Hoju Mc Dohl's origins are fairly murky, both due to his alchohol-soaked lifestyle and retroactive revisionism involving blunt objects and the heads of any credible witnesses. It is generally accept that he is, as his popular three-volume memoir claims repeatedly and gratuitously, the Greatest Black Wizard Of All Time. How exactly he came by this acclaim is uncertain, as vitually all institutions of higher magical learning either deny he ever attended or claim he flunked out within a semester. It is believed his powers are derived from his hedonistic lifestyle, namely overindulgence in grain alcohol and mustard, the latter taken in peptic ulcer-inducing amounts.
Persistent rumor has him spending his youth gallivanting about with Highlord and Generalissimo Pathin before his rise to (or usurpation of, depending on who you ask) power. Those remnants of his cult of personality claim Hoju is the main reason Pathin was able to gain power within the Elven nation and that without his skullduggery and shady dealings the Highlord would still be a street-level grifter with an inflated ego. Needless to say, Pathin's secret police take exception with this, and are largely responsible for the dimutation of the Cult of Hoju.
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