Raid Shadow Legends Lore: The Story of Nekmo Thaar

Nekmo Thaar comes from a spawn lineage of Lizardmen healers, all-wise and skilled. Once a practitioner of the ways of restoration in a quiet settlement on the edge of the Sorrowlakes, he might have remained there in peaceful obscurity, tending the elderly and the infirm and teaching his ways to the next generation, were it not for the coming of the Orc warlord Dordrum. The Orc intended to carve out his fiefdom in Peltas and decided to claim the village where Thaar lived. Dordrum and his warband descended on the settlement, killing those who resisted and demanding tithes and fealty from those they spared.

Thaar was not a warlike being, and he initially acquiesced. He cared deeply about his fellow villagers and his community, however, and as the months passed he realized that their subjugation was intolerable. Dordrum took too much, and those who survived his takeover were on the brink of starvation. But what could be done? The villagers were not strong enough to fight Dordrum and his brutes, at least not on an even footing.

Thaar decided to change that. After much thought, he realized that if knew how to heal he also knew how to destroy. A great many of the insects, fish, and plants from the Sorrowlakes that he employed in his medicines also, if prepared or treated differently, or used in excess, possessed toxic or poisonous properties. The physiology of Thaar’s lineage meant that he was able to extract medicinal properties from certain foods in his gullet and turn them into salving liquids that he could excrete via the sharp spines that jutted out of his back. Thaar realized also that, if he ingested more unwholesome meals – from razorleaves and pond-slitherers to rockberries, itch ants, molder sprouts, and more — he could induce the generation of toxins instead.

It was not long before Thaar had developed a wide array of poisons. He spoke to a number of the leading villagers, describing how he hoped to use these new weapons against the occupiers, and asked whether they would aid him. They agreed.

Firstly, Thaar poisoned Dordrum’s food. Due to Thaar’s inexperience with poisons, his dosage was not enough to kill the Orc, but ironically it ensured that the warlord was brought before Thaar in his capacity as the local healer. Dordrum’s underlings failed to realize that the tinctures the Lizardman was giving their leader was speeding along his demise. The food and water given to the Orc warriors was likewise laced with contaminants by the villagers, on Thaar’s instructions. By the time the Lizardmen’s oppressors realized what was happening, it was too late.

The triumph of Thaar and his fellows was tragically short-lived. While Dordrum lay dead, his daughter had been elsewhere, bringing other parts of the Sorrowlakes into her father’s dominion. When she heard of Dordrum’s death she swiftly gathered her own warriors. They descended upon the village, slaughtering all they found, intending to leave no survivors. Thaar narrowly escaped, convinced by the other villagers there was nothing that could be done to save their homes.

Convinced that he had brought devastation down upon his own people, Thaar wandered the Sorrowlakes before eventually crossing the Valdemar Strait and coming to the Free City of Arnoc. The city’s sewers were infested by impoverished Lizardmen, and amid the lawlessness Thaar found a new purpose. He had tried healing, being a force for good, but all it had wrought was
death and destruction. The sights he saw beneath Arnoc did nothing to rebuild his belief in any inherent goodness to the world. Why suffer for doing righteous deeds, when none around him in his new home seemed deserving of them? So it was that Thaar embraced the role of a master of toxins and venoms, a death-dealer who sold out his prodigious talents to the highest bidder. There was no shortage of such individuals in Arnoc, where only the strongest, or the most cunning, survived.

Arnoc’s murderous Lizardmen gangs will do much to win the services of ‘Poison Throat’, the infamous master of venoms who darts through the free city’s crumbling sewers in search of fresh ingredients. The Cult of the Skullsworn in particular court his abilities, though Thaar has never sworn himself to them, nor to the Skinners or any other gang who fight in Arnoc’s deadly underworld. Thaar’s refusal to take sides is one of his selling points, but when a small cut festers or fresh food brings on sickness anywhere, it is he who is blamed, a fact that only enhances his reputation. Few know Thaar’s origins, of his days as a kind and humble healer, but that matters not, for that Thaar is now long gone.

This Nekmo Thaar lore is originally posted by Plarium in-game.