Happy new year, Exiles. I’m going to start writing this up on my phone, with more updates and expansions to come later. I’m keeping this separate from the main post as it’s purely a lore dump/speculation, not inherently tied to the ever-ongoing scavenger hunt for clues. They’ve been posting some of the siptah concept art on social media lately, and I will be looking into that on the main post shortly. But for now, let’s get into what this post is about;
Sorcerous Patrons And You: An Amateur Wizard’s Guide to Magic
For those of you unfamiliar with how magic works in the Hyborian Age setting, let me give you a brief contrast to magic in other trope-laden fantasies.
No one is born with magical powers, at least not in the conventional sense. Conan for example was born and lived as a flesh and blood man; but there is no argument many of his deeds were aided by the supernatural, and divine intervention.
The easiest way to become a sorcerer is to harness the power from something else. Magic isn’t internal, there is no mana and there is no innate ability to cast spells.
The sorcerer Yara got his powers by holding a literal ■■■■ing alien captive and siphoning it’s energy.
Thoth-Amon wielded the legendary Serpent Ring of Set, an artifact of the arch-demon snake-god himself.
Both of these sorcerers lost their powers when they lost their relics. Yara even got merc’d by his pet alienphant. With great power comes great risk.
But what about some other sorcerers? How about the titular Siptah?
Side tangent, does anyone else read the journals and think he sounds like Nazeem from skyrim? Is it the same voice actor?
Now this part I’m going entirely off memory for my first draft of this post, as I’m away from my computer and my books currently.
Siptah came to the tower with nothing, and gained his power from the tower itself. We know the tower was created by the Elder Races, who in turn were betrayed by it. It’s power comes from Nyarlathotep. Nyarlathotep.
For those of you unfamiliar, Nyarlathotep is not a being written about by REH. It’s an Elder God born from the mind of none other than the legendary HP Lovecraft. The cthulhu guy. That’s right, this whole time this game has secretly been a lovecraftian survival horror all along. Hell, it’s a theory that the exiled lands aren’t even a real place, but some planar snowglobe soul prison run by Nyarlathotep himself. Before they removed wild surges, they were hurled down literally by him tearing a hole in the sky and casting open a portal with his tentacle.
So what does any of this mean? Well I honestly do not have the time to do the full thing justice and that would require and equally lengthy separate thread entirely, so I’ll skim for now.
Main thing is, Nyarlathotep is known as the Crawling Chaos, the Black Pharoah. He came to the world of men in the guise of an Egyptian king and performed sorcerous acts to drive men mad, shepherding them wholly out of their reality and into his endless maw, consuming them soul and body. Mortals are his food, and his plaything. Whatever pact he has made with Siptah, the price must be steep.
Even without these great costs, being a sorcerer generally isn’t a sustainable way to live. My favorite sorcerer I have yet to mention, Thugra Khotan meets his end in a more traditional way; Conan straight up yeets a sword into him.
There is no magic to prevent a physical death. They can prolong their lives, induce magical comas and even conjure impassible barriers, but in the end they are still flesh and blood. We see this most clearly in Grave Matters, as the sorcerers are untouchable until the totems are destroyed. After that they are very much touchable.
Not only can they die, they’re actually pretty weak. It’s been widely talked about and mostly agreed upon, corruption goes hand in hand with this. The exact specifics I can’t begin to outline as I do not know them, but we do know they’re inherently linked. Wherever there is sorcery, there is corruption. It weakens the body, making you more vulnerable to a mortal end; but the boons it grant are yet to be seen.
Great power comes at a great cost.