Spellweaver

Spellweavers, also known as Weavers, were a race of highly intelligent humanoids originating from an alternate Prime Material plane.

Gifted with an unprecedented mastery of the Art, they built an empire that spanned the multiverse before meeting a tragic and almost instant end.

Description
Weavers were alien-looking creatures: their genderless body sporting six arms, and an exceptionally long neck around which they could easily turn their head completely. Their skin was smooth and hairless, and was usually gray, with patches of beige, pink or yellow. Their blood was metallic blue in color, reminiscent of quicksilver.

The body and mind of spellweavers were naturally in tune with arcane magic. As a result they displayed an incredible mastery of the Art, using powerful telepathy and accomplishing feats such as casting multiple spells at once. Their natural dominion over magic was akin to that of sorcerers.

Lifecycle
"Now I am my death and my decay, and soon I shall be nothing... but the scheme of my causes will repeat itself, and generate me again. I lived six times to breed six new lives, and I shall be the same, identical life. I shall be born again as six recurrences of myself."

- Extract of the Breeding Tablet

Personality
Claiming their civilization is older than the birth of the deities, the Weavers believed themselves to be above the gods and didn't care for divine magic.

Spellweavers continuously looked for magic items, necessary to power their furnaces and to accomplish important rituals. While they were open to trading, they weren't opposed to using force or persuasion to accomplish their goals.

Combat
Spellweavers often initiated combat themselves, organizing thoroughly planned raids against target of high magical power. Raids could be prepared months in advance, using scrying magic and spies to get information on their target. They usually involved teleporting the weaver and its allies in the enemy base, tying opponents, and teleporting back as soon as the deed was done. Targets of such raids were either magic items, or powerful spellcasters whose soul they siphoned with their chromatic disk.

Society
While all spellweavers were masters of magic, some were classified by sages in multiple categories depending of their specialties:
 * Battle Weavers were masters of melee combat, using their six arms to wield multiple blades in a deadly ballet. They hunted down the best combatants in existence, aiming to capture worthy souls in their disk.
 * Thought Weavers were masters of the mind, dominating their enemies with psychic powers. They were usually the masterminds behind successful raids and complex schemes.
 * Hex Weavers were drawing power from the Shadowfell itself. They usually followed their own plans, puzzling even other weavers and sometimes pitting them against each other.

Spellweavers spent most of their time trying to rebuild their ancient civilization. In order to do this they sought out the ruins of their former colonies&mdash;called "nodes"&mdash;which often took the form of huge pyramids of stone and steel. Once found, the weavers repaired and reactivated them.

Reactivated nodes were linked together through a network of planar portals and housing huge furnaces capable of sucking the soul of mortals and the power of magic items. Weavers usually built a single node per world or plane of existence, making their discovery a true rarity.

Empire
At the peak of its power, the spellweaver empire was mostly peaceful. Highly intellectually advanced, they kept a role of watcher over the multiverse, only occasionally subjugating more primitive creatures to perform chores and hard labor. Above all spellweavers liked to study semantics, and traveled the multiverse to study other cultures, their symbols, languages and codes. Through those studies they developed uncanny telepathic abilities and incredible magical talents.

When encountering a race that posed a threat to them, the weavers gifted them with powerful magical items and artifacts, and let them implode from within. After the fall of the empire, some weavers continued to keep this tradition alive.

Uses
Spellweaver remains had magical properties. Notably, a spellweaver skull was amongst the ingredients of an antidote against the zombie plague which hit Chult in the late 15 century DR.

Nerra
Weavers had a strong relationship with Nerra, humanoids with mirror-like skin who helped build the portals connecting their bases. Some sages believed that the Nerra were an artificial race created by the Weavers.

Other races
Spellweavers were not against using other races as servants, or allying themselves with powerful factions if it served their plans. They favored working with races opposed to the gods, and with elemental forces such as efreets.

If they needed to negotiate with other races, the Weavers would often call a meeting in the City of Brass.



History
According to spellweavers&mdash;mostly from their written history&mdash;their civilization was a great empire that spanned the multiverse and predated the creation of the gods and primordials, in times long forgotten.

The empire stood against a terrible enemy from the Far Realm, trying to prevent a seed of chaos from entering the cosmos. They partly failed and the seed ruptured, destroying their homeland apart and scattering it across the planes. According to them, this event created the Astral Sea and the Elemental Chaos.

According to sages studying them, it's unclear if the history told by the spellweavers is true. Some speculate that they tried to acquire total knowledge of all existing communication across reality, while others believe the fall of the empire was due to a grandiose but failed attempt to alter reality itself across the multiverse. According to those sages, every furnace exploded one after the other in a chain reaction that destroyed the empire in a single moment. Only a few weavers were away from the nodes at the time, and became the ancestors of all subsequent members of the race.

In the, the city of Treshla was destroyed by a pod of beholders seeking to eradicate a spellweaver base located in the city's catacombs. As a consequence, the spellweavers went further underground, and settled north on the fallen kingdom of Barakuir. According to rumors, some spellweavers are still lurking in tunnels far below Treshla.

During the, gold dwarves from the Great Rift allied themselves with a colony of spellweavers to help them fight duergar and they beholder allies in the war for the reclamation of Shanatar.

The Forgotten One
Both the spellweaver and thri-kreen races were rumored to have a connection to the divine self of Jergal, the "Lord of the End of Everything".

Goals
The end goal of the Spellweaver race was unknown to all but them. However, some sages theorized that their final goal was to reunite the planes together&mdash;an event of apocalyptical proportions that would kill all, including the gods themselves.