Barnace Grapham

Azeroth's graveyards are full of men who gave their lives for their kingdom. Barnace just has the had the strange luck never to have given his, despite ample opportunity.

Appearance
The man's nearly seventy, forty years of his life having been spent at one war or another. He's tried to give up his lifestyle many times, but it just keeps pulling him back in as another conflict calls his skills to use. His hair is grey now, his muscles still corded and strong beneath skin that sags a bit from what were once strikingly handsome features. Wrinkles and more than a few old scars cross his weathered face.

Personality
He tries to be his old self, the affable, rough-mannered sailor who serves his king and is glad to be of help when needed, but there is a palpable undercurrent of sadness to his words and ways these days. He's tired, ready to give it all up for a few years to fish in.

Biography
The story of Barnace Grapham is the story of the Alliance; just a man trying to live out his life in peace, called to extraordinary deeds and a lifetime at war by a world that just won't let him be. There's more to tell. Always more to tell, of course, but that'll come with time.

Early Life
Barnace Grapham was born on a midsized farm near the northwestern coast of Westfall, the third son of the area's miller. A rough-and-tumble young man with a mischevious streak who stood to inherit almost nothing of the family estate, young Barney got in his first fistfight at eight, won his first fistfight at ten, and burned down Grandpappy Saldean's barn whilst smoking a corn-cob pipe with Edie Saldean in the hayloft when he was eleven. He spent his first stint in the Moonbrook jailhouse at fourteen for hijacking a wagonload of liquor with his father's militia crossbow, but it wasn't until two years later when another such stickup turned ugly that he and his gang were formally charged with murder.

Sentenced to hang for their crimes, a local tough named Wally Freemore broke them out and together they went on the run through Westfall; hiding in barns, rustling cattle, robbing travelers and stealing from root cellars to survive. Hunted by a militia hired by his father and led by his older brothers, Barnace and his gang stole a lighthouse-keeper's fishing boat and fled south.

The Westfall Corsairs
It's easy to romanticize pirates, but being a pirate is entirely a different matter. Desperate, often hunted by the Stormwind Navy, Barnace Grapham and the Corsairs (which, I should note, would be a great name for a rock band), sailed the coastal waters of Westfall and Stormwind, preying on merchant shipping and over the course of the next years established their place among the most feared pirates of the Westfall and Stranglethorn coasts.

The Corsairs slowly expanded their range as they captured larger ships and were able to attract a crew comprising members of nearly every human nation and even a few elves and dwarves. By the time Grapham was twenty-nine, the Corsairs boasted a fleet of three large ships and two smaller ones, operating from a hidden island in the South Seas and raiding as far north as the Thandol Span and as far south as Booty Bay.

The First War
The First War was over almost before it began. That much is generally agreed upon by the historians. On the day the Dark Portal opened, The Kingdom of Stormwind hadn't been involved in a major war in several hundred years. This is not to say they were weak, for the legendary Footmen - at the tip of whose shortsword and steel shield the Kingdom had made its name - still drilled regularly, but long decades of peace had started to eat away at the once-hard edge of the Kingdom's military, as evidenced by the impunity with which the Corsairs had raided the coast. Sure, there'd been attempts to capture them, but most had fallen short, thanks to defense funding that seemed to end up more in the nobles' purses than in the form of ships or harbor cannons.

Indeed, Grapham and his pirates were raiding a small fishing village when they first heard news of the monstrous green brutes with jagged iron axes that had come pouring out of the Black Morass, razing Grand Hamlet in Southern Elwynn Forest to the ground two weeks earlier. Taking it to be poppycock story cooked up by the locals in a desperate effort to save their skins, the Corsairs did as they usually did - taking any valuables, a few live pigs, sacks of wheat and ale, and heading back out to sea, setting the mayor's house ablaze before they left as a warning against telling any more tall tales.

Things got a bit more complicated when the next village down the coast told the same story, and a week later, the next did as well, each time placing the raids a bit further north and west from where they'd last been seen, the tales of their ferocity and the terror this 'Horde' sowed a bit more dire. Still, needs must, and they went on their way, burning and looting their way up the coast as they always did in the fall season. It was only as their raiding party came into sight of his old home town of Moonbrook that Barnace Grapham began to understand the size of the problem. Thick black smoke rose from four huge, hastily-built furnaces that rapidly turned the ore of the Moonbrook Mines into cheap, rough iron war-swords. Adopting a simple farmer's hat pulled low over his eyes, the young pirate captain swaggered into the crowd, quietly taking note of the obvious preparations for war: the local militiamen drilling and being fitted for armor, the farmers loading sacks of grain, dried meat and casks of pale local wheat beer into wagons. He glanced into the local Duke's courtyard, only to pull up short, face to face with none other than his own eldest brother, dressed in the full fitted plate of a trained Stormwind Footman company captain.

Now, let it be said that by the time he was full grown, Barnace had become quite an accomplished fighter, certainly on par with his big, honorable and rather boring older brothers. However, a fight between a very, very angry man in steel plate and one in a floppy hat and peasant pants isn't so much a fight as a beating, and young Barnace got beaten badly. Bloodied, aching and bound with a thick hempen rope, the youngest, disgraced son of the Grapham family was led not to the local magistrate for sentencing, but hogtied and thrown into young Pappy Saldean's hayloft to await nightfall, when he would presumably be dealt Westfall Justice in the traditional way - the way a pirate, murderer and fugitive from the King's Law didn't recover from.

Currently
Fishing in Draenor, hoping to be left alone long enough to die in peace.

Relationships
More tavern wenches than you can shake a fishing pole at. A few long-term partners, but none he's been able to keep.

Trivia

 * Grapham is not actually anybody's grandfather. That he knows of.
 * His theme song is a gentle fart, released slowly into an armchair whilst falling blissfully asleep.