The Goblin Wastes. A forsaken land where the sun hangs low and oppressive, painting the sky in gradients of molten gold and fiery crimson. A parched and desolate region, with its earth a mosaic of cracked earth and shifting sands, punctuated by stubborn tufts of scrub-brush that cling to life with a tenacity born of defiance. Jagged outcroppings of rock jut skyward like the broken teeth of some long-dead colossus, casting slender shadows that offer scant refuge from the elements, by day or by night. A land where life is a constant battle, where the echoes of a thousand forgotten conflicts whisper through the arid air.

Including yours.

Your name is Ezreal Mious van Houtzmann. You are many things: a half-elf born of the Sylvan Realms, a Mage of the Hawksong Mages’ Tower and personal apprentice to Archmage Theresa Henzler. You are the founder and keeper of the royal land reserve at Old Maple Hill, in your capacity as a possibly-apostate Disciple of the True Fey. In service of your mother’s folk and your father’s, and for the sake of your own ideals of a peace between peoples, you found yourself embroiled in politics of gods and kings. You prevented a war, but at great cost: you became an enemy of your homeland, outcast, and incurred a debt to the dreadfully-unpleasant fey of the Unseelie Court.

To seek out knowledge which would allow you to make good upon this debt, you sought the sacred knowledge of your cousins, the Neme (or Ashurati) ‘sand-elves’. These genasi-folk keep a covenant with a court elemental fey ‘djinni’, and have shared that knowledge with you in the past. When you arrived, though, you found their sacred place forsaken, save for a band of goblinoid bandits and slavers…

And you destroyed them. Killed them with lightning. Sicced your demon-goblin creation—Carazzi—upon them, to rip and tear their flesh and feast upon their fear. You liberated their slaves, tore down their perverse and wicked ‘goblin market’, and took some of their number prisoner before banishing them into the wasteland when supplies grey scarce. All this carnage in turn attracted ravening trolls, who nearly brought ruin and death to you, your friends and freedmen.

You killed them, too.

With more lightning, with fire, with the horns of your new minotaur companion and your beloved chimera Muffins. Their blackish-red blood seeps into the cracked earth. The stench of their death permeates the air. Their greenish flesh is opened up to the circling vultures above, and their yellowish eyes stare, unseeing, at the horizons of this awful, awful place.

You did that.