THE SWORDS OF VALOR

THE SWORDS OF VALOR

Hire this shining band of adventurer heroes for your next spot of trouble! But don’t be surprised if they’re all monsters, when they show up!

Ooops!

Overly boastful names for adventuring bands are rightly mistrusted in the Realms, though they have a long and inglorious history. Calling yourself the Lords of Justice or the Guardians of Good is not a swift and easy road to acceptance and many hires.

So when a new adventuring band comes along calling themselves the Swords of Valor, and also answering to the name “Lords of Valor” when someone miscalls them that, mistrust of them will be the order of the day.

This particular band won’t be surprised at all; they chose the name as sardonic satire—for they are a motley crew of monsters most potential clients in the “civilized” Realms will fear on sight, or upon hearing about them.

Yes, the Swords of Valor are seven strong, and consist of a lich, a doppelganger, a mindwitness, a gargoyle, a night hag, an ogre, and a yuan-ti abomination. They are mind-linked together by means of spells (as well as by the powers of the mindwitness member), which also enable the two leaders of the Swords to dominate (mentally compel) the other members if they see the need. As this causes deep rage and hatred among the Swords, they do so only in emergencies—but all members know they can, and some harbor deep ire over this.

The Swords were formed when the spell experiments of a lich hiding in the cellars of a long-ruined, collapsed, “haunted” (due to the lich’s spells, designed to scare would-be rebuilders away) mansion in Flyndagol in Durpar accidentally summoned a night hag—and rather than battle each other, they were attracted to each other, spent days in fascinated converse, and formed a partnership. They are now akin to husband and wife—enjoying the sort of union wherein the couple respects each other and takes counsel together often and eagerly. Any serious breach between them would likely lead to a nasty, messy splintering of the adventuring band they’ve formed, but for now at least, they show no signs of discord. They are aware that to keep their unlikely band of adventurers together and working as a team, everyone’s needs must be respected and addressed, and those who could turn on their fellows or seek the leadership (notably the brain-seeking mindwitness and the ambitious-to-lead yuan-ti) must be mentally “watched” at all times.

The lich is Laklaundar Yuuroon (“Lack-LAWN-dar YOU-roon”), an Illuskan human male who achieved lichdom a little over three centuries ago, with initial ambitions of ruling Durpar and becoming the greatest archwizard in all Toril. He planned to spy on, ambush, and defeat other wizards and seize their spellbooks, as he worked with dragons to conquer lands—until the right time came to betray those wyrms.

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Unfortunately, he couldn’t find any dragons who didn’t want to betray him first, or saw right through his schemes and sneeringly rebuffed him. Nor did he fare all that well against wizards: they were either too weak to be worth the dangers of attacking them (he gained only a few new spells, of little power and value compared to what he’d already mastered), or he had to flee when they almost destroyed him. Both outcomes also made too much public “noise;” word got around that there was a lich on the prowl to take down the living, and both the spying and the ambushing got harder as wizards took precautions.

So Yuuroon turned to private experimentations, seeking to develop new spells that would cut through most magical defenses, and enable him to defeat other mages. After a little more than a decade of slow, painstaking progress, he’d improved half a dozen well-known wizard spells, but had little more to show for all his work. So he started taking risks, using fragmentary rituals in old Netherese and Imaskari grimoires—and one of them lured the night hag Imrurrue (“Imm-rur-ROO”) into his presence.

Imrurrue is unusual among her kind. Her innate hunger to sow misery and malcontent and to wreak vicious violence on others are far less than her gnawing need for power. She gleefully pursues corrupting mortals, prefers to spend her time in the Realms and not in the Lower Planes, and sees the road to ever-greater power is through uplifting the lives of mortals and prosperity for all within a specific realm or region. However, her attempts to do so through mercantile means she found slow and boring, in part because selfish, shortsightedly greedy humans would abandon the “long road” of patience time and again for short-term gains. She saw becoming beautiful and seducing humans as one way to get them to “perform” properly in her schemes to building shared prosperity, and so welcomed the spells Yuuroon could give her or cast on her to change her form temporarily into shapes of great feminine beauty.

The lich and the night hag felt an instant attraction to each other, as if they were falling in love at first sight, so rather than fight each other or verbally fence, they talked candidly to each other of their aims, their failures thus far, and what they might achieve together. Imrurrue willingly sacrificed herself to be a “test creature” for Yuuroon to practise his “mindbond” spells on, to perfect them into a mindweb that he could exert control through.

When they both judged the magics ready, they started recruiting. First they took aboard creatures they could easily dominate.

Their first recruit was a male brute of an ogre and scarred, failed bodyguard by the name of Glont Hullarr (c let him bed her, and he was hooked). Then they came upon a doppelganger, Xerril Tothtant (“ZAIR-rill TAW-thh-tant”), and a gargoyle, Vruld, who were trying to work together in the city of Flyndagol to take down human victims but without much success. Their magic easily took over the mind of the gargoyle, and when they made it turn on Xerril, the terrified doppelganger surrendered but found itself not doomed, but welcomed into a team it soon came to value as achieving far more than Xerril could manage alone or with Vruld.

The yuan-ti, Shrulkh Gorlug (“Sure-RULL-k GORE-lukgh”) found them: Yuuroon and Imrurrue were closing in on capturing a mindwitness, Iqaliir (“Ih-KWAL-ear”) that a human merchant had secretly brought to Flyndagol, not realizing that the mindwitness was influencing him into doing so. The trader, Narvor Caladath, thought he was taking the “rare abomination” he’d captured to a city where wealthy folk would pay him handsomely to have it as a live trophy, whereas he was really bringing it to a rich hunting ground full of many brains.

The lich and night hag partnership had something of a mind-battle on the spot with the yuan-ti and and the mindwitness, but the former soon realized it was outclassed and must play along or die, and the latter saw the offer of an ongoing, ready supply of brains (which it now gets, feeding on anyone who doublecrosses the Swords of Valor).

So the mindweb-linked adventuring band began its unlikely career.

The Swords Set Out

The mind-linked monsters soon realized that Flyndagol was too small for it to flourish for long, and so has headed west into more populous Faerûn to seek wealth and power.

Yuuroon and Imrurrue have agreed upon a plan. They intend to end up ruling a busy port city somewhere, and so make lasting wealth through fees and tariffs on the trade flowing through. Every member of the Swords can then see its needs met, and can re-evaluate what they want out of life and the partnership at that time.

To reach that goal, the Swords are hatching all manner of schemes by hiring lesser evil bands (local thieves, smugglers, mercenaries, and adventurers) to do various nefarious money-making things and to bring about the downfall of local rulers and persons of authority, from moneylenders to merchant fleet owners to City Watch heads.

And it is these tools of the Swords that your Player Characters are most likely to encounter first, with the Swords of Valor spying from the background, ready to throw more evildoers at you.