Dilbert the Mage

The mage of the Middle Tor mine — the "Mage-Man" the hermit Pentuckle spoke of, drowned/died when the mine burned, and now a ghost bound to his fire-gutted upper office. In life he kept the operation's records; in death a fragment of that routine remains, and he sits endlessly miming the act of writing a logbook that no longer exists — perceiving objects but not people, oblivious to the party moving around him.

Pentuckle blames the fire on the Mage-Man ("the last thing he did") — and he is wrong. The mage's own research log, page 6 of the Menagoles Mine Journal, ends with him hearing screams from far below and going down into the smoke to save whoever he could. His value to the party was always his journal, whose contents Fenric recovered from the magical residue of his years of ghostly writing; the handout page now supplies the rest of it, including what he was actually researching and why.

(Spelling: the GM said "Dilbert" aloud once in play and wrote "Dillbert" on the handout. The vault keeps the note at "Dilbert" and carries both.)

Session 51 (found — journal read)

• Encountered in the drowned office of the burned mine, silently scribing empty air. The party breaks (then, via Fenric, rebuilds) his desk, and moves the ghost to a fresh corner so its own aura stops clouding the writing it leaves behind.
• Fenric reads the glowing aura-residue of the repeated writing — decoded as Dilbert the Mage's journal. The key reveal: Laewendas is going after the "Godkiller Shard" — the Shard of the Autarch, confirming the mine's true purpose as a hunt for the god-slaying crystal.
• He remains a standing Speak-with-Dead / interrogation lead the party can return to — and a far more valuable one than it looked, since he was inside the operation's confidence and went down toward whatever was screaming.

His research (Mine Journal 6/8)

Page 6 of the Menagoles Mine Journal is his working record — logs, readings and proportions of crystals found at various depths, layers and sediments. He was the mine's surveyor as much as its clerk, and the two findings he set down are the operation's whole strategy: crystals are found more often the deeper you go, but small pockets appear anywhere in the mountains at times.

The first finding is the technical argument for sinking a shaft instead of chasing a vein — the argument BAWMU's committee sold to the diggers, and the depth Vara'nak Gar-Galdar watched them drive with the Queen's boring machine. The second means the crystal is not unique to the Middle Tor; anywhere in the range around Menagoles may hold a pocket.

He was a volunteer, not a captive. Unlike the kidnapped alchemist Snuffles, forced to cook ore in a shed, Dillbert was glad of the work:

"Dillbert takes great effort to separate themselves from their work. For the benefit of Laewendas, and her efforts to better Rivalon, Dillbert is glad and excited to partake in such research."

And he understood exactly what the research was for:

"If it is possible to reproduce the material known as 'Shards of the Autarch' it is theoretically possible to emulate the power of a woman who killed a god that hunted gods."

That is the clearest statement of Laewendas's motive the vault has. The goal is not to find a Shard but to reproduce one — the manufacturing problem Dr. Provostinalkov is still losing to in the Gwyndinas Sewers — and the point of reproducing it is to emulate The Autarch herself. His phrase for the God-Emperor she killed, "a god that hunted gods," is the mine's own contemporary description of him.

How he died

His final entry is the last thing anyone in that mine wrote down:

• He hears screams from below.
• "One scream, unlike the others, was made by no lungs of flesh."
• Smoke billows from the lower, lower shaft.
• He will go down and try to save as many as he can — "it is his purpose as a spellcaster to put his often unspent potential into saving lives."

He went toward it. A staff mage with an office and a logbook, hearing a mine full of people burn in the shaft far beneath him, wrote down that saving lives was what his unspent potential was for — and then went down. He did not come back, and the ghost the party found in Session 51 is what stayed behind.

This ends the Mage-Man rumour. The fire's origin was the deep supply storeroom, lit deliberately from multiple points (Session 52) — below Dillbert, not at his desk — and the man who lit it was Foreman Brent Pallwath. Dillbert is the second man the mine's official story defamed, alongside Vara'nak Gar-Galdar. Both of them died trying to stop it.

Threads

• Nobody has cleared his name. Vara'nak asked, in writing, and the party delivered. Dillbert never asked, and Pentuckle is still telling every visitor to the flooded deep that the Mage-Man burned the mine.
• He is still there, and still writing. A ghost that perceives objects but not people, mid-routine — but Speak with Dead, or anything that reaches a shade directly, now has specific questions to put to him: what the non-flesh scream was, what he found on the way down, and whether he saw Brent Pallwath set the fire.
• Which crystal did he log? His survey does not distinguish the red explosive ore, the blue magical vein, or the refined green "panache" of The Foredweller Research Facility. Whether his depth-trend applies to all three or one is unstated.