Lore dump thread

Tell me, who is the most powerful mortal magic user in your setting, why are they the most powerful, and what do they do in their spare time?

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Technically Lephart The Warlock is the most powerful but his power level goes up and down more often then a hookers panties. The way magic is set up is that it all comes from an outside source (demons, spirits, angels, etc) and Lephart is one of the very few who knows this and knows how to contact these beings from the outside in order to make deals with them for power or just to act on his behalf. Of course, none of these things will give a shred of their power for long and so he loses it when they take it back, but he can always make another deal.
In his spare time Lephart can be seen either enjoying the finer things in life such as literature, cigars, music, worshiping the goddess Babalon (his patron deity whom he has an obsession with) or sometimes he does this weird 180 and turns into a drunken, lecherous degenerate.

He's an artificer of unbelievable skill. His greatest accomplishment is building a clock so perfect that it controls time instead of tell it. He's used it to try and fix something in the past a number of times, but he always fails, but not without seriously fucking up the timeline in the process. His personal power is mainly in the form in his creations (golems, guns, other devices), while his spellcasting is powerful, it's not his main method. He's still the most powerful magic user by default however.

In my world, the most powerful magic user is an insanely old mortal who traded his services to a Great Old One for a form of Druid's Timeless Body, but even after almost a 1,000 years of secretive service to this person, is still running out of time and is approaching the enhanced end of his current lifespan. He's currently scrambling to figure out how to stick his soul and all his accumulated knowledge and magical power inside a new host body, but is finding that no living person or current technology can house such a thing.

We're soon getting to the point where he has to decide if going down the path of lichdom is worth the effort and potential headaches involved in going through the process.

Eckhardt Rex XVII

Culmination of about three hundred years worth of secret eugenic plotting by five different noble wizard families to produce somebody who could possibly fix the fractured Ward that isolates the world from the celestial realms.

It worked. A child was born who had a nigh limitless capacity for ether absorption, a natural charisma and athleticism that would put an olympian athlete to shame, and a towering intellect. The child was then given the most comprehensive education it is possible to receive, tutored in each field of magic by a multitude of universally agreed upon experts.

Unfortunately, no amount of high class education, latent magical affinity, or supernally perfect health can prevent you from being a massive coward who is terrified of any form of responsibility, and so he utilised his overwhelming arcane power not to attempt to repair the Ward, but instread to put himself a few hours out of sync with the rest of reality. Now he is the archmage equivalent of a NEET, reading endless numbers of arcane tomes in his tower, imperceptible to the world.

Harvey, The Beautiful King, ruler of Galinn, which he overthrew the old sorceror king of twenty years before.
Nobody has reported seeing him in pers9 NBA in about 10 of those years.
He spends most of his time controlling the astral soldiers he has summoned to guard his realm, and trying to work out the Desert Between, my own homebrew thing that is the world between worlds, a desert woth nothing but portals strewn across it to other worlds and marauders a la The Wild Hunt

The ice cream wizard. Now here me out here. It's a low magic low fantasy setting. The fact that this guy makes ice cream with an added stage show is a fucking huge attraction. He's the envy of courts everywhere. If there's ever a feast or festival you can bet your ass he's invited with offers of riches. Shit's a status symbol if he agrees to show up, and a pretty hefty humiliation if he doesn't.

Long story short he's heard a lot of shit from a lot of people, and as a result likely is much more valuable politically that anyone could possibly imagine.

After him would likely be a royal diviner, but they have the issue of any and all nobility that can scoop up someone with divination powers will do so at even so much as a peasant rumor, given how absurdly rare they are. The ones that can actually work hold huge amounts of power when they aren't dodging another assassination attempt.
However this power is sort of dulled because of course rival kingdoms also have at least one of their own (or know that you know that they know that you know that they don't). So even if you ask the gods the right questions, in the right way, and do the little rituals correctly, and they actually respond with both correct and actionable information; the other guy's gods might have as as well. So the whole system is pretty much rendered moot via a long convoluted chain of counter counter counter seeing.

An ex-demon lord.

He started as a mortal and ascended to become a ruler of an Abyssal layer back in the day, but was later deposed by a collective (is the official story, the truth is that he honestly got sick of demons being, well, fucking demons). He kept some of the powers, namely the unaging part plus a few extra tips and tricks, then spent the next several centuries/millennia mastering lots of the more esoteric magic.

Right now he's pretending to be a fairly wealthy merchant (a partner in a shipping consortium) who enjoys hearing about new magic in one of the main port cities of the central continent.

Balthagast the Grand is the most powerful wizard in the Material Plane, he is the most powerful because as a half-elf, he possessed an elf's extreme longevity and a human's passionate nature, which, combined with no small amount of autism and dungeon delving in his youth, allowed him to accumulate an arch-mage's power, and a decade-long quest allowed him to find and assemble the recipe for a potion of eternal youth. In modern times, he sits in his tower and occasionally does a magical favor for one of the descendants of his old adventuring buddies, though he mostly studies and struggles in his attempt to establish his own discipline of magic, something that'll take a few more centuries.

The most powerful mortal magic user in my setting is a sage who somehow managed to survive multiple world shifting cataclysms, making him the only one who has any idea what happened and how to fix it.

What makes him powerful is that each time the world resets, the fundamental properties of how magic works shifts with it. However, since he was able to survive multiple resets, he has access to every form that magic had taken.

In his spare time, he mostly meditates in a remote part of the world as a partially mummified corpse who passes the time by observing the world in order to find a way to end the resets and grant the world an actual death, rather than an endless cycle of death and rebirth.

Does anyone know where I can find images similar to OP's? Shit's my jam.

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Time travel bullshit puts his mortality kind of into doubt.
>namely the unaging part
Not mortal
>and a decade-long quest allowed him to find and assemble the recipe for a potion of eternal youth
Not mortal.
Surviving multiple cycles of the universe doesn't seem mortal to me.

He could die from natural causes in between cycles. I should have mentioned that each time he uses the clock it breaks and he has to repair it. He's not sitting on a time throne turning the dials all the time. He's also perfectly vulnerable to stabbing.

Mortal magic users don't exist in my setting, just shamans, and they don't have power themselves, just the spiritual strength to call on their ancestors and negotiate with nature spirits.

This shit is brilliant.

In the Irasha Empire, it would be Magnus.
An ancient, hunchbacked old man of indeterminate age. Living on top of the mountain in the middle of the city of fire, he seems to know all. Citizens see him for prophecies, predictions and whatnot, but there's something sinister about him that nobody can name. His faceless soldiers have been slowly pushing the town guard into irrelevancy.

His true power level is unknown, but whispers in the dark tell of sinister beings under his control, of long-dead rulers returning in distant lands. Many swear blind that the hill he resides upon wasn't there 40 years prior. Those people always go missing.

That depends, modern or ancient?

In ancient times, that was Ttovaricht, who brought down the titan Mezzarat with a single rune.

Modernity it would be Nlel, Lord of the Undercroft, a necromancer who is reviving the titans who died in the Holy Wars, so he can kill the gods and ascend to their position.

I love this.

An interesting premise my good friend, but, I have a question. What, if anything, is preventing the wizard nobility from continuing their eugenics program?

What the fuck is this image? Is that fucking Daffy Duck, surrounded by half-naked elf bitches? Can someone explain this to me?

Nicolas of Lorten, was on the run from the hunters his Elven Lord had sent to retrieve his runaway property when he hid in what he thought was a small cave turned out to be a large complex of tunnels. After stumbleing around in the caves for a few hours he comes upon a sight that that almost made his bowels loosen in terror, a dragon. But this ancient dragon was near death from one of the Elves dragon hunts and looking around saw the body of a second dragon and several shattered eggs. The near dead dragon then struck a deal with Nicolas he would give Nicolas three things the power to defeat his foes, the knowledge to use that power, and his entire hoard on the condition that he, his mate, and his unborn progeny be avenged. Nicolas after some consideration (helped along with the baying of Elven hounds) agreed to this proposal. So the dragon then uses telepathy to basically download all the knowledge he had accumulated over the millennia into his brain, instructed him to drink the yokes of the shattered eggs (Eating the yokes means he consumes the potential for magic those dragons would have achieved a secret dragons guard jealously) and left him his hoard.

Now Nicolas, with the strength of three dragons and the knowledge of a dragon who personaly knew the goddess of magic, is going about uniting the Human tribes and building a kingdom funded by dragon gold all to free his people who are enslaved by the Elves.

The most powerful mortal magic user in my setting is the God that invented the concept of mortality.

The other Gods aren't very happy with him, and while it is possible to kill him his absurd power has allowed him to survive.

youtube.com/watch?v=3Oe7Q8OCm5I

In my setting, the gods are in fact mortals from the future with massively extended, but still finite, lifetimes. They went to the past to prevent the discovery of time-travel magic, because its overuse caused a calamity that would inevitably lead to the destruction of the entire universe.
This is why different cultures have different gods; they have children and die.

Addendum: In the time of the players, this makes the strongest mortal magic-user Kronos, although he was imprisoned by his children, the current ruling family, for using time magic.

Holy shit this is awesome.

Meklil the Blind is the most powerful living mortal mage, but is only the most powerful in that his knowledge of occult lore far and away exceeds that of even the second-most knowledgeable, giving him an unparalleled grasp on sophisticated spellcraft, even though his arcane strength itself is only middling. He gained this knowledge through ritual self-blinding while staring into the apex of a total solar eclipse during the winter solstice while the stars were aligned. Needles to say, many practitioners of the dark arts know him as Meklil the Lucky, and he has long surpassed the need for vision, though true immortality still eludes his third-sight.

> tfw I will never be an immortal arch-wizard of unparalleled power reclining on his throne as half a dozen concubines tend to my every whim and desire

Why live bros?

persona 9 NBA sounds like an awesome game in general.

God's champion. Has the power reality warping through mastery of God's own sword.
>why are they the most powerful
God's blade is one hell of a powertrip drug
>and what do they do in their spare time?
He's bound to eternally serve the God. So not much, mostly eternal war.

>Tell me, who is the most powerful mortal magic user in your setting, why are they the most powerful, and what do they do in their spare time?

Depends on what you consider mortal. The most powerful mostly mortal person is a moon elf named Arkllon. Through some major metaphysical BS (and a good roll on his player in a dumbed down homebrew system), he is a sorcerer whose lineage traces to a set of lovecraftian-tier deities called the Gentry. He can manipulate reality almost at will, and doesn't follow general rules for spellcasting in the setting.

The most powerful "mortal" that plays by the rules is Maralux, the Lich King of the South. Self explanatory desu, he's in exile after his phylactery was stolen though

The most powerful actual mortal is a tiefling named Kairos, an extremely powerful wizard, who mostly just sorta chills somewhere in seclusion and wishes his daughters and grandchildren could get their heads in the game and stop doing whatever they want.

>who is the most powerful mortal magic user in your setting
Goku

the official most powerful wizard is a master of a modern city, he uses light magic.

the non official one is an ancient warrior (actually a memory of it) he uses three kind of magic (light, wind and water) and is approximatively 5 times more powerful than the final boss. nobody knows why he's (was so powerful) but probably trained a LOT

Is Helirian, probably the last real witch alive. Considering that before the fall but after the magician war, the use of magic was strictly forbidden by the inquisition most of the wizard and witch were killed and their tome destroyed, Helirian manage to survive by a deal with a Inquisitor. Now she's hiding in the remote ruins of her old temple. While not being incredibly powerful, she's the only one able to read the old tomes of magic knowledge, but most of all she have one of the few remaining stones of times, making her able to see the future. Galath, the black king, is by far a more powerful magician, but the knowledge that Helirian has is a thing that even Galath lust to obtain

It's the king, In a time before time (last campain that the party just stopped playing cuz of time and shit), he was gathering power and doing stuff to create chaos,since there was no one to stop him, he succeded. Then, with the help of a powerful ritual, he sealed all that chaos inside him, but as opposite of the Limbo plane, he got the supreme control over the prime material plane and for a split second, he became one with the essence of the lawful (Mechanus) and reconstructed the world with him as the supreme king. To keep a fraction of that power, after he made that, he put what was left of it and his soul into his sword. Now he's a sorta paladin-lich.

Most powerful mortal in my setting currently has no name.

He's thousands of years old, long ago his village was plundered by a neighbouring settlement and he pleaded with the setting's goddess of knowledge for the means to defend himself and others.

She granted him his boon by teaching him various magicks, including illusion and the power to control blood. Instead of using his powers for the benefits of others as he promised, he slaughtered the neighbouring settlement and began siphoning power from the goddess.

After a lot of effort and a lengthy war, he was imprisoned, his vault eventually built over and forgotten, now lying at the bottom of a long, empty well shaft.

He despises the gods with a vengeance, and feels they have no business in punishing and interfering with mortals. He waits for the time when he might be free of his shackles to decimate the gods.
He's kind of ambiguous in terms of morals, as he is kind and supportive of his followers, and the setting's Gods have done some fucked-up things.

>Goku
Always nice to see Chinese mythology getting some attention

Unaging just means you don't die of old age, user. You can still die from getting stabbed, poisoned, disease, or any number of other methods. You're plenty mortal.

>the Virgin Saiyan
>the Chad SunWukong

What the hell is this picture from? Daffy duck stuck in hyrule?

Mazdir Thertullen, he’s still technically mortal but he’s essentially a step away from ascending. Though he deliberately “anchors” himself to the material world so he can continue to interact with others.

For all intents and purposes he’s basically a monk that can warp reality through sheer overwhelming will. To others, Magic is a basic sense of control over a certain aspect, elements, nature, life, death. But he was the only one to take a look at the grand weave and actually gain absolute control over it.

He’s usually in a meditative or sleeping state, but the few who do manage to gain his attention or wake him up for what he considers to be worthy reasons receive his help. Aside from that he’s laden with dark humor, and enjoys oversimplifying subjects created by other magic users, so Master Yoda if he were a sith essentially

His most notable acts thus far have been
>Offering to assist a queen in world conquest in exchange for a hug; which she denied out of fear/paranoia
>Cursing a dragon to never fly again, by making its wings disappear
>Creating a legendary sword that can only be weilded by the worst person suited for whatever world saving job needs doing
>Summoning a demon lord to argue the semantics of loyalty

Most consider him odd or terrifying, which may be the reason behind his somewhat silly attitude at times

Are we counting dragons and those far removed from the mortal realm?

The Crimson Emperor wrestled the power from the land, and the symbol of right to rule, the dragon piece from dragon chess, was absorbed into him. Even before he did that and gained the ability to shift into a crimson dragon form, he was a great sorcerer who conquered and united many under his flag.

After his battle wound, he's mostly letting others do the whole empire ruling thing (Though some suspect he's just not into that sort of thing), parade once a year with the annual military march for funs, and occasionally burn down an enemy castle with dragonfire. He's having fun with his life and power, at least.

>most powerful mortal magic user
That would be either the Sage of Earth or the Omnyouji of the Sun Throne.

The Sage of Earth is the steward of the Earth Crystal, one of the four crystals that govern the natural forces of the world. He's in his 70s and was the apprentice of the previous Sage of Earth, who in his time was also known as possibly the greatest mortal magic-user. The previous Sage of Earth was responsible for the Valonne Kingdom withstanding the advances of the Garm Empire, by using wards placed throughout the mountain range separating Valonne from Garm to halt Garm's advances. There are stories about how Garm lost more troops to rock and land slides, avalanches, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions, than to any actual military engagements on Valonne's part. What puts the current Sage of Earth above his peers is his natural understanding of how aether flows and how it can be shaped; he's able to improvise spells in a way that puts other archmages to shame.

The Onmyouji of the Sun Throne is the chief sorcerer of the Gou Empire and a direct servant of the Gou Emperor. He has an obsession with fate and destiny, and he's thought to be responsible for the Empire's peaceful prosperity over the past half-century or so. He's reclusive and takes very few apprentices, but stories are told about how he uses his magic to guide the fates of influential and powerful to favour the growth and stability of Gou. However, with the Kalsh Empire invading and the Gou Empire taking heavy losses in battle after battle with them, people are beginning to question if he's even still alive.

'Mortal' is a questionable term at this point but in this case but Yorrick the Denouncer is without a doubt the strongest.
During the war between mortals and gods Yorrick lead the mortal army, only to be ran through the heart by Not!Gungnir. He is now located in the center of the largest city in the setting still pinned to the ground.
Though he can't move he used his power to make a great city of stone, which he now protects forever more. He has been offered leadership of the city many times but he believes he is too detached from humanity to do a good job leading them. He is functionally immortal but would die should anyone remove Not!Gugnir.