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Summoner Lore & Fiction
🕑 Added 2025-08-24 01:12:42 +0000 UTCHey Folks! MC here! Since you folks got the Summoner yesterday, I figured today was a good day for the lore!
This isn't final, it'll get an editing pass, and will eventually be integrated into the main doc. You can see our thinking is changing over time regarding what different summoners are called and what their organizations are. But until that future revision, this is the straight dope!
Enjoy!
Intro
The process by which essence, the ambient energy of creation, can be channeled and focused to pierce the veil between worlds and summon biddable creatures, is obscure. Deliberately hidden by those who master it.
In principle summoning should be no more difficult to learn than elementalism, since the two disciplines both manipulate essence. In practice there is obviously some difference, as elementalists are relatively common, summoners are vanishingly rare.
While there are known incidents of summoners who learned their craft through study alone, most apprentice themselves to a mentor. Mentors are both hard to find and typically recalcitrant. Many supplicants are rejected. Many who are accepted fail their first test. By tradition summoners guard their knowledge jealously.
Each summoning discipline has its own loose affiliation of practitioners called Circles. Most members of a summoning circle know only two or three other members. They have no centralized leadership, no agreed upon meeting place. One may go months or years without meeting another member. But information makes its way among them. Even the far-flung practitioners of the summoning arts enjoy their gossip.
Tradition holds the necromantic circle, the Circle of Graves is the oldest. Summoning undead from the Necropolitan Ruin, the City at the Bottom of the Timescape. The elemental circle, the Circle of Storms may be the most numerous, summoning elemental motes from Quintessence, the plane of all elements.
While the Circle of Graves certainly enjoys a sinister reputation, the Circle of Blight, also known as the Circle of the Wasteland, diabolists who summon demons from the Abyssal Waste are often outlawed. One may argue that animating a soulless carcass is a morally neutral act. No such argument exists to defend those who summon the armies of that wasted abyssal land.
Finally, the most celebrated and benign circle—summoners lauded in folklore and often mistaken for elementalists—the Circle of Spring calls forth fey animations from Arcadia, the home of Val, god of the elves.
There are rumors of another organization of summoners, though whether it exists and what it calls itself is not well-known. Rumors and folklore hold that membership in this fifth circle is permitted only to the most powerful summoner from the other four circles. If this circle exists, it may be called the Eidos Circle, or the Eidos Society.
Essence, it seems, cannot impart or touch a soul. This much is known. The animations summoners pull from places like the Necropolitan Ruin or Arcadia have the semblance of life, sometimes even personalities, but these attitudes are something like a recording. Programming. Pixies and sprites speak, but they seem to repeat the same stock phrases. They do not appear to think novel thoughts or create. There are, at the last, limits to the power of essence.
On Summoning
He obeyed two masters. The one who loved him. The one he protected. Would protect with his life. And she protected him. Beyond certainty, he knew they would protect each other. In every way that mattered, she was the other half of him.
And the other. The one he feared. The one with power. The one who burned with hate. This one too, he must obey. Their relationship was complex, the three of them. Sometimes his two masters fought, barked at each other, much anger, and he knew it was his place to sit and watch. When the barking was over, there would be purpose, and he would make them proud. They were a good team.
Sometimes the barking got very loud, and then very quiet. And the one who loved him would go away, and he would follow. They would be alone together, sometimes for so long he forgot about the dark master. But eventually she would return, or the dark one would find them, and it was as though nothing had happened.
It was like this with families.
But always he knew there was a crisis ahead. He couldn’t see it, but he felt it. He took pride in being a servant of the dark master. Pleasing him was difficult, but the pride he felt afterwards….
And he knew the dark master cared for him, as well as his other master. But there was something else inside that one. The hate. He knew: someday the hate would take over.
He wondered if his other master knew this.
---
He stared at the corpse at his feet. He looked around the clearing. No tracks, no sign of activity. No obvious way the corpse got here. No sign of struggle or clear method of termination.
He looked up. Through the canopy of emerald green he saw white clouds float past a cerulean sky. He saw the shape, the depth of the clouds like massive flying cities. The world contains beauty enough. And miracles, he thought. He took a deep breath, the smells of the forest filled his lungs.
He looked down at the dead peasant. And mysteries enough. And horrors. He imagined himself as standing somewhere between the two. But, he noted, prodding the corpse with his boot, certainly closer to one than the other.
His herald was nowhere to be seen. This was not unusual after a row. He would not compel a servant to stay if he knew doing so might force them to leave and never return. Even his tyranny had its limits.
He crouched, using his staff for support, reached out, and touched his fingertips to the corpse’s face where it pressed into the rich earth. The corpse juddered for a moment, movements mechanical, not organic, then something like a sigh escaped its mouth.
He stood and ordered his thoughts. When he was young, the power filled him and he leapt at whatever question popped into his mind, wasting precious moments. Now he was older. Much older. He held more than power now, he held wisdom. He knew that broad questions, even vague, left room for answers that were more enlightening.
“How camest thou to this place?” he said in the old formulation his circle taught. It wasn’t required, but it was traditional.
Without moving, lips slack, not forming words, sound emerged from the corpse’s mouth. This was a routine occurrence for him, no longer did his skin crawl, no longer did he hold his breath.
“The twilight children,” a woman’s voice said, and it echoed as though coming from deep within a cave. “The arrows. My family.”
Wheels spun in his mind, a look of intense concentration on his broken face. He sensed, he knew from her response he had asked the right question. But her words were more a key than an answer. He filed it away and pressed on.
“Setati,” he said. “Priestess of the Boatman.” It was not a question, it was a prompt. Let the corpse respond how they saw fit.
“Urged us. To stay. We should not. Have left. But we could not. Have stayed.”
He nodded. Took a deep breath. We’re on the right track. He pushed his thin hair in streaks of black and white out of his face.
When first granted this power by the Circle, he would chase down as many answers as he could get before the window closed. But that just filled his mind with fog. Answers became just more questions. Now he was a master, and knew it was better to let the conversation take its natural course. Do not press the issue.
He asked a final question, the least important. Almost trivial. He was sure he had what he needed already.
The voice came, faint. This would be the last answer. “I was Gwir Pawley,” then only a whisper. “I am Gwir Pawley.”
This startled him and he spoke aloud. “I was,” he quoted and looked around the forest, the trees, the outcropping of rock as though they might answer. “I am.”
Mysteries enough, he thought, and stroked his chin. At the edge of his reason, he thought he glimpsed something like an answer. But his worldlore was weak in this category.
He scanned the clearing once again, still no sign of his herald. He pursed his lips and closed his eyes, drawing himself up.
Muttering in the first language, he opened a channel to one who might know. His mentor said it would only work locally, recently. But he had gone beyond the knowledge of the circle, he had already learned much denied to others. His powers were more…complicated.
Calmness came over him. Serenity. Rest. Warmth. Home. He gritted his teeth, these feelings were unwelcome.
A smell. The smell of her hair, her clothes. Almost he heard the sound of song. A lullaby.
The old woman walked into his body. His face softened. His eyes opened, and she saw. His lips moved, and her voice emerged.
“Oh my child,” her voice said. It was nothing like the voice of the corpse, it was alive. “My darling boy look at you. I would that you were free from this obsession that has its claws around your soul.”
His face contorted, and was his again.
“Is this an area of bilocation?” he asked.
His features softened, his eyes sad. He shook his head. “The gods were wise when they made the world,” the old woman’s voice said. “The burden of life is too great to bear for more than a small span of years.”
He clenched his fist, untrimmed nails bit into pale flesh. “Is this,” he repeated, “an area. Of bilocation?”
She sighed. He would not be denied. “Yes,” she said, and now when his face changed, he was smiling a knowing smile. He nodded. “I thought so,” he said. “A wode?”
She needed no more prompting. His power had mastered her, and she must answer. She was, he knew, more lorewise than he would ever be.
“No,” she said. “Not a wode. But no longer just a forest. It is something else. It is becoming.”
The channel cost more than effort to maintain. He had the lore he needed. “Becoming,” he said, and relaxed. Letting the woman’s spirit rest again. He felt her reach out to him, attempt to embrace him as she faded. He ignored her. “Becoming what?” he wondered aloud.
“Become your death!” a feral voice barked.
He glanced over his shoulder and noted there were five demogoblins at the edge of the clearing. What was this weakness of pride that caused ones such as these to announce themselves when an unannounced assault might have had a chance?
Only five meant it was a knife, a patrol. There would be a fist nearby with its own death captain. That would be a problem. But not this.
The hobgoblins’ ancient pact which birthed their species made them, in his opinion, better than either goblins or humans. He admired them. It was a shame these would be dead in a moment.
“Another straggler!” said one of the demon-descended goblin hybrids, a female. “At this rate we’ll kill their whole village! One lost stray at a time!” The other hobgoblins laughed and sneered at this, but the one who spoke first, the one who announced himself, was peering at the dark-robed human in the center of the clearing.
“You interrupt me in my work,” the human said, his voice calm. “Remove yourself.”
“Remove…!” said the female, incredulous. She hefted her long spear and looked at her commander. “Allow me, Vhorag! This one is beneath you!”
Vhorag was wiser than his eager soldier, and hesitated, sensing the presence of power before him. The lancer saw this as permission and howled as she charged. The others immediately followed.
Inside him, always now, there was a door. And pressure, things on the other side desperate for release, desperate to serve. To serve him. All he had to do…was allow it.
He gestured with a hand and a row of iron bars festooned with sharp metal spikes jutting out at all angles shot up out of the ground in front of the demogoblin lancer. She and her cohort slammed into the cold iron, and the bits of corpses, hands, arms, that decorated the bars reached out, grasping. All the warmth of the forest in summer fled, and cold, cold from the deep, spread out from the iron gate.
The hobgoblin lancers stood in terror. Their commander barked an order in their native tongue and turned to flee, leaving his terrified soldiers behind.
As soon as he turned, the earth shook. Once, twice, then a thing, a creature, loomed out of the forest.
A giant. Small for a giant, but a giant nonetheless, it bent two trees apart to make room, and the sounds of their trunks snapping were twin thunderclaps.
The hobgoblin commander barked something at the giant. An order? Whatever it was, the giant could not hear. Would not obey.
For the giant was long-dead. And now in the thrall of a greater power.
With speed it never possessed in life, the giant snatched the hobgoblin commander up off the ground and, using both its rotting fists, tore the commander in half. Scalding, bright-red blood erupted from the screaming body, burning into the giant zombie’s flesh.
It took no notice. It stepped forward and with a stomp, crushed two lancers. The other two turned in fear to flee but, forgetting the iron gate behind them, immediately impaled themselves on its spikes.
The hobgoblins now all dead, the giant dropped the legs and lower half of the commander from its left hand, and then plucked the head off the torso in its right. It worked the head for a moment, first popping the helmet off, then scraping as much flesh off as it could.
It stepped over the iron gate, and bent down to deliver the skull, covered in blood and bits of flesh, to its master. The iron gate sank into the ground.
“Thank you,” he said, and held the skull before him, turning it this way and that. A mediocre specimen.
The giant zombie bowed, then sunk into the earth that birthed it. Leaving a wide carpet of fresh earth where once there was grass and vines.
For a moment the clearing was silent again. Carrion beasts would come and take advantage of the fresh corpses eventually.
He heard footsteps running toward him, twigs snapping under feet and two figures burst into the clearing. A young woman with a longspear ready for battle, and a magnificent beast as large as a horse. Feline, seemingly white but in fact possessed of a mantle that rippled through many hues one could see if one looked closely. Its eyes took in everything with keen, seeking intelligence. It did not roar, did not announce itself. But seeing only corpses and the dark master, it sat on its haunches.
The girl ran to him and the beast loped along with her. She was alert, agitated, but the beast was relaxed. Whatever happened here was over.
“I’m sorry,” she said, frantic. “I…we smelled blood and found a trail of it.” She looked at the red corpses littering the clearing. “We thought it might be hobgoblins.” Her head snapped up to look at him, worried. “Master, what does it mean?! If these creatures are hunting the villagers they may already be…!”
He snapped his fingers at her, once. It sounded like a whip crack. Her back stiffened involuntarily, she brought herself under control.
Mastering herself, she got down on one knee and bowed her head. The great beast beside her sat on its haunches and did the same.
“My lord,” she said. “Your herald bids you. Command me.”
Comments
Michael Kingery
The summoner is an awesome class. I just really don't like the idea that necromancers summon undead from another plane rather than animating corpses.
MCDM Productions
12 minions!
Scott Hall
Haven't looked at the summoner yet, but showed one of my players the art, and she termed it "pretty metal." Told her about Matt wanting the summoner to call up 10 minions, and that got the Wow factor.
haggis42
I know this has been commented before but I just feel it deserves repeating. Every time I read stuff clearly written by MC my mind automatically adds his voice and cheerful/enthusiastic voice/cadence. Something which never fails to make me smile. Thank you for being someone who brings a smile to me Matt. Even if you don't do it on purpose it is much appreciated. Also please don't feel burdened by this, I'm lucky enough to have other sources of joy as well, and if you want to discuss a serious topic that's okay as well. ps. while this comment is specifically aimed at one person this counts for every public facing person at MCDM, you all are great.
John WS Marvin
Do we know how the Summoner will be released? Standalone, or part of a bigger product?
haggis42
Probably going to be a copyright issue, but can we have bright yellow minions wearing blue pants?
