In my game, the Ragman turned out to be Rudy, a figure from one of my player’s backstories.
Jhonatan, one of the characters, had in his backstory that his father disappeared during the war. The only news the family received came from one of his father’s comrades—a man named Rudy—who comforted Jhonatan’s mother and eventually became her new partner.
Over the years, Rudy revealed himself to be a violent, abusive drunk, entangled with what would later become Lorcan Kell’s criminal empire. One day, a young Jhonatan returned home to find Rudy beating his mother. He snapped and killed him, dumping the body into the Stanfield Canal.
As soon as I read this backstory, I knew Rudy had to become the Ragman.
I decided that his corpse got caught on a boat traveling through the canal into the Bleak Gate. Since he had just died, I ruled that he didn’t need to be marked with runes (something about freshly dead bodies being more attuned to the Bleak Gate naturally, idk)
There, his body was found by the Obscurati—and specifically, by another one of my players, who was unknowingly working in their labs. Her character had her memories wiped by Grappa (she was his daughter) and had a keen interest in necromancy. The Obscurati had recently unearthed a ritual for creating mummies in an ancient ziggurat, which she began to experiment with.
She used Rudy’s body for her trials, eventually reanimating him—but he escaped. Somehow, he discovered the secret to planar travel and began sneaking back into the real world. He could only stay for five minutes at a time, which is why all of his murders occurred in the Net.
Driven by vengeance against Jhonatan and his mother, he started killing young men and prostitutes—becoming the Ragman!
