Delon the Mage

Character Introduction
Delon the Mage was one of the main NPCs in the 1st Ed AD&D TSR module N2 The Forest Oracle, he is the players point of contact and responsable for giving the party of adventurers their instructions on how to get help for his village, The Downs.

Normally Delon would be more or less just a throw away character that would be forgotten once the party moved on from completing their task. Delon is an old man and in the module he says he remembers when The Downs was just a single farmstead before it was even a village, so normally this would probably be just filler or something to re-enforce that he was both old and a respected member of the community, but not in my world, no he is much more than he seems.

Meeting Delon
The players did not go to The Downs when they first met Delon, they went to New Uliamar as it has been called for over a hundred years at this point in time according to the Dwarven records, add to this the fact that a farming village does not grow out of nothing over night and suddenly you have someone that looks human and somewhere in his 60s but is probably easily pushing 200 years old. This means he probably has an interesting tale to tell of how he came to live so long.

Perhaps Delon's comments were written off as the ramblings of a crazy old man, or perhaps the connection was not made that he would have had to have had an unnatuarlly long life for his statements to be true, (or perhaps it just appeared to the players as a slight inconsistancy caused by placing a published module into a homebrew campaign and not relevant to the overall story) at any rate this seemed to slip by unnoticed, but Delon noticed.

But it was not until their return to Delon from their visit to the druids that the party would find how just how much

Returing to Delon
Upon returning to New Uliamar the party recieved a heros welcome townsfolk and where sent to Delon to give him the bottle of potion to cure the fields as instucted by the High Druid, he had locked himself in his little house and told the villagers he was not to be disturbed by anyone other than the party if they returned.

When Delon answered the door he was wearing a fine suit of plate armour of an outdated style that had been very well maintained but seemed to be fitted to a larger man, perhaps a younger more muscular less stooped version of himself accompanied by an old faded tabard that was Hirikitian in origin and was once clearly a splendid accessory beffiting the fine plate armour he wore, it was later revealed that it was infact the tabbard of one attached to the royal household of Hirikith that he wore becasue he was the personal millitary advisor of the former king of Hirikith who was killed at the end of the Hirikithian Tausian War.

Once inside his house it was noted that there was an excessive number of lit candles for daylight hours and a second smaller set of plate armour on a stand that seemed made for a female with a breastplate that reflected more light than it should and a tabard of a simmilar rank but of Tausian design.

Tea was prepared from the bottomless teacup and Delon told his life story.

Delon's Life Story
Delon told his life story it was a long story becasue his life had been long, it started a long time ago, about 200 years ago, with a young unnamed orphan boy that lived at a little farmstead in a small valley near the edge of the Greate Olde Woode owned and run by the Mullard Family, who treated him like a son, this farmstead would evntually grow into a farming village called The Downs.

Some time in his early teens a Man in fancy plate armour like the armour Delon was wearing and told Delon he was going to become a paladin, he was taken to the Capital of Hirikith, Hirikith City, where he trained as a Paladin by age 20 he was assigned to the royal guard, and worked through the ranks, eventually becoming millitary advisor to the king.

The more time he spent around the king the more slowly he aged, eventually he noticed that the paladins he trained with that were not assigned to the palace were becoming old men yet he had bareley aged a day, something that had not gone unoticed and whilst unkonwn at the time this ultra slow aging was the cause of the Hirikithian Tausian War

... To Be Continued