Wisdom Quotes

Excerpts from The Lives and Adventures of the Heroes of the Past:

The Kefzah build for their dead great underground cities of stone, counting these as border towns between the realms of the living and the underworld. In these cities, their superstitious say, the dead move about, eat, drink, and even have relations just as the living do. But the world of the living and the things thereof are anathema to them, and if they are seen by the sun, the powers of unlife granted them in the darkness of the underworld are taken away. So say the priests, who get much wealth from their skills at consecrating offerings and propitiating the dead, who are also said to cause illness and impotence if neglected.
–Herodita, ancient historian

The geography of Vardemar accounts for its depressing climate. It rests on a range of truly awful mountains, which, rising into the sky, push upwards and cool the wind from the more temperate and fertile plains to the east. The cooler air can carry less water, so it rains. And it rains. And it rains.
And sometimes it snows, just for fun.
This is also what makes the Khef desert on the other side of the mountain range so beastly unpleasant.
–Marius the terminally depressed, travelling scholar

Shadewalkers inhabit the more surface passageways of underground dungeons. Afraid of light, but unequipped with the excellent darkvision required to survive in the depths, they are scavengers and hunters of small game. They are not averse to eating the flesh of humans, however, and woe to the adventurer caught unawares by a pack of them. Naturally, they were no match for me, though the zombie minions had severely wounded me down the last passageway…
–Gareth Grimtang, warrior of the Red Blades, from his biography Noble Adventures of Gareth Grimtang (and the Red Blades)

Dragons are among the most evil of beasts. Their kind are getting scarcer every year, fortunately for peaceful townsfolk everywhere, but unfortunately for those who make their living and fame hunting them. It is said they ruled these lands before men came, but the truth of these claims is disputed…They destroy for the sake of destruction, kill for the love of killing as well as to eat, and none is more deadly than a clutching female guarding her egg…Without these strong mothering instincts, they would have been extinct long ago, for dragons are a bloodthirsty lot…which usually kill one another as readily as helpless farmers and sheep…
–Meraste Gallowglass, from A Treatise on Dragons: For Hunters and Scholars

rd 2019