As part of the adventuring group, “Vanquish”, you developed powerful abilities that greatly assisted your band’s capacity to demand extremely high fees to accomplish feats seemingly unimaginable by lesser beings.

However, your motivation does not come from coin or fame, or even in helping the oppressed.

But from acquiring knowledge.

Of course, you would never use your talent against the defenseless or the innocent, but with your knowledge, it is not uncommon for you to scoff at “mortal” law in preference to your own definitions of justice and fairness.

Adventuring, you’ve concluded, is the ideal way to obtain knowledge by visiting the great magical libraries, debating master spellcasters at the most prestigious universities, and perfecting your skill and technique against the absurd amount of monsters (in all forms and threats) found in Wildemount.

Your success has also made you proud and protective of your wizarding status. You’ve been invited to join a number of wizarding orders, only accepting the most prestigious two or three, and only from afar. For the pursuit of magical knowledge must come first. For the universe still hides many secrets.

One of these wizarding orders, the Cerberus Assembly, has hired “Vanquish” to track down the scroll of a powerful chonurgy spell that physically ages a target to the last 30 days of their life before dying of old age. You learned enough in your search to know that the spell is incredibly complex and far too powerful for not only your client, but nearly everyone else. Except you.

You want this spell. But the search for the spell’s scroll has been met with dead end after dead end.

Some, including your best friend, powerful cleric, and fellow Vanquish-er, Barrax Bonegrip, believes the spell should be destroyed, not learned, but does accept the urgency to find it before other entities find it first, and urges you to attempt to contact the wizard who created the spell, who might tell you if the spell book still exists, and the spell itself. The challenge is that this wizard–a necromancer (Lobo Blackwell)–died more than 150 years ago.

You prepare the 5th level spell, “Contact Other Plane”, but unbeknownst to anyone else, including Bonegrip, you hesitate at the idea of contacting a powerful wizard on the ethereal plane. You wonder perhaps, if they will judge you, or that they will discover buried truths about your true motivations and morality, and that perhaps you are not so steadily on the side of the angels as you like to believe…

Normally, you love the challenge of higher level spells, relishing their complexity. But your anxiety seeps in more than you care to admit. And with Vanquish in unanimous expectations, you hide your doubt and cast the spell…

You feel your mind drift off from the body and into the ethereal plane, searching for the necromancer. You know enough about her to seek her out, passing by the cloudy outlines of others.

In the far distance of the pink and yellow toned twilight mist, a figure stands out in great contrast–deep purple skin, head bowed, eyes hidden behind the curtain of raven black hair.

The mist relents and the twilight sky reddens with deep crimson and blacks with streaks of violet that show a smattering of stars. You’ve never been here. And it’s unexpected. You assumed for the legends and histories you’ve uncovered this wizard would have a place of honor in Elysium or similar.

As you near the lone figure, you notice her charcoal robes tailored to her body are in pristine condition and immediately recognizable–not as traditional Wizard garb from any renowned order, but that of a warlock, the hems and decoration streaming with a living, burning bright green that pulses and flows.

At once, the environment around you is in constant flux, collapsing and rebuilding, transforming from rock to salt to snow to ash and over again.

As you approach, you try your best to hide your anxiety, but you can readily sense she already knows. You attempt to ask your questions, but before you can even begin, she whips her hair back, revealing her piercing eyes steaming with the same shock of living bright green.

Immediately your head is filled with a screaming pain, a force pushing from within, ready to shatter and burn everything within.

“We are one, you and I! We are one!” you hear among the ravaging power inside your head. A voice, a maddening, beautiful voice, that immediately has you reaching for it, both for desperate relief and passionate desire.

“Join me. Join my eternity!” cries the voice, as the Warlock stands and attempts to jut forward only to be jerked back by the incorporeal chains around her waist and arms. 

Yet every cell in your body howls to obey.

And just as suddenly, you’re ripped away from the plane, back to the mortal realm where shapes and figures are at once familiar and strange. You find yourself resting against a thick chest with even thicker arms holding tight across your body, a muttering of incantation slipping into your ear.

You do not recognize the dwarf holding you, but you recognize the muttering.

“Healing. Sick. I’m not muttering,” you say, attempting to move from the grip but it is rock hard. More muttering.

“Emotions. My emotions. Calming them won’t feed them.”

After a moment, the muttering seems to affect your mind, allowing you brief respite from the building madness. Enough to recognize Bonegrip’s voice and arms. And you relax.

“It…appears,” you begin with raspy breath, “it did not go well.”

You let sleep take you.

Due to the stress of the spell and the mysterious warlock’s attempted invasion, your were only moments away from being not just possessed, but there was an attempted SoulShare with the warlock that would have left the majority of your consciousness chained in the warlock’s body in limbo, and she in yours, with access to all your knowledge combined with hers to wreak havoc on the world, while you are present enough to witness it, but can do nothing about it.

Only Bonegrip’s spells saved you.

Nevertheless, Ullrich Netherdawn, you have been affected with a violent and extraordinary manifestation of Indefinite Maddness, which results in the following:

Every dawn, the screaming inside your mind begins anew as though the sun is the cause of your suffering. You take 6d12 psychic damage. The next dawn will see 7d12 damage done. The next, 8d12 and so on.

Every time you are healed with magic, you must make a constitution saving throw. A failed throw reduces your max hit points by 20. A saved throw halves the reduction.

You are hyper aware of things (on perception and investigation checks all rolls 9 or less are treated as a 10) but have a difficult time communicating, using words that imply the message but without context sound like gibberish.

(For example: “Nobody eats the flying wind. It’s too big. It’s too big.” might mean, “There are a couple of huge flying beasts heading our way.”

Or if the party is discussing possible solutions to their problem, you say “diamonds are cheap, but dust is pretty” could mean, “I have a spell to help us but need gem dust to conjure it.” (This is going be awesome and crazy. Anyone trying to decipher will need to make a perception check. If your communication is too obvious, it’s an immediate fail. The feat in your sheet “See Everything” has more info. Good luck! 🙂

You do not have the cognitive ability to prepare spells, even if you know them, and no spell thus far has worked to give you the acuity you need. The spells you had prepared before your malady will remain prepared until you die.

You must make an intelligence check before every turn to see if you have the mental wherewithal to focus in battle. Magic has helped with this in the past.

Your concentration during a spell cast, however, is ultra-focused. You cannot lose concentration when you take the first or second hit in a battle, regardless of damage. On the third hit, you must begin taking constitution saving throws.

Because of this malady, Barrax Bonegrip is taking you to see his cleric order in Nicodranas, where he hopes his mentor has the skill to restore your body and mind (9th level greater restoration). He is your main source of healing and survival.

He has booked passage for both of you on the luxury ship, “The Cloud Quintessant” captained by Serafina Darkgrave, who guarantees the fastest and safest voyage on the Menagerie coast.

But will it be fast enough to reach the Master Cleric in time? Or will your mind succumb to the infinite madness rapidly devouring you and all the precious knowledge you’ve come to acquire?