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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jeremy E Grenemyer" data-source="post: 8014778" data-attributes="member: 12388">So, Who Spied On Ostramagarus? Who Were His Rivals? Who Betrayed Him? Some Ideas...<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">A dragon or two. Mayhap a dragon directed its human servants to use Ostra's hideaways for its own purposes. Perhaps these hideaways were enhanced with yet more monsters teleported in by the dragon. Or maybe a dragon left clues for Ostra's factors to find, so that a potential hideaway could be discovered, when in fact the place had already been cleared of dangers and otherwise "tamed" by the dragon's servants, with the idea of using Ostra's monsters and minions to help secure things the dragon wanted kept secret--such things likely secured below ground and accessible via secret entrances or by short range linked teleportation (such paltry magics have been mastered by many dragons of the Realms).</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Ostra's own factors. The hideaways were great places to hide things and people. Maybe one or two of his factors used the hideaways for safekeeping of their own valuables. As well the evidence of their misdeeds.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">The Cult of the Dragon. That bunch has always been trouble in Elversult/Teziir. Perhaps the sellswords used by Ostra's factors to haul goods and guard them at hideaways ended up revealing the location of a couple of hideaways to the Cult after the sellswords became converts.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">The Crown of Cormyr. I don't know if Ostramagarus was Cormyrean, but I'm sure he would have helped the Crown out if it needed a bolthole for a spy to lay low in somewhere beyond Cormyr's borders (offering one of his hideaways as a place for a spy to disappear to in exchange for a favor to be named later).</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Nobles, be they Sembian or Cormyrean. Ostra was not afraid to hurl insults at Cormyrean nobles (see "Elminster Must Die," page 68 [softcover] for an example). No doubt he had his friends and his foes among the nobility. Ostra could have offered his services to enable a noble to punish a merchant or a master of a merchant coster by using Ostra  to effect a market shortage and hamper the merchant's business.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Anyone he might have sold a hideaway to. Perhaps Ostra rebuilt one of the foursquare keep ruins, stocked it with obedient guardian monsters, and sold the whole thing off to a wizard or mercenary captain, or to an exiled noble as "a safe place from which to rebuild."</li> </ol></blockquote>

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