Artificer (Imaskari)

Imaskari artificers were the mages of the Raurin Empire, or Imaskar. They were known to be haughty, arrogant, and overwhelmingly powerful.

In the year, Emperor Umyatin of Imaskar gave himself the title of Lord Artificer; all emperors would use the same title until the destruction of the Empire in.

The Imaskari were known to have an Artificers' Guild. The guild was active in the facility underneath Maskana, where they studied the powers of unusual creatures. The symbol of the Guild consisted of a crescent and a fox.

The longest-lasting legacy of the Imaskari was their extensive use of extradimensional spaces and portals, which had transformed their cities' design almost from the beginning of their empire. High-class dwellings, such as Sonjar's Tower, which belonged to an artificer who lived through the end of the Empire, had permanent portals to the Inner Planes for things as minor as pond water, ventilation, and even cooking fire. Imaskari wizards were also asiduous users of pacts with extraplanar creatures. Both Umyatin and Omanond were often represented as making compacts with demons or strange fey creatures.

The artificers were aware not just of planes from the Great Wheel, but also some otherwise unknown planes, such as a Dimension of Silence and a Dimension of Darkness, both accessible from portals in the City of Solon. Under the orders of Lord Artificer Khotan, artificers of the Middle Kingdoms period kidnapped the ancestors of the Mulan not only from a different crystal sphere, but across different times, suggesting that the artificers were also capable of creating permanent portals across time. Similarly, The Elder Evil, Pandorym, was summoned to the Realms near the end of the Imaskar empire, probably under the orders of Lord Yuvaraj. It was said to hail from an entirely different cosmology, and to be capable of not only seeing across thousands of years, but make minute changes across the timeline.

Shortly after the Silent Death in the late Middle Kingdoms period, The Imaskari had developed an intense scorn for the divine. Artificers created wards aimed at thwarting divine magic through experimentation and torture of druids, priests, shamans, and similar. Those wards were later employed to keep the Mulan slaves' prayers from reaching their gods. The practice of torturing divine spellcasters, however, continued well up until the final collapse of the Empire, almost 2000 years later; Sonjar's Tower had rooms for that purpose.

An ancient arcane Imaskari text, "The Chants of Arcainasyr, as recorded by Macchius the Ebon Flame" held incantations that were worded as hateful littanies of foul destruction, prayers to nameless deities of malevolence. A copy available in the College of Mages of Cimbar circa was also enciphered with a simple substitution cypher. Per Aeron Morieth's judgement after reading the text, the Imaskari sorcerers had probably bound dark spirits in their own bodies for power.

Imaskari wizards were known to extend their lives through sorcery. Lord Artificer Omanond ruled for a minimum of 700 years between and. Kujawa, another artificer and later Emperor of the successor state of Anok-Imaskar, ruled between and. Hilather, another wizard, lived from Omanond's reign to the end of the Empire, and then for more than a millenium as Halaster Blackcloak.

The Imaskari were aware of earth magic. Sonjar's Tower was built inside an earth node to better take advantage of its powers; Deep Imaskar was built in a cave sought specifically for the strength of its faerzress.