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Adventurers old and new love a good tale surrounding their favoriteDungeons & Dragonscharacters. Exploring distant lands, slaying dangerous beasts, and tricking kings and demons into working for you, are just some of the ways you can experience everything Faerun has to offer.
Some characters, like the illustrious Volo, have a long and storied tale to tell, often with plenty of self-inflated importance, perhaps a bit of hyperbole, and plenty of knowledge and personality to back it all up. Here’s all you’ll need to know about the extravagant researcher Volo and his many adventures across the land.
Volo’s Early Life
Much of what we know of Volo comes from hiseditor and begrudging friend, Elminster. BornVolothamp Geddarm, the baby who would grow up to be the roguish writer seems to have been born rather unceremoniously in a bog and was named after the town where he was conceived.
Volo’s curiosity would lead him to want to discover all the secrets he could, from attending Mage Fairs as a child tolearning skills from the Harpers, a secretive organization dedicated to protecting the innocent and keeping accurate accounts of Faerun’s history. He would take this desire tolearn all the world had to offer and begin to record his findings, though initially with mixed results.
Working with a publisher in Waterdeep, Volo gained notoriety when he releasedVolo’s Guide to All Things Magical. Doing so was generally considered a bad move by many and upset plenty of mages from all across Faerun. The book wasa mix of facts, spells, and secretsthat many wizards would have preferred to keep behind closed doors.
Volo claimed that he wanted to make magicmore accessible for the common folk, but Volo himself was not an expert in the magic arts so many of the spells and informationhad errorsand could lead to wide-scale destruction if the spells were performed incorrectly.
After publishing his first book, Volo receivedmany threats from powerful wizardsfrom across Faerun, avoiding most terrible fates thanks to Elminster and Khelben Arusun of Waterdeep. He was stilltransformed into a bird for a timethanks to Simbul, the Witch-Queen of Aglarond who found the whole situation amusing.
Other wizards still managed to curse Volo, and some would trigger if he investigated the secrets of magic and wizards too closely.
Perhaps the most harmful consequence of his book’s release was that he wasforbidden from attending another Mage Fairever again. Volo would take this lesson to heart, working to track down every single copy ofVolo’s Guide to All Things Magicalever printed and destroy them so that there would be no more physical copies of the secrets he revealed.
This garnered some praise from Elminster, who would eventually work with Volo on future endeavors.
Part of Volo’s tremendous luck when it comes to getting himself out of impossibly sticky situations comes from his status of beinga Weave anchor for the goddess Mystra. A Weave anchor is an item, place, or person whom Mystra has imbued with divine magic to keep the world stable if anything should happen to her.
Traveling For Fun And Glory
After some time, Volo would switch the focus of his studies from the mystic to the more tangible, traveling to foreign places andrecording all he could about his destinations. His first few works would go unpublished, as it would seem that nations and governing bodies don’t always want their secrets exposed in the same way as the wizards.
His first published book in this endeavor wasVolo’s Guide to the Frozenfar, withVolo’s Guide to Waterdeepshortly afterward. By all accounts, it was a more comprehensive book, with even Elminster admitting that despite a few errors, it was better than his previous work. It did accidentally expose a kidnapping operation by the Unseen, a group of ne’er-do-wells who conspired to take over Waterdeep.
Volo’s notoriety would only grow over the next few years as he would go on to release guides to various places like the North, Sword Coast, the Dalelands, and the Lands of Intrigue. He would be subject to identity theft by a thief named Marcus Wands, who stole an immensely magical item called the Dragonking’s Eye and then proclaimed himself to be Volo.
Volo’s Guide To Time Travel, The Slow Way
Volo’s desire to document the mystical workings ofan enigmatic group of mages known to few as the Sword Heraldswhile researching his guidebook to Cormyr, a wealthy nation in Faerun, got him into serious trouble with his good friend Elminster.
For reasons of his own, Elminsterensnared Volo in an imprisonment spell, placing him in a perpetual state of stasis where he was unaware of the world around him or even conscious of his imprisonment.
There, Elminster would keep Volo imprisoned for decades until eventually he was released. During this time, Volo missed momentous upheavals to Faerun including the Spellplague,an apocalyptic event where all magic failed caused by the assassination of Mystra. Upon his release into a wildly changed world, Volo departed to record and document the world once again.
Volo would continue to write books and pamphlets for the strange new world he woke up to while spending time listening to adventurers in inns, going on a few of his own, and even penning a book on exploring dungeons calledDungeonology.
Eventually, Volo would hear of a curious group of goblins acting strangely in the Western Heartlands. He would discover that these goblins were part of theCult of the Absolute, who mistakenlyworshiped an Elder Brainbelieving it to be a deity when it was in fact being manipulated by three other gods, Myrkul, Bhaal, and Bane.
Volo has since popped up a few times, once in the film Dungeon & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves where a painting of him was used to break into the Castle Never vault by Edgin, Holga, Simon, and Doric. He has also appeared inBaldur’s Gate 3, where he is still investigating a strange group of goblins.
