The sorceress Rivia the Pale is what many adventurers strive to be:
In her early years she was a treasure hunter, mercenary, and monster-slayer, and won some fame and admiration from her deeds.
After a few years she and her companions gained fame by slaying a dragon, driving off Jorunn raiders, and exposing a corrupt guildmaster,
When her friend Cerrick the Unbent was knighted, she helped him purge the lands of red crag of gnolls and chimeras and helped keep the laborers he hired to build his fortress there safe.
As Red Crag grew into a thriving town, she advised Cerrick, trained young magi, and when called into action, protected the town from marauders, natural disasters, and exposed a cult that had taken root in the population.
Eventually, she grew uninterested in mortal affairs. Cerrick and her other companions had Red Crag well in hand. She began roaming the planes. She treated for demon princes on behalf of a faerie conclave on the borders between Arcadia and Hell. She put a demilich to his final rest in a citadel-demiplane. She even became a member of the Demigoddess Akasta's divine court - the holy troubleshooter of the goddess or Arcane Wrath.
When Akasta ascended to true divinity, Rivia set out to follow in her footsteps; to do the kind of deeds that could awaken the Godhead in her. To that end, she sought out a Shard of Creation - a left-over spark of pure potential from the dawn of time. And performed perilous journeys to learn how to use it.
If properly controlled with the most taxing of spells, a Shard of Creation can build a vast new demiplane, people it with living creatures, even rewrite the very laws of time and space within its bounds to its user's whims.
With an entire demiplane crafted to her desires, Rivia would be able to create a perfect sanctum in which she could nurture a new race of beings, and become their creatrix and deity. All while pushing the boundaries of magic itself.
Only Rivia was never a healthy woman; she was sickly even as a child. In her travels she has died four times and been raised by her companions, each time making her that much more fragile. And she has been forced to weave wishes so complex that they strained her essence. Although only 48 when she began her quest for divinity, she was already frail.
She was also prideful. She refused to let her poor health, impoverished background, or other people's opinions on what a woman ought to do stand in her way. She was famed for being bloody-minded, and pushing harder than many of her hardier companions on campaigns. And, not coincidentally, for missing much of the action on those campaigns while being forced to recover after overextending herself.
While reading the words of the Protodaemon Ubbo-Sathla written on the Boreal cliffs of Shattered Thule, she caught a cold. What started as a sniffle and a postnasal drip slowly metastasized into walking penumonia.
But Rivia was so focused on her task that she refused to delay the making of her new demiplane. Ignoring shakes and coughs, she began the taxing process of shaping a new reality. The first few chambers of her arcane sanctum were already shaping around her when her fever spiked and the walking pneumonia became a life threating fever.
She forced herself to continue shaping the new demiplane even as she fell into delirium. Half-conscious, in pain, and hallucinating, the plane changed from a mystical paradise into a twisted labyrinth that mirrored her innermost thoughts, her fevered delsions, strangest imaginings, and greatest fears.
Finally, on the brink of death - but no longer even able to die, Rivia's desire to go home to her family, to be nursed and cared for by her yonger brother like she had been when she was young caused the plane to open a doorway back onto the material plane.
Her home town, a poor farming village called Thrommel's Garden had been peaceful for years when the mysterious doorway opened on the side of a nearby hill, and monsters born of her delirium poured out to terrorize them.
Now the town needs heroes to fight of the dranged creatures and disocver where this bizarre nightmare labyrinth came from... and how to close it off.
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