“Welcome, seekers of the Ink. Hear now of a fell thing—an abomination born of ink and lunacy, a construct that should have never been. Only minds undone by fever and maddness could conceive it.

You know the libraries of Otera—vaults of whispering pages and patient dust—now choked with a new, crawling chaos. The instrument of this undoing is the very ink the scribes trusted: black as oil, viscous as blood, and hungry. Blasphemous texts were written with it, and when those lines were read aloud the letters unstitched themselves from the pages. From those syllables came horrors that crept through the stacks, but wickedness did not stop at loose daemons and whispering books. Something worse was engineered: the Daemon Wells.

Imagine wells not of water but of ink, brimming with a corruption that hums. Each Well is a wound in the earth—ribbed stone embossed with sigils of damnation, the air around it sour and electric. Scribes, their eyes white with obsession, form rings and chant in a cadence that makes the skin lift on the back of the neck. Around them the captured crawl—thin, glassy-eyed souls—are offered, their screams dissolving into the fluid’s slick surface. The ink bubbles, breathes, smokes; then it vomits. From its oily throat crawl things of jointed shadow, mouths filled with teeth made of dripping quills, limbs ink-stained and wrong. They do not come as beasts so much as ascription’s of violence—paragraphs of hunger given tooth and claw.

Halls have been devoured. Shelves bowed and splintered; priceless tomes soaked through with that malevolent stain until words run like worms. Knowledge—centuries of careful cartography and prayer—gone or twisted into mockery. We who remain know the truth: those Wells must be destroyed. They are not mere blasphemies to be cataloged; they are doorways.

Do you, Noble Lord, have the grit to descend into that black subterranean hell and wrest back what belongs to us? Many have gone before—pious men and women, hardened mercenaries— none have returned. Perhaps they lie dead among the ink-stiffened pages, or perhaps worse: turned, their faces blurred into new forms, their tongues reading for the Wells instead of against them. For your sake, let us pray its the former.

—Escaped Librarian Omero
The Surface of Otera

During the pandemic, stuck at home with lots of hobby time, I started to create a narrative called The Daemon Ink. I got pretty far with it too and was going strong when—- I got called back to work and play time was over. So 5 years on I have decided to delve back into it, rewriting a few things and, ofcourse, creating new characters and war bands. They will then play the parts set out for them on the boards I also started to make all those years ago.