Professor Maverick Galevan

Professor Maverick Galevan is one of the prominent members of the Coalition of Enlightenment, the leaderless but united community of scientists from every people and culture that seeks to replace magic with technology, a less feared alternative.¹

In his book Temporal Deteriorations of Spells he discovered the law that bears his name, the Galevan Law.¹

Two scholarly works on arcane subjects are credited to a Professor Merrick Galevan: The Magical Atrophy, which examines how powerful spells gradually lose their potency over time, and Long Lasting Natural Effects of Potent Magic.² In the campaign Sürgün Günlükleri ("Exile Chronicles") the professor is called Merrick Galevan, a naturalist of the Imperial College who studies how the traces of magic fade from the land; in the later campaign Yeni Dünya ("New World") he is Professor Galevan of the Coalition, known for his law on the effects of magic on plants and their surroundings.³⁴⁵

In Sürgün Günlükleri

Magic and the land

A fair-haired, well-dressed scholar, Galevan heard Sarah sing at an inn near Gromkar, and she recognised him from his books. He spoke of a debate, supported by the Emperor, over how magic disturbs and transforms its surroundings and whether its everyday devices are dangerous. His own research found that the entropy of magic disperses in a regular way: with warriors at his side he had gone to a hill in the north where a red dragon had just been killed, and for a month he watched its effects fade steadily, above all from the plants.³⁴⁶

He took black amethyst to be ordinary amethyst changed by the residue of magic, perhaps by an ancient dragon or some other power in a particular mining district, and said that black colour alone proves no new power, though some things are turned into wholly different materials by intense magic. When Ephorus drew the sign of a ring he was seeking, Galevan said it was no dwarven symbol.⁷⁸⁹

At the same inn the innkeeper showed a cube with a crank that played music, made by a gnome friend and said to record sounds. Galevan called it a scientific and magical advance, but no substitute for live music, and said he would leave the next morning for an important project in the east. Ephorus later bought his little-sold academic book on the effects of cold on the fauna and flora of the Empire, and gave it to Sarah.^10111213

The celebration of Gloria

Galevan sent a messenger to ask Sarah to accompany him to a celebration at his work tent outside the city. A private carriage took her by night through a Gromkar gate that was normally closed, and along half an hour of rough road to a cleared stretch of forest, where a great red tent stood lit by magical lights and glowing stones. He told her that ghost stories had been spread on purpose to keep people away, and that the place was watched and warded. He had been called there for the work's effects on nature, not as its chief engineer, and his part was almost done.^14151617

When Sarah told the story of the wood elves' bond with the trees, a guest called Bartos dismissed it as superstition, but Galevan said that he had seen elves enter one tree and come out of another, and that he thought of their bond with the forest as an alliance.¹⁸

The work was the cannon Gloria. Galevan explained that the earlier hellfire cannons had drawn on energy from a lower plane and on magical powder, and that bloodstone made Gloria at least twice as strong, though unwieldy and hard to use. The builders had followed his advice for keeping the bloodstone's residue from harming the land: deep wells, spreading it through the soil, and burning some of it into the air. He thought the cannon had cost more than a year's work and great expense, and that its real purpose was to tell the nobles that they were not safe even in their castles.^19202122

Sarah's studies

Galevan offered to use his connections to help Sarah finish the college studies and diploma she had left incomplete because of family troubles, saying that the graduates' brooch brings respect; bards who graduate from the Imperial Colleges are given a brooch of their own. He gave her a half-filled notebook of an old bard's songs and notes, its empty pages left for her own, and told her she could find him at the college in Batıkalkan before he packed up and left.^23242526

In Yeni Dünya

In Aquila

In Aquila, Miro researches for Professor Galevan, who is known for a law on the effects of magic on plants and their surroundings. Galevan had fought for the dose given to arrivals at the harbour to be free or very cheap, and the governor agreed.⁵²⁷

He received the band in a small house beside the Coalition's large laboratory on the Merchant Road, a guest house rather than his own. He explained the Galevan Law, which he had worked out in his youth: a way of calculating how long a magical effect lasts once its source is gone. The calculation holds on the mainland, he said, but does not work in the same way on the new continent, and he does not know whether the air, the soil or the people are the cause. He expected his research to shake the church's teachings on saints and holy objects. He handed the band three volumes of the Galevan Law to keep.^28293031

Galevan cannot work magic himself, but he knows a great deal about how it works.³²

The inscription

Galevan asked the band to bring him a large object that acquaintances in Fauna's tribe had found, and not to open it, since it might be very bright. In return he offered to work to have her family's hunting grounds declared a research site, which he hoped would keep the Empire out of them for thirty or forty years. He had discovered the object underground on those lands and needed the tribe's own magic to bring it out.^3334353637

His people received the chest at an abandoned fishing village south of the city, where he waited with some fifteen men, horses and an awning. He looked briefly inside it, gave the band three horses, and agreed to Finli's wish to become an independent researcher of the Coalition. The object, he said, belonged neither to his people nor to Fauna's and could be a bridge between them; he thought that production of the warming stone Alaztaşı might begin in a year or a year and a half.^383940414243

He described the object as a stone with a memory, which he believed gathers the memories and magical energy of its surroundings and carries knowledge from before the Exile; he held it to be holy in nature, and said it cannot be moved by magic. He thought it could be consumed for magical power, and that if broken into pieces it could strengthen many mages. The discovery of the new continent, in his view, has changed the teaching that the Lands of Exile are the last line of resistance.^4445464748

Spoiler: Later eventsRevealSpoils: Yeni Dünya #5.5; Yeni Dünya #6 · Say what you have read

Galevan worked long hours with a potion brought to him by a man known in the city for selling potions under the counter; it put off his weariness rather than removing it. The mage Albus Rodarius Willow wanted him kept away from his work, and the band kept him talking at breakfast until past nine. As he was leaving, the ground shook. In the cave below the building the pedestal was empty and six researchers lay dead; Galevan looked shattered, glanced at his pocket watch and said that the game had begun.^495051525354

From a mark left in a drawing he knew who had threatened them. He had never believed he could defend the object, he said, and had tried to learn what he could from it quickly, expecting the mage to take it without killing. A half-elf envoy of the court, a friend of long standing, had told him of Willow's fall from favour. He had placed something on the object that would let him find it wherever it went, and showed a compass hidden in his pocket watch that does not point north. He meant to call on powerful old friends, to press through his court connections for an order summoning the mage to the capital, and to leave the city for a while.^{5556575859606162}

The half-elf envoy later told the band that Galevan had asked her to help Finli in particular, and that she supported his good aims.⁶³