@Device(PostScript)
@Make(Report)
@Style(Spacing 1.5, Leftmargin 0.75 inch, Rightmargin 0.75 inch,
       SingleSided, Font = TimesRoman, Size 10)

@comment(Set these values appropriately for each character profile)

@string(name="Dodani Yitzhok")
@string(realname="Dodani Yitzhok")
@string(playername="Player Name")
@string(id="984932")

@include (/mit/abstract/Characters/Sheets/cover.mss)



@MajorHeading(@value(realname))

The first blow has at last been struck in your private war.  You have
gathered your powers, recruited allies and pawns, and planned your
strategies for long enough; now first blood has been drawn.  Soon, all
too soon, you shall have revenge on the mages who tried to destroy
your life.  Soon they shall taste the consequences of their failure.

It is one of life's little ironies that the first casualty in your war
was the woman who first educated you to the truth behind what you
were, and what your life was destined to be like.  You remember well
your early years with Segwina, how she pretended to like you and
deigned to associate with you, despite your handicap.  Then, you
worshipped her; you were an adolescent boy, and worse, an adolescent
ptaav, one of those without magic.  You were worse than blind, worse
than crippled; over and over again you were told there was no place
for you in society.  Segwina was the only one who did not insult you,
feeling instead, you now realize, a pity and disdain that you,
desparate for affection, mistook for caring.

You understood what it was to be a ptaav when you finally succumbed to
adolescent foolishness and proposed to marry her, to become
life-mates.  She turned you down, laughed at you...and later that day,
when you followed her home, you saw why.  You saw her meeting with a
then-young man, Havilah Jacob; you saw them laughing together, and
you saw them practicing bizarre and unusual rites ... magic.  The one
thing you couldn't offer her.

You never spoke to her after that, although you kept an eye on her.
Several years ago, she apprenticed herself to the Wizard's Conclave,
and thereby joined the ranks of those responsible for oppressing you
and your fellow ptaavs.  When she entered the Conclave, you swore to
yourself a silent oath, that she, and the system she represented,
would someday fall by your hand.

Thus, it is indeed ironic that Segwina herself was the first to fall.
It is doubly ironic, and deliciously so, that the person actually
responsible for it was one of her fellow mages.  On the other hand,
that shouldn't surprise you.  Clerrik Milcah is and always has been
trivial to manipulate, and Nineveh Nimrod, for all that he's a high-
placed Guard of the Realm, still tends to think with his muscles; it
was practically a foregone conclusion that once they were brought to
suspect Segwina of traitorous activities and interrogated her, she
would not survive.  

Milcah and Nimrod are a useful pair of pawns, them and their Holy
Order of Whitefire.  You are the third member of that organization,
and you've found its self-proclaimed mission to rid the world of evil
to be incredibly useful to you, particularly since both of those self-
righteous hypocritical fools have incredibly self-centered views of
right and wrong.  It wasn't at all surprising that they decided to
interrogate Segwina after you dropped a few hints that she had been
colluding with Eastern witches, the same ones that had killed the
previous Justiciar.

What was surprising, to you in any case, was the discovery that she
really @i(had) been associated with Eastern witchcraft.  As the three
of you stood outside her chambers one night, you heard her say, with
great urgency, "The Eastern hand is raised again!".  You burst into
her chambers, to find her staring out the window, she was holding a
smoking candle, looking so beautiful ... She whirled at your entrance,
and raised her hands, in what looked like a spell-cast; you knew you
were helpless against her spells, so you let Milcah handle her.  You
helped the other two subdue and bind her to her chair, and Milcah
began casting truth-spells.  Segwina revealed that she was a witch;
before Milcah could find out more, however, she began to writhe and
mumble nonsense, finally breaking free.  It was then that Nimrod
struck her with his truncheon and she died.

There was something about Segwina's death that really bothered you.
Yes, you had been the one to put the Holy Order on her trail, but no
one was more surprised than you to find out she really @u[was] a
witch.  You, frankly, find it hard to believe.  She was a
manipulative, self-serving, self-righteous bitch, but... a traitor?
Perhaps the notes she left behind, written in some obscure code, would
give you the clues to figure out what she was @i[really] up to ...
Milcah and Nimrod seemed utterly uninterested in them at the time
(understandably -- they had just killed the woman slated to be the
next Heirophant), but you could probably, inthe "name of the Holy
Order", get them to help you figure them out.

Indeed, there is an irony in the world.  Segwina lies dead and
powerless now, and soon her fellow mages will follow her into
powerlessness.  At least, that's what you are told by one of your
allies in the war for ptaav freedom, Arrani Moses.  He is a biologist
by training, and has been devoting the last several years to a project
isolating the genetic traits that determine ptaavhood.  He claims to
be close to a breakthrough in his work that will solve the problem
of ptaavhood, though he isn't forthcoming on details.  Still, being a
ptaav himself, he certainly does have motivation.

He is also a study in paradox; although a Ptaav, he has a considerable
understanding of magical lore.  Somehow, he managed to make his way
through his apprenticeship period with the Conclave, and is now
preparing to become a "mage," in order to find out more about the
enemy.  On this front, too, he has achieved progress, and mentioned to
you the last time you met that he had discovered some promising
references to the source of all magic, and perhaps a means of removing
it from the World once and for all.  You aren't at all certain what
it is he's talking about, but if he can pull it off...

Moses is perhaps the most ambitious of the team, but each of your
Ptaavs is rich resource.  lle-Victory Sorsha, a fighter and scientist
@i(par excellence), is also on the Castle doing an autopsy of the
bodies that were discovered on the surface, and Shallar Rebecca, the
newest of your Ptaavs and a Guard of the Realm, is here with the Guard
contingent that arrived recently to "protect the Realm's interests."
She in particular you have an eye kept out for; she can be incredibly
useful to your cause (having a cop on your side never hurts), but you
have to be careful about not causing her to break her Oath...unless,
of course, you can find some way around that.

By the same token, you aren't standing still yourself.  It was your
good fortune years ago to find a blacksmith who took you on as his
apprentice, and it was in his smithy that you learned the lore of
metals.  You discovered that some alloys are nearly impossible to work
by magic, and thus require menial labor -- this is how you obtained
the job.  But what was to everyone else a nuisance was to you a
godsend, for you applied yourself to discovering the secrets of the
crystalline metal known as mythril.

Your breakthrough came when you were commissioned by an aged and
wealthy war hero to fashion a suit of plate mail made of pure mythril.
You were aghast at this particular display of wealth, for the
materials alone required thousands of Stars, and working mythril in
such a fashion required completely original techniques which you
charged appropriately for, but he was adamant about it and you needed
the money.  So you did it.

You met with Malachai Jonah, the Master Jeweler, and working with
Jonah you developed a technique for fashioning mythril plate, and
made a number of other discoveries.

For one thing, you discovered that properly fashioned mythril plate
will serve to protect its wearer from magic, although you still don't
quite understand why.  Having established that, you pulled a fast one
on that customer and kept the suit yourself.  What proved more useful
to you, however, was the discovery of Jonah's techniques of ore
processing (he made the mistake of letting you too close to his notes
one day...).  You worked at it, duplicated it, and finally improved
upon it!  In addition to simply fashioning the pure ores with which
Jonah worked into Stars, your process actually allowed the conversion
of copper Stars into gold ones.  The key to the process was simply
quantity: 21 copper Stars can be fashioned into one gold Star, worth
25.  Thus, every citizen who banks with you gets a 2-Star profit, and
you get a 2-Star profit off of each such deal, making the entire
arrangement profitable for all involved.

Disclosing this secret got you named Master Smith, and put the Smiths
Guild in a far more influential position within the House of Guilds.
You finally had your moment in the sun.  So of course Jacob had to
outshine you; after all, how could he let a lowly ptaav get the better
of him, right?  The arrogance of these... well, anyway, he managed to
finagle the position of Guildmaster, becoming your boss.

Well, he's been doing a pretty poor job of it.  First there was the
so-called "Sword of Justice," the thief who was robbing the House of
Guilds blind for ages, and was finally arrested by the Guard only to
turn out to be Jacob's brother Yossi!  He's still doing community
service as part of his sentence, probably -- but the Sword of Justice
is still striking, despite Yossi's presumed incarceration.  You know
it, because you were recently hit by them and lost a number of sets of
armor, including two sets of mythril plate you had just finished
making.  This Sword, be he the old one or a new imitator, must be
found and stopped.

Worse than the Sword, though, is the Thieve's Guild, which has been
stepping up its harassment of guilded merchants.  One of the
Guildmaster's jobs is supposed to be protecting the House of Guilds
from thieves, and this is a job Jacob has been doing exceedingly
poorly.  In speaking to a number of your fellow Masters, you
discovered you weren't the only one with a grudge against Jacob, and
you decided it was time to take advantage of it.  You started
circulating throughout the House the idea that it was time for Jacob
to be replaced, and slowly started collecting proxy votes.  Your idea
was to declare a special meeting on the Castle, where the majority of
the House would be unable to make it, and call for a vote of
confidence on Jacob, where your proxies would be enough to turn the
tide.

In fact, it occured to you that it might be even more beneficial, if
you could pull it off, to alter those proxy votes so that they
supported @i(you) as the new Guildmaster.  That would certainly put
the boy in his place.  But there's a minor difficulty, which is that
the suitcase with all of the proxy votes in it has vanished.  You
don't know how, or who has it, but you need to get it back or all
your plans are for naught.  That would be particularly devastating,
for recent political developments have made it even more necessary for
you to obtain the post.

Through your political contacts, you have discovered a number of the
bills that are coming before the Table of Peers, proposed ammendments
to the Articles of the Realm; two, in particular, have caught your
eye.  The first, a proposed Prohibition bill which would render the
sale and distribution of mind-altering substances illegal in the
Realm, you were intrigued by -- it @i(would) seriously weaken the
Alchemist's Guild, of which Jacob is the Master.  It might be worth
supporting.  The other one, however, you found far more important --
it was a bill to make magic a licensed profession.  If it passed, then
the Guildmaster would have ultimate control over how magic was used in
the Realm; he would have the power to issue or revoke licenses at
will.  If, further, you were the Guildmaster...at last, the mages
would no longer be free to lord their capacities over your fellow
ptaavs.

Another bill that struck you as interesting was the free-trade
agreement with the Clans that would allow Clansmen to peddle their
wares in the Realm, unlicensed, unaffiliated with the House of Guilds,
no better than the thieves of the Black Market.  Of course you cannot
allow @i(that), but the issue of trade with the Clans is of special
interest to you, as several years ago you received reports of an
incredibly rich source of mythril in the Clanlands.  You sent out some
initial surveyors to this "Clearstone Mountain," as the natives called
it, and to your shock they returned with several chunks of the
precious metal that was purer than any you'd ever seen.  Each small
chunk was worth 30 to 50 Stars -- an incredible find!

You sent out a mining expedition to do some initial extractions, and
that was the last you saw of them.  Shortly thereafter, they were
attacked and slaughtered by the Easterners, as the initial move in
their treachorous war against the Realm, and since then you haven't
had the opportunity to send another team.  If you could stake a claim
to it, it seems likely you would become rich beyond the wildest dreams
of avarice; this, however, depends greatly on the results of the Peers
negotiations during these two weeks.

You have your natural skills and an excellent team behind you, and an
entire people's rights to defend, as well as your own personal
position to think of.  With skill, cunning and courage, nothing will
prevent you from wresting control of the Realm from the arrogant magi.

Luck is for the weak.

@newpage

@section(Items and Abilities)

You have the following abilities:

@begin(itemize)

Ptaav

Mint Stars

Armorsmith

Armor Use

Weaponsmith

Weaponsmaster 3

@end(itemize)

You begin the game with the following items:

@begin(itemize)

A set of mythril plate mail.

Two chunks of Clearstone mythril.

Assorted weapons

A set of chain mail

Several sets of leather armor and curboilli

A ball-peen hammer

An iron bracelet

@end(itemize)

@newpage

@include(/mit/abstract/Guides/lore.creation.mss)
@include(/mit/abstract/Guides/guide.realm.mss)

@section(Organizations)

@include(/mit/abstract/Organizations/house.guilds.mss)
@include(/mit/abstract/Organizations/ptaavs.mss)
@include(/mit/abstract/Organizations/order.whitefire.mss)