SourceMaterial-The Burning Page

The Burning Page

The Burning Page is a growing organization of Saemilists and their supporting followers founded approximately two centuries after The Great War ended. Their main occupation is the recovery of the ancient art of Runic Magic and the research and discovery of its expansion.

History

Though The Great War did not permeate the reaches of the Underdark as it did the surface, the Orcish evocation spell ripped through the continents and caused reverberations which penetrated the deep the crust of Avlis and loosened the rocks and caverns, some of which had been sealed off by tightly fitting portals for ages. Unknown to the surface dwellers, this set off a renewed age of exploration below them where Demon Lords sought out and conquered new territories sometimes filled with ancient races. It was within a newly reopened enclave that the Demon Lord Teralatax, daughter of Alifanitax, stumbled upon an ancient library with tomes that seemed to date back to the Age of Gods. As a practitioner of magic and a prominent member of the old Black Order, Teralatax was elated and immediately fortified the area and concentrated her efforts on combing this treasure trove for secrets to the power of the gods. Initially, she was taken by the idea of finding the all powerful Black Dagger, however her efforts soon proved futile on that account. Instead, Teralatax encountered a reference in an old book that referred to the Age of Spirits and the inhabitants that roamed the land before The Negerai Prime infested it with her ancestral kind. Thus began an adventure that would outlive her by over a thousand years.

The obscure reference that started Teralatax's journey told of spirits long ago that could use magic by drawing runes on their skin. As one of the few volumes detailing history before the arrival of the Negerai Prime, it told several accounts of spirits lost to history who were great warriors in their own right and used these magical runes on their skin to augment their abilities and those of their allies. Within the long-forgotten political web of that age, these warriors were held in great esteem and were seen to stand alongside of other types of magic users that existed among the spirit-kin. Intrigued, Teralatax had to know more about this great power and after exhausting the resources of the conquered library, she set out to find others that may have been uncovered by the great rumbling from above.

As she wandered through the tunnels and caverns of the newly revealed sections of the Underdark with her entourage, Teralatax kept journals of her exploits and findings. She set the goal of aggregating all knowledge of these runic casters in one place. Additionally, she began to do research and included these findings in her journals along with the rest. From her interpretation of the limited text, Teralatax believed that there must be some special kind of ink used in creating these runes and that by inscribing characters onto the skin in the language of Magya, she could produce magical effects. This became known in her writings as Teralatax's Theory.

Initial efforts focused on finding references to this mysterious ink, but to no avail. Teralatax began to devise inks on her own and experimenting with runes on the skin that could trap and use energy from the Mortal Magic Vortex. For over a century she relentlessly pursued this quest through library after library and tome after tome. Eventually, her obsession caught up with her when her paramour, another Spawn of Alifanitax named Elira, managed to stick a dagger between her shoulder blades while she was falling asleep at a table. By killing another Spawn of Alifanitax, Elira took on her Black Dagger energy and became as powerful as both of them combined. She also took on her lover's quest, but had different ideas on how to accomplish it.

After securing all of the territory she inherited from Teralatax, Elira had a tower built in her capitol city of Turgestok. She then set out a summons to all the powerful mages in her lands to assemble at the tower and begin researching the power of runes. Their apprentices would be set to work combing the caverns for more tomes, while the masters would conduct experiments. Occasionally, apprentices would also be brought in for some of the more dangerous trials, for safety. The fruits of that research yielded some new capabilities after a couple of decades. The conclave figured out the composition of an ink that could be used to inscribe runes on the skin, and how to wield that effectively on themselves and others by drawing power from the Mortal Magic Vortex, and in Elira's case, the Divine Magic vortex once she began to amass enough followers and power to grant spells to her worshipers.

With her new-found magical system, Elira set to turning it against her enemies. Her conclave was ordered to inscribe runes on all of her soldiers to enhance their speed, agility, and resistances to damage of various kinds. Her best fighters were kept together in a single squad that earned a bloody reputation on the battlefield and came to be called Elira's Death Runes. Over a period of several more decades, Elira and her Death Runes managed to triple the size of her holdings and multiply the numbers of rune-bearing soldiers in her army. As often happens, the fame and success of Elira's Death Runes began to catch up with them, and as the victories mounted they gained the attention of several of the Orders of Magic and the Fold of Eight. The case with most magic users at the time, and all of the magic users in Elira's conclave was that they held dual memberships between their homeland liege and their order of magic. Several of the conclave members grew worried that what they were doing was hurting the art and if Elira's rune users became too numerous, it would make the original versions of magic obsolete. This threat was too much to bear so the conclave began secretly feeding information to the Fold of Eight on where Elira's attacks would fall and what her strategies would be. This information was then fed to the magic users in the armies of her enemies.

On a fateful night when Elira sought to conquer the capitol city of Sharis from its Lord Sharistracterus, the information provided ahead of time sealed her fate. Elira was ambushed by Sharistracterus and defeated in single combat while her armies were torn to shreds. Sharistracterus then confiscated all of her lands and put the resistant ones to the sword, wiping out the tower and Elira's conclave in the process.

History records only a single survivor of that routed army, a tiefling Lieutenant in the Death Runes named Jorko Binder. Immediately upon seeing the fate of his liege and the deaths of his comrades, Jorko threw down his weapons and hid in the shadows of Sharis, melting away into the populace. He set himself up as a baker in the city and gradually put a life together for himself. Along the way he had many children, but he selected his favorite son to teach the ways of runic magic according to the Death Runes. For the next two centuries, this method was quietly passed from father to son and temporarily forgotten by everyone.

A scion of Jorko Binder named Damar Binder was the latest inheritor of the secrets of runic magic around the year 500 A.O.D. During his lifetime he successfully led armies and amassed followers to become a Demon Lord in his own right, and knowing full well his direction, he gradually conquered his way back to Teratalax's land and managed to find the library referenced in her now lost journals, which Damar heard about from a lonely sage he had killed. Unlike many of his ancestors, who merely passed down information, Damar turned if over and analyzed it. He theorized about it. When the means became available, he secretly researched it. In those musings, Damar came up with a novel idea: that runes could be created from objects placed on the ground, not just from ink, but there would have to be some method to link this arrangement of objects to a Vortex.