Rarn was a Dhampir, aka a half-vampire. Dhampir have the natural bloodsucking urges of their vampire father but don't need to actually drink. Because of his status as a Dhampir he's what's known as a "half soul" meaning he cannot get into the afterlife, is hated by the goddess of death Pharasma, and is functionally an undead in regards to effects. Dhampir mothers tend to die in childbirth, and Rarn's did. Most Dhampir tend to seek out their fathers in revenge for this, or for other reasons, and most Vampires that father Dhampirs tend to try to find them to absorb their half souls and power.

As well as prevent potential assassination attempts later by their progeny.
Rarn was born Adalon, his mother was a prostitute at a brothel on the docks who unknowingly slept with a vampire. She died in childbirth and he was raised in the brothel as the cook in the kitchens until he was about ten.

At the age of ten a group of inquisitors of Pharasma (goddess of death) raided the brothel he lived at, these inquisitors belonged to a group called the Grey Wardens. They are an organization consisting of thirteen wardens that hunt a list of thirteen abominations of Pharasma (powerful undead) and came to this brothel for information. They question and kill basically everyone save Adalon, who is tortured and branded with spirals (the holy symbol of Pharasma) on his feet, these spirals suppressed his bloodsucking tendencies and allowed him to be tracked at all times by the Grey Wardens and even see/hear/whatever him wherever he was at.

They know he's a dhampir and he doesn't know he's the whole reason they're there, one of the prostitutes gives her life to help him escape. Later revealed to be a ploy by the Grey Wardens because they want him to go free hoping he leads them back to his father.

For a good chunk of his life Adalon changes his name to Mince, and becomes a street urchin and swindler, and eventually a low tier smuggler for a few crime syndicates.
He marries a dumb baker's daughter who is as dense as her poundcake (according to my notes) and she burns through coin faster than he can earn it. His syndicate gets a job with a famous local vampire pirate called Argor Bloodbeard, and he runs jobs for the man for awhile before getting a large and difficult job directly from him. He does the job, gets paid very little, and on his way off the ship from the meeting he swipes an urn off the dresser of the captain's cabin to make up for it. He stores it under the floorboards in his house. Bloodbeard senses the urn, because its his "coffin", and arrives at the house and gets invited in by his dumb wife. When Mince returns to his house his wife is dead, drained of every drop of blood, and painted on the wall in her blood is the words "I still have work if you want it." and the floorboards are all torn up.

Mince goes on the run and tries to become "normal" and renames himself Handel this time. Becoming a blacksmith's apprentice and thinks he's safe and hidden away until one of the Grey Wardens comes and finds him. His name is Harlaw, and Harlaw reveals to him what the spirals do and how they always know where he is and he can't hide from them. He tells him Bloodbeard is on their list of abominations at the moment and if he would help them find and slay him he'll be considered absolved of his crime of being a half-soul and be set "free". So Handel joins a free pirate crew as a cook and keeps an ear to the oars for information on Bloodbeard. Eventually they have a run-in with Bloodbeard, whose crew infiltrates ships with vampiric ghouls pretending to be people and then they "call" his ship and the entire ship is ransacked and everyone taken except Handel, who hides in the walls, his vampire blood masking his scent to the raiders. He ends up stranded alone on the derelict ship at float for awhile before he's found by some of the local pirate hunters who accuse him of mutiny, piracy, and more. He gets locked away for decades at Parley Point, an old ruined tower, and forgotten about and assumed dead.

While at Parley Point he "removes" the spirals from his feet the best he can.
He eventually gets free and returns to his home of Beggarbriar and tries to piece back together his life, this time as Rarn Halleck, and gets back into the smuggling business. One night while he's drinking he suddenly feels sick and passes out. Thus begins the actual campaign. (This has all been backstory.)

He along with the party, a dwarf, an elf, and a sorceress, are shanghai'd and forced to serve on a pirate ship. They're beaten, abused by the crew and eventually settle into their roles. Rarn of course becomes the cook and his quick hands mean he swipes booze to gift crewmembers, he gets in chummy with the quartermaster and chef. However he knows eventually the crew will be testing for vampires using a few vials of holy water they have about to avoid Bloodbeard's minions. So he tries to find the stash of them and steals them. The sorceress catches him stashing them and steals them from his stash for herself. In the middle of the night she wakes him and brings him up on the deck of the ship while everyone sleeps and starts grilling him and interrogating him about his thievery and what he's been doing. Solely out of curiosity. She blackmails him by revealing she has the holy water and wants to know why he wants it so bad. He argues for a bit before realizing she's going to use it on him regardless and holds out his palm and tells her to pour a few drops. She dumps a good amount on his hand and burns the fuck out of him.

She then proceeds to continue grilling him until he admits he's a Dhampir, that he's afraid the crew will find out and because of Bloodbeard they'll kill him, confides in her some other shit about his backstory. She becomes intrigued, and tries to get him to bite her and he refuses, explaining it won't make her a vampire and immortal. She gets disappointed and instead gets flirty with him in apology for burning the fuck out of his hand. He's got an actual ingame trait that he's unnaturally beautiful to those who would be attracted to him, and she's enthralled by that. They bang on the ship deck during the storm.

Meanwhile the elf tries to break into the quartermaster, but due to Rarn's stealing everything is rigged with traps and she gets hit by an arrow trap. She meets with us and has us heal her the best we can to hide the evidence in exchange for giving us our starting gear back. Rarn feels guilty that he's the reason the chests were trapped. The quartermaster and crew threaten to punish everyone unless the thief steps forward, and the punishment is cruel and brutal, Rarn having been through enough shit in his life knows he can take it and due to his guilt steps forward. They lock him in a box in the hull for 3 days that's being steamed, he can't move, he's curled into a ball, he's just constantly subject to ridiculous heat.

This entire time the other party members visit him one by one, thanking him for not outing them under this torture, they bring him water, little things to keep him going. Ahnra, the sorceress, and him have long talks particularly.

He's freed at the end of three days, begins plotting to escape the entire ship, realizing they'll kill him if he's here long enough. While spying one day he overhears the main crew talking about a major storm coming and hears the words "Storm.. wind.. newcomers.. trouble.. rid.. overboard.."

Storm comes, everyone is on the deck helping, people can't hear or see anything in the rain really.

Rarn's low light vision means he can see a little better, and he sees one of the crew members climbing the crow's nest to where Ahnra is handling ropes. He's sure she's going to throw Ahnra overboard and starts climbing, he cuts ropes below her failing to send her swinging overboard (due to bad perception checks to figure out which rope is which) eventually he climbs into the crow's nest and tries to bullrush the crewmember overboard.

He rolls a 1.

So she turns around and tries to bullrush him. She rolls a 20.

Tossing Rarn 400 ft to the water below.

Realistically he'd be paste, but I used my hero point to stabilize but I was still drowning. Ahnra looks over and yells for Rarn, and jumps after him casting a swim spell and water breathing before she hits the water.

They wash up on an island, there are these things called Mirelurks on the island, they're half-goblin half-octopus. Ahnra brings Rarn into a broken hut and hides him as he recovers from his ordeal.

She tries to fish and survive but fails miserably, she's almost starved when Rarn finally recovers enough to help. We spend weeks fishing and trying to stay alive, drinking the local water as best we can.

They kinda build up the hut to where its hidden so the mirelurks don't find us, we kill quite a few of them when they discover us, but every night is us taking shifts to watch out.

They have a lot of emotional chatting during this time, more banging, she gets him to bite her and drink her blood. Something he's never done but has had this low end craving for his entire life and didn't realize it. Sorcerers store their magic in their blood, and because of this Rarn starts finding he can shock with his fingertips and cast lightning from them even. He also finds himself able to "sense" her and her him as well as each-other's emotional states.

During one intimate moment she goads him on and he loses control, becoming aggressive and about drinks her dry because he begins craving the "taste" of arcane power in her blood. There's also a feedback loop where because of them able to feel each-other's senses it gets crazy for them when stuff happens and she starts feeling his aggression and hunger. Morning comes, he basically finds the murder scene of their night before, he feels incredibly guilty and draws a huge spiral in the sand and scars his feet with the spiral using a sharp rock. He says a prayer to Pharasma and begs for forgiveness, she doesn't answer but his hunger starts fading.

(Not literal murder scene, she's still alive)

I'll cut through some stuff here because its not really important to their story and is typical dungeony stuff but the rest of the party finds us on the island. We're cursed due to the water we drank and appear almost undead to them, they get the curse cleared and we mutiny the ship taking it over. We become pirates, Rarn the treasurer and Ahnra the captain. We return to port and on the docks waits Harlaw, standing in his masked grey armor with arms crossed.

He tells Rarn he can smell blood on him, and that he's disappointed. Rarn is pretty sure he's going to be dragged away but Harlaw just leaves with a warning to keep it in check. He tells him Bloodbeard has been "taken care of" but that he isn't done with Rarn yet.

Rarn returns to his ship, the party does piratey things. Rarn confides in Ahnra a lot of things including his true name, Adalon, he gives her a ring when he finds out she's pregnant with their kid but starts feeling incredibly worried about what might be coming, especially with the knowledge his father is still out there somewhere and might come for him. The spirals start being less effective, and the hunger gets worse every time he indulges. He's afraid one day he'll hurt or kill Ahnra.
And by extension their child to be.

The DM gave us permission to run side-campaigns to expand story stuff and I wrote up one, but I had to promise Ahnra's player not to run it, because it made her too sad and made her cry her eyes out.

This is about when the actual game came to an end anyway due to a few IRL obligations for some of the players.

At this point I should note, Rarn is a tragic and sad character, he's 100% emotion in writing and the amount of tears people in the party shed over this fucktard and his stupidity at times was absurd. It was beautiful.

The campaign plan:

Rarn disappears in the night and the party doesn't know where he went. Ahnra, rather pregnant at this point decides to go find him and the first people she goes hunting for are the Grey Wardens. They hunt them down and after capturing a few of them realize they aren't people, they're ashes bound to armor. The Grey Wardens keep trying to incapacitate the party and won't kill them. Ahnra begins to think Rarn made a deal with them. They kill the captured Grey Wardens by pouring holy water in the ashes. All the while they are harrowed by Harlaw and Ladaon, two of the thirteen. Eventually they catch up with the two and slay Ladaon, under duress and torture he divulges no info and Ahnra pours holy water to end him, only to find a locket washes out of his armor with her picture in it. Ladaon is Adalon. Harlaw explains Grey Wardens are former Dhampir who cannot control their hunger and want atonement, they can never be let into the afterlife because of their half-souls and will never know rest. So they sacrifice their bodies, become bound to armor, and serve Pharasma hunting abominations eternally. Harlaw is actually Adalon/Rarn's half-brother, another Dhampir by their father. Rarn's father had begun hunting his children he sired and wanted to consume them to ascend to demi-god status, and Rarn knew that meant Ahnra and their child was at risk, either from his own hunger (which she caused by making him bite her remember) or from his father. So he sacrificed his body to go end his father alongside his brother knowing he'd no longer be a risk to his love and their child.

But Ahnra wouldn't let me run it because it was way too fucking tragic. Becuase she's a jerkkk.