The last of the gunslingers and the sole surviving member of a knightly order sworn to protect the Beams that hold the multiverse together. Roland has pursued the Man in Black across a dying world for years, driven by a singular obsession with the Dark Tower - the nexus of all realities. Trained from boyhood in Gilead, he is one of the finest warriors alive, possessed of an almost supernatural speed and accuracy with his revolvers. He is also ruthless, willing to put the quest above all else - a quality that defines him across eight books.

A late-emerging figure whose origins and significance the closing books of the series take their time unfolding - linked by deep bloodlines to forces on both sides of the long cosmic conflict the Tower's defenders have been waging. Possessed of unusual physical capacities and animated by an inheritance of grievance that predates his own existence, Mordred is the rare antagonist whose nature is itself one of the things the series is still revealing in its final act.

The Master of Algul Siento (Blue Heaven), a former human originally named Paul Prentiss, of Rahway, New Jersey, before circumstances and a long career took him very much further afield. Pimli oversees the Breaker compound with a mix of bureaucratic efficiency, household-manager fussiness about the dignity of his position, and the kind of carefully cultivated ignorance about what his charges are actually accomplishing that the bigger machine he serves prefers in its supervising staff.

The ultimate antagonist of the series - an immortal demon king whose sole purpose is the destruction of the Dark Tower and, with it, all existence. The Crimson King is a presence felt across the later books long before he is seen in any direct way; more cosmic threat than active character through most of the saga, he represents entropy and annihilation given form, the gravity well around which much of the wider Tower mythology is arranged.

The primary antagonist of the early Dark Tower books and one of Stephen King's most recurring villains across his wider fiction. A sorcerer of vast age and power, Walter has manipulated events across countless worlds and centuries. He is the Man in Black whom Roland has been pursuing since the first line of the series. Devious and theatrical, he is a figure of genuine menace.

A big, blond, stolid young man from Gilead and one of Roland's closest friends, travelling under the alias Richard Stockworth during the Mejis expedition. Alain possesses the touch - a psychic sensitivity that gives him premonitions and an awareness of what others around him are thinking and feeling. Calm and diplomatic by temperament, he is the natural mediator between Roland and Cuthbert when their tempers collide, and an unfussily capable shot in a tradition that prizes the showier kind of capability above all else.

A seven-foot-tall messenger robot (Many Other Functions) built by North Central Positronics, and the last functioning robot in Calla Bryn Sturgis. Andy predicts the Wolves' coming on schedule, offers unsolicited horoscopes to anyone who will listen, cooks meals, and presents an unfailingly cheerful, courteous face to a town that regards him with a mixture of dependence and unease. A relic of a far more sophisticated age, he has outlasted every other machine of his kind in the Calla.

Foreman of Vaughn Eisenhart's Rocking B ranch and father of young Benny, Ben Slightman is a familiar figure at the council meetings that fill the early days of Roland's ka-tet in Calla Bryn Sturgis. A practical, self-contained man, he wears a pair of spectacles - a rare and valued thing in the Calla - and is fiercely devoted to his son.

Ben Slightman's teenage son and the first friend Jake makes in Calla Bryn Sturgis - a kind, eager boy who takes to Jake with no curiosity about his uncanny gunslinger gravitas and bonds quickly with him over barn-jumping, Oy's billy-bumbler tricks, and the small adventures the Rocking B ranch makes available. For Jake - older than his years and a long way from the friends he might have grown up with - Benny is the first easy companionship he has known on this side.

An insane sentient monorail built by the Great Old Ones, running on a single elevated line out of the ruined city of Lud at speeds well beyond the sound barrier. Over the long centuries Blaine has grown bored, lonely, and dangerously unstable, with a fondness for cruel games. He agrees to carry Roland's ka-tet out of Lud on one condition - that they keep him entertained with riddles he cannot answer - and warns them that he will kill them all if they fail.

The weapons master of Gilead who trained Roland and his generation of gunslingers. Brutal, demanding, and deeply traditional, Cort tested each apprentice with a formal combat trial that would either earn them their guns or exile them. Roland defeated him at an unusually young age - the youngest ever to do so - using a trained hawk named David. Cort appears primarily in the Wizard and Glass flashbacks and in Roland's memories throughout the series.

Roland's closest childhood friend and fellow apprentice gunslinger in Gilead. Cuthbert is the quick-witted, talkative one of the trio - sharper-spoken than Roland and quicker to a joke, with a ready grin he can produce even in situations no one else in the room can find anything funny about. He trains alongside Roland under Cort, present for the small everyday cruelties of their apprenticeship and the larger crises that shape them: the master hawkman David's training, the cook Hax's treason, and the unprecedented early test Roland is driven to demand for his coming of age. Loyal, sharp, and unsentimental about the kind of company gunslingers tend to keep, Cuthbert is the friend Roland trusts soonest and longest.

A young psychic Breaker held at Algul Siento, and one of Ted Brautigan's closest companions there. Despite his youth and a deliberately rough, prickly manner, Dinky has strong telekinetic ability and an unsentimental streak of compassion. He becomes close to Sheemie Ruiz during their time at the compound.

A heroin addict from 1987 New York, drawn into Mid-World through one of the doors on the beach. Quick-witted and irreverent, Eddie has a gift for defusing tension through humour that masks a deep well of courage. He becomes one of Roland's most capable and loyal companions.

The leader of the Big Coffin Hunters, the trio of older hired guns working for John Farson in the Barony of Mejis. An old man with a pronounced limp and long white hair, Jonas is cunning, dangerous, and unburdened by anything that might encourage him to be otherwise. He was once a gunslinger's apprentice himself, failed his testing, and was sent west in the cold formality of that disgrace - a wound he has been a long time carrying. He coordinates the Mejis end of Farson's conspiracy with the unhurried thoroughness of a man who has been planning this kind of work for considerably more years than the three boys from Gilead have been alive.

A cunning, meticulous crime boss who runs a large part of New York's drug trade from a midtown bar called the Leaning Tower. Balazar built his organisation patiently and has no tolerance for loose ends. Eddie Dean works for him as a drug runner, and Balazar keeps a firm hold on Eddie through his heroin addiction.

A former Catholic priest first introduced in King's Salem's Lot, who crosses into the Dark Tower universe and eventually settles in Calla Bryn Sturgis. Whatever happened to Callahan in his New England parish - and the answer is not the kind of thing a man can give a short version of - left him spending years wandering before finding purpose again with Roland's ka-tet. His backstory occupies a substantial section of Wolves of the Calla.

A diseased, violent member of the Grays - the surviving faction in the broken city of Lud, where the centuries of feuding with the rival Pubes have left both sides degraded almost past recognition. Gasher is the ugliest face the Grays present to whatever new arrival happens to wander into their crumbling territory, and Jake's introduction to the realities of Lud comes very largely through him.

A wealthy summer visitor to the Lovell, Maine area in June 1999, married to a retired physicist, and not at all the sort of person who expects to find a gunslinger from another world standing in her driveway. When Roland and Jake's path brings them through Lovell on a single, extraordinarily compressed day, Irene rises to the occasion with a brisk, intelligent practicality nothing in her summer-resort life has previously had reason to call on - and provides the ka-tet with a piece of help they could not have arranged any other way.

A prim, fastidious New York accountant whose surface respectability conceals one of the more methodical predators in this particular layer of the Tower. Known to himself, and to almost no one else, as the Pusher, Mort is the inhabitant of the third door on the beach - and the body Roland is obliged to wear during one of the more difficult episodes of The Drawing of the Three.