Lore · Legendary Figures
Al’Kabor
Every time you clicked a Combine spire and landed in the Nexus, you were using Al’Kabor’s discovery.
The search for immortality
Al’Kabor’s own journal begins by noting that no wizard on Norrath wields the power he does, and that he must keep researching to be protected from the evil beyond Norrath. His real quest is immortality. Travelling the frigid plains of the barbarians, he found ice crystals with a strange glistening glow and carried them back to his laboratory in Erudin to study.
The road to the moon
After countless years of Luclin’s isolation, Al’Kabor discovered a permanent route between Norrath and the moon. The old wizard spires of Norrath were converted into transportation devices, and ordinary adventurers began visiting Luclin in great numbers. The RPG adds that some say his experiments tore a rift across time and space that lets explorers use ancient Combine magic.
Sources: Library of Erudin: Al’Kabor · Library of Erudin: Luclin (RPG)
A goddess’s patience
Luclin was not pleased. Her tolerance was already worn thin, but she saw no way to drive the visitors off her moon without angering the other gods and ending her isolation. So she waits, knowing the moon will eventually move away from Norrath, possibly closing the gates and stranding thousands. The visitors, meanwhile, have enthusiastically taken sides in every conflict on the moon.
Who he is
In-game NPCs keep calling him the same thing. Realla Segoan, sent to Firiona Vie by the High Council of Erudin to investigate his disappearance, calls him “the most powerful living wizard on Norrath.” A Verant article opens “Search for Immortality” by saying he has reached heights of power most have never dreamed of, but all of it is “for naught” unless he achieves what he wants most: power over death itself. The Library of Erudin summarizes him as an arrogant Erudite wizard of great power, hostile to the Erudite heretics.
Sources: Library of Erudin: Al’Kabor (Realla Segoan, Firiona Vie; Search for Immortality)
The journals and the spells
His in-game journals double as spell research notes. In Journal III he combines his Rune with a Lexicon to make spells that spread blasting winds of ice, fire and magic over great distances, and admits he can’t remember how he first made the Frost Spiral effect. Journal IV mixes the Rune of the Helix and the Rune of Infraction into a Force Spiral “ideal for wizards of rank 39,” and the Rune of Concussion into a freezing Wrath not for any wizard below 49th rank. Journal V records a return to Kunark and the fiery Inferno Shock. He also wrote a three-part Fusibility Study on the melting points of minerals, and his assistant Makil Rargon, in the Western Wastes, is following up on its findings while Al’Kabor returns to his Combine Empire research.
The Hole Uncovered
A run of Verant stories, The Hole Uncovered, finds him researching near Qeynos, where locals will run errands for a handful of coins. After a gang of upstart earth elementals ruins a week of work, expensive components and a favorite robe, he walks into the hills outside Qeynos and finds Ognit the gnome behind it. He nearly kills Ognit (“Now I shall end your miserable gnomish life!”) while Dagda Icefury reaches for her sword. In a later chapter he tells Dagda that Dartain was one of the heretics of old, among those who put the Hatch in place to repair the Wall of Living Stone.
Sources: Library of Erudin: Al’Kabor (The Hole Uncovered: Elementals Attack and Ognit Arrested; knohole7–9)
Kedge Keep and other quests
The Relic of Brell Serilis article has him finally obtain the scroll he sought and learn the truth about the kedge: Phinigel Autropos, the last surviving kedge, had condemned his own people to permanent undeath with a powerful spell. Armed with that, Al’Kabor confronts Phinigel. In “The Swashbuckler’s Homecoming” he hunts a scroll of great power lost at sea, which he needs to recreate “a most heinous ceremony” in his quest for immortality. Not everyone liked working for him. Terblyn Zelbus, a merchant at the Temple of Solusek Ro, quit as his assistant and calls him “an old fogey” who doesn’t like short people.
Legacy: Al’Kabor’s Nightmare
Years later he got his own zone. A 2010 House of Thule preview introduces Al’Kabor’s Nightmare, where level 90 adventurers explore “the deepest fears of the greatest wizard Norrath has ever known,” and asks what makes him so great when “he never uses the nearly infinite power at his disposal.” See House of Thule.
Sources: Library of Erudin: Al’Kabor (House of Thule Preview – Al’Kabor’s Nightmare)
Where the sources disagree
- In House of Thule (2010) players entered nightmares belonging to Al’Kabor and Miragul; that part of his story is planned for wave 2.
Keep reading
Retold in our own words from the sources linked under each chapter; short quotes are marked and sourced. The illustration is an original AI-generated painting made for this page alone, not from the game.