time standing between My Lord and Master and those he did business with. It seemed the Master trusted few, and in general, those he did business with did not fit into that slender category. And with good reason; in the years following Mump's transformation, he received a number of scars and minor transformations due to the magics that funnelled into him, shielding his Master from harm. This has left Mump able to glow from time to time -- the residue of magic, exuding from his pores as luminescent waste -- and, if he somehow gets up the gumption to do it, a small talent in frightening the overly curious (the scars and other intermittently visible marks have certainly lead to mothers taking their children to the other side of the road). As a matter of survival, Mump also learned how to recognize certain types of magic (though he is no savant in this regard), and he has come to recognize the "smell" of spellcraft -- apparently a side-effect of his original transformation.

Eventually My Lord and Master (The Master of Sigils, as others knew him) ran afoul of a puissant witch skilled with dire curses. In her efforts to let the Master know he had been outsmarted, she laid a curse in his path in symbolic form, a sigil to make life difficult for the Sigil-Master; poetic justice of a kind. Naturally, Mump ended up stumbling into it and, as a Spell-Eater of the Master, the curse went off and targetted him -- but was so great, that it overspilled and hit the Master as well. The Master's great ziggurat collapsed upon him -- the curse, as it turns out, was the Curse of Bad to Worse, guaranteeing that anything that could get worse, eventually would -- and Mump, somewhat due to the curse's influence, and definitely due to his innate cowardice, fled the scene, unsure whether his master was dead or crippled (Mike, this is yours to play with, potentially), but fearing his wrath either way.

Mump spent a good amount of time after the Master's downfall (and disappearance?) on the run, from problems both imagined and real. As a Spell-Eater without a master, he was effectively contraband under certain laws, and soon -- thanks to the influences of the curse -- found himself in the clutches of an entertaining parade of underworld figures.

Ultimately, though, Mump never escaped his essential slave-ness -- in fact, it's hard to say if he even has the mental capacity to truly grasp the essential concepts of freedom. The Underworld for all of its dangers (which he cowered before frequently) also gave him a ready supply of purpose in the forms of those who would be his master.

As a spell-eater, Mump has been invaluable to the criminal element (and their "money will buy me anything" customers, betimes), and has ended up parlayed into a sort of spell-eater for hire (in actuality, the revenue does not, of course, go to Mump, it goes to Mump's master of the moment). In this, Mump has seen more of the rich, powerful, and magically influential than he ever feared possible (dreamed possible? no. Mump does not dream of good things, he only fears the inevitable consequences of life).

Thus, Mump enters into our story as a slave, but an illegal slave of a sort (he would not be so in the hands of His Lord and Master, but as those who are now his master are not sorcerors...), hired out for dangerous duties at the side of people who are, most assuredly, doing something the authorities would not approve of.