#wiki-diving

Okay. Azuth. God of wizards, basically. Him and Savras were on the rise towards divinity around the same time (Savras was a demigod and so had a leg up), and promptly got into a massive fight over it. Spell Lord vs Lord of Divination

Azuth opened with trying to rip off a bit of Savras’ divinity for himself. When that failed, they had a knock-down drag-out fight, which Azuth eventually won

Azuth then imprisoned Savras in a staff called the Sceptre of Savras, which he’d made for the purpose, and planned to use as a staff of office-slash-magical battery

He was going to carry around his beaten and imprisoned rival as a badge and wave him in people’s faces while siphoning off his power

Azuth is not evil, by the by. He’s apparently lawful neutral. He’s just a vindictive bitch

Savras, because Lord of Divination, had some safeties in place, and manage to teleport the staff out into the world instead and keep Azuth from finding it again

He then spent centuries locked in this thing, going slowly mad as it siphoned off his power, begging wielders of the sceptre to let him out, including showing one lady how to turn into a silver dragon if she just let him out of the draining torture stick

(You would have had me a ‘dragon’, and this is why I should not be trusted with artefacts)

The silver dragon lady did not trust the creepy desperate haunted staff and did not agree

Stuff happened, and the silver dragon lady eventually handed the Sceptre back to Azuth, which Savras possibly saw coming but I’m imagining was not the desired result regardless

At this point, Azuth is having conscience pangs over the whole ‘trap you in a magic staff and wave your imprisoned form in people’s faces’ thing, as well as the whole ‘centuries trapped and going mad’ thing, so he wants to let Savras out

He’s not stupid though, and figures Savras may be carrying a wee bit of a grudge by now, so he extracts an oath of fealty first

Apparently after this it’s relatively hunky dory, they graduate from ‘uneasy service’ to ‘cautious friendship and a cordial working relationship’

Except for the fact that the staff had literally eaten a good chuck of Savras’ power and promptly vanished as soon as he was let out of it, taking the power with it

The big murdering-the-goddess-of-magic oops happens and Savras is (maybe?) killed, and it’s all a little moot, but then 4e became 5e and maybe that didn’t happen anymore?

Also he is, again, a god of divination and the staff with his power went conveniently poof for a while, so maybe he just Ragnarok-proofed himself again?

But! Coming back to the above point!

People who revere Savras take the staff as a ‘potent symbol’ of him and make themselves fancy ones in hopes that he’ll stop by for a while. I’m just. Maybe gods are made of much sterner stuff than me, and PTSD is not a thing for them, but if I was Savras I wouldn’t put so much as a wisp of myself within 20ft of a magic staff again, let alone go around camping in them. How do you … I like you a lot, so I’m just going to wave a symbol of your captivity in your face in hopes you like me back? Do wizard-adjacent folks just have zero tact?

(Maybe he really is chill about it, it just seems a little tasteless. At best. You know?)

Also? When the realms of the gods of magic got comprehensively blown up by the whole murder-the-goddess thing, Savras was safely dead (or safely ‘dead’), while a dying Azuth got catapulted into hell and wound up imprisoned in an archdevil. THE archdevil. Asmodeus. Who fused with him to become a god. Which … I’m just wondering. Imprisoned and fed on for power to become divine. Not by a sceptre, but by an archdevil. Arguably so much worse. And Savras is, again again, the god of divination. Including foresight. And is also lawful neutral and a god of magic …

I’m just wondering if Savras was not, in fact, at all chill with any of it, and was instead secretly joining Azuth in the ‘vindictive bitch of a lawful neutral wizard god’ mould by comforting himself with the knowledge that what goes around comes around, sunshine, and karma is a bitch

I mean, possibly not, maybe he is just a really chill, forgiving dude who hangs out in tiny shrines in libraries and got himself legitimately and fatally blindsided a couple of times over. I’d love that, honestly. But. I’m wondering.

Anyway. What I’m getting from this generally is that:

Wizards are vindictive as all (sometimes literal) hell

Nobody involved in the arcane has the remotest shred of common sense or tact