Fizz

A forest gnome. Mostly.

Fizz had no idea how old he was. Moons and seasons blurred together, and his few attempts to obtain an answer were not encouraging. According to Fizz, a druid once looked into his eyes, screamed and turned into a vole. He took this as a sign to stop asking.

He described himself as ‘a forest gnome. Mostly.’ What the qualification meant was unclear even to him. Chaos followed him so naturally that separating the gnome from the magic was like trying to separate a storm from its lightning.

His earliest memory was of waking inside a fiery circle surrounded by rune stones. He attached little importance to it: strange events happened constantly around him, and sustained curiosity was rarely his defining habit.

The hedge witch

At some unknown point, Fizz bit the head from a strange beetle and awoke in the back garden of a woman living deep in a forest whose name he could no longer remember. She may have been a hedge witch. It was she who called him Fizz, and the name remained when so much else did not.

She did not so much teach him as endure the consequences of trying. Bottles shattered, cats caught fire and on one occasion her entire hut was turned inside out—literally. Yet she allowed him to sleep on the warm side of the hearth and recognised that the power inside him was ‘wild and sideways’, the sort of magic no book would explain.

One morning she was gone. Fizz found no fire in the chimney and no footprints in the loam, only a scorched circle in a clearing and a bitter smell on the wind. He waited for three days before taking her staff and leaving.

The staff appeared to possess a will of its own and hated him. It nevertheless helped him channel his magic until the two quarrelled over the last of some carrot soup, whereupon Fizz carved it into a spoon. In his own judgement, the result was useless both as a wand and as cutlery.

Kinetic outcomes

Fizz did not bond with people in the usual way. He understood teamwork, as he put it, ‘the same way a lightning storm understands farming.’ He remembered the stillness before disaster and the screams of former companions more readily than their names. Most left. A few did not have time.

He was not cruel and did not set out to hurt anyone. He simply found moments in which events might go brilliantly wrong irresistible. Fizz did not love violence; he adored kinetic outcomes.

Wild magic poured through him like lightning through wet bark. Enchantments exploded, transformed into unrelated objects or occasionally caused Fizz himself to explode. He smoked heavily—both recreationally and, as he observed, atmospherically—and treated death as an odd acquaintance he had already met once or twice.

The wandering expert

Fizz wandered from the barkskin villages of the Sylvans to the rusted boundaries of old dwarven tunnels, seldom remaining anywhere long. People mistrusted what they could not predict, and very little about Fizz could be predicted.

By the time he travelled with the Grey Vow, he had found a place as their erratic authority on the world’s strangest lore. Facts appeared inside his mind without any clear source and often disappeared shortly before they became useful.

Among the fragments he recalled were the Brick of Whispers, the Echoes of Endarn and the Velcrith Medallion. Shortly before the party reached the Temple of Velnarath, Fizz realised that Luthain had never sold the medallion as the others believed, but had been wearing it secretly around his neck.

The object stirred an association with a prison at the end of the world and immortality. Fizz intended to tell Marlo when next they drank together. The surviving account does not reveal whether he remembered in time.

The Undercrown’s claim

At the great reveal, the Undercrown claimed that Fizz was the backlash of a failed attempt to summon it: intended as a gate, but born instead as a laughing, unstable spark. It presented Fizz’s chaos as one more component it had cultivated for its eventual design.

Fizz’s memory of the rune-ring and fire makes the claim disturbingly plausible, but it remains the testimony of a being attempting to convince the Grey Vow that it had authored every part of their lives. Fizz himself neither understood nor appeared especially troubled by the question of what he truly was.

The Song of the Undercrown later named him as ‘the one of flame, both child and pyre’, charged with burning what bone might otherwise remember how to rise again.

Fizz’s final note before Velnarath

Anyway, best head off. We’re approaching the temple soon.

Love,
Fizz

P.S. Forgot I was talking to myself. Need to stop doing that…

Oh look, an orange cow.

The gnome beneath the world

Far later in Fizz's life, he lived with his wife inside a gigantic tree-like mushroom in the Lower Underdark. When four amnesiac adventurers became trapped in a nhalis canyon, he complained that the bridge was always breaking, threw them a rope and gathered ingredients as he led them home.

Fizz and his wife brewed the potion that restored the memories of Marlo, Erynd, Vorstag and the Devil, then directed them towards Stillreach. The travellers did not recognise him, and Fizz offered no explanation of his past. His intervention allowed the Expedition to the Heart of Earin to continue.

Notes and record

This article combines campaign record, spoken lore and the mythic account preserved in the Earin archive.