The Commander of the Guards Eleventh Regiment and thus ultimately responsible for keeping law and order in the Triple Cities. It is no small matter and Rodan Strace can maybe excused for ducking it as often as he can. With the Eleventh so polarised into the three city Units, each with their leader and answerable to their respective Councils, the Regimental Commander's job has often been a little superfluous, particularly since the arrival of Central Command to Yaleth. Strace operates a strictly hands-off approach, only becoming involved in ceremonial affairs and a little discrete diplomacy. Many feel this approach to be the sole reason he has kept his job so long. Born to rich south Dorlafan gentry in 1270, groomed for officer material at the Tukas Institute, Strace's plans for a glamorous and easy career were rather scuppered by the Labbish invasion. Nonetheless the Ten Years War made his reputation; he commanded a Unit with distinction at Briers Field and chased the Labbish out all the way to the Siege of Niche. After Labland surrendered, Strace began showing an unrivalled capacity for getting himself in, and out, of all sorts of crises. A full Captain by now, he switched to the newly formed Fourteenth Regiment which garrisoned the Annexed Lands. There he not only encouraged a rivalry with Ham Driak but had an affair with Driak's wife. In 1308 the Rifton Ripper learned of the affair, challenged Strace to a duel, half-killed him and engineered his transfer to Gesund, at the other end of the country. Marooned in the wilds, Strace recovered some of his reputation in campaigns against the Moretti Road bandits and arranged a transfer to East Zabrial in 1312. Though he rose as far as Deputy Commander during his eleven years in the port, Strace also built up some epic debts though his gambling habit and a string of failed business ventures. His over-active libido also encouraged him to use the Guards as a sort of pimping service, which hardly endeared him to locals increasingly seeing the troops as a colonising army. A transfer to the First, on the Dorlafan coast, offered a handy way out of East Zabrial just as things were coming to the boil. However even that turned nasty in 1325 when a large consignment of Guards equipment went missing and the suspicion fell on Strace. (Though the facts never became public, he actually used the goods to placate his Zabric creditors, still only a boat-ride away). The monumental ineptitude of the Second Fleet disaster a few months later maybe put such fiddles into perspective; whatever, Strace was suspended briefly but then was moved to the Eleventh. In 1327 the Commander's job became vacant and he swooped on it. The success of such monumental opportunism was partly due to his still-potent Ten Years War reputation, partly to the revolving-door nature of the Commander's post in recent years reducing quality of candidates. Chiefly, though, it was because Strace never lost touch with the top members of society during all his years in the wilds; High Commander Oldran Bryano and Lord Holstace Fortraine are both personal friends. Strace also has a knack of getting on with rank and file Guardsmen, possessing a strong sense of humour, a taste for the bawdy and a tolerant, though not very consistent, application of discipline. The Cities as a whole know that he is a rich, unreliable tosser but quite respect the way that he never pretends to be anything else; a garrulous, ostentatious villain whose mind, not heart, is underdeveloped.