Halas Lutagran

Halas Lutagran is a powerful wizard who disappeared during the Calamity. As an NPC, Halas is played by Matthew Mercer.

Appearance
Halas is a thin man, with light brown skin, "piercing amber eyes, and a thinly-groomed" chin beard several inches in length. In the portrait in his library, he was drawn wearing a red robe with gold trim and billowing sleeves, had several rings, and his dark hair has grown past his shoulders.

Personality
Yussa Errenis described Halas as "not a very team player." He potentially tried to possess Caleb when Caleb spoke to him. In the, he was described as an entirely selfish person who would have, if freed, found a body and left to pursue his own desires.

Background
Halas Lutagran was born during the Calamity, long after the floating city of Aeor was destroyed, and referred to his home of Zemniaz as "a half-cocked mageocracy steeped in extremely bureaucratic ways of government". He idnetified himself as a part of Zeidel, Zemniaz's society,}} and was a member of the council of Zeidel. He eventually felt he could progress no further within Zeidel, and began traveling the world, hoping to learn how to build a construct which could be used to extend his life.

Halas created an extra-dimensional manor of approximately a hundred interconnected rooms. He performed research inside his chambers and he left magical artifacts around the world to transport people into the manor. He made a deal with a blue dragon, Thelashas, to guard parts of the manor in exchange for food. Halas also brought many other dangerous creatures into his manor. One feature of the manor was that he could set the rate of the passage of time relative to that of the Material Plane; he set it to a particularly rapid pace in order to quickly "bypass a few nuisances and lifelines."

As part of his extraplanar research, Halas discovered what he believed to be the heart of The Laughing Hand. He had found a chamber floating in extraplanar space, and added the chamber to his own Folding Halls so that he could further research it. Within the chamber, he found the heart, which was surrounded by a magical field. When Halas dispelled the field, the heart emitted necrotic energy and began attacking him. He was eventually able to seal it again with his arcane powers.

While Halas had little interest in the ongoing divine battles of the Calamity and the Laughing Hand's role in them, he became interested in the heart's potential as a source for an undying body, as the heart seemed not to age. After many failed experiments, which he set adrift in the Astral Sea, he successfully developed what he believed to be a viable host body. He then experimented with the Magic Jar spell to develop a means of soul transference. In his writings on his research, he made note of his ritual chambers within an astral dreadnought. The notes then stopped there.

Before the creation of the Divine Gate and the Divergence, Halas was set to perform a ritual of transferring his soul to a new body to "test the boundaries of his mortal shell". One of the components for this ritual was a ruby to serve as a temporary vessel for Halas' soul. He commissioned the gem, but an enemy of his had deliberately cursed it to trap Halas' within.

Gathering information
Using Comprehend Languages, Caleb Widogast was able to read the name "Halas" from the symbol on a cloak recovered from the a portable hole created by the Happy Fun Ball of Tricks. Beauregard recognized it as an archaic Zemnian name, but could not remember any specific historical figure named Halas.

The Mighty Nein and Twiggy were transported by the Happy Fun Ball of Tricks into Halas's extradimensional manor. They explored three of approximately one hundred chambers: a stone room with four different colored trapped banners, a library with hundreds of locked books, and the blue dragon's hoard. Beau and Fjord noted that the stained glass panel in the library showing the layout of the planes did not include a representation of the Divine Gate, suggesting that it was designed before the Gate was created just after the Calamity.

Caleb identified one of books taken from Halas's library as a transcript of public debate from the forum of Zeidel "regarding the moral implications of arcane experimentation on prisoners of Ghor Dranas and warnings of the war with the gods". Zeidel was one of a number of extremely erudite societies in the Age of Arcanum that had harnessed crystals to make Zemniaz hover aloft.

Yussa Errenis recognized where the Happy Fun Ball of Tricks led, and the mage to whom it had belonged. Yussa said he had not personally met Halas, who had been missing for a very long time, but there were "few in his circles that have not heard of his exploits in the past".

In the Heart Study chamber, the Mighty Nein found some of Halas's notes written in archaic Zemnian and learned how Halas had come upon the Permaheart and how he had used it.

First encounter
The Mighty Nein passed through the dreadnought's mouth and were transported into a laboratory room. In the center of this room was a table with a breathing body on it, which the party recognized as the body of Halas they had seen earlier in the Happy Fun Ball. While investigating the surroundings, Nott found a polished ruby with Halas' soul inside.

The party learned that at some point prior to the Divergence, Halas wanted to temporarily free himself from the burden of the human body, so he transported his soul in to the ruby. However, the ruby was defective and Halas found himself trapped. He told the Mighty Nein that if they would free him, he would reward them with treasure, he would tell Nott how to transport her soul from one body to another, and he would show them the way out of Heirloom Sphere. The party decided to wait on their decision until they met with Allura.

The Mighty Nein retrieved all the information from Halas that they could get, saved Yussa, and exited the Happy Fun Ball, leaving Halas's body behind in the Prison of Soot.

The Mighty Nein had Yussa Errenis retrieve the gem containing Halas's soul from the pocket dimension in which it is normally kept. Caleb held the gem and spoke to Halas, who offered to trade information in return for Caleb allowing him to occupy his body. Caleb counteroffered that if Halas answered three questions honestly, they would see about answering another three "in different circumstances." Halas told Caleb of his past in the floating city of Zemniaz and how he came to begin building his extradimensional home accessed through the Happy Fun Ball. He also spoke of Aeor, which he said had crumbled before his time; of its "tumult within" and eventual destruction by the gods; and of the Somnovem and their fanatical belief in the power of the mortal imagination. To Halas's apparent knowledge, there had been no survivors from the fall of Aeor after its annihilation by the gods. Caleb dropped the gem after these answers, resisting Halas's apparent effort to possess him.

Relationship with Thelashas
Blue dragon Thelashas made a deal with Halas to guard the extra-dimensional manor in exchange for food and gifts. However, he intended to eventually eat Halas and claim the Folding Halls as his own.

Notable items

 * Heirloom Sphere (Twiggy stole it from an unknown location in Port Damali (possibly the Exalted Collection Auction House)
 * Set of winter clothes embroidered with his symbol (taken by the Mighty Nein from an extradimensional pocket opened by the Happy Fun Ball of Tricks)
 * Magical Rod of Hand Warming (taken by the Mighty Nein from an extra-dimensional pocket opened by the Happy Fun Ball of Tricks)
 * Spellbook with the name burned out (taken from library by Caleb Widogast)
 * Public Debate Records: Forum of Zeidel (taken from library by Caduceus Clay)
 * Book on corrupted plant life (taken from library by Caleb Widogast)
 * Book on the ice fields of Eiselcross (taken from library by Nott)
 * Jar of magical ink (taken from library by Nott)
 * This ink can be used to copy 500 gold worth of spells onto any kind of paper.
 * Jar of beads (taken from library by Twiggy)
 * Caleb Widogast cast Identify on the jar, later revealing to Nott that they were a type of non-perishable food.

Abilities
As a part of Magic Jar spell, Halas, trapped in a soul gem, has the ability to telepathicall speak with a creature who touches the gem and also can attempt to possess a humanoid creature who is touching it.

Spells known
Halas's spirit is trapped within a gem, and he has not demonstrated an ability to cast spells while trapped. However, the following have been mentioned by him or appear in his notes:
 * Clone
 * Feather Fall
 * Fly
 * Magic Jar
 * Reverse Gravity
 * Trap the Soul

Appearances and mentions

 * Campaign 2
 * Campaign 3
 * Campaign 3
 * Campaign 3
 * Campaign 3
 * Campaign 3
 * Campaign 3
 * Campaign 3
 * Campaign 3
 * Campaign 3
 * Campaign 3
 * Campaign 3

Quotations

 * Yussa Errenis: (in response to whether Halas is good or bad) "At a certain level of arcane practitioning, morality becomes a bit ambiguous; but to the common man, I would say probably not a very... team player."
 * Halas Lutagran: In seeing the world, I began to realize one continuous truth: Everyone else is worthless, petty, frustrating, self-obsessed, and weak.
 * Halas Lutagran: Society is sick and destined to crumble. There is an illusion to the idea of community and working together, because every single time, it reaches a point where everyone tears each other apart, or something on the outside sees the community as a threat and destroys it.

Trivia

 * If the Mighty Nein had allowed him to get free, he would have been uninterested in their issues and would have become a "Campaign 3 problem".
 * Halas has many similarities to Halaster Blackcloak, a powerful wizard who created the megadungeon known as Undermountain in the Forgotten Realms.