At Will

Savis Rayn, Illustrated by James Keegan

Displaced from Bael’Turath, our people lack a sense of self. They lack pride. We are scoffed at and beaten, cajoled by the other races of the world. And for what? For our beauteous horns? For our rich tradition of magical power and strategy? Those are all simple answers but the true answer is simpler still. We lack a home, a place to call our own. All other races have a place that they can claim for themselves. They draw, rightly, from home as a place of identity, of sustenance. Home is many things, but it is first and foremost the wellspring of a race’s ability to know and to love itself.

I have been labelled by many as a warmonger, uttering the speech of hatred. But the truth, as is every truth I utter to you my friends, is again simple: In working towards a homeland for the tiefling people, I Savis Rayn am an avatar of the purest and brightest love. This is what I will give the world, and if it fights me I will fight back in the name of this love.

Background

Savis Rayn left home at an early age. Unable to withstand the never-ending assaults and taunts on his tiefling family, and ashamed that his father failed to fight back, he vowed to strengthen the status and position of all tieflings in the world. Exploration brought him in touch with the history of his people, and further in touch with his people’s powers and otherwordly origins. Tales of Bael’Turath filled the young Savis Rayn with passion, and a desire to recreate the homeland of his people. Savis Rayn envisioned a place where his people could live by their own rules, a place where they held their own destinies fully in hand. He began to speak to all the tieflings that he met,a wandering bard spinning tales. But his tales of the tiefling Golden Age ignited passion in other tieflings he spoke to. He wrote a series of scrolls called “The Songs of Flame”. These scrolls were copied and spread from tiefling to tiefling across the land. From all over, people flocked to him.

And thus a movement was born.

Motivation & Goals

Savis Rayn wishes to cast aside the rules of society at large and establish a homeland for tieflings –with him at it’s head. The creation of a homeland as he sees it will be fought tooth and nail, as it will require the displacing of someone else from their home.Savis explains this in the “Songs of Flame” as the Right of Suffering. When a people have suffered long enough, they have earned a right to a home and cessation of this suffering. Taking those people’s place are a people that have not suffered sufficiently. Savis uses the Right of Suffering to justify many of his acts, and to motivate his followers as he works to subvert society from within, then take his people’s rightful home and to take his rightful place upon a throne of flame.

Organization

The Singers of Flame are the cult/organization that surround Savis and act as his main agents in the world. They perform many actions for Savis, but their main acts are split depending on what role they have claimed for themselves.

Singers work to influence other tieflings and to spread Savis’ words.

Flames sabotage society’s infrastructure and perform assassinations. They sometimes ‘persuade’ those tieflings who oppose Savis to have a change of heart or at the least be silent.

There are very few tiefling communities in the world at large, and Savis has organizers the Singers of Flame to keep to this trend so that they may work in secret. He uses magical means to communicate with a select few lieutenants who make his word known to small cells of tieflings working for his cause. Working in this manner, most of the world is unaware of the threat that lays in their midst. If Savis can have his way, he will keep it thus until he hatches his master plot, claiming his prizes in a single decisive sweep.

Adventure Hooks

• The players stumble into a plot by a low-level cell to assassinate several key leaders throughout the region, replacing them with doppelgangers sympathetic to the tiefling’s cause. In their initial encounters, they discover the Song of Flame and the hidden plot of a tiefling uprising, lead by a charismatic known as Savis Rayn. In stopping the plot, they have gained valuable information and powerful enemies…
• Savis makes the final preparations for his uprising. He reveals himself to the world, making an impassioned speech detailing his plans for the tiefling kingdom. The region reacts, but the plan is already in motion. Devil legions rise from portals created with the major cities…the Uprising has begun in earnest.

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