Hugh Jass-Plates was a soot stained artificer from Baldur’s Gate who just wanted to build better armor, not save worlds. Known for his laugh, his terrible branding, and plate harnesses that were “only slightly” explosive, he was working in the Outer City when the sky split with sickly purple light and the illithid armada descended. Dragged aboard one of the reawakened nautiloids along with other fresh faced adventurers, Hugh did the only thing he knew how to do: climbed into his experimental powered plate, ripped the walls apart for parts, and started turning mind flayer bio tech into reinforcement plating and improvised weapons. By the time people began fighting back across five stolen nautiloids, Hugh was one of the loud, frantic engineers holding his ship together while they all took shots at the same impossible monster: an Elder Brain Dragon that kept blinking between battlefields until they finally brought it down in a storm of cannon fire, spells, and bad ideas.

The victory was short. The helms lurched, the ships were dragged through the void, and the five wounded nautiloids fell toward a hard little world crowned by a single vast tower and the town clinging to its base. Hugh woke in the wreckage, armor half melted, bones aching in time with invisible surges still rippling through the land. Now he is a crash survivor and frontier tinkerer, walking around in a Frankenstein suit of Gate steel and illithid plating that hums when the magic spikes. He cracks jokes to keep from thinking too hard about the dragon screams he still hears in his dreams and has decided on one clear mission: if this new frontier is going to be warped by wild magic and fallen starships, then people here are going to have properly reinforced armor when it hits.