Short, stoute, and bluff, Jean Martel is a senior partner at the Sieur Du Luth Company known for his bravado and ability to survive tough situations. He was once abandoned to his fate at the hands of a very large and very dangerous group of undead monsters (at his own insistence) by the New Brevik Travelers, only to emerge months later, unscathed but noticably more grim and serious. He was once a junior member of Heward's Stalwarts, but was chucked out for sleeping with Heward's mistress, the rogue Melacanotta.
His story of his underworld adventure:
"After you left me, the room went very dark indeed, but I could still sense the undead horde rushing toward me in the darkness. I was thrown on my heels by the initial rush, but I gathered my wits and charged the group. They clawed at me - the dragon in particular is what gave me this beauty," he says, pointing to his scar, "but I rushed past them into the passage beyond. As they wheeled around to follow, I dashed through the darkness, groping my way along the cooridor, which at this point was dimly lit by some light producing moss."
"Suddenly, I fell through a trapdoor, and this turned out to be my salvation - it was too narrow for the dragon to enter, and by the time skeletons began sliding down after me, I had left the group far behind. For almost a day I wandered through old cooridors and natural caverns, losing track of time and direction. I made a torch by wrapping some of the brightest moss around an old wooden handle that I found, and I was able to catch some blind fish in some of the underwater streams."
"Eventually, I came across a place that looked like an old tomb. I think the inscriptions and design looked as though they were from the Plano people, but it could have been later than that. The door had clearly been recently tampered with, however - its seal had been broken, so I was able to enter."
"Inside the tomb was a rather hideous demon in the shape of a dog-headed man, who attacked me with a pearl-handled saw-toothed dagger" - and here Martel reaches into his bags "which you see here. I was able to bring him down after a nasty struggle. He was carrying a leather bag made in the style of one of the northern clans - Loon or Serpent, I think - and inside that bag, I found this."
Here he refers to part of the now-recovered and restored Staff of Nokomis.