Castle Spulzeer
No one in Amn, and few in Tethyr, are unfamiliar with the name "Spulzeer". Fewer, perhaps, recall that the family changed its name from Spellseer after the unfortunate incidents of 830-836 Dale Reckoning. Today, a sinister aura still hangs about the anciently proud ancestral home of this strange clan.
The castle itself, completed in the Year of the Firehawk (795 DR), was once the site of grand carnivals given for the benefit of travelers. Castle Spellseer was a stop not to be missed by any southbound caravan or free merchant. A place of peace and gaiety, food and good ale, the castle and its family grew in wealth, power, and prestige until 830 when jealous merchants turned the crown against the Spellseers. Compounding the accusations leveled at them was Kartak Spellseer, a necromancer steeped in evil. In 836 he was tried and convicted of a horrible series of murders. Kartak escaped, but the damage done to the family appeared too irreparable.
In the year 838, a youthful but wise Spellseer patriarch, Tregas II, changed the family name to "Spulzeer" in an attempt to restore the good name and profits of the clan. He instituted other reforms, dropped a cloak of total secrecy around the family’s magical training and practices, and curried favor with the King of Amn by loaning money to the crown without interest. His plan was successful, and by 900 DR, Spulzeer was a family to be reckoned with. "Spellseer" was beginning to be forgotten.
The House of Spulzeer was to know many more highs and lows as its fortunes ebbed and flowed over the centuries. And, as the years rolled by, the family and its castle were on a slow, downward spiral, a descending gyre that finally saw them fall into the sinister pit of their own depravities.
Some claim that the fall was preordained, that the land upon which Tregas I built the castle was cursed, and many chilling tales were told around campfires, stories of why this was so. Others, sages of more rational schools of thought, said that the Spulzeers themselves were cursed by elves or other demihumans who claimed the land occupied by the first Tregas's great manse. In Amn they have a saying, "investments yield the profits they have earned," and they see the Spulzeers' fall as a proper return for the venture. The truth, as it usually does, probably contains elements of all these theories.
