Earlier I had posed an interesting shift in the time line where the Pharaoh Ramose managed to oust Senkha and her entropic followers. She then fled to the KW under the urging of the burrowers to retrieve something which would destroy Nithia.
The Scrolls of Destruction
by John HareBack when Nithia was still on the Known World, Thanatos sent 12 scrolls into the Kingdom. These scrolls when read by themselves boosted the magical spells cast by the reader. Each other scroll read doubled the magical potential of spells cast by the reader. Fortunately these scrolls where hard to read and thus few people managed to read them. Plus lending them out could give their rivals the same power. However after successfully reading one of the scrolls the reader 'had' to read more. After many years and several dead mages one mage named Hotep gathered all 12 of the scrolls together. Discovering that the 12 scrolls where actually part of the same manuscript he eventually puzzled them all together and read it. Hotep didn't survive this as his brain imploded after finishing the last line. However the effect of this spell was that all Nithian mages gained the ability to cast extremely powerful spells (ie equivalent to level 10) and soon started fighting and destroying entire towns with single spells. When the Immortals intervened they removed this massive spell ability from the Nithians but didn't look into how they gained such power. With Hotep dead his apprentices took the scrolls and hid them away at Thanatos' urging. When Nithia was moved to the HW the apprentices were part of those wiped out, but the scrolls remained in hidden locations across the old Nithian nation.
Game Effect: These scrolls are all in Ancient Nithian and even so require 5 skill checks to successfully read them. The 1st check takes 1 week of reading and has no modifiers. The 2nd takes 2 weeks of reading and is -1 to be understood. 3rd reading is 3 weeks at -2, 4th is 4 weeks at -3, 5th is 5 weeks at -4. If a skill check is failed the reader must try that reading again (thus if the 1st and 2nd reading were made but the 3rd was failed, the 3rd must be done over again). When the 1st scroll is successfully read then all damage spells do an additional +1 pt of damage per die.
The 2nd scroll increases the range & area affect by 50% (or creatures affected). Further odd scrolls add another +1 pt of damage per die and even scrolls increase the range & area affect by 50% each time (from the original spell)
Thus reading 4 scrolls would make a fireball do 1d6+2 pts of damage per level and would have 100% range and area of effect.
Side Effects: After reading the
first scroll the reader must make a save vs spells at -5 or seek
out the rest of the scrolls to be read. Should a reader save and
then read a second scroll the save is at -7. If again saved and a
third scroll is read the save is at -10. If the reader reads a
fourth scroll he/she must seek out the rest of the scrolls (no
save). This can be treated like a quest spell but can only be
removed by both a remove quest and a heal spell, which would remove
the knowledge gained in the scrolls.