Gwenfor

When travelling through Clan _______'s territory, it's a good idea to spend your nights in the fortress's inn. Nobody will complain if you choose to sleep in a cave or simply nap on the ground outside instead, and honestly, you can probably get away with bunking in any room that doesn't look like it's being used at the moment. But the experience of resting at the inn will be much more pleasant, and much less likely to end with a dragon finding you and deciding you look like a great test subject.

However, anyone who wants to stay at the inn has to get through the innkeeper, Gwenfor, first. (Don't worry, he's a pushover.) He will plead with you not to stay, to go anywhere else. Gwenfor claims the inn is cursed, haunted, a deathtrap due to not following building regulations, maybe all three at once. For your own safety, you should find somewhere else to stay for the night. But nobody listens. After all, a night in the haunted inn is just one of the unique experiences that Clan _______ has to offer! And it's not like it's really cursed, anyways. That's just what they say to make it more exciting, right?

Gwenfor definitely belives his own stories, though. Some of his guests disappear without a trace, and no amount of his clanmates telling him it's because he always sleeps in late and they check out before he wakes up will convince him otherwise. There's weird shadows constantly flickering across the walls. (Because Yen keeps leaving candles everywhere.) And dangerous monsters lurk behind every corner in the hallways at night! (That's just what dragons are like when you wake them up before the sun has risen, Gwenfor.)

The only reason that Gwenfor sticks around is that he doesn't believe he has a choice. After all, he grew up in an inn, and now he's in a different inn, and he honestly doesn't remember how he even got to Clan _______. Clearly, he's doomed to work in the innkeeping business forever. Is this what happens if you get lost in the Starwood Strand? You leave one inn only to end up in another? Well, Gwenfor doesn't want to have to keep an even more cursed inn than this one, so he's staying right here. He likes the rest of the clan anyways, so that sort of makes up for it.

His clanmates, for their part, did try to convince Gwenfor that nothing was wrong with the inn. Or the rooms that he had decided were an inn. There wasn't any inn before Gwenfor, after all. They didn't try that hard though. It turned out the mystique of a haunted inn was doing a solid job of attracting visitors. That, and Gwenfor's inn had quickly come to be known for having some of the best service to be found in Sornieth.

After all, if someone insists on staying in his inn, it's Gwenfor's duty to try to protect them from the myriad curses and ghosts. Or to at least give them the best stay possible before they meet their inevitable doom. With his emotion-sensing abilities, Gwenfor can always tell when one of his guests has a problem, and will be rushing to their side to offer his help immediately. He'll be so afraid for their safety that he'll be tripping over everything in his hurry to aid them, only to blame the mess he made on a malicious poltergeist later. To his guests Gwenfor is a well-meaning if slightly incompetent host, which is really one of the draws of the inn. Another is the near-infinite number of ghost stories cooked up by Gwenfor's overactive imagination, meaning that every visitor gets a slightly different version of what the inn's curse is supposed to be.

One of the many ways that Gwenfor tries to protect his guests is through the traditional arcane magic of blessings based on the stars. Unfortunately, no amount of star charts or a particularly fancy telescope can make him very good at it. He struggles to recognize any constellation (they rudely move a little bit every night), and while he'll eventually manage to piece together some magic, he's never sure what it's going to do. His guests appreciate the thought, even when all he manages to do is cast a blessing of protection against trees falling on them.