Alter Aeon The Great Library

Welcome to the Alter Aeon Historical Archive!

Note - as with any topic, researchers should question the reliability
and veracity of these texts.  The library's aim is to preserve
documents, not verify accuracy.

AABN:  37339
Title: a book called "The Life and Times of Gad Addlebrook"

Gad's Landing and Gad's Mountain are named after Gad Addlebrook, an
eccentric mage who was born in Ralnoth in the early years of the Reign of
Dentin.

His parentage and the circumstances of his birth are unknown. He was
apparently gifted in magic from an early age. The first record of Gad
appears in the fragments of classroom rosters from the Ralnoth Mage's
Guild. He received excellent marks in conjuration and teleportation magic,
but he was not a skilled evoker. The Alchemist's Guild in Ralnoth also
lists a Gad Addlebrook as a member during this time period.

Gad reappeared on the public record several decades later, as a missing
person in the archives of the Ralnoth Watch. He had vanished without a
trace, leaving all his possessions behind. Divination spells failed to find
any trace of him, but there was no trace of foul @play, either.

It is believed Gad was attempting to develop his own version of the gate
spell. The power to single-handedly open a portal is known to angels,
demons and fairy lords, but mortal practioners require extensive
preparation and coordination to create a stable portal. In an attempt to
combine teleportation magic with planar travel, Gad inadvertently
catapulted himself across the world, finding himself on the Westering Isle
of Archais.

Finding himself alone and in an unfamiliar location, Gad began casting
increasingly powerful location spells. With extreme effort he managed to
ascertain that the Temple of Dentin in Ralnoth was "somewhere to the east,
and very, very, very far away".  Unable to summon anything across such a
distance by himself, Gad constructed a temporary residence and began
working on boosting a communication spell so as to be able to contact the
Mage's Guild on the mainland.  After two years of effort, he was able to
reliably do so, though it was another three years before a sufficiently
powerful gate spell could be cast to bridge the distance.

Rather than return Gad to Atmir, a decision was made to send more mages to
Archais and set up a more permanent, easier to manage gate between the two.
 The later discovery of the ancient portal network eliminated the need for
this, and in the year 501 Dentin himself moved the far end of the portal to
central Ralnoth to promote trade (and his temple).

In his later years, Gad went into seclusion. He set up a labratory
somewhere in the Sloe Badlands. He turned his studies to the construction
of wards. He had several apprentices over the years, including the founder
of the Mages' Tower in Vemarken and the first headmaster of the Indira
School of Illusion.

Some mages theorize that Gad's teleporation spell may have latched onto the
dormant gate on Archais. Second-hand accounts of his landing state that
upon apparation, he found himself between a pair of overgrown pillars. It
could be that his experiment was successful, and that he managed, however
briefly, to access the ancient portal network decades before his colleagues
in the Mages' Guild.