Game history notes

Ren

Ren is a traveling mystical scholar. Not so interested in becoming an amazing mage. He is mostly looking for the cure to a curse that afflicts his tribe.

Yep. No other explanation. Ren's ancestors were really mystical nomads that traveled the desert outside the edge of reality, now cursed by the evil wizard they were enslaved by after they broke free.

On the one hand, it was all so ridiculous. On the other hand, what other explanation could possibly make sense?

Ren got out from his pack a little notebook and his ink pot and wrote what he was sure of.

Everyone in my family has weird headaches and fever dreams of flying above a sea of sand.

We do not always, but often, grow into insane wrathful disfigured monsters.

We've figured out a few ways to perform magic rituals and to create magic potions that keep ourselves sane and even temporarily remove the dis-figuration.

Ren spoke aloud.

"We thought it was punishment for something terrible our ancestors did."

Ren was alone in a dusty corner of the library of the wizard school so he didn't feel self-conscious about talking aloud.

"But it WAS NOT because we had done something terrible! Instead, we escaped from servitude!"

Ren kept writing:

This order of wizards, this one that now runs this one monastery, is now dedicated to peace and kindness, but generations ago, they were a guild of sadistic necromancers.

The leader of the guild, Lord Magg, enslaved the nomads of the desert, and with terrible magic, stole their ability to shape shift from them.

He had a stack of scrolls in front of him. One stack had the history of this wizard guild. There was a footnote in there about some ancient evil Lord Magg, that was a leader from the darkest times before the reformation. Magg would hunt mythical monsters, and sometimes, extract from them their mystical nature, and other times, make them into his slaves.

Then there was another book that Ren had been carrying for years now as he traveled from one library to another, looking for clues. It was a book describing the magic monsters and people that lived in the desert on the edge of reality, written by some ancient scholars from a previous age. When Ren had found the book, it was in a junk shop, and it was in a stack of moldy old books likely being sold for kindling.

Ren read it, asked about it, and the storekeeper thought it was all fiction, but Ren knew enough to realize it was very real, just from a previous age.

So, Ren bought it, and that night, he read it. Almost half of the pages were faded, or ripped out, but there was a section about a tribe of nomads that the writer had met in the desert. In fact, the writer described how he and his friends had become hopelessly lost in the desert canyons, and could not find their way out, and were out of food, and water, and were being raided by the scorpions of the desert every night.

Then a few nomads appeared, and guided them out of the desert. The nomads and the explorers didn't speak the same language, but it became clear that the nomads understood that the walls of the canyons moved around imperceptibly. And the stars in the sky did too.

The explorer wrote how the nomads would dance around fires they built in the desert at night, in such a frenzy, and would leap into the air and become gigantic condors and soar into the sky.

The writer described how the nomads walked the explorers out of the canyons and led the explorers to a spring.

Now Ren realized he was the descendant of those nomads. The curse was really the family's ability to shape shift, that had become perverted by the wizard. Even though this resolved many doubts and questions, now Ren saw so many more, but really, one main one: could he find a cure?