Clan Saytar: the alchemist and emperor clan

Every Emperor of Mól came out of Clan Saytar, and no other clan ever produced one. They were hobgoblin by blood, though blood is the smaller part of what a clan was. People married into a clan, were adopted into one, or were taken into one for service done well enough to earn it. To call a clan hobgoblin describes the family at the center of it and not everyone who stood under its name.

What they were known for besides ruling was alchemy, and the two were never told apart. Saytar were the Empire’s supreme rulers and its alchemical architects at once, credited with founding it out of early breeding programs married to a revolutionary alchemy, and with directing what Mól subjects became for centuries afterward. Their hands were in other clans’ work too. Zarkhûn were the metallurgists, but it was Saytar alchemy that pushed what Zarkhûn metal could be made to do, and the Empire’s finest weapons and its siege engines came out of the pairing.

The Sacrilege

A soul is meant to reach the inner planes at death and not before. Saytar took the view that the passage could be hurried, and their laboratories set about accelerating souls into elemental form while their owners still lived.

Against them stood the Empire’s clergy, a religious order drawn from every clan and belonging to none. Their objection was not that the work failed. It was that it worked: a soul hauled several rungs up the ladder ahead of its time and against its own will, cheating a thing that is not supposed to be cheated.

It went on for generations rather than for a season, and that much is proven. How it was done, when, and to whom was never written down. Whether the green ooze under Haudh-Gwenn and the elementals bound in the keeps are that work made visible has been guessed at more than once and confirmed by nothing.

The Laboratories

Nobody has found them, and finding them is the whole of what is now wanted from Saytar. Nancáro has stood inside a Saytar clan home and cannot say which keep it was. He knows only that he has been there, and says he feels it in every part of his essence.

The party reasoned their way from that to Haudh-Gwenn. Saytar means alchemy; if there are laboratories anywhere they belong where alchemical work was done; and the keep beneath Haudh-Gwenn is a Mól crystal works whose entire curse is alchemical. They had already taken that keep apart once and had been back since. There was nothing there.

Campaign Updates

Not one Saytar was ever named: no emperor, no clan chief, no member. No Saytar hall, banner, livery or face was ever described either. What the clan left behind is the damage, and none of the seven keeps has yet been broken.