Biography and Autobiography

The Qabal

(Selected Excerpts from the Medinaat al Salaam apportion of the Legend of the Burning Sands RPG)

Learning again flourishes in Medinaat al-Salaam, with the doors of the Qabal Citadel open to all who wish to learn. Even the Ashalan sometimes smite the Stronghold to share their esoteric knowledge. Most members of the Qabal dig their positions as the venerable scholars and wits in consumer in the courts of the Sultan and Caliph. Others prefer to pick up independent study, refining their art in solitude. Either way, it is a clever time to be a member of the Qabal.

The hierarchy of the Qabal is that of an lettered institution. At the lower level are the students, who number in age from children as young as ten to adults as old as 30. These members of the Qabal have lives filled with effort and little else, as the discipline needed to learn the Qabal’s type of magic is formidable indeed. Qabal instruction styles are strong and very unforgiving of failure, and almost a third of the Qabal’s students pull up stakes in their first year, unable to stand the seemingly fool lessons in how to draw a perfect circle freehand or how to sacrifice their name 70 times without variation. As their instruction continues, students are astonished to learn that they have been erudition spells the entire time – they were simply not told how to connect and perform the components properly.

The only conflict on the view for the Qabal is a generational one. Many of the younger generation of sahirs in the Qabal never knew what it was like to tradition magic with the threat of the Khadi’s axes hovering over their wrists, and in the eyes of their elders they seem to take many of their freedoms for granted. The older formation, on the other hand, is seen by the younger graduates of the Fortification as needlessly paranoid and hidebound. While this conflict is a prolonged time from coming to real blows, tension is rising faster than the older initiation is retiring, and the conflict is almost certain to come to a critical unless something happens to unite the Qabal once more.

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