#⟪Muster Roll 👥⟫

[lily-of-the-eyrie]

Here’s that long-overdue revision of that cast sheet attached to my first info post on the 35th, featuring the Colonel’s team! 🍊 

Extended character sheets & HCs below:

🍊 The Colonel

Born: 1700 Age (in 1750): 50

The fatherly commanding officer of the 35th. Known for the sincerity in his concern for the rest of his soldiers, from the oldest of officers to the newest of recruits, he’s well-loved by his men.

The type to regularly check in on his subordinates, he keeps a close eye on everyone to make sure they stay out of trouble. It’s not only about making sure everybody’s doing their job, though—if he notices a soldier looking like they’re down in the dumps for one reason or another, he’s never afraid to step in and talk to them. As such, he wound up knowing quite a bit about a lot of his men’s personal lives (but he wouldn’t tell another soul, you have his word on it). On the other end, said men agree that he’s a very approachable boss.

Generally a gentle teacher, he’s not a huge fan of using corporal punishment like it’s the one solution to every problem. But he is still quite the strict disciplinarian, and holds all his subordinates to high standards. While this means he wouldn’t flog anyone over an improperly-cocked hat or a sloppily worn coat, do expect those concerned to get advised about it (relentlessly, if they persist in their inattentiveness).

Through his eternally busy days juggling the regiment’s management with Templar work, he makes it a point to ensure that his soldiers are well taken care of. He took it as his obligation and duty to them as their leader, and a proper reward for their loyalty and the hardships they suffer through in the name of their service; however, he also inwardly also saw it as a way to make up for the unfortunate and worrying frequency with which his men seemed to, in one way or another, keep getting caught in the crossfire of the Templar-Assassin war, which follows him wherever he goes as a member of the Templar Order. 

===

Through the years, the Colonel had accumulated something of a close team of soldiers within his own regiment whose members had, at some point in time, had an unfortunate run-in with the Assassins, and are therefore more aware of the shadowy war unfolding around them than the rest of their oblivious comrades. Not all of them are full time Templars, but if the Colonel needs a few extra hands to help him carry out some Templar duties (or even anything else outside work, really), they’re always ready to chip in.

Here’s a quick chart for everyone, sorted by age:

===

🍊 John

Born: 1697 Age (in 1750): 53 

One of the veteran sergeants within the regiment, John’s the oldest member of the gang—older than even the Colonel himself, in fact (by 3 years, to be precise). Usually found somewhere near his boss, he’s the only actual ring-carrying Templar in the party, and serves as the Colonel’s personal aide in the Order’s matters. 

Calm and even-tempered, he’s attentive to his charges, who in turn consider him someone they can easily talk to about their problems. He’s grown into a sort of mentor figure in the barracks, and as such, if there’s any internal trouble brewing among the soldiers, he’s often the first to pick up on it—he’s got eyes and ears on every wall.

A really, really old friend of the Colonel’s, he’s been standing at the man’s side for the last 40 years, serving as his assistant since the day Monro stepped into the barracks as a fresh-faced greenhorn no older than 16. The arrangement had been the work of the Colonel’s father, who’d wanted someone to help his son settle down into his new life with the army and the local Templar network—a request that John had volunteered to fulfill. 

While that was the first time the two of them met, the story goes way further back. John's father was a soldier who had once fought alongside Monro Sr. in Flanders during the Nine Years War; coming along with the latter’s family when they moved over to Ireland, he’d been serving them as a guard. An Assassin attack targeting Monro Sr. at around this time ended up killing John’s father in the process; feeling responsible for his friend’s death, the Colonel’s father decided to help support the man’s widow and 5-year-old son even after the Monros moved back to Scotland. Eventually, when he got older, John joined the 35th Foot, and was only too happy to help when he heard that his longtime patron’s son was coming over.

Having stood side by side with the Colonel for literally his whole career both as a soldier and as a Templar, they’d been through a lot of shit together, and John knows a lot of things about his boss many others have no idea about. From paltry episodes like watching young Ensign Monro fumble with the regimental colours for the first time to life-or-death situations like covering for each other during clashes in Assassin territory, he’s been there and done it all. If you want to hear an interesting story about the Colonel, you can try grill John for one (he’s one tight-lipped fellow though, so it won’t be easy).

Given his circumstances, he’s got a good reason to not be very fond of Assassins, but doesn’t let it get to his head, and he’d long outgrown any leftover considerations of petty revenge. He’s more concerned about avoiding the same fate that befell his father now.

While it took him a very long time to get promoted to Sergeant, he has no intention of going any higher, since his current position puts him in the best place to still stick around the rank and file. The Colonel can approach any of the officers anytime and keep tabs on them himself, but seeing that there are things that most of the common soldiers would consider too petty or crass to talk about right in front of him, that’s pretty much John’s front to cover (though the privates, on the other hand, have somewhat noticed that whatever they tell John seems to find its way to the Colonel’s ear soon enough, and do use him as an unofficial multipurpose helpline from time to time).

Took a liking to muskets for their versatility, and makes it a point to get good at using one…which he did, earning the jealous glare of the resident self-proclaimed best shot, Philip.

🍊 Thomas 

Born: 1726 Age (in 1750): 24

An easygoing fellow who takes things in stride, he believes the cheapest and most effective way to lessen any kind of misery is to let go of them ASAP. Though he’s incessantly chirpy for most part, his friends do appreciate his ability to keep people’s spirits up even in trying times.

Joined the army for the money—coming from a family on the verge of poverty with too many children but too little money to afford an apprenticeship for every one of them, and rather enticed by the idea of traveling around by joining the army, he took up soldiering instead (plus he thinks the uniforms look cool).

Very close with William, one of his older brothers who signed up together with him. While they’re polar opposites in terms of personality, they’re pretty much joined at the hip in everything else. You’ll see them going around together most of the time.

After an incident involving working together with the Colonel and John to save William, who had gotten kidnapped by some thugs in 1743 shortly after they joined the regiment, he’d grown to be quite attached to his commander, and is always ready to do anything for the man (yes, he always goes around camp looking like the Colonel’s biggest fan and isn’t ashamed of it). He’s usually up and about running errands for the Colonel.

Good at cooking, he seems to always know the right moment to flip a pancake or take the stew off the fire, or exactly how much salt or sugar to put on something. While most of the other soldiers considered cooking just another part of their daily routine, he approached it like a hobby (and will totally offer to run errands for you in exchange for some condiments he couldn’t obtain by himself). In the meantime, his mates are more than happy to leave cooking duties to him—especially William, who’s fully aware that he can’t cook for shit and owns it.

Always hungering for cooking ingredients, Thomas will often frequent the garrison’s gardens looking to trade materials with some friends, and spends a lot of time at the town markets. Once out in the wilderness in the colonies though, he’s often found wandering among the light infantry company in search of wild mushroom picking tips or the like... Or he might just go bug Gist when he’s around. 

🍊 William

Born: 1724 Age (in 1750): 26

Thomas’ more responsible older brother.

Tries to keep Tommy out of trouble 90% of the time, but may be tempted to join in for the remaining 10%.

Aware of their family’s unfortunate financial state, suffering from difficulty in finding other kinds of work, and seeing joining the army as better than being a vagrant, he decided to go along with his brother’s career plans. Still, he’s hoping they don’t have to get sent right into the frontlines…

Got kidnapped while on patrol duty once. It turns out that the kidnappers were affiliated with the Assassins, and were paid to beat some information out of a particular redcoat which their sources told them could help with identifying a suspected Templar—except they got the wrong person (they were actually looking for John). He was eventually saved with the Colonel’s and Thomas’ combined efforts, but the incident did leave a few scars, the most noticeable one being the cut right across his face.

Needless to say, he came out of the experience a little worse for wear, but grew the same attachment his brother did for their commander. The Colonel was still a Captain back then, but still, seeing one of your higher-tier superiors come to get your commoner ass out of trouble in person is pretty powerful stuff.

While not as impulsive and/or courageous as his little brother, William is the more strategic of the two. He doesn’t get much credit for it as a foot soldier whose on-the-job effectiveness depends on how well he follows orders, but if you’re planning a sneak attempt into or out of an Assassin hideout and need someone who can think on his feet, he’s your man.

Very good at cards, so much that anyone who played against him will say that the only winning move is to not play at all. He jokes that it’s all because his bad luck is all getting used up elsewhere, but honestly nobody knows how he kept such a good win-lose ratio.

Not a very good cook. He can help with preparing the materials, but once they’re in the pan or the pot, it’s Jesus-take-the-wheel time. 

🍊 Philip

Born: 1721 Age (in 1750): 29

A ladies’ man with a showy streak.

To his credit, he never brags about something he didn’t work to earn.

Joined the army primarily to impress a girl he was smitten with, and was always eager to drill, march, or anything “soldierly”. Unfortunately, the girl ended up taking off with someone else instead, which threw him off for a bit. The Colonel, noticing that the promising new kid everyone’s talking about seemed rather distraught, helped him get back up on his feet (…by taking him to go blow some stuff up together in the training field, but the point was that it worked).

He’s always trying to stay on top of the class among his colleagues, but is a good teacher to his juniors. He’s also got something of a friendly(?) rivalry going on with John.

When not on duty, he’s usually hanging out in the nearest pub, charming (or trying to charm) the local ladies over some drinks.

He loves the view from the guard towers, and will continue to loudly proclaim it no matter how many insinuations about intelligence and high altitude his friends lovingly toss at him (it’s something of a running joke at this point, yes).

A sharp-eyed fellow, he’d often be the first guard, if not the only one, to spot some shady hooded figures slipping around the base. The other guards seem to think that he was hallucinating or making things up because they never saw anything...but not the Colonel, who gave Philip a toned-down explanation of the hooded figures’ identity, and tasked him with keeping the base safe from them as well as he can.

🍊 Henry

Born: 1721 Age (in 1750): 29

The local stick-in-the-mud.

The second son of a relatively prosperous landowner, he lived a comfortable life growing up. Having dreamed of joining the army since he was a boy, he’d joined in as soon as he can, and had plans of paying his way up the career ladder quickly...until a string of bad business deals soured the family finances, rendering the plan unfeasible. Not keen on quitting halfway through (and more than a little in denial about his now flatter, lighter purse), he resolved to just earn those promotions with sheer hard work instead.

This did give him a bit of a complex about his superiors though, especially the lower-ranking ones, since he believed the only difference between them and himself is that they had money and he didn’t. Of course, he couldn’t talk shit about them openly, but he does fret about it a lot…

He grew to be a bit of penny-pincher, a trait he saw as common and inevitable among the foot soldiers due to their very meagre pay, but didn’t expect the higher-ranking, definitely better paid officers to have—which was why he was surprised to find out that the Colonel, unlike his presumably rich fellow commanders, seemed rather stingy himself. He turned up his nose at this in the beginning, until the Colonel took notice of his management skills and entrusted him with some of the renovation projects he’d been doing on the side. Having discovered that said projects were where most of his superior’s money had gone, his opinion of the Colonel took a turn for the better.

Eventually warming up to the job, he grew an attachment to the idea that it was a thing worth doing well, and had been pouring his full effort into it ever since. The Colonel’s quite pleased with this development.

His renovation-related errands often sends him right at Paul, one of the regiment’s grenadiers who had previously worked in construction. They became good friends pretty quickly. 

Speaking of which, even outside his errands, Henry tends to hang around Paul a lot—since he’s a rather slight fellow, Thomas theorizes that he may have felt safer standing close to people who look like 100-year-old trees...

Tends to overthink things, needs to be watered with reassurance regularly.

Highly susceptible to the cold, he doesn’t do very well during winters. He’d really rather stay indoors when it’s snowy outside...

While he spends a lot of time with paperwork, he’s also an impressively fast runner, and could beat the rest of the group easily in a footrace—a fact that he’s inevitably rather smug about.

Since his involvement with the Colonel’s work mostly centers around his renovation projects, Henry’s the one least exposed to the Assassin Brotherhood among his friends. However, he does have an extensive knowledge of the Colonel’s friend network outside the army, and often wonders why they all wear that fancy ring. 

🍊 Paul

Born: 1715 Age (in 1750): 35

The quietest of the bunch. Neither wordy nor loud, you won’t hear much from him while at work.

Formerly a bricklayer by trade, he joined in for a more stable, less seasonal income. He’s usually found quietly doing whatever task happened to be assigned to him that day, and probably one of the few people in the camp who isn’t bored to death by sentry duty.

It was during one such shift guarding one of the army’s storehouses during the regiment’s stay in Cork that he first encountered an Assassin. While by no means a careless fighter, he’d also never seen a hidden blade before—a disadvantage that nearly got him killed. Surviving the assault by the sheer luck of help arriving before he bled out to death on the ground like the rest of his comrades around him, he’d been wondering about the strange blade ever since—until he saw the Colonel going toe to toe with someone wielding one such weapon like he’d been doing it all his life. Naturally, he’s got some questions for his commander, who taught him just enough to keep himself and the other soldiers alive should they run into another wielder of this mysterious blade.

On a more informal level, he’s more or less the unofficial babysitter for the party, in charge of breaking up petty bickering between William and Thomas, playing Henry’s therapist, trying to make sure Philip doesn’t drink himself under the table when fooling around at the bar, etc. The Colonel’s quite thankful for his looking out for the others, since he often couldn’t do it himself.

He took a liking to fishing, seeing it as a hobby where he can sit alone in peace for a (rather long) while. During off hours, you might see him by the quayside or on the shore.

🍊 Extra HCs

Given their varying circumstances, all the boys have differing levels of awareness when it comes to the Templars’ and Assassins’ existence. ・John knows pretty much all the ground details of the Colonel’s Templar operations and sometimes even tags along with him on them, but he doesn’t sit in meetings the Colonel has with the Order’s higher-ups (Birch, Lawrence, Haytham, etc.) ・The Walsh brothers, given their close-and-personal encounter with the Assassins, kinda know that (1) there’s this thing called “the Assassin Brotherhood”, and (2) for whatever reason, they’re out for the Colonel and his friends. They’re not sure what to make of it, but they’re 100% certain they’re not going to let those shady guys have their commander. ・Henry has no idea whatsoever about the Assassins, and with his specialty being renovation-related desk jobs, he doesn’t really have the chance to run into them. ・Philip and Paul only know that if they see someone skulking around the base wearing a hood and has a knife strapped to their arm, they can’t be up to any good; however, the Colonel had ordered them not to engage these suspicious figures unless they get too close to the fort/camp, and be extra careful when they choose to fight them. 

When it comes to splitting up into groups for work, John, Thomas, and William tend to work with the Colonel on out-of-base activities, while Henry, Philip, and Paul watch the base while they’re gone. However, when the situation calls for it, they can get swapped around; for example, if the Colonel needs extra help on the bone-crunching side, he could bring Paul instead of Thomas or William (though those two tend to get antsy if you split them up, no matter how much they deny it, so there’s that to consider too—team management is such great fun /s)

The Colonel originally had no plans to adopt so many people in his own regiment, since he risked tipping off the Assassins about a Templar’s presence in it if he did, but well, sometimes life doesn’t turn out the way you planned it to be. In the end, rather than repeatedly letting his men get stabbed for a war they never even knew existed, he decided to let a few of them know what they’re up against. He’s fully aware that he’d get in hot water with his Templar seniors if he starts handing out adoption papers to all his soldiers like it’s going out of style though, so he does keep a cap on it, even if it means he can’t always save them all—a fact that plagues him a lot.

That said, he does find his little accidental gang to be very lovable, even if some of its members do not have their shit together sometimes...but they’ll grow up eventually. 

On the group’s end, knowing that their boss actually gave a damn about their problems and whether they lived or died did a lot to solidify their loyalty to him—or, as they like to call it, their “sense of teamwork”.

📝 Miscellaneous Notes

Thank you for reading! I’ve been toying with the idea of giving the Colonel some friends among his own troops, and well, it’s not AC until the Assassins get involved, so I tried writing in how the common redcoats under his command would have potentially interacted with the Brotherhood—something which we all know happens quite frequently 👀

When developing this crew, I made it a point to tie them into the Colonel’s story in one way or another—this ranges from callbacks to stuff us players had had to do (Henry w/ renovation sidequests, Paul w/ warehouse raids), bits of info in the Colonel’s lines (Philip’s story grew out of that gunpowder line at Ben Franklin’s place), and main story quest-type ideas (Thomas & William’s story was written as something that could’ve fit into an Assassin-related Templar mission). John’s a bit of a special case: his job is mainly to be someone who knows what’s really going on other than the Colonel himself, because otherwise the poor man wouldn’t have anyone to talk to 😂 Also I thought it’d be nice to give the Colonel someone who’s to him like Lee or Holden was for Haytham, so there he goes 😀

Given how this entire gang’s story happened pre-1750 and I haven’t fine-tuned all the details of that segment of the Colonel’s backstory yet, I might still change a few parts of that character data table (this is why their birthplaces are so vague 😂), but this is what I’ve got so far.

[lily-of-the-eyrie]

Intros for the tiny Colonel and the rest of the fam 🏡 Extended character sheets coming up next!