$A history of Arcane Magic$
%Heising of Ehlonna's Grace had the tongue of a snake, and before long legions marched before him, leading him into a crypt of legends. Foolhardy and unsurreptitious, the band found itself surrounded by able men at arms. Their assults were vicious, and relentless, and Heising's ranks were quickly thinning. He was still brown haired and able bodied; it was not his time. Some say that the fear had broken him, while others hold that his derangement was forever with him, but with a cockeyed gaze and shattered grin he produced a green serpent the length of his forearm from his sleeve. With his other hand he grasped a curved dagger, white-knuckled, and with supernatural swiftness at once sliced the scales of the snake cleanly to the ground. Only a few long elegant strokes of the blade, from head to tail, left the poor creature a bleeding mess and nothing more. His troops felt inspiration in their minds, in their hearts, and soon in their striking arms, as in synchronicity they delivered firm blows, guided and deliberate as Heisings slices to the serpent, to the foes before them. Heising was not the only one to have cheated fate that day, as the blooded snake then quickly slithered off, leaving what must have been fully one half of itself in winding trails of gore behind it.
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%A single word can break a man, as is well taught to all of the arcane order. One such incantation, however, is exceptionally elementary so that even the most menial of apprentices may utter it. Nevertheless, it is ruthlessly humbling to those who would do well to be humbled, a designation which extends well beyond the ranks of meager and mundane skills of those who might speak this word. This word inflicts the pain of the nine hells upon its unlucky auditor. It gnaws and grinds for minutes at a time. So terrible is this pain that the weak will abandon all value they had given to life; death eternally is preferable to one more second of their excruciating existence. One might speculate that it is the product of a despairing instructor, presented day after day with talentless peasants to tutor. Few ways are there to gain so much from so little. This hypothetical instructor was certainly very clever, however, as the word is crippled in utility, totally ineffective against any creature of moderate health or ability.
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%He controlled such immense power in every part of him. It reached to the tips of his fingers, the soles of his feet, and the back of his eyes. This is the account of a phenomenal feat, even by his standards. Before him stood a mighty giant, and it was his whim to fell it. In either hand he held grotesque dried jawbones which he clattered incessantly as he stared as his victim, his mind a razorblade. Suddenly he opened his mouth, wider and wider, inhummanly wide. The air about him crackled and an emerald phantasm of his maw grew out of his face. The yawning storm envlloped the giant, and it seemed to just stand there, disoriented, as the spell chewed it appart. Within seconds the mighty creature had been reduced to a pulp. It was truly awe-inspiring, and I found myself in as much of a stupor as his victim.$

  $Beasts of the material world$
%Dread blossoms are blood-drinking plants from the Wilderness of the Beastlands transplanted to the Material Plane by foolish elves who mistook their nature.
%An individual dread blossom looks like a foot-long crimson flower, speckled with gold and black pollen, that ends in a 6-inch-long hollow thorn surrounded at its base by a frill of inch-long roots. Few creatures can examine a dread blossom in such detail, as a dread blossom swarm at rest is usually firmly planted in the bodies of its last victims.
%In flight, a dread blossom swarm resembles a flock of birds wheeling swiftly through the air. Each blossom flies thorn forward, fluttering two petals as rapidly as a hummingbird flaps its wings.
%Creatures of the Beastlands know not to disturb beds of dread blossoms, but inhabitants of the Material Plane are often curious about the dead creatures where the plants have taken root.
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%Beautiful and enchanting, glaistigs are fey that lurk in and around pools, lakes, and streams. They have an insatiable craving for the blood of mortals, beguiling victims to come close to their lair in order to drain them. They are commonly mistaken for vampires because of their bloodsucking technique, but they are not undead.
%Glaistigs resemble incredibly attractive female humans or half-elves, but instead of normal legs, they have goat legs with long, white fur. Most have snow-white hair and eyes that shimmer like water. When they smile, glaistigs try not to show their teeth, which are sharpened to cruel-looking fangs and revealed only when they are about to strike. Glaistigs wear long, fine robes and dresses that drape along the ground, which are used to hide their legs. Glaistigs loathe showing their legs to anyone, and will only reveal them to lash out in anger. If someone catches sight of a glaistig’s goat legs, it will become very angered and attack the offender.
%Despite their single-minded lust for blood, glaistigs are unpredictable and capricious. If they have recently fed (say, within a month), then they are just as likely to help someone as they are to attack. More than a few people have been attacked by a glaistig, even if it has talked and been friendly to them in the past. Glaistigs also enjoy dancing, and some lure their victims to caper and dance for many hours before attacking them.
%Glaistigs are solitary by nature and do not even like other fey all that much. While they gain  no  sustenance  from  the  blood  of sylvan creatures, glaistigs have been known to attack fey that come too close into their territory. Perhaps because of their similar nature, glaistigs in particular do not like dryads, and it is extremely rare to find the two beings in the same territory. An average glaistig is about 5 feet 2 in height and weighs about 90 pounds.
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%Long before luckless travelers in more remote and foreboding marshes see the harrowing sight of a lone night twist, they hear its haunting and melancholy song. The ghostly moaning sounds of its song seem slightly different to every traveler. For some, the song of the night twist sounds like a women weeping. To others, it is more akin to a cold wind blowing over a desolate graveyard. Most likely, the despair song of a night twist is the most sorrowful sound each traveler can conjurer within his or her own mind.
%Night twists subsist in the most inhospitable marshes, feeding on the rotting carcasses of creatures and travelers attracted by its despair song. A typical night twist stands 15 feet tall and weighs 600 pounds.
%Killing a night twist invites a terrible curse. The creature dealing the death blow is often cursed with hideous and unsettling nightmares. If the victim of the night twist curse dies and is interred, a new night twist springs from where the corpse was laid one month later. While the creature is developing, a night twist “sapling” appears at the gravesite; the creature seems to be a normal plant until it reaches maturity.
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%Born of arcane experiments into the changeable nature of life, the skindancer perpetuates a perversion of eldritch magic. This strange creature has prodigious defensive abilities, and many theorize that skindancers were created to serve as guardians for arcane spellcasters.
%Although it is not a shapechanger, a skindancer’s flesh is highly reactive to weapons and spell attacks. The thick protrusions that cover a skindancer’s upper body look like a hard carapace, but in truth they shift in shape and consistency to best resist any attack that is used against it. A skindancer stands between 9 and 10 feet tall and weighs 800 pounds.

  $An evaluation of undead population levels and related matters$
%Moving at a clip of 20 miles in a day, a standard tier 4 squad of 6 slays an average of 72 undead in a day while in the depths of the Deadlands. High variance is associated with this quantity, but never the less is seems as though there is a significant decay at the outskirts of the region. More precisely, for a range of 30 miles or so, undead density seems to grow sigmoidally, after which it plateaus for at least 150 miles.
%The sigmoidal density distribution is preliminarily consistent with common diffusion of populations. The uniform distribution beyond would typically suggest some dependence on a natural resource. Undead, of course, have no such dependance, but this may be a reflection of the distribution of living creatures prior to the cataclysm. This is in accordance with what the authors know as the prevailing belief: that the entire region of the deadlands was affected simultaneously, as opposed to the creation of a large number of wights at one location, for example.

  $Ooze Chemistry$
%To manipulate functional groups, it is first necessary to be able to identify them, understand their bonding and oxidation levels, and recognize the bonding changes that are needed to convert one functional group into another. A variety of functional group reactions are available, and much of the introductory organic chemistry course is devoted to learning reagents and reactions for carrying out functional group interconversions.
%Very often these reactions are traditional and illustrative, but they are not necessarily the best way to manipulate a particular functional group. Many traditional methods have been replaced, in practice, by newer reactions or reagents which offer certain advantages over older methods. In general, these advantages have to do with mild conditions, selectivity, generality, and/or experimental simplicity. Nevertheless all types of functional group interconversions, new or old, are still based fundamentally on the ideas that have been developed earlier in this book.
%The main focus of this chapter will be to introduce the most widely used and practical ways (or “real” ways) to introduce the major functional groups. These latter methods have practical synthetic value and are usually the first choices in real laboratory situations, but often they differ from the standard list of preparations. What is important is that these first-choice methods must be integrated into the methods previously encountered so that a wider view of how to manipulate functional groups is achieved.
%The functional group order goes from highest oxidation level (carboxylic acid) to lowest oxidation level (alkanes). As might be anticipated, carboxylic acids are most often prepared oxidatively and alkanes are most often prepared reductively. Functional groups of intermediate oxidation level can be accessed either reductively or oxidatively. Furthermore the methods discussed for each functional group are organized by the oxidation level change that is used, that is, oxidative methods followed by methods requiring no change in oxidation level followed by reductive methods.
%Because of the wide variety of reactions available to synthetic chemists, it is possible to devise synthetic strategies for just about any target that we wish. Nevertheless the planning and execution of any synthesis must be verified by showing that the product of each step is in fact the predicted compound and that the target compound was actually obtained. Thus a critical part of any synthesis involves determining and proving the structures of synthetic intermediates and final products. While the majority of the time careful planning will result in the formation of the expected product, there are always enough exceptions to make structure proof an imperative step.
%In earlier times, proof of structure was based largely on wet methods. The first step was to rigorously purify the compound by crystallization, distillation, sublimation, and so on. The functional groups present in the material were established by classification tests. The elemental analysis gave the molecular formula, and from a knowledge of the starting materials, a tentative structure could be written. Confirmation of the structure was obtained by either degradation to known compounds or an alternative synthesis of the compound from known starting materials. Thus, while the presence of functional groups could be determined rather straightforwardly, the connectivity of atoms and groups in a molecule were much more difficult to establish.
%Today structure proof involves the same components—purification, functional group identification, and establishment of atom and group connectivity; however, the ways in which these are accomplished are more efficient, sensitive, and reliable. They are also much faster. The ability to run reactions, purify products, and determine structures on milligram scales, often in a matter of hours, has caused a huge increase in the rate at which structural information can be obtained. This has resulted in an exponential growth of chemical knowledge and is directly responsible for the explosion of information being continually published in the chemical literature.
%The first step in the identification of any compound is to obtain that material in pure form. The most common way to achieve this goal today is to use chromatography. While a discussion of the many separation and purification techniques which utilize some form of chromatography are outside the focus of this book, all rely in one way or another on the interaction of molecules with a surface. Such interactions depend much more on the chemical properties of a molecule (functional groups, polarity, unsaturation, etc.) than on physical properties of the bulk substance (boiling point, vapor pressure, etc.). Furthermore the interactions of a compound with a surface allow it to be resolved (separated) from other substances by placing it in a flowing system (mobile phase). When the substance is not adsorbed to the surface, it moves over the surface at the same velocity as the mobile phase.
%When it is adsorbed to the surface, it does not advance with the mobile phase. Since adsorption is an equilibrium process, those compounds which are only weakly adsorbed to the surface spend a greater portion of time in the mobile phase and thus move over the surface faster than compounds which are more strongly adsorbed and thus spend more time immobilized on the surface. Because different compounds are adsorbed differently on the surface, each can travel at a different rate over the surface. By collecting the effluent from the surface as a series of fractions, individual compounds can be separated cleanly from other components in the original mixture because each component exits the surface at a different time.
%Many different mobile phases have been utilized to provide the forward velocity for nonadsorbed substances If the mobile phase is a gas, then the technique used is gas chromatography (GC). In GC, the surface to which the substances adsorb can be a wide variety of materials which are often prepared by coating an inert surface with a polymer whose properties are related to its structure. In this way the surface properties and hence adsorption of the solid surface can be varied to give the best chromatographic resolution.
%If a liquid is used as the mobile phase, the technique used is liquid chromatography (LC). The solid adsorbent is constrained in a tube or column through which the liquid mobile phase flows. Any number of solvents, buffer solutions, or supercritical fluids can be used as liquid mobile phases. High-pressure liquid chromatography (HPLC) is used if pressure is needed to force the liquid phase through the tube. If the liquid phase moves over a thin adsorbent surface propelled by capillary action, the technique used is thin-layer chromatography (TLC). In general, two types of surfaces are used as the solid phase.$

  $The Draconomicon$
%Exactly how long a dragon can live after reaching the great wyrm stage is a matter of some debate (some scholars contend that a dragon lives forever). Unfortunately, dragons themselves are little help in this matter. They keep no birth records and are apt to exaggerate their ages.
%The half-elf sages Guillaume and Cirjon de Cheirdon made a study of dragon ages by carefully noting when certain famous (and infamous) dragons reached their wyrm celebrations and then tracking their ages from there. Some later scholars suspect that Guillaume and Cirjon were silver dragons using half-elf guise, and that the speculations they published were in fact field notes. In any case, the pair eventually vanished, and their final resting places are not known. Perhaps they died in a dragon attack, or perhaps they are with us still, in other guises.
%Guillaume and Cirjon established that the shortest-lived true dragon, the white, can live as long as 2,100 years. The true dragon species that lives the longest is the gold; Guillaume and Cirjon put the gold’s maximum age at 4,400 years.
%In addition, the sages discovered that dragons can extend their life spans to some extent by entering a state called “the twilight.” That term, coined by Guillaume and Cirjon, refers to the closing phase of a dragon’s life. The cessation of growth at the great wyrm stage heralds the onset of death (as it does for most creatures that grow throughout their lives). A dragon can survive for centuries after reaching the great wyrm stage, but a dragon is mortal and cannot stave off death forever. The twilight occurs when the weight of a dragon’s years finally comes crashing down, forcing the dragon’s physiology into a downward spiral. A dragon’s twilight period can last for a number of years, but often the dragon succumbs when the twilight first sets in.
%Many dragons prefer to avoid a slow descent into death and leave the mortal coil with their dignity intact. Many great wyrms seem to just disappear at the ends of their lives. No one knows exactly where they go, but scholars have identified at least three possibilities: departure, guardianship, and dracolichdom.
%DEPARTURE
%A dragon can simply will its spirit to depart. Upon doing so, the dragon dies, and its spirit is released into the hereafter. A dragon prepares for its departure by consuming its entire hoard. Most dragons also travel to a dragon graveyard and die there.
%Dragon graveyards are ancient places whose origins are lost even to dragon memory. As a rule, they are accessible only to flying creatures, being situated on mountaintops, in hidden valleys (surrounded by jungle, deserts, or mountains), on islands located in windless or storm-tossed seas, or in the depths of great rifts on the earth.
%Within the graveyard, dangers abound. Storms of elemental energy often wash over dragon graveyards, and elemental vortexes often appear in random spots. Some of these may belch forth groups of hostile elemental creatures or suck the unwary right off the Material Plane and onto an elemental plane. Dragon carcasses or skeletons
%may spontaneously animate and walk about, attacking any living creatures they meet. Dragon graveyards also are haunted by ghostly dragons.
%Despite the dangers, dragon graveyards often draw visitors. According to legend, and some reputed discoveries, not all of a departed dragon’s consumed hoard is always destroyed, and many treasure hunters (showing dragonlike greed) eagerly seek out dragon graveyards for the treasures they are said to contain. Other visitors seek to obtain dragon remains for magical or alchemical purposes.
%GUARDIANSHIP
%At the end of its normal life, a dragon can elect to become a guardian, literally transforming into part of the landscape. After the dragon consumes its hoard, it changes itself into a geographic feature: hills, mountains, lakes, swamps, and groves seem to be the most common choices.
%Such areas become favorite places for dragons to lay their eggs. It is said that no nest of dragon eggs laid in such a locale will ever be disturbed. Wyrmling dragons living in the site are said to commune with the guardian spirit, receiving the knowledge they need to become strong adults.
%As with dragon graveyards, legends say that some of the late dragon’s treasure may still remain hidden at the site, making these features prime targets for treasure hunters. Extracting the treasure (if it exists at all) is apt to be difficult. Younger dragons living at the site usually resent intrusions, as do absentee parents who have laid eggs there (as we have seen, dragons that leave their eggs untended often still keep watch over their nests). These sites also attract their share of ghostly dragons, adding a new element of danger for trespassers.
%DRACOLICHDOM
%Some evil dragons enlist the aid of others to cheat death. The dragon and its servants create an inanimate object, called a phylactery, that will hold the dragon’s life force.
%Next, a special brew is prepared for the dragon to consume. The potion is a lethal poison that slays the dragon for which it was prepared without fail.
%Upon the death of the dragon, its spirit transfers itself to the phylactery. From the phylactery, the spirit can occupy any dead body that lies close by, including its own former body. If the body it currently inhabits is destroyed, the spirit returns to the phylactery, and from there it can occupy a new body.

  $Martial Teachings of the Northlands$
%Now I will speak of the Blessed Birds. They are no mere legends, young one—I have seen two of them in my travels. This is the beginning of their story.
%Three lifetimes ago, a young human called Reshar came to study at the hobgoblin monastery of Ur-Thaldaar. The hobgoblin swordmasters administered cruel tests and challenges, but, to their surprise, Reshar survived. They saw that he must be taught, and so they permitted him to remain.
%In the days of Reshar, the individual philosophies and traditions that we know as the Blessed Birds were scattered haphazardly across the world. Adherents of the various disciplines were the fiercest of rivals, each seeking to prove the superiority of his own philosophy over all the others.
%But having mastered the spar, Reshar set out to end this rivalry. He returned to each place where he had studied and took its single most promising student as his own apprentice. Then he led his apprentices to the Sunspire Mountains, where he founded the Temple of the Blessed Birds. For many years, Reshar and his masters sought the path to perfection, walking farther down the road of than anyone had before—or since. Hundreds of students came to them and learned much from their temple.
%After a century of study and teaching, Reshar called his masters together and told them he was leaving to travel the world again. Age had never touched him, other than to whiten his hair and line his face. The masters begged him to stay, but Reshar refused. Before he left, though, he gave each master a gift—a sword that embodied the principles, skills, and philosophy of the recipient’s first art. “As long as these swords remain together, the Temple will never fail,” he told the masters. “Now I go.” And he set off alone, on foot and unarmed, because he feared nothing in the world. No one ever saw him again.
%A lifetime passed, and one by one Reshar’s original disciples died or returned to their own lands. The students they left behind became masters in their own right, and they guarded the swords with great care. But one night, the rakshasa lord Kaziir-Thet came to the Temple of the Blessed Birds. He adopted the guise of a weary traveler and was given welcome at the temple. Kaziir-Thet stole the swords into the wastelands. The masters pursued, but they could not catch the clever rakshasa prince.
%From that day on, the temple began to fail. Slowly at first, the students of the various beliefs fell to bickering, consumed by the question of which path was best. Boasts and arguments became intrigues and deadly duels. In time, the remaining masters exiled the two of the masters who had plotted to murder the rest—from the temple to restore order and harmony.
%Enraged by their exile, the two outcast masters allied with each other, and together they raised an army of monsters in the wild mountains. A year after their exile, they returned at the head of a fearsome horde and destroyed the temple. It is said that all the masters died that night. It is said that someday the swords will be brought together again, Reshar will return from his wandering, and harmony will be restored to the world.
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%Followers of the Blessed Birds draw strength from divine inspiration. It is said that in the heat of battle, their creed grants them supernatural insight and creativity into their spar, giving them the power to best their enemies with exceptional strength and technique. The manifestations of the Birds' insight is diverse, and reflects the true heart of the warrior they inspire. Some warriors draw into their blades a surging holy spirit, striking with such awesomeness that their foe is left scalded and smitten. Others recieve the power to call their compatriots to action, overwhelming enemies not with strength or speed, but with spirit, motivation, and alliance.
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