Nar Bloodhand is a broad-shouldered half-orc with dark gray-green skin, a heavy jaw, and a pair of lower tusks worn smooth from years of biting through pain. His black hair is shaved close on the sides and tied into a short knot at the back. A crooked scar runs from his left temple to the edge of his mouth, while old rope burns circle both wrists. He wears battered chain mail beneath a red-brown traveling coat, with a scarred wooden shield marked by a faded Tymoran symbol that he did not carve himself. His hands are stained dark with old blood and iron dust, which earned him his name in the fighting pits.

Nar is guarded, observant, and blunt, but not cruel. He has a soft spot for debtors, runaways, frightened children, and anyone trying to look brave while clearly outmatched. He distrusts polished officials and wealthy patrons, yet he is quick to respect people who keep their promises. Nar rarely laughs loudly, but he has a dry, sudden sense of humor that appears when danger is at its worst.

Luskan never called what happened to Nar slavery. The city preferred cleaner words, debt, punishment, seizure, inventory. He learned that laws could be made to mean whatever a wealthy man needed them to mean, especially when the person being beaten had green-gray skin and tusks. Nar put himself between a moneyed creditor and a smaller debtor who could not pay. By the time the guards arrived, the story had already been purchased. Nar was sent to the Prisoners' Carnival, a public square dressed as justice, with a fighting pit run by the Coin Spinners in the gutted remains of an old temple of Tymora. There, an unnamed handler gave him a debt and a schedule, then turned him into entertainment for people who liked to wager on suffering. Nar stopped counting the fights before he stopped having them. Then, one night, every cell door in the block opened within minutes of one another. A woman crouched outside his cell, her face visible for only two seconds in the torchlight as her picks defeated the lock. Nar ran, first from the guards, then from Luskan, and finally because running was the only thing that still felt like his own choice. Two months later, after traveling south through Neverwinter and along the Triboar Trail, he reached Phandalin and took work at the Stonehill Inn. He keeps watch at the door, works as a caravan guard when offered, and refuses to let anyone call him property. A few days ago, near a modest shrine to Tymora, he saw the face of the woman who freed him. He has not approached her. He is not yet certain she is real, but he has been watching for her ever since. When talk of Wyvern Tor fills the inn and a disheveled dwarf arrives wearing impossibly expensive armor, Nar recognizes the familiar shape of trouble, and steps between it and everyone smaller than himself.