The Web

This simple and unimaginative name is that given by Ivid III to a network of spies, agents, and assassins in his service.

The simple name is almost a double-bluff; the overk ings have tended to favor flamboyant, clichéd names for their personal servitors (Fiend-Knights of Doom, for example). The Web was set up under the aegis of the then-court wizard, Belerak the Wizened, to strengthen the overking's grip on the other royal houses of Aerdy.

Given such a goal, these agents were organized using a cell structure, so that active cells did not know where their orders came from, nor who their source of instruc tion was. This, obviously, allowed the overking to deny any knowledge of them if they should be apprehended (and he usually took steps to make sure that cells appeared to be linked to other nobles who were rivals of the target the cell was acting against).

This is sound strategy, but it has one central pitfall. Cells can become autonomous and out of control. Since, over the coming decades, creatures of Chaotic Evil align ment came increasingly to fill the ranks of the web, the problems with this organization grew greater. Now the situation is one of near-complete anarchy.

The old spymaster of the Web, Remaelak, was recently executed for treason. His lieutenants in Rauxes have either suffered the same fate, or else fled the capital. In several major cities of Aerdy, Web spies and agents have been left without instructions or leadership as a result, and have thus opted to follow their own instincts.

What makes the Web dangerous is that Web members are routinely equipped with extensive magical protection against detection—rings of invisibility, rings of mind shield ing, amulets of proof against detection and location and the like, and also items which prevent their easily being disabled, such as rings of free action and magical devices protecting against polymorphing and other spells.

They also have extensive supplies of sabotage items, such as poisons, food contaminants, glass spheres of thick toxic syrups which emit vast clouds of poisonous gas when broken, the volatile substance known as firewater (perfect for arson and incendiary attacks), and much more. In the past, these were used for strikes against "economic targets," to lash out against nobles who had offended Ivid.

The Web was also used to sniff out "subversives" within Aerdy. Web spies and agents provocateur would sometimes commit acts of sabotage, and then ally with genuinely seditious elements so that they could uncover those who actually did oppose the overking.

However, with so many of the overking's enemies now dead, and those who remain mostly open in their opposi tion to him, such wiles are hardly necessary. In a bizarre twist, in at least one of Aerdy's cities (Eastfair) virtually all such subversion is actually carried out by Web spies from two different cells. They are unknown to each other and believe that the other cell contains the real terrorists that they must hunt.