Fizzwick Sparkmender: Cleric of the Morninglord
I’ve got a new character, and for once “new character” doesn’t mean “rolled up at session zero.” Fizzwick has a whole life before this campaign — most of it spent as a barbarian, exactly none of it spent expecting to end up a cleric — and I wanted to actually write that life down instead of summarizing it in a Discord message. So: this is equal parts prequel and reference sheet. If you just want the crunch, the block below has it. If you want to know why a gnome with a warhammer he refuses to swing anymore is currently serving the god of dawn, keep scrolling.
Fizzwick Sparkmender
born Fizzwick Ironwhirl
formerly Barbarian (Path of the Berserker)
- STR8-1
- DEX16+3
- CON14+2
- INT11+0
- WIS16+3
- CHA10+0
Ability Scores
- Skills
- Religion +5 · Insight +5 · Investigation +2 · Persuasion +2 · Perception +3 · Survival +3
- Tools
- Smith's, Jeweler's, Mason's, Carpenter's, Tinker's Tools (racial)
- Languages
- Common, Dwarvish, Gnomish
- Divine Order
- Thaumaturge — bonus cantrip, WIS added to Arcana/Religion checks
Proficiencies & Skills
- Cantrips
- Toll the Dead · Sacred Flame · Guidance · Spare the Dying
- Racial Cantrips
- Mending · Prestidigitation (Gnomish Lineage)
- Channel Divinity
- Radiance of the Dawn · Warding Flare
- Prepared Spells
- Healing Word · Scorching Ray
Spells & Divine Features
- Traits
- I still narrate my own actions out loud — but now half of it sounds like prayer.
- I used to think consequences were for other people. I've met the dark now. I take it seriously — even if I still smile through it.
- Ideal
- Renewal — "Every dawn is a chance to fix what broke — myself included."
- Bond
- My god pulled me out of the dark once. I owe him — and everyone the dark has already taken — a debt I intend to pay in full.
- Flaw
- I charge at the dark before I've thought it through — some habits didn't die with me.
Personality
- Chain Shirt
- Shield
- Dagger
- Holy Symbol (worked into the sunburst chestplate)
- Smith's / Jeweler's / Mason's / Carpenter's / Tinker's Tools
- Warhammer (kept as a relic — no longer wielded)
Equipment
Origin — The Ironwhirl Household
Fizzwick grew up the middle child of five, in a loud, warm gnome enclave built into a hillside — the kind of place where every wall shares a room with a cousin. His mother, Pemma Ironwhirl, was a cobbler with a booming laugh and zero patience for self-pity. “A broken thing,” she liked to say, elbow-deep in a boot she was rebuilding for the third time, “is just an opportunity wearing a disguise.” His father, Bramblewick, was a retired caravan guard turned part-time brewer, permanently, endlessly amused by his middle child’s chaos. Fizzwick could set the pantry on fire — he did, once — and Bramblewick’s only comment would be some variation of “well, at least it was interesting.”
His older sister Tillie runs the family shop now and still bosses him around like he’s twelve. His younger brother Podge thinks he’s the coolest person alive, which says more about Podge’s taste than Fizzwick’s judgment.
There’s no tragedy here. No dead parents, no burned village. Just a hyperactive, attention-loving kid in a big, chaotic family that loved him and found him exhausting in roughly equal measure — which, in hindsight, was the most stable thing about him.
Grandpa Thistle
The instability came from Grandpa Thistle.
Thistlewick “Grandpa Thistle” Ironwhirl held court by the hearth most nights, and every story ended the same two ways: treasure, or a joke. Lost vaults nobody had found. Singing swords that judged their wielders. Riches still sitting out there, waiting patiently for the right fool to go looking. Never a cautionary tale. Never a story where the moral was “and that’s why you shouldn’t.” The real tragedy, as far as Grandpa Thistle was concerned, was dying having never gone to look.
Fizzwick believed every word of it, completely and permanently. It’s where he picked up the quiet, foundational conviction that consequences happen to other people — the less interesting ones. It’s also, though nobody clocked it at the time, where he first saw the rage. Every so often, mid-story, something old and violent would flicker across the old gnome’s face — a flash gone as fast as it arrived, catching itself before anyone could ask about it. Fizzwick never asked. Grandpa Thistle never explained. But it went somewhere. It always goes somewhere.
Three Guilds, Three Failures
Cast out of the Tinker’s Guild after the “Whirling Hammer Engine” — his words, still, unapologetically — leveled the guild hall. Two more guilds followed, in two more towns, with the same general outcome. Fizzwick doesn’t call these failures. He calls them field data.
So he took his genius on the road instead of into another workshop, and it turned out the road agreed with him more than any guild ever had. He became a real tomb-diver, a relic-hunter with actual results, eventually a warrior-engineer good enough that people who’d normally never hire a gnome kept hiring this one anyway. Loud, chaotic, occasionally on fire — but good at the job, and the job paid.
The Curse
He was retained by a benefactor he never fully vetted — that part matters, in hindsight — to extract a single tome from a sealed vault. The vault’s guardians warned the party off more than once, in more than one language, with increasing specificity. The party ignored every warning, because the party had a job to finish and Fizzwick had a lifetime of believing warnings were for other people.
They got the book. Fizzwick lingered too long near the arcane machinery sealing the vault behind them — just a few extra seconds, admiring the craftsmanship of a lock he was never going to get to keep — and something inside that Book of the Dead reached out and unmade a piece of him. Not his body. He walked out on his own two legs. It took the charge in him instead — a decade of hard-earned mastery, gone, like a candle someone else had blown out from the inside.
He walked out withered. Weakened. Cursed, in the specific, technical, “a piece of me is genuinely missing now” sense of the word.
Death and Rebirth — Finding Lathander
Death, when it finally came for Fizzwick, didn’t feel like an ending — it felt like the workshop lights going out mid-project, everything half-built and unfinished, plunged into a dark he’d never truly known. He’d spent a lifetime unafraid of consequences, laughing off explosions and expulsions alike, certain that nothing could touch a gnome too stubborn to notice he was in danger. But the dark that took him wasn’t fire or collapse — it was the cold, patient hunger of the Book of the Dead, and it did not laugh with him. For the first time in a hundred and forty-three years, Fizzwick Ironwhirl was afraid, truly afraid, of something he couldn’t out-tinker or out-swing. He felt himself unmade in that dark, hollowed out soul and all, and understood with sudden, screaming clarity that this — this — was the one invention he could not fix with a wrench.
And then, impossibly, warmth. Not sudden — it built, the way morning does, spilling in from some direction he had no name for. It found him in pieces: first a flicker against his cheek, then a pulse of gold behind his eyes, then a full tide of rose-and-violet light pouring into every hollow the curse had carved. It didn’t ask permission. It didn’t explain itself. It simply arrived, the way dawn always arrives, indifferent to whether the night believes it’s earned — and Fizzwick, who had spent his whole life building things that broke, felt something in him being rebuilt instead. He heard no voice, exactly, but understood all the same: you are not finished. get up. there is a wrong to put right, and the day is starting without you.
He woke gasping, grasping at his own chest like he could still feel gears turning where a soul should be — and found, engraved faintly into his skin like a brand he hadn’t asked for, the faint outline of a rising sun. He wept, laughed, and immediately began sketching armor designs, because that was simply who he was, curse or rebirth notwithstanding. But underneath the old manic energy sat something new and quiet: purpose. He didn’t fully understand what Lathander was, or why a god he’d never prayed to had reached into a dying gnome and pulled him back — but he knew, with the same stubborn certainty that had gotten him banned from three guilds, that he was going to find out. He was going to meet this god properly. He was going to undo whatever the Book of the Dead had done to him — to his soul, to his companions, to whatever else it had touched — and if that meant marching straight back into the dark he now feared more than anything, well. That’s exactly the kind of terrible idea Fizzwick Ironwhirl had always been famous for.
Current Status — The Discovery
Here’s the part the rest of the party knows and the rest of the world doesn’t: the gods aren’t dead. That’s the story everyone’s been told, and everyone’s been told it long enough to stop questioning it. They’re not dead. They’re cut off — restrained, walled away from something that should be theirs by right — and every time Fizzwick casts even the smallest spell, he’s not channeling some faint leftover echo of a god who used to matter. He’s pulling on the real thing, at real physical cost. He took eight points of damage casting Guidance. Guidance. The cantrip. His eyes go gold when it surfaces, an honest-to-gods glow that no amount of goggles hides.
The party has seen it happen enough times that there’s no more pretending it’s a trick of the torchlight. They know. The wider world still doesn’t, and every session that secret sits there is another session it gets heavier — and Fizzwick’s already proven it, at real physical cost, more than once. “The gods are dead” isn’t a eulogy. It’s a lock somebody put on the door on purpose, and now there’s a gnome who’s died once already walking around with a very specific, very personal interest in finding out who’s holding the key.
Old habits die hard, and apparently so does everything else — Fizzwick’s just the first thing that came back different. More on the party, the campaign, and whatever’s actually keeping the gods out, as it unfolds at the table.