Mag Tureah

The realm of Mag Tureah was an ancient underground kingdom centered around a spectacularly ornate iron fortress in the Feydark. In an odd parallel to eladrin cities’ seamless blend of crystal tower and native wood, Mag Tureah’s iron walls often abruptly give way to stone arches and natural tunnels. No one knows who (or what) built the fortress. Abandoned for unknown reasons by its unnamed makers, Mag Tureah lay empty for centuries. Fomorian after fomorian attempted to seize this crucial strongpoint. All were destroyed by whatever horrors stalked its mazelike corridors—until the fomorian king Thrumbolg, dubbed the First Lord, reached its dark heart. He defeated its horrible guardians, and now his empire expands inexorably from the iron towers out into the Feydark, a black tumor spreading unseen beneath the living green surface world.

On its own, the military stronghold of Mag Tureah would be the great prize of the land. But Mag Tureah has a special relationship with the mortal realm, making it valuable beyond measure. It is honeycombed with portals to the mortal world. What’s more, although the Feydark sides of these portals all occur within the boundaries of the fortress, the passages to the mortal world are connected to dozens of locales scattered over thousands of miles. Mag Tureah is a hub offering access to every corner of the mortal realm.

On the mortal world, the portal sites often appear as unremarkable ruins. Explorers walk among shattered walls, marveling at the black stones, never noticing as the starry night sky above them is slowly replaced by onyx ceilings and glowing gems. By the time the travelers realize they’ve stumbled through a portal, it’s too late. They are transported from a corridor on the surface of the mortal world to a black, unmarked tunnel a mile below the Feywild in the guts of Mag Tureah. Escape is unheard of, and if they are captured by the First Lord, death will be a blessing.

Retracing their steps rarely aids these unlucky interlopers— the magic of Mag Tureah is unstable. Whatever portal abandoned them to this lonely spot quickly dissipates. It may reappear in an hour, or a day, or never.

It may change location, now accessed by a tunnel mere yards away or on the other side of the Dark River cutting through the center of the fortress. Although all the portals of Mag Tureah connect to ruins on the mortal world, they do not connect to the same ruins on every trip. This fact is all that’s kept the First Lord from launching an invasion force into the mortal realm.

Thrumbolg is working furiously to master the unreliable portals of his fortress. To this end he has kidnapped arcanists from multiple realms and put them to work studying the phenomena. Several of the lesser portals have been mapped, and each can be used—with reasonable certainty—if one possesses a complex guidebook filled with multidimensional equations predicting the times, locations, and endpoints of the portal in question. Only a few copies of these guidebooks exist. They are stored in the vaults and laboratories in the heart of the fortress. It would seem suicidal to try to steal one, but the alternative is to attempt to escape Mag Tureah the hard way.

No one can explain why Mag Tureah has these properties, or why the portals are so unstable. Wizards knowledgeable in the ways of the Far Realm find disturbing similarities between these stuttering conduits and the methods by which aberrations travel the planes. Such theories put a different light on the fortress’s initial abandonment. They also raise even more distressing questions about the First Lord’s rule over the fortress. What if he did not so much defeat whatever lurked at the heart of Mag Tureah, but instead bargained with it?

THE LORD OF MAG TUREAH


No fomorian bows to any other, but all grudgingly admit the mightiest among them is the tyrant Thrumbolg, commonly referred to as the Lord of Mag Tureah or the First Lord. This elusive monster has built the largest fomorian kingdom in the Feywild around the ancient iron fortress from which he rules. The First Lord has forged unlikely alliances with fey, mortals, and even beings from planes best left unnamed. Although fomorian cooperation is unheard of, Thrumbolg has twice managed to trick other kings into marching with him against unsuspecting eladrin cities. Then while the victors squabbled over the conquest, his assassins moved in. The First Lord does not overreach. He pillages his targets and retreats to the safety of his monstrous cavern kingdom.

Most eladrin refuse to take the fomorians seriously as a unified threat. Yet recently Lord Oran finds himself unable to shake a nagging thought: the terrifying prospect that the Lord of Mag Tureah is somehow, against all odds, sane.

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