Grigori

The bard Grigori is a charismatic orator and an agent of Pitax who seeks to undermine the PCs' authority while spying on their kingdom. He shows up in the kingdom's capital city while the PCs are out adventuring and immediately begins giving speeches criticizing and denigrating their leadership and actions. More and more of the townsfolk gather to hear him talk and, as the days wear on, he builds a wellspring of support among the disaffected settlers in the town. Every decision the PCs make has a winner and a loser, and Grigori is gifted at shifting focus to the losers in these decisions and riling them up. Whether it is appealing to the citizens who didn't get what they wanted when the PCs built a new city block, to spinning a narrative that paints a recent event in the most horrid light for those for whom the outcome was a negative, a properly played Grigori should become a constant barb in the players' side and one of the most memorable villains they encounter. Grigori takes great pains to avoid breaking any of the PCs' laws so that they have no legal justification to arrest him other than that they want to silence him.

Grigori is more than just an itinerant storyteller; he's a spy and agent provocateur sent by King Irovetti, the Lord of Pitax, to spread chaos and dissent in the town with the aim of overthrowing the PCs and possibly paving the way for Pitax to annex the settlement. In order to cover his tracks and retain plausible deniability, Irovetti used several layers of agents to hire Grigori; as far as the bard knows, he was hired to cause trouble in this fledgling town by agents from Fort Drelev to the west.