I will put the save up for you on monday, if that helps in planning.
As for my adventure, it is not the Treatyseed thing, I don't think I'd be up for a task that daunting.
It is something different from the regular adventures though, and we have discussed it before. Here we go.
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Can Mischief save the world??by Midas Squarewheel, head ecologist of the museum.Dear reader. Before you lie the incoherent writings of Midas Squarewheel, the new head ecologist of the museum. I am but a simple scientist, and my deeds may not amount to much, but I feel it is important to put them to paper. The world needs to be saved after all, and if I fail, others may read this and prove to be more successful.
Recently the museum has made some funds available to hire an ecologist. They ended up hiring me for the job, Midas Squarewheel, in most aspects a fairly average human. I fear that if they had hired an elf, he would have gone mad within days, due to the current state of things.
In fact, because of the current situation I can only assume that the museum must have hired an ecologist out of a feeling of guilt as the effects that the museum itself has had on the world’s ecology are nothing short of catastrophic.
In the Third Age of Myth and before the world had a thriving ecosystem, with megabeasts as top predators, living together with many other creatures in an intricate web of relationships. The adventurers have destroyed all that, by killing every last megabeast and by unleashing terrible plagues on the land.
I’ve heard all the excuses. They say that we are better off without the Dragons, Rocs and Hydras, they claim it is well known they killed people on their rampages. But the truth of the matter is that by removing the top predators, the whole ecosystem becomes unbalanced and will collapse. The data shows this clearly: every other population, even that of all sentient races has been in decline over the last centuries. Mass extinctions are everywhere. The Golden Age is not truly golden, it is an age of rot and decline. If nothing is done to stop this we will end up in an Age of Death. The rate at which the intelligent races are dying is far in excess from the few sentients that fell to megabeast raids in the early ages:
Even the dwarves that initially seemed to profit from the decline of the others have been in a steady decline over the last hundred years.
Raki, the mad monkey king was the first to recognize these facts. This was still in an early stage, well over a century ago. If only his reaction had been different. He chose a path of revenge and destruction and only ended up making things worse.
No, to save the world we have to heal it. We have to reintroduce key species to stabilise the ecosystem. The megabeasts however can no longer be saved. The last have died. Necromancy is no cure, it is a curse that will only make things worse. Our only option is to look at important species that are at the brink of extinction now, and try to save them, that way we can stop the decline, and maybe we can turn it back around.
This line of reasoning brought me to the gremlin.
Yes the gremlin, one of the most remarkable creatures that used to live in our realm. They were by far the smallest of the sentient creatures, even a moth man or a kobold stand at twice the height of a gremlin.
They are well known for their mischief and their stealth. Despite their size a single gremlin could bring a whole dwarven fortresses to ruin by pulling the right lever. Their cleverness and unique features were an important balancing force in the ecosystem of Orid Xem, but today they are all but gone. Rumours exist of populations deep below the world, but they are just rumours. Official counts tell us that today, only one Gremlin remains in the world, in the Teal Pit, a cave on the inaccessible “Dreamy Island”. I had therefore abandoned all hope that the species could be saved.
Untill one day an old man showed up at the museum with a caged gremlin. He told me that despite the fact that this particular gremlin was resistant to sunlight, I should never let it come in contact with water, or feed it after midnight.
I am of course first and foremost a scientist, and curiosity got the better of me. I did both of those things the same night.
Now I am in command of a gremlin horde of 381 gremlins.. so when starting as an outsider you can take gremlins as pets for just one Urist per gremlin.
By selling my starting gear I could afford 381 of them. This will be.. interesting.