The First Chaos Lord

The Book of Lore

On the road to Battleon, Zorbak tells you that a dragon has the Princess and reckons the King will pay for her rescue. You meet a Horc named Dogear who claims to own the local bookstore. He has been eating the books and thinks one tastes like beef jerky. The book in his hands begs you to keep it out of his mouth.

The real bookseller calls for help from behind the bushes. You free her, then follow Dogear into the shop and defeat him. Maya gives you the book he was eating, despite the missing pages and the slime. The Loremasters call it the Lore Grimoire, a book said to seek out a hero and give them the knowledge and power to save the world.

Princess Tara and Bloodtooth

Robina identifies the dragon as Bloodtooth, and Artix warns that shooting it down would send the Princess falling with it. A ballista fires a giant arrow with you aboard. You land on Bloodtooth and make your way along the dragon to Princess Tara.

Tara insists Bloodtooth is hers. Tired of getting ponies for her birthday, she accepted a ring from a blue Moglin who said it would let her play with any dragon she wanted. The Ring of Dragon Control carries Gorgok’s curse. It lets Tara control Bloodtooth while controlling her in turn, so you have to fight her to break its hold.

Bloodtooth crashes near Battleon. Robina sums up the rescue as beating up a princess and crashing a dragon, while Artix assures her that breaking the ring freed Tara and she’ll be fine. He wonders what the King might give you for the rescue.

The Attack on Swordhaven and the Alliance

Your journey begins amid the war between King Alteon's Good faction and Sepulchure's Shadowscythe, as the flying fortress of Shadowfall reaches Swordhaven and draws you into the city's defense.

You help Robina gather reports from the knights and fight through the undead inside the castle. Sir Kull and Sir Round watch the flying fortress approach, answering the danger with a few strained puns before the battle reaches the throne room.

As Sepulchure confronts Alteon, choosing between Good and Evil seems unavoidable until Drakath intervenes. Both rulers recognize him but are unprepared for his new power. Sepulchure insists that being undead places him beyond death, only for Drakath to destroy him as Gravelyn cries out for her father.

Shadowfall crashes into the mountains. Alteon survives, gravely wounded and aware that something is changing within him. Drakath announces an age of Chaos and the threat of thirteen Chaos Lords, leaving you and the king alive to witness it.

Good and Evil agree to a truce against their common enemy, but Gravelyn makes no promise of lasting peace when she accepts Good's help in Shadowfall. Once Drakath is defeated, she intends to resume her father's war.

Gravelyn asks you to recover Sepulchure's armor from Swordhaven's crypt as a test of trust and a symbol of her claim to rule, but the armor you bring back is itself corrupted by Chaos. His Unlife Insurance offers a more practical hope: the policy you obtain through the king's tax collector promises a trillion gold, enough for her plans to rebuild Shadowfall and hire an army. As you pursue Drakath's Lords, however, Alteon's infection continues to worsen.

Escherion and Mobius

In Chiral Valley, Escherion's Staff of Inversion has twisted Mobius backward and inside out. Anna and Otto survived by hiding while his soldiers searched the town, and now entrust you with part of the Runix Cube in the hope that it can help oppose him. Two more pieces remain with the Faeries and Cornelis under an old agreement between the three communities, although none of your allies knows exactly what the completed Cube will do.

Dew Drop holds the Faeries' piece, but before she will trust you with it, you must protect the trees that sustain her and the forest. Saving the Tree of Life earns you the second fragment, after which you travel to Cornelis to help Anise recover the last piece and a book recording the valley's history. Among the ruins, you also find a magic mirror.

A pizza delivery persuades the teleporter's guards to admit you, allowing you to work through the tower's locks and defenses with the completed Cube. Only when you reach Escherion do you discover your mistake: he needed the artifact himself, and by assembling and delivering it, you have given him the means to awaken his Chaos Beast, the Hydra.

With the Hydra awake and Escherion still in his tower, you turn to the runestones supporting the structure. You break them with the Hydra's teeth and carry their fragments to the magical bonfire, bringing the tower down onto the creature before it settles into the lake.

Otto and the other villagers come to help reclaim their home, only for Escherion to invert them into his supporters. You defeat the mage and demand that he leave, but his apparent surrender becomes another attempt to turn you inside out. This time, you raise the mirror from Cornelis and send the inversion spell back at him.

At first nothing seems different, until Escherion's spells begin striking him instead of you and his own polymorph leaves him a frog. The villagers recover, but Drakath is satisfied despite his servant's defeat: awakening the Hydra has already broken a seal.

Sources

Newbie, Dragonfire