Bohdan "Bo" Thorruk

Ability Scores

Personality

Traits: (To be developed through play)

Ideal: (To be developed)

Bond: (To be developed)

Flaw: (To be developed)

Backstory

I. The Orcs Who Learned to Pass

Orcs came to Boston the same way they came to Canada. By boat. By necessity. By the promise of work no one else wanted.

Bohdan's family arrived in Edmonton decades later than most, part of a smaller wave that followed the rail lines and the factories instead of the ports. They learned quickly how to disappear. Names softened. Accents adopted. Stories adjusted. To the unawakened, they were Eastern European immigrants with heavy hands and heavier bones. To each other, they were something older, something quieter.

Orcs were born Awakened. Not with spectacle. With awareness.

Bohdan grew up knowing the world was layered — that shadows lingered too long, that some places felt fuller than others. He assumed everyone saw this and simply didn't talk about it. His parents encouraged silence. Survival depended on it.

II. The Cavern That Should Not Exist

In 1969, when Bohdan was fifteen, the ground opened beneath his feet.

He was hiking alone in Edmonton's River Valley when the earth gave way and swallowed him whole. He fell into darkness and landed in a cavern that had no right to be there. Bioluminescent fungi covered every surface. Colors without names pulsed and breathed, responding to his presence. Spores filled the air, tasting of copper and honey. The cavern felt alive in a way that was neither animal nor plant.

Bohdan didn't panic. He felt recognized.

He thought it was science.

He named it The Luminous Hollow and spent years chasing it. He studied mycology. Filled notebooks with precise illustrations of organisms that existed nowhere else. The entrance never appeared for anyone but him. Professors dismissed him. Papers were rejected. Photographs came out blurred or black.

III. A Closed Door in Cambridge

By 1981, Edmonton had run out of patience for Bohdan Thorruk. He was twenty-seven, credentialed, brilliant, and professionally radioactive. Harvard's Farlow Herbarium represented everything he still believed in. He also knew Boston had orcs — a real community, families who understood how to survive an Unsleeping City without being consumed by it.

He went south with a suitcase of notebooks and a hope he could not let go of.

Harvard didn't want him. Foreign credentials. No American institutional backing. No money to start over. The door closed politely and firmly in his face.

The city opened another.

IV. Five Years of Honest Work

The orc community took him in — an apartment in Southie, introductions, eventually a sanitation job. Union. Benefits. Early mornings. Heavy lifting. Honest work.

Bohdan told himself it was temporary. Five years later, he was still hauling trash past the buildings where he should have been working. It was in Boston that he finally understood what he was. The community had words for it: Awakened. Unsleeping City. His entire life snapped into focus all at once. The cavern wasn't a scientific anomaly. It was magic.

He didn't know what to do with that knowledge. So he kept working.

V. The Cost of Shelter

Protection costs something. The Boston mob didn't care what you looked like beneath the Arcana as long as you were reliable. Bohdan needed stability. So he accepted the drinks. The introductions. The small favors: ignore this dumpster, leave that one untouched, don't ask about the smell. Nothing illegal. Not exactly. Just silence. Complicity. Now he's in deeper than he ever intended.

VI. The Apartment and the Lie

Bohdan's apartment smells like fermentation — garlic, cabbage, something earthier underneath. Jars line every surface. Kombucha. Kimchi. Sauerkraut. Controlled decay. Life becoming other life.

He writes his mother letters he never sends. Tells her he's an assistant researcher. Sends money he can barely afford. She tells her neighbors her son is a scientist in America.

Hidden in his closet are the notebooks. Dozens of them. Museum-quality illustrations of impossible fungi. The Luminous Hollow, preserved in graphite and memory. No one has ever seen them.

VII. The Spores That Remember

Bohdan's magic did not arrive in a moment. It grew, like mycelium through soil. When he casts, the air smells of rain and decay. Impossible colors shimmer faintly around his hands. The spores respond to emotion — blooming brighter when he's agitated, settling when he's calm. He talks to them. Apologizes before cleaning mold. Greets fungi growing in sidewalk cracks.

Boston has begun to notice Bohdan Thorruk. Not because he is powerful. Not because he is dangerous. But because he is trying to be good in a city that keeps daring him not to be.

The spores are restless. Forces older than the mob are paying attention.

Class Features & Spells

Circle: Circle of Spores
Features: Wild Companion, Druidic, Halo of Spores, Symbiotic Entity, Circle Spells

Racial Features (Orc): Adrenaline Rush, Powerful Build

Spells (selection): Spiny Shield, Air Bubble, Animal Friendship, Animal Messenger, Augury, Barkskin, Beast Bond, Beast Sense, Blindness/Deafness

Equipment

• Modified Sanitation Coveralls (his access pass to every corner of Boston)
• Salvaged Can Lid (improvised equipment)
• Machete
• Herbalism Kit
• Sprig of Mistletoe (druidic focus)
• Blanket, Bedroll, Mess Kit
• Rations (1 day)
• Clothes, Common

Connections

Session Notes

Notes updated each session.