(Not done yet!)
Name: Silas Piotrovitch
Age: 53
Occupation: Barkeep
Hair: Thinning. Herbally dyed brown.
Eyes: Squinty, smallish, and bluish gray.
Skin: Pale and bad.
Defining characteristics: Pockmarked face, squished nose, huge battered-looking cudgel.
Sergei's appearance makes him seem faintly intimidating. Those who know him, though, know he's not too bad. His tavern defines him.
He was born as the second-youngest child to Pyotr(descended from Russian-type immigrants) and Ursula(Thoroughly mixed breed) Vladmirovitch. During what is sometimes known as the Wolf Winter, a particularly hard time when winter was bitterly cold and long and hungry, Sergei's younger sister was carried off and devoured by wild beasts. Some of his siblings died, as did Pyotr, due to a combination of starvation and hypothermia. But the oldest brother moved back in with his wife, and life went on.
As an adolescent he was apprenticed to the local brewer, and so was versed in the art of fermenting grain and potatoes. Beer. Vodka. Aside from his oldest brother, Ivan, who sought the brewer out, the family took a bit of a dim view of this occupation. And although Sergei was tragically found to not only be a teetotaler, but also a mediocre brewer, he had quite a way with tasting it.
Sergei never married and has no children. Now, if pressed enough he'll say it was because he fears losing loved ones. But there might be another reason, one he is ashamed of and would risk death by revealing.
These days Sergei is the owner and proprietor of a little tavern in Loghedge called the Two-Faced Sow... usually shortened to Twosow. It's not the place where you find the upper crusts of society, nor where musicians aspire to play, nor can one rent rooms, with or without quality. Things aren't all that clean.
No, compared to some, the Twosow is a bit of a pit. It's where the working class, the unskilled laborers and the least of the servants, go for a pint and a bowl of stew and bread and conversation. Only rarely is space rented out to sleep on, and then it's usually a table or the patch of floor close to the fire.
Twosow, years and years back, was once mildly more prosperous. Enough so, anyway, to have an actual stone fireplace instead of a firepit complete with smoke-hole in the roof. Sergei claims that he won it off a neglectful owner in a game of knucklebones during his brewing days.
Now the chimney and part of the ceiling is blackened by smoke; the rafters are adorned by the webs from several generation's worth of spiders. No matter how often the rushes scattered on the packed-earth floor get changed - and that's not too often - they never smell fresh. Ever. Every night plates and mugs are scoured, but they always look dingy, and customers are advised to bring their own cutlery. Lights are flickering flames, kept low on purpose. When there is someone acting as entertainment, it's nearly always a shoeless street musician with bones, a drum, or a reed pipe. That or a ragged unofficial storyteller.
