Rowan Clearbrook
Age 0: She was the bastard of a wealthy merchant's daughter from the harbour town of Gale. She was left out on the plains 5 km from the gates in the hopes that the aggressive giants would step on her on their yearly migration east. Instead, she was found by one of the more peacefully dumb tribes and adopted.
Age 6: Rowan grew, and when she was about six years old, she was considered the smartest person in the tribe, not that that was such an accomplishment. Anyhow, as a smart person she desired more than what she had. Her thieving days began with nicking straw baskets, pouches of berries and a leather bracelet with small shells sown on to it. She still has the bracelet, her first real theft, and uses it as a belt and lucky charm.
Age 7: This selfish and smart behaviour was deeply frowned upon by everyone she stole from, especially since she tended to flaunt the things she took. Barely a year went by before they left her to her own devices outside the gates of Runedale one night, tied up and gaged with all the things she had stolen, they were after all hers now. The guards had been terrified; the smallest of the giants had been 2 meters taller than the walls.
Age 7: As you can imagine Rowan had always been small compared to her friends and family, the tiny giant, that was what they called her. This, she was used to. When she then came to this village full of halflings, dwarfs and even a human or two, she felt big; or at least bigger. Dodging the small feet of these new people was easy, only there were more of them to dodge. Their valuables, or things she knew she wanted by instinct because it was someone else's, were closer to the ground, and her, but they were more used to thieves like her too. All in all it proved more difficult to nick stuff in the world of tiny people.
Age 7-16: For months she struggled with understanding the concept of money and metal as anything more than what it was. She didn't know common either, so there was no getting work, even if she had been interested in that. Her big ego also got her into trouble, more than once. When she was really down in the dumps after about three months the temple of Avandra was her saviour. They took her into their folds in good faith, and taught her the language, and other basic things they found she lacked, like a proper name instead of garbled sounds, how to use a lavatory and 'how not to eat with your face, you have hands you know'. Trying to teach her how to read was a lost cause though. It took too much time, and by then she was thoroughly sick of all the priests telling her that stealing was wrong. So she moved on, by sneaking aboard a boat heading for The Crusted Sea, the ice-covered north.
Age 16: With the motto of her tribe, 'the coward hides in the back', and Avandra's doctrines of 'the brave and bold are rewarded richly', she started a rather short carrier as an assassin in one of the greater, colder cities in the world. She was recruited by a man called Joseph Ragnan, who was impressed when he watched her entertain a crowd of people by throwing daggers purposefully ineptly, whilst robbing them blind as well. He thought to himself, someone who can pretend to be that bad a throwing knives is surely a master deceiver, better get this one before the Thieves Guild does.
Age 16-17: She tried killing people for a while, but discovered it wasn't as much fun as she thought it would be, and quite frankly she didn't like it. She was surprised to find she had a moral compass and it pointed away from murder. The fact that she wasn't always allowed to loot the corpses didn't help either. Unfortunately one does not simply leave the Assassin's Guild. You either live as an assassin, or you die a murderer.
Age 17: As I said she still had some of the mentality of the giants. That meant her solution to this problem was simply to try and scare her fellows into letting her leave. That resulted in a lot of shouting and growling, and a few broken noses. That got her nowhere. The other thing she had learned from her tribe was that when attacked, the leader must be protected, or the whole tribe dissolves. So she killed the leader. It wasn't all that hard. He was old, unprepared for such a rash and stupid tactic, a very self-confident elf, and didn't wake up and see her before it was too late.
Age 17: The plan didn't go exactly as she had hoped. After all, with him gone who would do all the paperwork? The guild was livid, but not broken. Luckily no one thought she had actually done it, especially since he had been strangled, and her hands were surely to small, right? Well, that was right, sort of. They were small, but strength and technic went a long way. She slipped away in the night and moved on to an ever bigger city, a dwarf city in the snow-covered mountains further inland.
Age 18-21: With a big helmet and a scarf she could pass as a tiny, skinny dwarf, since she was a rather tall, buff halfling. For a while it worked like a charm, no one suspected a thing, though they thought her accent was a bit off. They blamed it on her having been born topside and left it at that. She continued stealing, always getting bolder, stealing from bigger and stronger people, more important ones too. Once she stole from the gate guard Gerhard, a big brute of a dwarf, easily two heads taller than her, and three times wider, just to prove that she could. It was just a simple brass medallion, and she sold it on to some priest or other.
She also started sneaking into people's houses, a little breaking and entering. She particularly enjoyed breaking into the town hall and stealing the city's copper and gold emblem of a hammer and axe on a shield. Eventually they stopped making them out of solid copper and gold; it saved the city a lot of money. When Rowan discovered this, she of course stopped doing that, opting instead to break into the aristocrats' townhouses. That's when shit really hit the fan.
Age 21: Rumours started to flow in the city; a new, more aggressive thief was at large. Still a bit under informed about how people felt about being stolen from, when a bit down in her cups, she bragged about how it was her, and that the guards would never catch her. She didn't think anyone would rat her out, but they did, quite fast actually, fearing that she would steal from them as soon as she got the chance, which she probably would, or had already done.
Age 22: She was arrested and condemned in short order, pun not intended. As she was transported off to the block,- the aristocrats had demanded an execution-, someone slipped her a lock pick through the bars of the carriage, saying she was now indebted to, something she didn't quite catch, what with her imminent death hanging over her head and all. She escaped and fled the city with as much loot as she could carry without being weighed down. The rest, and there was a lot of it, the guards found a few days later. Of course instead of turning it over to the rightful owners of the upper class, they told said upper class that they hadn't found a thing.
Age 23-24: After this near-death experience, Rowan started to understand that not everybody liked getting their stuff nicked. The thought of others taking the loot she couldn't bring also left a sour taste in her mouth. For the first time she felt empathy with her victims. But she couldn't stop stealing, it was all she knew, and quite frankly it was a lot of fun. All these realisations led to the decision that she would simply stop stealing from those that would miss it. That meant aiming higher than merchant princes or lowly noblemen, since they had a knack for actually counting out their coin. Soon enough this landed her in another heap of trouble, since barons and lords for some reason have better trained, loyal, incorruptible guards than the ones she was used to, and because, for some reason, people that have a lot, are more afraid of losing it. They threw her in jail, and forgot about her, because there was a murderer at large at the time. For three months she sat there before her salvation came sliding through the bars again. This time there was just a note attached to the lock pick. Of course, since she had never learned to read or write, she threw it away.
Age 24: When she got out, she ran away, south again, and came to a city called Falkrest. Deciding that perhaps it was time to put the thieving business on the shelves for a while, she joined a mercenary company, choosing it for its name, The Giants. She was a bit disappointed to discover there were no actual giants in the guild, though some of the men were quite tall, and said their father had been a giant. Of course, if that was true, she felt very sorry for their mothers.
Age 24-28: She stayed with the company for some years, learning a thing or two about how to lie to someone's face without bursting into laughter, intimidate them with words instead of animal noises, and how to scale a wall with your daggers when you're caught in an alley with three guys on your tail. One of the wizards even tried teaching her diplomacy, but she quickly lost interest in it half-way and went with Marc and Dunir to straighten up the fellows working at the grain storages. Dunir claimed she was the tiniest thing he had ever been scared of, and she took that as a compliment, and an invitation into his bed. And he didn't mind.
Age 28: After a while even roughhousing the workers got a bit old. So she looked for something else on the board. Someone was looking for a courier that didn't mind getting his or her hands dirty, knew how to sneak around, didn't ask too many questions and liked gold. Rowan wasn't sure about the no questions thing, but she did like gold. So she delivered an anonymous package at an anonymous door, to some anonymous people, and thus began her life as a drug dealer/smuggler.
Age 28-33: The experience was thrilling, lucrative and well worth it, for a while. That was until she got to know her employer. Quaron was, to put it mildly, a complete arse. He was high of his own merchandise all the time, tried to use her in experiments a few times, once he actually succeeded, she saw green mice everywhere for a whole day, and he was all around a douche.
Age 33: When they got in deep trouble with the Lord of Falkrest, he told them to slay a dragon. They did, and for only a second she respected Quaron's display of courage, even if it was because he was high. But, when he stole from her, actually took her proof of slaying that dragon, the dam broke. When the Lord of Falkrest then wanted her to help hunt him down and kill him, she was more than willing, she was practically ecstatic. She showed the paladins, even that racist bastard of a lord's daughter Aria, where his laboratory was. Now was the time for revenge… and finally taking all his magical stuff.