Rary the Traitor
Once a name spoken with respect in the highest towers of wizardry, Rary now carries the epithet "the Traitor"—a title earned in a single, catastrophic moment that shattered alliances and altered the balance of magical power in the Flanaess.
Long ago, Rary was a sage of profound intellect and subtle charisma. As a member of the Circle of Eight, he advised rulers, studied the deepest mysteries of the multiverse, and held a vision of order through arcane precision. But something within him shifted—perhaps impatience, perhaps despair, perhaps a long-hidden ambition at last allowed to bloom. During the signing of a great peace accord at the end of the Greyhawk Wars, Rary turned on his own allies, assassinating two fellow archmages and vanishing into exile.
Rary reemerged far to the south, deep within the Bright Desert—a place already steeped in ancient curses and the sorrowful remnants of the fallen Sulmish Empire. In the crumbling ruins of Mithat, one of Sulm’s forgotten cities, he established his arcane stronghold, a place now whispered of as the Tower of the Black Sun.
From this bastion, Rary has begun the systematic transformation of the region:
- Caravans disappear in the desert wastes, their members reemerging as glazed-eyed thralls or transformed into monstrous guardians.
- Ancient tombs are cracked open, looted not for wealth, but for knowledge—runes, glyphs, relics of Sulm’s pre-cataclysmic magocracy.
- Tribes vanish, only to return subjugated by bizarre enchantments or warped by magical afflictions that render them loyal, mindless, or twisted in form.
Personality Characteristics
Representation & Legacy
Rary's presence has brought new and unnatural order to a land once ruled by chaos and ruin—but at the cost of freedom, life, and memory. The land itself seems to resist him: sandstorms devour his roads, ancient curses unravel his rituals, and cryptic echoes of Shattados’s doom whisper through the vaults he unlocks.
Yet he endures, undeterred.
“The gods failed Sulm. I will not. What was broken shall be remade—not in their image, but in mine.”
—Rary the Traitor
Rary is no longer merely a fugitive or rogue wizard—he is a Dark Power rising, a sovereign of a cursed land whose thirst for knowledge threatens to unleash forces even Sulm dared not master. Those who enter the Bright Desert may find themselves not only trespassers—but test subjects in a vision of arcane dominion that has no place for mercy.
Reign
Rary does not rule like a tyrant, nor inspire fear through spectacle—his tyranny is clinical, based on cold calculation and obsessive research. He believes Sulm held magical truths that could reorder reality, and he seeks to uncover and control them, no matter the cost.
The desert’s warped energies—vestiges of Sulm’s fall—are a font of raw magical power, but also dangerous, unstable, and haunted. Rary’s experiments include:
- Reconstructing Sulmish magical matrices to tap planar forces directly.
- Binding elemental and undead servitors to watch over his excavations.
- Breeding arcane constructs, like dustborn homunculi or bronze-clad desert sphinxes, infused with lost protocols of command and obedience.
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