HOUSE BELTARN (Patreon)

THE WYVERNBLADE HOUSE

As requested, let’s take a closer look at a modern noble house of Sembia, a “mover and shaker” right now in the Realms.

House Beltarn is a part of the landscape in Saerloon; a formidable noble family respected for their wealth and martial connections, but not one of the “noisy” haughty and trendsetting houses.

Their motto is “Rise By Readiness,” their colors are scarlet and silver with a deep purple dividing stripe or border between the other two hues, and their badge (simplified blazon) is a silver wyvern rampant on a scarlet field.

They are not a large house, having just over sixty live-in servants at their seat, a tall and many-towered walled mansion in Saerloon called Brightbanners (a popular name among Sembian nobles, for it has at least seven namesakes, all owned by different families who will all tell you that theirs was the first), with a main family of but five, plus two aging aunts and a wastrel uncle “living out.”

Beyond their everyday moneymaking “fists” (of six clustered warehouses in every major Sembian port), their property holdings in Sembia are modest: a plain night-over house in Saerb, a tallhouse in Selgaunt, and an upcountry estate (called Talark’s Haven, after the long-ago family patriarch and adventurer-hero, Talark Beltarn, who founded it) due south of Archtassel, near the Archwood, of six barley and mixed vegetables farms and an extensive wooded hunting preserve.

As of 1499 DR, the patriarch of the family is Braezel Beltarn, a handsome, trim-bearded brown-haired (but going white at the temples), with a thin line of a moustache, brown eyes, and a mellifluous voice. He stands tall, is broad-shouldered, goes armed at all times with an ornamented longsword, and wears rings known to be magical, though no observer can agree on just what powers they have, beyond agreeing on an ability to hurl back foes as if slammed by a great invisible fist.

Lord Braezel Havalaer Tronstran Beltarn is a calmly competent businessman who has tripled the family fortunes over the last two decades by shrewd shipping and warehousing practises and by serving as a go-between for hiring bodyguards and more formidable mercenary forces for fellow Sembian nobles, wannabe-nobles and the fearful in Westgate, and for a rising wealthy class in Teziir. His is the eye for swordsmiths and armorers who need sponsorship and in turn make for him magnificent armor and topnotch swords; House Beltarn is building an impressive collection of such things as forty-foot-long boar-swords and exotic whipswords, as well as selling a “standing armory” of lance, glaives, greatswords, longswords, shortswords, and daggers.

His father Toalrandar began the family habit of buying or commissioning impressive wall-sized paintings of battles and martial nobles doing splendid things, that now grace so many walls in Brightbanners. Servants sneer that the commissioned ones depict scenes of heroism that never happened, and that the purchased ones celebrate deeds done long ago by unrelated others, but recent rumors suggest that a few of the paintings are enchanted, and house either hidden gates that can transport those in the know between Brightbanners and Talark’s Haven, or from family homes in one Sembian city to another, or guardian monsters that can be called forth to battle intruders.

Unusually, among all the boastful nobles of Sembia, Lord Braezel doesn’t speak of such things. Nor does he betray the confidence of his clients, by revealing who has hired whom among mercenaries, and for what purposes.

His wife, Tazarandra, is even more private. Possessed of what one admiring noble called “smokily splendid looks,” with long flame-red hair but very black eyebrows, and intense bright blue eyes, she glides silently through the few social engagements she can’t avoid, and spends the rest of her time behind closed doors, closeted with what servants swear is “an ardent and all too fearless pursuit of sorcerous might.” It seems Lady Beltarn is already a powerful sorceress, and gaining more power through bold experimentation daily. To what ends? She’s silent on that, and so is everyone else inside the walls of Brightbanners.

The couple have three children: daughter Tanzaeze (“Tan-ZAY-zuh”), son Daerond (“DARE-rond”), and infant son Mralikh (“Mur-RAL-ick”).

Tanzaeze has mastered ten-and-nine winters, and is a darkly beautiful, silent and moody loner who’s said to be dabbling with dark powers with an eye to acquiring a small private army of smitten young male thralls through judicious use of warlock spells. There have been several hushed-up scandals involving her seducing older male servants and then sacrificing them to her patron, who is some sort of horned archfey with mighty magic and an aversion to being seen by anyone but her—and suffering such witnesses to live.

Daerond is an arrogant, young rake who fancies himself irresistible to women and too charming to need to atone for his many cruel pranks, but who is smart and sensible enough not to cross his father, and to progress in becoming his father’s heir just fast enough not to make Lord Braezel despair of him and disown him or send him off into harsh-discipline service to a fellow Sembian noble (for a habit is growing of patriarchs and matriarchs trading their “problem children” to each other for a few years of stern treatment, in hopes of rescuing them or allowing them to write their own dooms).

Mralikh is totter-walking rather than crawling, but is still young enough to have not made his mark in anything more than demonstrating his cruelty and his swift inventiveness to his nursemaids (his first—and if Braezel’s will is followed, very stern—governess lurks in his very near future). 

The “live outs” are Lord Braezel’s aunts and uncle, all of them more than a decade older than his sixty-odd winters.

The aunts dwell together, are often mistaken for each other because they are both tall, thin, wrinkled “bitches who live on their own spite,” as a senior servant (who died under mysterious circumstances, shortly thereafter) with haughty vocabularies, sophisticated tastes and manners (including a frighteningly prodigious appetite for wines and strong liqueurs; there are rumors that they were both poisoners by profession, years ago), a shared taste for young noble ladies, and the names Morandra (the elder, by a year) and Sartaszmura. They tend to wear black gowns, a heavy coating of black-gem jewelry, keep their nails sharp and long, and have their long gray-white hair pinned up with combs atop tiaras shaped like merchant-ships under full sail.

The wastrel uncle is far less malicious than his sisters, far fatter, drinks to belching excess daily, and rejoices in the name Garlhoaskur Malagar Beltarn. He’s full of stories about his own heroic exploits among the ladies and in monsterslaying adventures that curiously no one else seems to recall, but he does carry handaxes at his belt and knives in sheaths all over his person that he’s quite swift and deadly accurate with, when throwing, so a few of his tales may be true. And whereas his sisters seem to live on their spite and getting invited—or inviting themselves—to many noble feasts and revels where they can eat and drink all night long, Old Uncle Garl seems to do quite well gambling, and investing in certain mysterious smuggled cargoes, and in providing brief “safe house” hiding for Zhentarim agents on the run. And be judged more useful alive than silenced forever by that notably ruthless organization.

Lord Braezel does his best to ignore these kin (who dwell in their own residences in Saerloon, the two aunts together and the uncle on his own; they own an old, narrow, gloomy tallhouse and he rents upper rooms, and they both make do without servants), and they return the favor, with interest.

The wider world remembers House Beltarn for just two famous ancestors: the founder Talark, the first to amass wealth enough to aspire to nobility, and a later warrior hero, the only really famous Beltarn thus far, the adventurer and later mercenary Warrendar “The Wyvernblade” Beltarn, who flourished in the early 1300s DR and earned his nickname by slaying an entire family of wyverns in a ruin in Starmantle that he then looted—netting enough gems and mixed old coins to buy more than a dozen buildings in Westgate (later Beltarns lost them all, one by one, in various financial reverses, but he cemented the self-proclaimed nobility of the family by his wealth and holdings, during his long life).

Aside from whatever magical doings the two Ladies Beltarn may be up to at the moment, House Beltarn is remarkably free of rumors, salacious or otherwise, at the moment. Their goals are the usual ones: getting richer, and more influential (which to most Sembians translates as “more feared”).

And there you have it: a deployable noble family of Sembia, as they are right now. The Wyvernblade would likely shake his head in disgust at all of them but Lord Braezel, but that’s neither here nor there. He’s not the family ghost who’s watching them.

Who is? Ah, that’ll have to wait for another video. Someday.

In the meantime, Realms forever!