Morgan Bruis

Morgan was born as Portia Hammer. She never knew her biological father but she grew up in the Den of the Seven Vales tavern in the Lower City of Baldur’s Gate where her mom was working. The tavern owner, Avon Colton, was a con artist and taught her all sorts of tricks when she was a young child. He was her mentor. He taught her how to read and do math, how to recognize the class of people that were walking into the tavern, how to distinguish between good quality items from poor and cheap manufactured ones. The mom taught her how to make a man lose his mind. She learned all the stories and useful skills from the people that were hanging around the place, like how to play card games and how to use a musical instrument, but her true nature was to disguise herself and to use her cuteness (when she was a child) and her beauty (when she got older) to make people believe in whatever she wanted them to believe. When she was little she performed as a sad little orphan to get money and clothes; she would sell colored water to adventurers convincing them it was a strength potion and she started forging all sorts of documents and getting paid for it.

From time to time, rich merchants would stop in the Lower City on their way to the richer Upper CIty. When Portia was 18 year old, one of those rich merchants stopped at the tavern. Portia decided it was time for her, being grown up, to engage in a bigger con so she could get enough money to leave the tavern and the poor neighborhood and find a better place to live. She planned everything but one of the young servants of the merchant was a very attractive boy, Oliver, around her same age, and she fell in love. Because of it, she was not as careful as usual. The merchant con failed. She used to be the most attractive girl and to get her way because of her looks but this time she fell for the charms of a boy. The merchant caught her lies, and started spreading the news to other merchants that they had to be aware of Portia Hammer so she could not go anywhere without being recognized as a grifter.

Really disappointed and heartbroken, Portia retreated in the tavern to hide from people and she barely went out. When finally - some time later - another rich merchant showed up in the Lower City and decided to settle there and make the place his headquarters, Portia’s mentor decided to help her by providing her a new identity. He got her a lute (that he took from a bard that had no money to pay for the beer he ordered in the tavern), new, better looking clothes and new identity documents. Portia Hammer, the poor clothed and dirty girl from the tavern became the well-dressed, attractive and charming bard Morgan Bruis.

Avon recruited a group of other misfits - most of them younger - to help her do a new big con job, hoping they would get away with it and get a lot of money and valuable stuff so Portia could then use her new identity someplace else and start a new life. They tried to rob a rich merchant that settled in Baldur’s Gate without knowing that he was actually a very important member of The Guild. The con failed, and they had to leave town in a rush. Morgan went back to the tavern to talk with her mentor but he had disappeared. She gathered all her things, stole a horse and started traveling north.

Based on the stories heard from the many bards that had stopped there at the tavern in the past years, she made up a story about her to tell people. She would say she was born from a poor family. She had many siblings but she had a talent for singing so she decided to learn the basics of the bard profession at the very famous Fochlucan College in Sylvermoon. Only recently she perfected her skills at the college of Cli, on the eastern side of Baldur’s Gate. After that, she decided to stay in Baldur’s Gate for a while and sing in taverns all around before adventuring elsewhere. During her long travels from Sylvermoon to Baldur’s Gate - from one college to the other -, she met an older man named Randall, a charlatan that tried to trick her into buying useless potions. She decided to hire him as company for the travels and to learn the charlatan skills, that is how Randall became her mentor. She had a natural talent for it so in no time she became a master of trickery and disguise, that she finally combined with the bard education and skills. She also learned to forge documents of all sorts.

After her education, Morgan would be paid and hired as bard around the places and at the same time she would trick the people with her charms into giving her valuable things. She acquired a disguise kit and some colored water bottles along the way.

Now she presents herself like a beautiful red-head, well-dressed woman in her thirties, with a fine crafted lute and a wide knowledge of things and nobody would think she never actually attended school or that she came from a very poor family. She never tells anyone that Morgan is a fake identity but she still has her Portia documents that she sometimes uses as a second identity.

She stopped in many towns after leaving Baldur’s Gate but she never settled anywhere until she reached Neverwinter. She felt it was far enough and safe enough for her to start anew as the bard Morgan Bruis, and also she ran out of money and she was hoping to make some friends and start adventuring. She did not want to keep tricking people in taverns, but she wanted to start using her abilities for better purposes.