Tom Fields
First appearance: Evolution, chapter 3
Last appearance: Evolution, chapter 26
Appears in: EvolutionLatest status
Alive — leading a mercenary team in methodical witness eliminations for Alexion
Tom Fields is a player allied with an ambitious guild leader’s inner circle, a mercenary opportunist who profits from conquest without much concern for the human cost involved. Brash and openly contemptuous of the loyalty and ceremony others place value on, he attaches himself wherever the rewards are greatest, taking on taxation schemes, armed raids, and quiet cleanup work with the same practical detachment. His arc traces a hired gun steadily entrusted with dirtier and more consequential tasks as his patron’s ambitions grow.
Book 3: Evolution
Tom Fields appears first among the players looting a newly conquered Crystal Reach, mocking the city’s nobles with an exaggerated curtsy and defending the plunder of dead shopkeepers’ goods as fair game; he had previously abandoned Alexion when Alexion lost rank, only returning once the city fell. As a Trinity guild member he takes charge of a new taxation scheme on farming land outside the city, reporting the operation’s profits to Alexion with satisfaction, though he makes an example of players who resist paying and leaves abruptly when public executions begin, uncomfortable with that level of brutality despite his tolerance for player-on-player violence. He later joins Alexion’s inner circle at Crystal Reach, where he openly dismisses the group’s roleplaying conventions as pointless and lounges apart from the others, his contempt provoking Alexion’s temper without costing him his standing. When Alexion sends a mercenary team to seize the teleportation platform ahead of the raid on Vaerwald, Tom fights as an archer, killing two earth guild mages to secure the position and treating the coming plunder of Vaerwald as effortless. He then leads that same team in methodically hunting down and killing witnesses and stragglers to keep the raid secret, treating the eliminations as a routine, well-compensated task.
Status: Alive → Alive — leading a mercenary team in methodical witness eliminations for Alexion
Alexion: Moves from an on-again, off-again hanger-on who abandoned Alexion during his fall in rank to a trusted mercenary leader entrusted with taxation enforcement, platform seizure, and witness elimination, even as he shows discomfort with the brutality Alexion’s rule increasingly requires.
Key quote: “As you suggested, we secured the more popular farming areas outside of town. A few players gave us some trouble over the new fee, but we made an ‘example’ of them.”
Appears in
- Evolution — 5 chapters