Help to make a cool background story

[Razuchee]

Hello Playground

I am currently playing in a campaign where the guardian of death tries to kill everyone, so it is a dark and gritty campaign and people are generally asshats. After my last character died (never rolled so poorly before) I decided to play a Duergar Vengeance Paladin of Deep Duerra. He is LE and and has the knight background (always been part of Duerra's cult).

His Stats are Str 18, Dex 12, Con 16, Int 12, Wis 13, Cha 14

His Character traits are an awful lot of spite, insolence and grumpyness. He is pretty power hungry and wants to build an empire. When there are prisoners, he knows a guy who knows a guy who would buy and resell them as slavs. His Hobbies are smithing, chess, insulting people, bringing vengeance to everybody and slave trading. He also has a weakness for hammers (only those of good quality).

The Tenets of his Oath are:
- No mercy
- By any means Necessary
- Fight all who stand in your way

Oh and he is 63 and 5' 4''.

The Idea I now have is that considering this framework, everyone who wants to can write a sentence or two in coherence with the post before. What I already have is the ending:

He was pursuing a bunch of gnome thieves through the underdark, and at the next moment he stands in a bloody jungle on the surface (he hates trees gimli style), where he eventually met the party.

[mgshamster]

Usually when I can't come up with a backstory, I roll on the trinket table and design a backstory around the trinket.

It's from an idea called The Trinket Game, and there's a link to it in my signature.

[Biggstick]

This is a Vengeance Paladin right? Where is the redeeming quality in his tenets? While I like the idea of picking your own tenets to follow for the Oath, Vengeance needs that redeeming quality to balance it out. To be honest you've chosen two standard Vengeance tenets, but the third one of "Fight all who stand in your way" is a bit...chaotic. That doesn't seem like something a Lawful Dwarf would consider a viable option. There are plenty of Lawful ways of going around an obstacle or encounter in normal society that doesn't involve fighting. In fact, a Paladin (even a Vengeance Paladin) would likely be a solid candidate to Intimidate it's way through situations and avoiding potential fights where law enforcement within that society gets involved.

How is "bringing vengeance to everybody" a hobby? This definitely needs more clarification, as a Vengeance Paladin doesn't just blindly attack everything in front of it. They have the willpower and mental fortitude to pick and choose their targets. The Vengeance Paladin's focus is so powerful that it can straight up channel the power of whatever they're gaining their power from into advantage against one target once per short rest. You as a Vengeance Paladin are most definitely capable of picking and choosing the fights you're going to be a part of. What is the back story reason for this PC to have sworn an Oath of Vengeance? What wrong was done upon him or his clan and by whom?

I'm going to circle back again to the tenets just to emphasize the importance of it. This set of tenets doesn't include any redeeming qualities. A Vengeance Paladin has a redeeming quality or tenet that keeps them within the good graces of whatever force is granting them their divine power. This can include things like: Restitution, Unselfishness, Piety, Honor, etc etc.

[lordarkness]

(Character name) was a douchebag. He was born a douchebag, his parents were douchebags and even his pet cave fish had those tendencies. He learned to pillage at the tender at of 3, raid neighboring drow villages at 4 and made a hobby of stomping on kuotoa eggs in kindergarten. As a child he used to play "guards and bandits" with his growing collection of recently severed ears and fingers. Secretly he liked to dress up in drow scalps and lloth priestess dresses because it made him feel "pretty."

It was one of these days that his best friend and shield mate, a similarly douchebagy duergar named Anazol Gnomesquisher walked in on him playing drow maiden. Friend or no, Anazol was a first and foremost a douchebag and so it wasn't long, about 15 minutes to be exact, before every little duergar to in the clan had heard ever exaggerated versions of what (character name) had been up to.

He had never been betrayed before and by his own best friend no less. The fact that they was shieldmates through countless lunch money raids and babysitter disappearances only made the pain worse. Shieldmaties for life they used to say. (Character. Name) tore off his shield mate bracelet and fled town.

The unfortunate thing is that while the story had begun accurately enough, as it spread through the clan from one snotty toddler to another it had taken on a life of its own. By the time it had made its rounds and had circled back to Anazol it had become a tale of star-crossed lovers, vengeance, revenge, brutality, cannibalism, and disembowelment that involved broken mindflayers, outwitted purple worms, entire drow cities laid to waste and more than a few recyclables thrown in with the regular garbage.

At the center of this story was (character name), the new hero of the duergar and the epitome of all that was dark, wanton, and gratuitously violent. So compelling was the tale that even Anazol believed it.

Alas, a very irate (character name) was unaware of any of this and shame-raged he wandered the underdark searching for victims to make him feel good about himself.

For nearly 6 decades his clan searched for their little prodigy in vane. During this time (character name) terrorized the underdark popping the caps off of myconids, pulling tentacle whiskers off of aboleths and plucking the legs off of innocent umber hulks.

It was at this point, while in a particularly foul mood that he happened upon a small group of brain-damaged gnomes snorting ochre jelly behind a school for orphaned grimlocks.

[Edited because of spellcheck on my phone]

[N810]

what's his race ?