Kethgar is a lean, sharp-featured tiefling with deep wine-red skin, swept-back black hair, and polished obsidian horns that angle slightly backward from his brow. His eyes glow amber-gold, and his thin tail is usually wrapped once around a chair leg or hooked over his belt when he performs. He dresses in a weathered burgundy coat over a cream shirt, with brass buttons, bright scarves, and a well-maintained rapier at his hip. His lute is decorated with tiny gold stars and several deliberately terrible jokes carved into its frame.

Kethgar is gregarious, irreverent, and theatrically confident. He treats strangers as an audience he has not yet won over and enemies as critics who need better material. He is quick to offer a song, a drink, or a ridiculous explanation, but he becomes unexpectedly serious when someone is being exploited by a powerful person. He has a gift for making people feel included, even when his jokes are objectively dreadful.

Kethgar was born in the lesser infernal house of Varkesh, a bastard son whose bloodline was inconveniently noble and whose existence was useful only when someone needed a smiling intermediary. His mother was a traveling singer who had been invited to perform at a private court, and his father was a devil-blooded aristocrat who treated every conversation as a contract. Kethgar grew up surrounded by etiquette lessons, political schemes, and servants who never quite met his eyes. He learned early that a well-timed joke could puncture a room full of pride more cleanly than a blade. At seventeen, Kethgar abandoned the household seal, the inheritance, and the expectation that he would become a polished agent of infernal influence. He took his mother's old lute, a rapier from the family armory, and enough coin to reach the next city. Since then he has wandered from festival to battlefield, earning meals with songs, stories, sleight of hand, and an inexhaustible supply of bad puns. His bardic magic first appeared when an audience laughed at a joke so painfully awful that the lantern flames bent toward him. Kethgar now treats every road as a stage and every tyrant as an invitation to improvise. He remains wary of anyone who offers him a favor in language that sounds too much like a contract, but he cannot resist helping outcasts who remind him of the child he used to be.