The journal reveals a bizarre and disturbing tale of a warped and evil mind. The Kobold Shaman took great delight inflicting pain and suffering on the Kobolds having wiped out whole tribes before coming to this one less than a year ago. In fact, Tartuk was not born a kobold—he was born a gnome. He was killed in a fight against a group of ogres who were tormenting his village, but his accidentally heroic sacrifice was enough to give his village a chance to defeat the ogres. The village, sorrowed by Tartuk’s death, unanimously voted to restore him to life—so they decided to use a scroll of reincarnate that had sat in the village treasury for years. In an ironic twist of fate, poor Tartuk came back as a Kobold. Scandalized, the village didn’t know how to react. Tartuk did—he hadn’t meant to give his life to save the village (he’d actually been trying to surrender to the ogres and offer to help them destroy the village in return for sparing his life, but the ogres crushed him before he got his offer out), and now they’d turned him into one of the most hated of monsters—a kobold! The fact that his new scales were the same deep purple as his hair in his previous life served only to ensure Tartuk’s shame. Enraged, he fled into the woods, only to nurse a deep grudge. He found a tribe of kobolds, joined them, used his magic and manipulative lies to rally them, and led his new army in an attack against his old village. The resulting battle was furious, and only Tartuk survived. That was fine with him. Since then, the mad kobold has drifted through several River Kingdoms, periodically haunting towns and murdering gnomes he finds and at others insinuating himself into kobold tribes, taking them over from within, and then driving them to extinction by forcing them into wars they can’t possibly win. The Sootscales are but Tartuk’s latest project. He uses a combination of lies, magic, and his favorite tool—a non-magical statue of a devil—to seize control of a tribe. He’s become quite skilled at convincing tribes that the statue is magic and that it will curse the entire tribe if the chieftain doesn’t follow its commands—commands, of course, that only Tartuk can hear. The depth of evil and depravity revealed in the journal is enough to mad a brave man shudder. Pixie's killing blow may have actually been a great service to all Kobolds. Tucked into the back of the journal is a scroll containing the spell 'Fly'. At one point in a moment of depression, Tartuk revealed that he planned to someday end his life should he tire of it by flying a league into the air going up and up until the magic failed and he fell to his doom. The last entries talk of his hopes that the current war between the Kobolds and the Mites would end with only a couple of survivors which he would delight in sacrificing to the devil idol before moving on to a Gnomish village he has heard word off in the far south.
