Tamsi Coppercoil – Rock Gnome Artillerist
“If the blast came from the right direction, we call that a success. If the wall’s still standing, we call that a bonus.”
Name: Tamsi Coppercoil
Race: Rock Gnome
Role/Class: Artificer Level 8 (Artillerist)
Appearance: Tamsi Coppercoil is a compact storm of motion in a soot-streaked package. Barely three and a half feet tall, she has a round, lively face framed by a wild halo of corkscrew auburn curls that escape any attempt at taming. Brass goggles with cracked but carefully repaired lenses sit on her forehead or over one eye, leaving pale rings around otherwise permanently smudged skin. Her eyes are bright copper-brown, always glittering with a mix of mischief and manic calculation.
She wears a thick leather work-vest over a dark, sleeveless tunic and reinforced trousers tucked into heavy boots. Every inch of her attire is scorched, patched, and stitched with visible repairs. Multiple belts crisscross her torso, bristling with tools, wrenches, screwdrivers, coil-springs, and spare crystals. Her gauntlets are made of layered leather and metal plates with built-in runic inscriptions and pivoting nozzles. A bandolier of small canisters and arcane fuses crosses her chest, and a compact, spider-legged arcane cannon—currently dormant—often skitters at her heels like a metal pet when she isn’t actively deploying it.
Backstory
Tamsi Coppercoil grew up in a deep gnome enclave where “safety protocols” were mostly treated as polite suggestions. Her clan specialized in experimental defenses: collapsing tunnels on command, redirecting explosive gas pockets, and turning scrap into deterrents for things with too many teeth. As a child, she learned to think in angles and shrapnel patterns. As a teenager, she learned the cost of miscalculations when a test defense collapsed the wrong shaft, trapping three miners and forcing a desperate rescue.
Determined to make her work less lethal for the people it was meant to protect, Tamsi left home to study with surface artificers and siege engineers. She absorbed everything she could about wards, runes, and ranged spellcraft, blending it with her gnomish flair for overbuilt gadgets. When she heard rumors about a remote forest outpost perpetually short on defenders and long on creative improvisation, she marched in, dumped a crate of prototypes on the table, and declared, “You have walls. I make walls louder.”
Over time, she became the outpost’s unofficial quartermaster and chief of improvised artillery. She built ballista-like turrets that fired force bolts instead of bolts, anchored crystal-tipped cannons to the palisade, and rigged the approach paths with remotely triggered “sound discouragers” to spook prowling beasts. Her creations have saved the outpost from raiders, monsters, and more than one rampaging forest horror—though they’ve also singed roofs, cracked a gatepost, and once turned the command platform into a very surprised bonfire.
Despite (or because of) the chaos, the outpost trusts her. Tamsi keeps meticulous logs of her failures right beside her triumphs and insists her gear be stress-tested before any real battle. She’s fiercely protective of her crew, deeply proud of the ground she’s helped hold, and more than a little suspicious of anyone who wants to “borrow” her prototypes for use elsewhere without understanding the risks.
