During the Century of the Cricket Moon, a terrible plague swept the southern Empire, causing whole towns to become deserted and slaying one person in five, especially among the wealthy and the merchant combines - at least at first. As social order and the rule of law began to disintegrate, the plague took a heavy toll among warriors, mercenaries, and eventually peasants as well. Most horrific of its many effects was the weakening it worked on bones, until even taking a single step unburdened was guaranteed to shatter shins and crack hips.

Its seemingly unstoppable march was only arrested after a young scholar traced the spread of the disease back to its source, and discovered that it wasn't a disease at all. His research led him to a noisome and bestenched cavern deep in the Brackenmarshes, surrounded by ancient standing stones carved in crude likenesses of dragons, but with newer grave markers nearby.

This scholar, whose name was Dareg Entillion, entered a ruined city which lay a few days travel away and studied its damaged but still mostly intact records. Wrapped in protective herb-steeped shrouds, he found the first mention of the plague directly after a great celebration, when a vicious dragon called Kaxar had been slain.

The beast had been preying on livestock, farmers, and small villages in the hinterlands of the city, and so fearsome was the creature that merely passing beneath its shadow was said to cause agonising death. The heroes who slew it with tremendous cunning and courage had inherited its fabulous hoard, and were spending it freely before the plague struck.

Looking up from the mildewed scroll he was studying, Dareg chanced to see a golden coin from the hoard encased behind glass in commemoration of their triumph, but it was gold no more! Or rather it was, but it seemed to ooze a greenish-grey fluid which had eaten through the bottom of the case.

Untouched for decades with no hand to rub the oily sheen from its surface, the metal was impregnated with the dragon's own slimy secretions, seeped into the treasure after centuries of unhallowed slumber, and any touching the coins or other artifacts were affected by a slow-acting poison which worked its way into every fibre of their being, weakening their bones and eventually killing them.

The metal slowly sweated out its toxins, and any so infected could - even by their perspiration - pass on enough of a dose to prove fatal or severely incapacitating.

When the Emperor heard this tale, he ordered all parts of the hoard gathered up from circulation and resealed in Kaxar's vile tomb, but some of it yet remains in ruins and hidden lockboxes, ready to deliver Kaxar's last curse to the unwary.