Dragonraid AM's Wandering Smith

The Book of the Wandering Smith

You have read of the Brotherhood of the Watchtower, how their human arrogance destroyed and scattered the 11 lost Knights of the Tower. But what of Addamus, the Smith, the Brother left behind when their world came apart? Odd you should ask...

This story may only be found in Addamus' own diary, or told from his lips. It is up to your party to uncover this information. And thereby hangs the tale.

is name is Omegus, or that's what he tells his acquaintances. He has no friends to speak of, and he doesn't.
    He looks about eighty, but a hard eighty. Those aren't laugh lines, friend; those are grief lines. His shoulder-length white hair is ragged and frizzled. A small trickle of red runs through his full beard, but other than that it has run to white as well. For his age, he has remarkably strong arms. He carries a staff with a carved chesspiece on the top, apparently a rook.
    He lives in a one-room shack in a quiet part of town; nothing too showy, a bit dusty and rumpled. He is said to be a sage of sorts. He has an almost complete grasp of ancient history, and is a bit of a tinker as well, often mending cookpots for the local housewives. But he keeps to himself...and talks very little. "As silent as Omeegus," his neighbors say when they mention him at all.
    If you were to look into his room, you would see mainly books; hundreds of them, mostly history texts. His only other real possessions other than a half-melted anvilcracked anvil and some ancient smithy tools is a tiny clockwork bird. If wound up, it only gasps, some tiny internal mechanism long broken.
    He may be found at home, where he will refuse any contact with outsiders he does not know. If introduced by a third party he knows, he will consult on history...for a fee. If the party finds him elsewhere, it will be late in the evening, at a run-down pub called the Hope & Anchor. He will be drinking...and crying. The party will learn of him as a sage, and probably begin by viewing him as a tool toward larger goals. The AM must remember to play him with tragedy and sympathy to draw the party out.
    This is a man lost, a man adrift. What is his story? It will take a long while, several favors, and some serious trust-building to find out. They will learn it only from his own lips...or perhaps he drops a book during some consulting session at the pub...

Concerning
The Fall of the Watchtower

ddamus awoke alone, his forge long cold, the only sound in his massive smithy was the demonic laughter of a small red Dragon. He looked away in shame, knowing how he had compromised himself, and knowing something had gone wrong. Where there had been twelve fine suits of white plate armor, there was now only one standing watch over his smithy. A sickly-sweet smoke filled the air of his workshop as he lay in the dust.
    He had failed at first. He had tried and tried to find the formula; the powerful combination of the elements that would yield the perfect metal for the Fight. He sought some steel alloy that would provide his Brotherhood with the earthly protection they would need to vanquish the world's many dragons. His vast knowledge had failed him, until one day, when feeding the small subdued red Dragon that the Brotherhood kept as a research animal, the idea finally came to him: To slay the Dragons, once and for all, they would need the armor of a Dragon!
    He had scraped the scales from the small, horse-sized creature and had used the Dragon's own flame to heat his forge. He had melted the scales together with the finest, hardest metals, and talked it into shape; twelve suits of armor for the Brotherhood of men! They had thought they would emerge from the Watchtower and free the world! But here in the dust at the feet of the Dragon, he was beginning to see that they had been terribly wrong.
    The Dragon's laughter now mocked him.
    "Petty human!" It snorted. "So full of your own arrogance, so bloated on your own self-made wisdom! It is a wonder that our Enemy even notices your worthless lives! You so hungered for your own path to glory that you would dance with the Ancient Ones themselves and try to steal our secrets!"
    Addamus shook the sleep from his head, and for the first time he noticed that their "captive" Dragon was now twirling its collar on one razor-sharp claw. Its missing scales seemed to fill back in as he watched. It spewed another wicked laugh, and eddies of flame began to burn sections of his smithy. It regarded him with a cold, bright eye:
    "I was the weakest of our brood, sent to let your petty Brotherhood capture me. It was thought that your own pride would make you take me in as some lickspittle pet. I have waited years for your own arrogance to grow to the point that I could quietly work my will upon you."
"No!" Addamus shouted, as it all began to become clear.
    "Did you not hear me in the night?" The creature chuckled a deep, throaty laugh. "Calling to your petty brain in the stillness? Urging your kind on to their self-appointed task?"
    "You will fail!" Addamus proclaimed. "We fight on the side of Good! That armor..."
    "That armor I let you *think* you designed?" A thick spume of flame melted his tools into one cherry-red puddle. "Weakling! Did you think of your own glory you walked in Light? You walk in Darkness!" And with that, the tiny Dragon grew and shifted, filling out until his now-massive wings blew out the windows of the workshop.
    The finest smithy in the world was in ruins, and with his fiery breath, the Dragon flew up and turned his flame upon the grand Watchtower. The Dragon was joined by several others of his kind, even larger and more terrifying, and they all focused upon the Tower. The very stone flowed like water as the Tower crumbled unto itself, and sank beneath the sand it was built upon. The dragons danced in the air high over the smoking remains of that place. The now huge Dragon's laughter echoed across the Wastes, and with a flutter of his great red wings, he was gone. At the last, only silence ruled the place.
    What of the smith? He crawled from the ruins, bitter, bruised. His Brothers were all gone, clad in the armor they believed would protect them...armor forged by human hands to Dragon designs. Who knew where they had gone, or what would befall them? Did they die in the "battle" of the Tower? Did they run into the night clad only in the missing armor? Who knew? The smith cursed his own name, they day he was born, and his family line back to the Glade.
    All he found in the ruins of their great Watchtower before the Wastes blew quietly over the slag was a single clockwork bird from his workshop, a toy he had been creating before the armor was even a dream. It was battered and bent, and when he touched the switch with a bloody finger, it merely coughed and sputtered. He walked out into the Grey Wastes, hoping that this day would be his last. No curse in the world would be great enough for him. He had danced with the Dragons, and now he would willingly pay the price."

The first chapter of the tiny book ends there, and after some ragged and torn pages picks up again in the same handwriting, but different ink. Assumedly some time has passed between the two entries.

   "I may be the only survivor. Drunk on the wisdom of men, I have dammed my fellows to the Overlord knows what fate. I have scoured history to locate any mention of them, but there is none. In the years that followed, I sought them in the surrounding lands, then further and further away. They are as gone as our grand Watchtower. As far as I know, only I survive to carry the shame of my all too human arrogance; the blood of my brothers is on my hands. I committed the sin that caused the Tower to fall; I sought to conquer Evil with Evil's own tools. Surely the Overlord himself has turned his face against me. I am not fit to live, and yet I do.
    "I have tried many times to take my life, and yet I live. Cuts heal before my eyes, poisons pass right through me. I am a ruin of a man, aged but denied death. I walk the lands of the living, passing among men but never of them, afraid to tell a soul who I really am.
    "I began this as a history of the Watchtower, to set right every lie and error that men have said about us over the millennium since its fall, but even now, my spirit fails me. What is the point of what men say? The Brotherhood is gone. Perhaps they were the lucky ones. May they rest in a better place, if in truth there is a better place. I will probably be here, cursed that I am, long after the true Final Conflict has come and gone.
    "Our great Tower lies broken beneath the sand, and every night I find myself in another murky bar, listening to another tuneless bard further mangle the memory of my Brothers and our quest. Will this hell never end?

In my hand,

Addamus

Behold the Man

Omegus (Addamus)
Hope of 1
Knowledge of 20 in metalwork of all kinds
Knowledge of 15 in Ancient History
Vision of 12
Strength of 12
PV 25 (apparent...regeneration makes this Infinite
until the End of Time or TwiceBorn)

megus is a pathetic old man who is cursed by the Dragons to wander the world, calling no place home and no man brother. He keeps to himself, afraid to share his sin.
        The man is a sage of sorts, friends will tell the LightRaiders. If you want History, you want Omegus. The Orc Uprising in the highlands? He tells it like he was there. The Sad Case of the Battling Barons? He tells it better than the Bards do, and he knows their first names! Trust me, for research, its Omegus. His knowledge is vast, but his short-term memory is a bit spotty...always forgetting where his staff is, or what street he is on. He's not a bad tinker as well, they say. But he never touches weapons. He will fix a pot like new, or make a clockwork toy for a child, but he never repairs armor or weapons, not for money or threat.
    This fellow is a man without a country or kin, a hollow shell of a machine built solely for carrying his grief around, and built so perfectly it never wears out. This is the true curse laid on him by the Dragons: he will remember his failure forever...or so he believes.
    The sad thing is this, it need not be this way. Omegus knows not what happened to his Brothers, but he believes them dead, with the blood on his hands. He believes (in a stout, Old Testament way) that the Overlord could never forgive a sinner such as he. And though he knows it not, that is what is keeping his horrible enchantment alive. The enchantment is simply broken, if only he would accept the Overlord's gift. His exile is self inflicted.
    The party will need to witness to him several times. He will at first hustle them along to their adventures, then at another time he will make bitter comments about his sin being too great. At a time of the AM's choosing (possibly when drunk) he will relate the entire story most tragically, filling in what is known about the Brotherhood from the Palsmist's tale in the main book. The party will have to role-play him through the Great Runes, and get him to accept the Overlord. When he does, the following happens: complete catharsis, de-aging to a man of 50, and quite probably a Unicorn visitation. (Touched by a Unicorn?)
    As far as he knows, his Brothers were never seen again. He does NOT know they are the Sleepless Knights. If the party relates this to him at any time, he will take out a VERY nice sword, tucked away wrapped in velvet, and begin a quest to free his Brothers from the domination of the Dragons. If the party is nice, they can come along too!
Some possible plot lines to mix into the stew for the dedicated Adventure Master...

Omegus hears his lost armor calling to him, haunting his dreams. He fears it will work its dark magic on him, and compel him to put it on. He seeks a party to join him on a quest to the Wastes to seek the foundation of the Tower.
Or perhaps this is a lead-in to the revelation of his true past. The party hires him as sage when the Overlord dispatches them to destroy the armor, and along the way they learn the truth of his past!
Or, word comes that the Tower's ruins have emerged from the Wastes. Perhaps the Overlord wants the armor destroyed, or perhaps some Dragon has taken over the dungeons beneath the dunes as home base for a raid on the Human lands.
A secret society, a sect of the dreaded Cryptic Alliance, has found the armor and is trying to divine its secrets. Or...
Or the sect is seeing to perform some hideous ceremony that will draw the 12 knights together and begin the Final Conflict before its time!
Or the above sect is doing so at the bidding of the Dragons to destroy the mortal lands!
Or they are doing it as a power grab to try and control the Dragons!

ere ends the AdventuremMaster Archives. Click the sword to go back to the Homepage of the Dragonraid Inn.

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