The Forgotten Kingdom & The Summoner’s Plea

The ruins of the ancient kingdom looked surprisingly well maintained especially since no living person or breathing civilization had settled in this area in tens of thousands of years. It had a history that extended millennia beyond any history texts that had been written by any present day scholars. In an age forgotten to even the most diligent historians of the world of Ramora an ancient deity had cursed the kingdom to suffer from an unspeakable curse: it’d be forgotten by men and monsters alike, only remembered by the undead and by the spirits of nature who’d come to inhabit it and even then only the spirits and undead themselves in the area once considered part of the ancient kingdom would be forgotten.

The reactions from the undead and from the spirits of nature could not be more different: the undead despised this curse as it trapped them there, due to a mystical law in the world of Ramora about the nature of the undead: an undead being from outside of the kingdom moved into the area by accident or by force would be stuck in the area due to it losing the majority of its powers which stem from memories that those who loved them and those who hated them had of them. Undead in the area would lose too much power to maintain themselves if they weren’t being fed it by the rulers of the Forgotten Kingdom who due to their ancient age had developed a way to feed themselves the energy needed to maintain their existences as undead. Spirits of nature on the other hand drew mystical might and energy from nature itself and thus could come to the Forgotten Kingdom freely and even cherished the place as an area free of humanity where they could live in peace. In time the Forgotten Kingdom became a place of legend. Explorers independent of their species would hear whispers of a land of the dead where spirits and ghosts gathered in great numbers and soon whispers turned into legends of a strange region of the furthest continent where a culture of the dead was beginning to appear. This rumor was spread deliberately by the final and most beloved king of the Forgotten Kingdom. The ancient Golden King tricked both the living and the dead to come to the Forgotten Kingdom. When the dead arrived and realized that they’d been tricked they were approached with a way out: to be absorbed by the Golden King who in life had been a powerful sorcerer and knew the unspeakably powerful magic needed to break the laws of the world that kept an undead being tethered to the world that logically should have belonged to the living which would immediately send the energy that remained in them into the king himself. In this way the ancient Golden King had powers that gradually went from being a reasonably powerful sorcerer in life to powers that had reached the levels of the gods themselves in death.

The Golden King had long since defeated the deity responsible for the curse but in doing so he had depleted the majority of his energy and it took generations to buildup enough magical fuel to finally defeat the curse. On the eve of the 7th era of Ramora’s history the Golden King cast a single powerful incantation with two reality bending effects: He shattered the curse which kept the living from remembering the ancient kingdom and destroyed the meta-physical fears which pushed the living away from the land that was once the ancient kingdom, and he summoned a powerful figure who he hopes will lead the people who come to this newly inhabitable land into a new age of glory and influence.

In the midst of the spell’s activation time had frozen around the Golden King who was surprised by this sudden development. He found himself staring at something vaguely resembling a character creation screen which would be familiar to fans of Role-Playing Games back on Earth. In truth this “screen” was merely the spell urging the Golden King to select criteria from which the summoning aspect of the powerful incantation would be able to best bring forth a candidate from the variety of other worlds it was shuffling through. The Golden King was tasked with selecting characteristics through which the spell he was casting could pick the single greatest candidate for fulfilling the wishes of the King and those who had stayed behind to watch the day the unspeakable curse had been broken. The Golden King selected the following characteristics for his ideal summon: “Someone with great ambition, which is of course a necessary trait for country-building” “Someone with the knowledge necessary to build a stable nation” “Someone with the power to strengthen and harness the might of both the living and the dead” “Someone who possesses legendary management capability who’ll care about getting results more than arbitrary characteristics such as gender, species, social status or even whether or not his allies are among the living or the dead” “Someone who can create a cohesive and multicultural society where any talented figures can come and contribute”. Even for the spell going across multiple worlds it was difficult to find such a figure. Difficult. But not impossible. Which is how the Forgotten Kingdom and the Summoner’s Plea brought Jonathan Marshal to the world of Ramora.