- Completed Adventures:
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Echoes of Crystal
Dungeons & Dragons 5e
Slinking through the deep, dark undergrowth of withered canopies, streaking through the snaking shadows of silent moonlit plains, submerged in wait within the sludgy bogwater of a mouldering marsh... the solitary way of life of a lone black-scaled reptilian silhouette lurking beneath treacherous full moon nights offered seldom more satisfaction than the thrill of the hunt. And the thrill of the hunt was all Qu'al knew.
Cursed with the blessing of the god of vicious hunting, Malar, the Lizardfolk's earliest experiences in this realm were marred at every opportunity by his undue higher calling: his mind could conceptualize little beyond the satisfaction of the end of another's life to justify his own existence, and any empathy that may have been instilled in him was cruelly torn from his spirit to make room for his incorrigible predatory instincts.
Abandoned in the wilderness by his mournful tribe and left without the guidance of a pack, Qu'al fully embraced his deep-seated savagery and instincts as his only means of survival. The deaths of the many prey sustained the survival of the single predator. However, just one choice hunt was all it took for one creature too clever to be preyed upon to cross Qu'al's path; the Archfey of the Grove, Lomalloth, whose grove's protections —a tribulatory gauntlet of warding pranks and puzzles crafted by the many devious fae residents— ensnared the near-witless Lizardfolk. Unlike the many denizens whom had come into these traps before, however, Lomalloth found no amusement in the floundering of a sub-intelligent creature at the mercy of her subjects' diligently crafted creations. And to rectify this wrong, the Archfey enacted her own prank upon the reptilian being; providing the Lizardfolk with the heightened self-awareness of empathy that he'd been robbed of.
Instead of a terrified and quaking rat finding itself in a trap, contrary to Lomalloth's intentions, Qu'al did not find fear in the machinations of his entrapment, but rather expressed the purest intrigue and wonder brought upon by a newfound capacity for appreciating works of the mind over the rigors of the body. Seeing this, and taking a vested intrigue of her own, Lomalloth deigned to release the Lizardfolk under a new lease of life — a contract formed between mortal and Archfey, entrusting Qu'al's dedicated hunting to incorporate the fae values of testing the mind and spirit over physicality, swearing the Lizardfolk into service through the necessity of exhausting every available non-confrontational means of resolving a hunt before violence is taken.
