Carl is old. Carl is really old. Carl is really, really old.
In fact, Carl is so old that there is a nasty rumor going around that he’s a lich and has simply forgotten it. It’s possible, given that Carl is so old he’s forgotten more about magic than most wizards will ever know.
Of course, that’s also a problem.
When Carl started out on the road to wizardry there were none of these newfangled wizard schools and adventuring parties were likely to die 12 feet into a dungeon due the deadly falling block trap that was always conveniently put there. That’s back when being a wizard actually meant something. Or so Carl says.
He started, like most young would-be wizards, as an apprentice to an existing wizard. Back then wizards were old men with beards who jealously guarded their spells and built solitary towers to defend against other wizards and generally held a scorched earth policy as being “a bit understated”. Those were the days, as Carl will tell you, even if you don’t ask. The “good old days” when the wizard motto was “There’s no kill like overkill!”.
In those days a young man would apprentice to a wizard and spend his time as little more than a slave, fetching water, cleaning, cooking, gathering weird components, and dodging spells as their masters attempted to test out new magic. The only way to learn magic was to be cunning, staying up late to learn the basics from the tomes that were forbidden to be touched while the master was awake, and then, after many hard years if you were lucky and extremely talented at survival, you’d escape with some stolen spells and maybe a wand and start your career. The good old days.
Carl escaped his master with a few stolen spells and a wand, as tradition demanded* and immediately set about finding an adventuring party. As Carl will tell you, constantly, regardless of whether you’ve asked or not, adventuring parties were always looking for wizards in the “good old days” and they knew how to treat a wizard. There was a general fear of, and respect for, magic in those days. It was wild and unpredictable at best, and only the most powerful wizards could even hope to exert even the least control over it. Oh yes, let me tell you, adventurers knew what a wizard was worth back then, kids. Every wizard worth his components was a specialist, always having the “right” spell for the “right” job. Or, more accurately, considering any spell they cast to be “right” for the job by virtue of their casting it.
Like any young wizard fresh out of training and in the working world, Carl had dreams of building a tower, summoning succubae, and torturing apprentices, but all of that would require money. Thus Carl kept working the adventuring circuit, but time passes, sometimes quite quickly, and Carl saw the adventuring game and magic change a few times over his many years. The more it changed, the less he liked it. The less he liked it, the more he resisted it, and one day he just decided he wasn’t going to do it anymore. He gave up his dreams of a tower and an apprentice and summoning naughty demons and started phoning it in. He’d already gained his title, The Lightning of Wrath, and he really didn’t care much about all this wizard academy nonsense and all these hippie attitudes he was seeing among the “kids” in the adventuring parties. In his day a Druid was a Druid. They weren’t some tree-hugging sissy. After the Goblin-Faerie War of Terrortree Forest, where he worked with Goblin Field Marshall Cuspis the Dry Toothpick To the Eye, he really had had enough. He took a position as a court magician for some nameless minor baron and settled down to a life of doing absolutely nothing.
Because Carl is old. Carl is really old. Carl is really, really old. In fact, Carl is so old that there is a nasty rumor going round that he still owes Moses money.
Carl was fully prepared to retire on his pension when his employer was overthrown by an adventurer who’d just established his own keep nearby. His home in smoking ruins, his employer dead, and his pension no longer in existence, Carl didn’t know what to do with what remained of his life. The only things he had left were his magical staff, a portion of his spells, and a letter he’d received from the same Cuspis he’d worked with years before. The letter was an offer of employment serving the would-be world conqueror Morcar. With no other options open to him Carl made the journey and joined the Wizards of Morcar, a decision he regrets every single day of his life.
Personality: Carl is old. Carl is really old. Carl is really, really old. In fact, Carl is so old that there is a nasty rumor going round that his first familiar was a dinosaur. Carl is also a being of pure evil. Well, he would be a being a pure evil if he was in his prime, but as he is not, he’s mainly just grouchy. Nothing makes Carl happy. The world has changed and Carl doesn’t like it. His back always hurts, he’s going bald, he has a bum ticker, and the temperature is never quite right. Not to mention he has to work with these “kids and this stupid dogman thing”. Carl will go into long tirades about the “good old days”, which tends to confuse his co-workers because half the things that Carl claims seem most improbable, or at least historically inaccurate. Being quite set in his ways, Carl refuses to research new magic or learn any new spells, although it might be Wizard Dementia, in which case he simply cannot. However, since he’s not even inclined to try, nobody actually knows. Cuspis has become concerned that Carl is actually bipolar but even he doesn’t suspect the truth. Carl once invented a spell that he claims “will fix everyone’s little red wagon” but he can’t remember it and it is not in any of his spell books, leading to the suspicion that he’s confused or lying.
Likes: puns, Thin Mints, kicking Dingle
Dislikes: kids, other wizards, other people, weather, Dingle
The Truth: Unbeknownst to anyone, including Carl, is that Carl is not Carl. Rather, the being called Carl the Lightning of Wrath is not the being that Cuspis met at the Battle of the Stump That Looks a Bit Like a Wang. That Carl died in the battle. Or rather that Carl’s psyche died in the battle, but not his body. When Cuspis cast his conjoined Temporal Stasis and Dimensional Aperture spells Carl was very close to ground zero and he was in the process of casting that spell that would, “fix everyone’s little red wagon”. The energy from the Dimensional Aperture leapt into Carl as his greatest spell was being cast, and in the process destroyed the Stormlord…sort of. What actually happened was a trifold crossrip that opened alternate timelines and sucked two different timeline versions of Carl out of reality and into the vacuum left by the destruction of Carl’s psyche. Had the spell worked properly, Carl would have accessed the timeline wherein Carl allied with Morcar long before the battle, grew in power, overthrew the dark wizard, destroyed him, and accidentally destroyed the world while attempting to make himself immortal, taken the power from that Carl, and proceeded to make himself the overlord of his own reality. The feedback from the crossrip, however, grabbed a younger version of Carl from one timeline and an EVEN OLDER version from another, and melded them together in the body of Carl as we know him. The result is that Carl doesn’t so much remember the “good old days” as he remembers things that haven’t happened yet and that never did happen in his own world. Which is a blessing considering what Carl could get up to if he were ever able to put his mind to anything.
Somewhat ironically, younger Carl had a destiny to invent the waffle cone.
*The tradition is, of course, for the master to prepare a few spells in a book and a wand of minor utility and leave them in a secure place that is easily broken into. No one can say exactly when this tradition was established, but it is assumed that it was established in extreme self-interest, to prevent being murdered in one’s sleep as legends say it was in the “real good old days”.
