Crowley Crane



Crowley Crane is a Hand assassin, and highly placed member of the cult of the Worm that Walks.

Early Life & Training
Crowley Crane was born and raised in the Imperial section of the Ndango caer. His father and aunt were the last two surviving members of the Hand organization that, prior to the Isolation, was numerous and active in the dwarven kingdoms.

Over the generations, Hand training and missions were handed down from parent to offspring. Indoctrination and education began at a very young age, and Hand recruits were often kept isolated from the rest of the caer – and even from the rest of the small Imperial settlement in the city. Crane was one such young recruit.

He was raised to be fanatically loyal to the Empire, and to complete the missions he was given, even in the absence of regular communication from the Imperial command structure. As part of his training, he ventured out alongside his father and aunt into the tunnels to the Underdark where dwarven warriors often journeyed to prove themselves – but he was also active in the caer itself. The Imperial section of the city had the highest “suicide” rate in the city – particularly among those who voiced dissatisfaction with their status as Imperial citizens.

Career & Encounter with the Heroes of Anglesey
When he came of age, Crane took over his father’s cover identity as the secretary to one of the city’s numerous jewelers – an elderly dwarf named Harrigan Cross. Cross was a priority target, but one that was to be protected until he handed off certain documentation to Imperial agents. For 350 years, Crane’s family had protected the jeweler against the day those Imperial agents would finally come.

Crane’s history after his sanction of Cross is less clear. Shortly after he followed through on the assassination, he arranged the murder of a young adventurer, and coerced the local Imperial governor into stripping a trio of Imperial soldiers of their commissions and marching troops against one of the foremost clans in the city.

When his machinations came to light, he somehow fled the city and started south towards the capitol, hoping to rejoin the main body of the Hand in Avenanhma. At some point during that journey south, he encountered the embassy of Moiro Lycaeon and placed himself under the ambassador’s command. It may also have been during this time that he was first exposed to the Cult of Kyuss, though there is no way to verify that.

Crane shortly discovered that he and Lycaeon had similar sympathies regarding the current structure of the Empire. Upon sharing certain sensitive information, they also discovered that that their missions were compatible, and they committed to working together for the benefit of the Council of Regents and the Empire.

Journeying to the old Imperial city of Anglesey, they discovered the fortress Earldom under siege by a vast army of monsters, and decided to use the siege as leverage in an attempt to get the Earl to surrender the one remaining Imperial soldier from the conflict in Ndango, as well as the critical artifact he carried. The Earl – or, more to the point, the Earl’s son – refused.

Shortly after the siege on Anglesey was broken, the soldier in question fled westward, in the company of the Viscount and the Lord Commander of the city’s paladins. Lyceaon remained in the city, but Crane went south, once again back toward the capitol cities of the Empire, and this time bearing sure knowledge of the identities of those he hunted.

Adventuring and Pursuit
After reporting to the Hand in Avenanhma, Crane was assigned to the crew of the Regency airship Sky Treader''. Though Sky Treader'' was supposedly a diplomatic ship, and Crane himself supposedly a member of the diplomat's entourage, it swiftly became apparent to all aboard that he was the true commander of the mission. Through coded messages received by Sov Darnish, Crane was able to track the Heroes of Anglesey to the distant gnome city of Ap'Lei.

In Ap'Lei the diplomat swiftly ingratiated himself with the king, and reported at Crane's direction that a small group of Imperial subversives was loose in the city. The king's intelligence network reported that a group of outsiders had gone to ground at the bookshop of an elderly gnome named Errwinkle Zoomdack, and a group of the city's warforged militia, along with Crane, was dispatched to apprehend them.

That group was joined at the shop by a group of Regency soldiers loyal to Crane. The warforged were asked to guard the exterior of the bookstore, preventing them from witnessing Crane's murder of the aged proprietor, ransacking of the establishment, and frustrated arson when no sign of the Heroes of Anglesey could be found. Shortly after firing the building, Crane's targets emerged from a network of secret passages underneath the book shop. A running battle through the mist shrouded streets of Ap'Lei ensued, culminating in the Heroe's of Anglesey, accompanied the recently awoken Emperor, hijacking the Sky Treader, and fleeing the city, leaving Crane and his soldiers stranded.

How Crane returned to the mainland is again unclear, but it is likely he took passage on a gnome trader bound for Belix, and then made his way south. In any case, it was many months before the Heroes of Anglesey once again encountered him, and by then he was a full devotee of the Worm that Walks.

Final Confrontation and Death
At some point during the intervening months, Crane became companions with the lich Daern, and a number of other powerful adventurers, most of whom were fellow devotees of the Worm. Daern was able to convince Crane and the Council of Regents of the importance of the Tome of Becoming. Using the advanced scrying tools available at the Imperial Academy in Misr, and observations made by recon airships over the ruins of Aksum, Daern was even able to track the location of the Tome to the Bleak Eternity of Gehenna. In spite of this superior intelligence, Crane and his party just barely beat the Heroes of Anglesey to the grand bazaar at the foot of the Teardrop Palace in Gehenna. There, they discovered the erinyes Sascha, a dealer in rare books and other artifacts, and struck a deal with her for the location of the Tome.

Unfortunately for Crane, the Heroes of Anglesey struck a similar deal, and completed the task set for them by Sascha well before he and his party returned. The Heroes had nearly recovered the Tome when Crane caught up with them. He and his party fought the Heroes on the bank of the Styx, and were swiftly defeated. Daern escaped with his life, but Crane and the others were killed, disintegrated, and left to be forgotten on the bleak and crumbling shores of the great cursed river.