Also known as: Barrabus the Gray
Appearance
Artemis Entreri is compact and precisely maintained — 5’4”, not an ounce of fat, thick raven-black hair, and a heavy stubble he can never fully outrun despite preferring to be clean-shaven. His eyes are what people remember. They are lifeless in a way that goes deeper than coldness — they reflect someone who spent a long time deriving no pleasure from existence, and who built a wall between himself and everything that might change that.
His skin carries a faint gray tinge, a lasting consequence of the vampiric dagger he has carried for years. The blade destroys souls on a killing blow — no resurrection, no afterlife — and absorbs the magical essence of its victims. When he used it to drain the life force of a shade, the gray seeped into his complexion permanently. It is where the name Barrabus the Gray comes from.
Origins
He was born in Memnon, in Calimshan, to a woman named Shanali. His early life was one of sustained abuse and abandonment — his mother eventually sold him to a merchant, and he found his way to Calimport through circumstances that shaped him in ways nothing has fully undone. In Calimport he was taken in by the thieves’ guild of Pasha Basadoni, who taught him to fight, to move unseen, and to think three steps ahead of everyone else in the room. He flourished. He became the most feared assassin in Calimshan and, in time, in all of Faerûn.
His greatest contempt — the one crack in the emotional wall he built — is reserved for those who abandon or betray their children. He does not discuss his childhood. He does not need to.
Skills and Weapons
Entreri is widely considered one of the most capable fighters alive. He can observe a combat maneuver once or twice and replicate it with his own weapons almost immediately — a quality that makes him uniquely dangerous to anyone whose style he has had time to study. He is tireless in maintaining himself, precise in his thinking, and never allows emotion to interfere with execution.
His signature weapon is the vampiric dagger — the blade that gave him his gray tinge. It kills cleanly and permanently, destroying the soul of anyone it finishes. He has carried it long enough that it is less a weapon than an extension of how he moves through the world.
Jarlaxle and the Flute
At a certain point in his career, Entreri aligned himself with Jarlaxle Baenre, the drow mercenary and leader of Bregan D’aerthe. Jarlaxle saw in him an asset and, eventually, something more complicated than that. He gave Entreri Idalia’s flute — a magical instrument designed to surface emotions its player had buried.
Entreri played it. It worked. What it surfaced was not grief or longing but rage — immense, long-suppressed anger at everything his childhood had been. The flute eventually drove him back to Memnon, where he settled accounts with the people who had shaped his early years. Then he broke the instrument, told Jarlaxle that Artemis Entreri was dead, and walked away from the partnership.
He was wrong, of course. The name survived. So did the anger, quieter now but still present underneath the professional calm.
Barrabus the Gray
The alias has a specific origin. For a period, Entreri was enslaved — his life force bound to a sword called Charon’s Claw by a tiefling warlord named Herzgo Alegni. While bound, he had no choice but to serve as Alegni’s spy and assassin, operating under the name Barrabus the Gray in Neverwinter and the surrounding wood. He could not die. He could not refuse. It was, in the most literal sense, the kind of soul-binding that mirrors what had been done to Qalifar Driik — a life controlled by an object that held something essential.
He was eventually freed when Charon’s Claw was destroyed. He does not use the name Barrabus as an alias he chose. He uses it because it is useful, and because most people who hear it do not know the history behind it.
A man who survived being soul-bound now uses soul coins to bind others. Whether that symmetry is conscious or simply the way power tends to move in his hands is not something he has been asked about directly.
Role in Campaign 2
Entreri was the true hand behind Qalifar Driik’s original death, though Elerra Dalael bore the blame for years. He held Qalifar’s soul coin. He worked alongside Johan Bata, who intended to use a ritual involving Qal’s spider-shaped dagger — and the soul coin practice itself — for purposes the Raven Queen found abhorrent enough to justify returning Qalifar to life specifically to stop it.
When Qalifar thwarted Johan and confronted Entreri, the meeting resolved into a deal rather than a fight. Entreri had the leverage. The terms were straightforward: Qal would help him at a future date of his choosing. In exchange, Entreri would not use the coin, and when the obligation was fulfilled, he would return it. Both parties understood the alternative.
Role in Campaign 3
The future task came due. Entreri wanted the Nihil Shard.
Qalifar handled it and made a different choice — stealing it rather than delivering it, crossing the Astral Sea with it, and eventually reaching the warehouse where the Copper Piece Gang found themselves standing in front of Barrabus the Gray.
He sat in a curtained chamber with the calm of a man who had already decided how the conversation would go. When Qalifar vanished on a technicality, he redirected his attention to the party without raising his voice. He made clear that fighting was not an option worth considering. He offered each party member a coin — a soul coin, a future life debt — in exchange for their survival. One by one, they accepted.
Five debts. Outstanding. Uncollected.
He has not called them in. He named himself when the party listed figures who had affected them, speaking to Melora on the eighth layer of Hell. The debts exist. The moment to use them has not yet arrived — or he is simply waiting for it to be the right one. With Entreri, those two things are rarely different.