Gnome · Hunter · Beast Mastery

Cogblast

Character Sheet

Identity

• Full Name: Corvo Cogblast
• Family Name: Cogblast

Appearance

• Gender: Male
• Apparent Age: Older adult
• Height: Short
• Build: Rugged
• Eyes: Blue
• Skin: Fair
• Facial Hair: Brown mustache

Overview

Corvo Cogblast is a veteran gnomish hunter, engineer, peace officer, and military aviator. He founded the Gnomeregan R.A.N.G.E.R.S. Corps, the small corps of remote-area officers from which G.E.A.R. later developed. Corvo has the bearing of an old frontier lawman: rugged, self-contained, practical, and entirely at ease when working beyond immediate support. Compared with many gnomes, he speaks sparingly. When he does speak, it is usually because he has already decided what matters.

His fieldcraft is distinctly gnomish. Corvo is a marksman, tracker, investigator, navigator, and engineer, but not principally a naturalist or animal handler. His mature companions are mechanical constructs that scout, track, guard, carry out field tasks, conduct covert work, and fight at his side. That stable was the result of a long engineering career, not equipment he possessed from the beginning. His rifle, traps, engineered ammunition, explosives, tools, and machines serve the practical functions that another hunter might accomplish through a trained beast and wilderness lore.

Corvo believes that a competent officer far from support must be trusted to understand an objective and solve the problem before him. He respects command, but he does not confuse an order’s prescribed method with its purpose. This principle first made him difficult for his Second War commanders to manage; it later became the foundation of the corps’ doctrine.

Gnomeregan Peace Officer

Before the Second War, Corvo served as a peace officer within Gnomeregan and its surrounding tunnels, works, and industrial infrastructure. His work combined investigation and ordinary policing with the hazards of a vast underground city: mechanical failures, dangerous machinery, cave and tunnel environments, emergency response, and the defense of gnomish citizens and property. It gave him a disciplined foundation in marksmanship, engineering, evidence, and independent judgment, but it remained work conducted inside Gnomeregan’s own civilization and its established support systems.

The Second War

The Horde’s invasion of Khaz Modan forced Corvo into a wider war. As a captain in Gnomeregan’s defense, he helped turn the terrain around the city into a hostile, engineered obstacle for the invaders. The fighting was his first sustained experience of surface warfare and of enemies far more dangerous than the threats of an underground peace officer’s usual beat.

Corvo became one of Gnomeregan’s most capable flying-machine pilots. The craft of his era were reconnaissance machines, but he steadily expanded what one could accomplish. He dropped bombs and charges, improvised release mechanisms, used grenades, incendiaries, and smoke from the air, and fired his own rifle whenever the flight allowed it. He developed a taste for low, dangerous passes and for field modifications that could turn a reconnaissance opportunity into an attack, sabotage, or rescue without compromising the mission’s actual purpose.

That distinction mattered. Corvo was never casually insubordinate, but he judged orders by the problem they were meant to solve. A prohibition on engagement intended to preserve secrecy did not prevent him from acting if he could damage the enemy without exposing what needed protecting. His commanders were repeatedly exasperated, then repeatedly vindicated by the results. Over time they learned to give him the objective, the reason it mattered, and the constraints that truly could not be violated, then leave the method to him.

Repeated crashes and forced landings made Corvo more than an aviator. Shot down in wilderness and hostile territory, sometimes behind enemy lines, he learned to navigate, evade patrols, repair or destroy wreckage, ration supplies, establish alarms and traps, signal friendly forces, and survive alone until he could return. His engineering and investigative habits made the wild another system to read and solve. When the Alliance assault under Anduin Lothar and Turalyon broke the Horde’s position around Khaz Modan, Corvo fought in the gnomish push outward from the city. He then continued in the wider Alliance war as a reconnaissance pilot, carrying his new understanding of remote and unsupported work across the Eastern Kingdoms.

The R.A.N.G.E.R.S. Corps

After the war, Corvo returned to a Gnomeregan increasingly connected to a larger world. Engineers, pilots, merchants, researchers, couriers, and expeditions were beginning to travel beyond the city’s familiar networks. In a distant emergency, one gnome might be needed to investigate a crime, repair a machine, guide an expedition, protect civilians, negotiate with another authority, and decide what to do before a specialized team could arrive.

Corvo’s answer was the Gnomeregan Remote Area Navigation, General Enforcement, Response & Support Corps. The corps commissioned gnomish generalists for remote operations concerning gnomish people, technology, interests, responsibilities, expeditions, and emergencies. Its rangers were expected to understand their mandate, use judgment, and begin solving a problem rather than wait helplessly for every necessary specialist.

The corps remained deliberately small. Most rangers were reservists with ordinary careers as engineers, pilots, surveyors, peace officers, or other specialists, yet their commissions were complete commissions rather than a lesser form of membership. A tiny active cadre ranged widely, often working alone for weeks or months. Corvo stayed among those field officers instead of retreating into administration. The corps’ office-based adjutant, Itsi Toggletorque, kept its records, supplies, communications, reserve activations, and authority intact from Gnomeregan. Corvo treated that work as expertise equal to his own in the field, even when Itsi was understandably exasperated by the people she had been charged with organizing.

The Fall of Gnomeregan

The trogg invasion during the Third War drew the corps back into the defense of its own city. Reserve rangers were activated, and the active cadre fought through fractured tunnels, damaged works, isolated civilians, and failing lines. Corvo’s experience made him one of the senior field commanders during the catastrophe.

The original corps did not survive it. An emergency blast door sealed between Corvo and the rest of his command as the city fell to radiation and chaos. He was physically unable to reach them; every other ranger died beyond the barrier. Itsi, still directing communications, evacuation, and recovery from a central coordination post, was the only other survivor of the corps’ institutional structure. Corvo reached her only in time to get her out of Gnomeregan, not in time to spare her severe irradiation. She survived as a leper gnome until later treatment or stabilization became possible.

For years afterward, the corps was not a functioning institution. Gnomeregan’s people had become refugees, and preserving a continent-ranging specialist service could not take priority over survival. Corvo nonetheless continued its work in practice: scouting dangerous routes, recovering technology, searching for survivors, investigating threats, supporting displaced gnomes, and working around the lost city with dwarven and Alliance authorities. The ranger identity survived through him and Itsi’s records until Gnomeregan’s institutions could again support specialized field units.

Engineering and Companions

Corvo’s earliest combat doctrine centered on his rifle, traps, flying machine, explosives, and a reusable autonomous sentry turret. He placed the turret with care, selecting its field of fire, bracing it for the ground, maintaining its ammunition and mechanisms, and recovering it after an engagement whenever possible. It gave him local fire support without making it a substitute for his own judgment or marksmanship.

By the Classic era, Corvo also used disposable bomblings as semi-autonomous demolition devices. They could move toward assigned structural targets, but they were expendable tools rather than companions. His early permanent machines were more utilitarian: a modified Alarm-o-Bot that served as a scout, sentry, warning device, and mobile observation platform, and a pack robot for tools, ammunition, supplies, and explosives. Neither was a serious combat unit.

During the Cataclysm campaign in the Southern Barrens, Corvo remained principally a rifleman-engineer. At Frazzlecraz Motherlode, he held the mine mouth with rifle, traps, and turret while Tinks infiltrated the workings. The Alarm-o-Bot provided warning and perimeter awareness, and the pack robot carried the conventional demolition charges Tinks placed as redundancy beside the bomblings’ assigned targets. Corvo’s animal-form machines were still limited and experimental.

Later designs increasingly closed the gap between utility machinery and true hunter companions. A weaponized mechanical rabbit and a mechanical squirrel emerged during the post-Cataclysm years as more capable autonomous animal-form machines. His reusable exploding sheep could survive deployment well enough to be recovered, repaired, reset, and used again. These developments were steps toward a reliable mechanical hunting partner rather than a fully mature stable.

The decisive advance came with Mechagon. Corvo studied its mechanical-beast technology and applied what he learned to a robotic hound. The hound became a durable, combat-capable companion able to track, guard, perform field tasks, and fight beside him. It marks the point at which Corvo’s mechanical hunter identity took its mature form.

Later still, Corvo developed an advanced robotic hand that could be worn as a gauntlet or detached to scuttle independently on its fingertips. Built for covert precision rather than open fighting, it could enter spaces too small for him, manipulate locks and mechanisms from within, retrieve small objects, and plant or remove devices. Its compact autonomy belongs to the later stage of his career.

Corvo carries these machines through a combination of mechanical compaction and magical miniaturization. Their frames fold, telescope, nest, and retract before magic reduces them further; the process is practical, not limitless. Earlier hound-sized machines still collapsed to something like a large trunk before becoming satchel-sized, while later designs folded more efficiently and deployed more quickly. Larger machines still require cases or packs, and even Corvo cannot carry an unlimited stable without regard to bulk or weight.

Bael Modan

During the Cataclysm campaign, General Twinbraid sent Corvo to check on Marley Twinbraid and the Bael Modan excavation. When Marley repaired his aircraft and flew toward Bael’dun Keep, Corvo escorted him in his own flying machine. The keep’s destruction caught them in the air. Corvo narrowly kept his machine aloft, watched Marley go down in the blast, and could not save him.

He helped rescue as many surviving dwarves as he could, then returned to Twinbraid with the report. The General had correctly identified goblin involvement from the body left in the ruins, but wrongly extended that evidence to the nearby Bilgewater operation. After Corvo requested reinforcement through a real-time link to New Tinkertown, Tinks was ordered from Theramore to obtain whatever aid he could and reinforce him. Captain Garran Vimes could spare no soldiers. Tinks therefore flew to the Southern Barrens alone and reached Corvo by the following morning.

Corvo and Tinks subsequently led Twinbraid’s retaliation against the Frazzlecraz Motherlode. Corvo made, at most, a single disruptive flying-machine pass before the ground assault. He then controlled the mine entrance while Tinks entered to oversee the demolition. He regarded sabotage as legitimate warfare. His objection was to what he believed Bael’dun represented: goblins using a doomed tauren rebellion as cover to destroy an archaeological Alliance settlement while avoiding the consequence themselves. Frazzlecraz’s workers had not caused Bael’dun’s destruction, but their mine was still a Horde industrial target, and Corvo did not regard striking it as a moral error.

After the raid, Corvo and Tinks received an emergency request through their shared Gnomeregan and New Tinkertown information network. They bypassed the normal route through Theramore and went directly to New Thalanaar, where Grimtotem attackers were razing the settlement. They helped its evacuation and departed with the survivors for Fizzle & Pozzik’s Speedbarge, where their paths soon crossed with Gellix.

Thousand Needles

At the Speedbarge, Corvo and Tinks handled the Alliance side of the negotiations for the nearby centaur oil field. Their work centered on the Ancient Brazier and its sacred flame. In the course of it, they discovered that the Horde’s offered gold was fraudulent and tried to warn the centaurs. The warning did not win the Alliance a concession. The centaurs rejected both factions’ demands, and each side returned to the barge convinced that its rivals had failed worse.

Corvo then joined the Alliance drilling operation during the Thousand Needles Oil Field Dispute. He treated the job as a limited extraction, not a claim to the entire field: defend the rig long enough to fill a barrel and get it safely back. Gellix’s Horde crew worked a nearby rig. The two sides could see and harass one another, but neither could safely turn the field into a real battle without risking an oil fire that would destroy the resource and everyone around it. Corvo did not abandon the objective to pursue Gellix, despite hating him personally for Bael’dun. In a situation where the mission permits it, he would kill Gellix on sight; in the oil field, the rig and his own crew came first.

G.E.A.R.

The rebuilt corps was not simply a memorial to the dead. Its rangers retained their breadth, technical skill, discretion, and independence while evolving beside organizations such as Gnomeregan Covert Ops. By the Fourth War, their tradition had become the more heavily militarized and aviation-focused Gnomish Elite Aerial Rangers, or G.E.A.R.

G.E.A.R. inherits the corps’ expectation that an officer can reconnoiter, improvise, use engineering, exploit mobility, and act effectively without constant direction. Its focus is narrower and more military than the original corps, but its operating culture owes much to Corvo’s wartime experience and institutional design.

Corvo serves in G.E.A.R.’s senior command structure, where his experience and the corps’ legacy carry real operational weight. He remains capable of taking the field as a hunter, pilot, and engineer. Tavin “Tinks” Brasslock, however, is G.E.A.R.’s commander and directs its routine readiness, personnel, deployments, and mission execution. Their relationship is professional and institutional; they are not related.

Relationships

• Tinks - commander of G.E.A.R.; their professional relationship joins Tinks’s active command with Corvo’s longer institutional and field experience.
• Gellix - Horde engineer and recurring enemy; Corvo holds him personally responsible for Bael’dun Keep’s destruction, but does not let that hatred override a higher-priority operation.
• Itsi Toggletorque - corps adjutant and one of the two surviving figures of the original corps; Corvo respects her administrative authority and protects her in field danger.

Affiliations

• Alliance - current
• Gnomeregan - homeland; former peace officer and defender
• Gnomeregan R.A.N.G.E.R.S. Corps - founder and active field officer during its original era; later rebuilder
• G.E.A.R. - senior command

Timeline

• Before the Second War - served as a Gnomeregan peace officer.
• Second War - defended Gnomeregan and Khaz Modan as a gnomish captain and flying-machine pilot; developed the remote fieldcraft that shaped his later doctrine.
• After the Second War - founded the Gnomeregan R.A.N.G.E.R.S. Corps.
• Third War - helped lead Gnomeregan’s defense during the trogg invasion; survived the destruction of the original corps and rescued its irradiated adjutant, Itsi Toggletorque.
• After the fall of Gnomeregan - preserved and gradually rebuilt the ranger tradition while serving displaced gnomish interests.
• Cataclysm - investigated the Bael Modan emergency for General Twinbraid, survived the destruction of Bael’dun Keep, and joined Tinks in Twinbraid’s retaliation against the Frazzlecraz Motherlode.
• Cataclysm - responded with Tinks to New Thalanaar’s emergency, assisted its evacuation, and reached the Speedbarge.
• Cataclysm - handled the Alliance brazier objective during the Speedbarge oil negotiations, then defended an Alliance rig against centaur attacks long enough to recover a barrel of oil.
• Post-Cataclysm through Legion - developed increasingly capable autonomous animal-form machines and improved their portable deployment systems.
• Battle for Azeroth - used Mechagon engineering to complete the robotic hound that became his mature mechanical hunting companion.
• Fourth War - joined G.E.A.R.’s senior command structure as the successor organization took form under Tinks’s command.

Hooks

• The exact composition and individual histories of the original corps remain open.

Writings