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[An acolyte lingers behind after her group moves off to sight-see in Il Modo, she speaks with a Scholar in the Lamp of Il Modo. She shows a token of friendship, and asks a question. She is asked to leave a note..] (DM Howl)

Dear Mr. Est,

Thank you for taking my letter. My sister Narwen said to say hello, and that she was rueful that she couldn't make the trip today herself.

Important to us, and for the safety of many, we are looking for information about something called a Naptu Rod, Naptu Leadership Rod, Silvered Rod, or something similar.  Perhaps there are some references in your library?

Have you found any such thing?


My boat is to depart soon, so I will not be able to wait for a reply. You can send one to the Priory in Ephia's Well, should one be forthcoming.

Thank you for your assistance, your candor, and your hospitality

Acolyte Kellyn
Sybilline Sisterhood

What an incredible PC from an incredible player.

Maybe binders that you can use notes on to add them to the binder, and page through/remove.

Kinda like bard songbooks?

Someone was talking about spinning in place in discord and I thought they meant the swivel command. But I did wonder if it'd be possible to add the ability to rotate in place while holding an emote like /e sit, /e pray

Just another tool in the toolbelt.

You and I have some roughage in our past, but I truly respect the hell out of what you have learned, created and maintained scriptwise.

Your areas have personality and attention that does not compare.

You're an excellent character writer, and deserve this accolade and respect.

Happy abala day.

deltaTime

Varin Einlin
The Wyldsage

The seed of heroism is planted in all of us from our birth. It is shared to us by our parents, whether latent or fulfilled. It is up to us to tend to that seed. The onus falls upon us to water it when we are feeling unfit and to prune it when we are overconfident, and in so doing help it grow.

Varin Einlin tends not only to his own seed of heroism, but also the seeds of the smallest and most delicate rose, and the mightiest oak. He barely remembers his upbringing like many of us, but a figure in his life was with him from when he was a young boy, until the crumbling walls of Ringfall.

The old and wild man who mentored Varin was a wildskeeper in a savage time called Lorril; Master Lorril to Varin. Varin recalls his wizened visage; wrinkles upon his brow and cheek for every lesson ever learned. He remembers his unkept beard, and the debris that it would collect from leaning over bushes and hills to dig his gnarled and callused hands into the fertile earth. He remembered walking with this man from ring to ring, and learning ways of the land. He learned what the wind was whispering. He learned what what the bear was saying through its guttural growls and groans. And he learned exactly what it was that the brooks were babbling about.

Varin doesn't remember what he was doing the day that the Rings fell. He just knew it was some mundane chore, like any other day. But he does remember that his wise old master had a tone about him; something in his stance, or a glint in his gray eyes that day. He suspects that his sage knew something was coming, but by following his masters creed, and attending his task, Varin was alone when the ash started to billow up from the ground.

He never saw Master Lorril again.

The disk is a strange place, so there is some small hope that the elderly man is still out there with his watering tin, tending some overgrowth in a cavern, but Varin suspects that with the passage of time, the man has since passed.

As the first hints of ash started clouding his sight and chapping his lips, Varin knew that the wastes were going to be something like he'd never seen. Lorril taught Varin how to forage in the bushes for ripe berries and how to pluck sweet pears from trees. He had taught him how to combine lemongrass and wheat to make bread, and to survive not on the meats of the wild. But, the sands are cruel to such greenery, and he had to eat to survive, so his diet changed to whatever the sands would afford him.

He remembers the sun beating down on him in the beginning, hammering him with heat and thirst. He remembers the loneliness and talking to himself. He remembers losing himself in the wastes. He remembers walking for hours without a drink. Each granting of a quenching was a kindness unto itself. He forgot what it was to be a man, and gave in to his most primal instinct: survival.

When Varin first set sight upon the well, it was not by any design of his own. He was a wanderer, lost in the sands as any are. He is certain that it was a miracle of the Wyld herself, putting the jewel of the Well in his path. His first drink from the well was deep. He already had started to remember himself. By the time he had his fill, he was no longer a creature of feral survival, but rather again a man.

Now that Varin has the gods gifted comfort of the Well in his life, he has started walking the wilds once more, but he has a sanctuary he can fall back to if his waterskins get low. He tends to the life that blossoms around the city from the cacti off the road, to the noble skink sunbathing upon the rocks.

But, he has an interesting relationship with our home in the desert. He detests politics, and it is without doubt the most political place he's ever been. He wants to wander freely, but he feels almost tethered to it, finding his footfalls back to his hammock upon the rooftops under the clear night stars. It is a place of its own life, and it draws him despite any misgivings. It is a place he can come to drink, but he also has friends that he has come to love and care for. And these friends accept him, something that is truly new to him since Ringfall. The well is like a watering hole in the savannah to him where lioness and gazelle both sup in tandem.

Varin's aspirations for his life now are to tend to a dying disk. He hears the aches and pains of the earth itself. Each night he dreams of how things should be; birds in the sky, green rolling knolls, and abundant life. Each day he wakes to a nightmare where Qa'im and its cancer is spreading. He sees things plainly. We must staunch the blood, and eventually old wounds will heal.

And one path toward this may be the Cup. He is not certain of its origins, or of its powers but he holds hope that it is real. He seeks to learn of its mysteries, and endeavors to find it, should it be the key to saving the Disk.

Varin has had a few notable acts of heroism, and believes that each swordsman that takes a job to kill goblins is doing their part. He believes that evil grows wild over the entirety of the disk and must be removed, else it grow wild and untamed.

He recalls one story where a group of men and women were rallied to face death. A claim that the very fate of the disk hinged upon success. He gave this claim a doubtful pass, but learned that the gravity of the situation was very real. He remembered marching to a spot in the sands until he met dozens of corpses arranged like a flower. He recalls that dead may they have been, their eyes followed the groups every motion, until the coterie descended into a barrow with mirror lined halls. An uneasy feeling washed over them. The reflections stared back, not as mirrors do, but as monsters in the dark.

They fought many men there, begging for death. They fought chained gorgonops, enslaved to some dark power. They fought dark horrors that came from the mirrors; eyes atop eyes, shards of starlight shaped like themselves. There were great balls of blinding, horrifying light. There were unknown abominations.. And at last, a mass of eyes started staring back, intense enough to turn a man to granite.

One of the men there told the group he would kill it by sacrificing himself with spear in hand to prevent it from joining our world; this only wounded the beast and through the effort of every man and woman with them, only then were they able to fell the great horror.

"Everyone has a part to play to heal the world. A thousand drops forms a puddle. A thousand puddles form a pond. A hundred ponds form a stream. And enough streams form a raging waterfall which can cleave the mountains in twain."

Marriet Fineweather
the Champion

Not all of us are fortunate enough to remember where we came from. Some of us can't remember what happened, and when we crossed the threshold from some other place, and the sandscape we now call our home. Some of us awakened soggy from the waters of a dirty canal, some of us I've even heard emerged from dormant statues, unsure how they got to where they were frozen in time.

Marriet doesn't know from where she came; she remembered only a peaceful village amidst some old ruins dominated by smallfolk. She knew everyone at one time, and besides the thirty or more halflings that were there, she distinctly recalled that there were two, and only two dwarves. It was all hazy, but she knew she had a nice family whose names she has forgotten. And she remembers the storm.

It was a storm unlike any had ever seen or written of; it was violent, and it came on the horizon like a sheet of slate-gray. With each new part of the landscape it hit, there came a billowing cloud of gas that made plants slough on their stems, and leaves fall from the trees. The village knew they could not remain in their ruin home, and they packed quickly and tried to outrun it.

Marriet remembered being amidst packing the essentials, when the gas entered through the windows of her home. She remembered the racking cough, and the fatigue. She moved as quickly as she could, but she wasn't able to outrun it the first night. She was at the edge, where it was the most sparse, and remembers her lungs burning. She remembers the reports that the elderly and sick deeper in had been taken by death. Mari, with some of the other spry halflings of the village ran. They managed to get ahead of it, but not by much. With each breath they took of clean air, they knew that polluted air was on their heels.

After a long, grueling marathon of outpacing the storm, stone gave way to soft sand beneath her feet. By now, the storm was no where in sight, and what scraps of men and women that she ran with were starving, dehydrated, and filled with fatigue. Mariett had to make her choice, knowing that if she stayed with the slowing party, that she would find that the new arid desert would siphon her of her water, and sharing out her meals would leave her starved.

She wasn't sure how long it was that she traveled along those sandy dunes, or how many men and women she might have passed. She did know that her instinct for survival ruled her though. She found herself sneaking extra rations of food and water, so that she could break away in the middle of the night to find the next camp to do so again.

Her journey towards what would end up at Ephia's well was a spiritual one, as much as it was physical. She lost herself during the escape. She justified what she did, knowing that she was doing it to survive. Along with the thievery, she recalled one time where she stood at the back while a great sand horror fought her current camp, and she fled, unsure what came of them. She never killed, though she wondered if what she did would be seen as equally bad.

But to Ephia's Well she did stumble, giving thanks to her heritages well documented luck. The first thing she noticed was a great pyramid, jutting out of the sands. It was a beacon to her, and toward it she did trek until arrival. As she drew closer, she marveled at it; it was a sight to behold. And when she entered and saw men and women of civilization and culture, she felt herself surge with something that left her long ago - hope.

Men and women were not too kind to her at first. She was let down by the meetings of rudeness and doubt, pointed toward the office of minor nuisances, and eventually the Gutters. It was only then, after a few days of doing the dregs of work that all who are new to the Well have come to accustom, that she met her first friend.

Her name was Uphuria Dondu, a sword swallower from some side show in a far off circus. She was kind, and she was just. The two made an excellent pairing, and Marriet started to feel like she was being made whole again, warded off the selfish thoughts that kept her alive in the unforgiving desert. She learned a valuable lesson from Dondu, one she has kept to heart ever since - She would be a lot weaker if she were alone, quite easily. Her friends keep her honest, and keep her hale.

While she was working the jobs of the Nuisance board, Marriet was looking for something more. She needed something to fight for, and she stumbled into the offices of the League of Gold. While waiting on an exceptionally long line, she idly read their charter, and it called to her. She needed something to be remembered.

And this is where the Cup came into play. She knew that if she were to be the one to find this cup, our new Heroine would be remembered - no, immortalized - in song, story, and memory. While she doesn't know what the Cup is, or does, she does firmly believe that it will bring safety back to Ephia's well, and relieve the Janissaries of their duty through its finding.

Marriet had goals now. She was to join the Balladeers. She was to make the League of Gold a thing to be known and remembered not for their mercantile and mercenaries, but by their, and her actions and deeds.

Since these new goals, Marriet has saved men and women from a horrible red gas that they were ensconced in. Bolstered by her own memories of the gas that drove her from her home, she heroically charged in and pulled them out, making certain to resuscitate those that were in need. And of course, there was the life changing Tournament.

Marriet took part in a tournament hosted by the Gold League, where dozens entered and the winner would take a very special prize. It began with a free-for-all melee, which she knew she would be underestimated in. While folk were leaving her alone, she took out half a dozen men by herself, making her statement of how she was never to be underestimated again.

By the end of the melee, 3 others besides herself stood. All folk that she knew, and knew would be a great challenge. To her surprise and dismay, her first fight, she fought the one she was most worried about. She knew that the other combatant was armed well with supplies, and was ready to outlast them. She knew to best him would be pure attrition. And she did. But this left her too dwindling, and she had one more fight to go.

Fortunately, between matches Marriet was able to gather up new supplies from the crowd, and in the final fight, she managed to throw her opponent off his stance. Through crafty footwork, well managed consumables, and cunning, she had a chance to strike true, and strike true she did. She had won.

The crowds cheer was cacophonous. It was intoxicating. It was overwhelming. The prize for winning was hers. It was what she had dreamed of since she was a new arrival at Ephia's Well. She was to be granted a Voice - Earned by what she was and what she was good at, not bought with a surplus of dinar.

"I can be the bravest shield in the sands, but that doesn't make me a hero. I will prove myself."

Because money

Lynneth
the Wanderer

Just a girl, perhaps 10 years of age - estimated due to a restriction of timekeeping in the 99th ward - Lynneth grew up in the Peerage ward, a place of high chivalry, where honor was the law of the land. The ward was ruled over by several greater houses, filled with revelry, knights, servants and butlers, and an emphasis on the decorum defined by being "Peers" of the once-King. Lynneth lived a normal life for a girl of her age; too young to join the houses, too young to fight against the encroaching shadow. She was instructed to join the caravans out of the Ward, and find safety and sanctuary within the Inner Rings, and that is what she did.

Due to passage through the Ring Walls being made possible by some contraption of an enemy of our once-King, Lynneth was given a path inward, able to outrun the horror that followed in the wake of her and the other refugees. By the time Ringfall occurred, she was already passed the great mountain, displaced by the strange new environment and the unfamiliar landscape. The ash storms made it impossible to see where one was going, and like many of us, she wandered.

From ramshackle towns, to tent villages, Lynneth wandered the arid landscape. She grew close to her fellow nomadic friends, and became a community with them. Together they scraped, and they survived. They lived, but they could scarcely drink. They had to ration water, and parched lips became a thing of expectancy with their growing dehydration. For years, this was the life of Lynneth. Then, one day an unexpected accident lead to a face she would never forget.

The sun was hot, it was a dry heat. She was in the caravan wagon, when suddenly, there was a lurching sensation, and she found herself tussled sideways onto the naked axel of the wagon. None among them knew what to do, none could fix the wagon. Hope slipped away like smoke in the palm.  Until a figure emerged from the horizon. She was a matronly figure, carrying a crooked gnarled staff. She approached the wagoneers and for no fee, applied her skill as a temporary wainwright, and let them drink deep from her reserves. The caravan was grateful, they offered her to stay. But the woman shook her head. She was a Wanderer.

The one thing she did take with her when she went, was Lynneth. It was a hard choice for our soon to be heroine, to leave her friends that she scoured the sands these many years with, but something about the woman felt right. When asked in the future what she thought of the savior of that caravan she would proclaim, "The first word I think of, when I think of her is kind, of course."

The womans name was Alda. She was kind, but she was not naive. The years following in Alda's footfalls would be difficult. She was strict, she was stubborn, and she held everyone to the same standard - hers. But it would shape the teen girl. Lynneth learned of her patron, Warad, the Wanderer. She learned his ways and became a Priestess of him under her shrewd guidance. Lynneth was lead back to the Road, where for so long she had wandered, aimless.

And, the road lead to more towns and camps, these much more stocked and supplied. Lynneth knew thirst no more, as she learned the roads that they traveled. They took on many other people, guiding them all back to the road, pointing them toward civilization so they might not die in the vengeful heat.

One day, it was time for Lynneth to part from Alda. She had learned all that the sage could have taught her. She had become a fine young woman, an example of what all who serve the Wanderer should be. She was lead to the settlement of Ephia's Well, and it was there that Lynneth and Alda parted.

The first few days were a blur. It was a paradise compared to the places she'd been in the last 10 years. She was truly able to drink again, so much so that the first few gulps of Ephia's water caused a cramp in her dehydrated state. It was a good pain, knowing that she would Live.

Lynneth learned about the Cup of legend, and asked around about it. Everyone seemed to have a different understanding of what this great relic was, but there was a consensus. It was Hope, and it was why she was brought to Ephias Well. This was truly her calling. She would seek the Cup, and whether it was the essence of granting life itself, or a relic capable of flooding the sandy ashscape with verdant green and restoring order to things, she knew it was her destiny to search.

Already Lynneth has brought Warad to the wells refugees. She has turned bandits to pious men, she has given direction and drink to those in need, and she helped an aspiring young troubadour find salvation from a muddy wandering.

"The Road is long, but surely the Cup lies somewhere along it. I shall Wander."

Amidst the dunes and scorching heat,
A solitary Rose blooms at my feet,
In a time where life is harsh,
The road is tough, travelers parched,
there is a place a where lost souls meet,
to share with friends an ice cold drink,
the Krak des Roses, what treat,
A fortress strong, a sight to seek,
Alone in the desert's endless sea,
There blooms proud, a sanctuary.
So come and rest, weary traveler,
Find refuge here, your soul to gather,
In the Krak des Roses, haven true,
Amidst the sands, a dream renewed.

-Lynneth

[The New Heroes Who Share Our Hearth]

Foreword

Ringfall was a time of great confusion for us all. It came suddenly, and without warning. Those of us in what most outsiders would call the "Inner-Rings" didn't have any concept of a great force of Nothing coming to consume the Disk. We lead lives as farmers, politicians, merchants, and soldiers, offering what aid we could for those undertaking the King's trials of advancement toward his eternal keep.

But with these unknown events of the Nothing, came forward heroes. We know some of them from the Ring 99; the Just, the Last, and the Beloved. They forged a path for refugees from the outer rings, and when the Ring walls came down, ushered those refugees forth into the craggy dunes of the Great Ash Desert. Within these refugees, new Heroes were born; forged by the arid heat and dry sands. These are their stories.

They are - The New Heroes Who Share Our Hearth.

Within this space is a book with bindings open for the addition of new works as new heroes come to the light of the Krak des Roses hearthfire.

The New Heroes
Who Share Our Hearth

Written by

Benjin Lamire

Illustrated by

Edha

It'd be nice if packing them into a pouch used the removed unique power animation too.

The turn undead for Halfling domain "Champion of the Smallfolk" just doesn't seem to do anything at all. I've been with 2,4, and even 6 halflings and got nothing.

Character: Mickey Sureshine
Halfling & Healing

Bumping this as an unfortunate victim of the bug.

lol