05/25/2026
For the upcoming En Guard game - rumors are the rules will include the ability to create custom duelists, so I threw this chap together (I *really* enjoy painting at the 54mm scale). Enjoy!
Wilhelm "Der Rote Brüller"
Few who first lay eyes upon Wilhelm recognize him as a duelist of consequence. They see a broad-shouldered brute of a creature with a grim simian face and clad in tattered human finery. They see a beast dressed in a man's coat, and their dismissal costs them dearly.
Wilhelm was born in the verdant, cathedral-canopied jungles of Chol, where the great apes do not merely roam but rule in their fashion, waging territorial wars of tremendous violence along the high ridges and misty valleys that no cartographer has yet dared map. It was there that the crafty ape who would be known as Wilhelm first learned the language of the blade, though at the time it was spoken in tooth and bone and the shriek of the savage curtain of the jungle. He was already a fighter of terrible reputation among his kind when the hunters came carrying nets, tranquilizer darts, and the stink of profit.
He awoke aboard the Vergoldete Bühne, the infamous roving carnival ship forever adrift upon the Eight Seas, moving from port to port like a plague of entertainment. Here, to the jeering delight of dock crowds and drunkards, the proprietors of the Bühne had him perform feats of strength and rowdy brawls with other unfortunate creatures like himself. But the ringmaster was a man of both cunning and vision; he saw the ape's natural instinct for violence and placed a sword in his hand.
It was meant as spectacle, but it became something else entirely.
Wilhelm took to the blade with a savant's ferocity, studying every swordsman who came aboard to be humiliated in staged duels, absorbing their footwork, their feints, the cruel riddle of steel. He fights one handed, an affectation born of the jungle where the other arm was needed to grip and seize. His style is brutal and balletic in equal measure: explosive lunges that cover impossible ground, sudden retreats into a low ape's crouch, and a single devastating riposte they have come to call der Rote Streich, “the Red Stroke,” which ended more lives on the Bühne than the hungry sea itself.
In time, the Vergoldete Bühne made berth in the port of Therae for the Season of Duels, and Wilhelm knew his time for freedom was at hand. One picked lock, three bloodied guards, and a four story drop into the harbor later, Wilhelm was free.
He has not left.
The city suits him. In Chol, he was a warrior without an arena worthy of his gifts. On the Bühne he was a spectacle without dignity. In Therae, at last he is recognized for what he truly is: a duelist of the highest caliber. That he is also a chimpanzee is a matter of some debate among the council scribes, who have found no clause in the Code of Swords that explicitly forbids it. He fights under no patron lord, owes fealty to no faction. He has made a den for himself in the rafters of a disused chandler's warehouse in the Tallow District, where he sleeps among ropes and hanging lanterns and sharpens his sword by the light of a guttering candle. The Vergoldete Bühne has returned to port twice since his escape. Both times, the men sent to reclaim him returned the following morning unharmed but empty handed, missing their swords, their boots, and their dignity.
Der Rote Brüller - The Red Howler - does not go back to the cage.
