Speaking of which, my character concept: The Dread Necromancer [del]Roberts[/del] Vrai.
[spoiler]Vrai was born 220 years ago on the eastern continent, to an average, unexceptional family in a small satellite community of a larger city. While growing up Vrai had a reputation for recklessness and foolishness; if someone was swinging through the trees on homemade ropes and grappling hooks, chances are it was Vrai. For all practical purposes Vrai was a fairly well adjusted, if high strung, young elf. That changed in his 157th year.
A non-magical, but virulent, plague swept through the entire continent, decimating the population in short order. Since the continent’s healers were taxed to the limit and focusing their efforts in major cities, they were almost totally absent in the smaller outlying communities. Vrai’s village was particularly hard hit, with a mortality rate of 30% within the first month alone. Vrai’s mother was one of the first in the village to be stricken, and his father was left a bitter, angry man before he too succumbed several months later.
By the time Vrai’s father died, nearly half of the town’s populace had either died or fled deep into the wilderness in the hope of riding out the plague. Vrai was already showing symptoms and already had a high fever and had begun to hallucinate. Without help he was forced to tie a rope to his father’s body and drag the corpse, already starting to decay, to a burial site. Along the way he imagined his father’s corpse rebuking him for his failings as a son and steadily berating him on his many (real or imagined) failings as an elf. Exhausted, when Vrai finally dragged his father’s body all the way to the communal grave that his village had set up, he collapsed in a sweat-soaked heap near the lip of the grave.
It was there that the first healer on the scene found him, delirious with fever and raving about how if his father didn’t shut up he would damn well kill him again. Before the healer’s spells could take hold, Vrai slipped away from life but did not quite reach death; an essential part of his soul brushed up against the negative energy plane but did not quite cross over. The quick casting of a cure disease spell broke his fever, but the cure light wounds spell which followed nearly killed him, much to the healer’s confusion. Only through the application of herbs and poultices was Vari’s condition stabilized and, eventually, he recovered.
But he did not recover fully. Healing magic would never again work on him, and would cause his body to erupt in sores, wounds, and gaping rends. He was never as hale or hearty again, as well. Running even short distances now exhausted him and his sleep was vexed by nightmares. The boy who had once swung through the trees began now never left the ground, and began to shun the company of his fellow children, instead preferring to sit by the edge of the, now covered, mass grave to which he’d dragged his father’s body. Those few individuals who visited him were disturbed by the fact that Vrai intently, and with great curiosity, began killing the plants which covered the grave site; one day he would methodically use a magnifying glass to burn the plants from the top down, the next, from the bottom up. Boiling water, salt water, excessive shade, and more were all stages in his experimentation. During these days he kept a detailed, methodical journal of the means and methods he used to kill the plants, as well as the time it took the plants to die and the nature of their withering. Upon seeing his journals, the few elves who had been visiting him abruptly began finding reasons to be elsewhere.
Vrai realized that while elves may live for a very, very long time, in the end even elves die. And some die much, much sooner than others. He was resolved that nobody would ever drag his corpse into a pit filled with stiff-limbed bodies. While the clerics could raise the dead, their ability to do so was dependant on the permission of their often capricious gods. Magic, on the other hand, offered tantalizing possibilities. And so on his 210st birthday, Vrai set out for the nearest mage’s college.
While not particularly impressed with his intellect, the mages were charmed by Vrai and convinced that he would make a worthy addition to their ranks. While he was readily accepted, his tutors quickly became disquieted by his path of study; as uninterested by divination as alteration, bored by evocation and illusion equally, Vrai poured endlessly over necromantic tomes. His teachers soon realized that Vrai was a necromantic prodigy, but while he had aptitude in other schools of magic, he made virtually no use of that ability. The mages at the college were even more disturbed to see that Vrai’s studies were not just into the practical effects of magic, but into the dark, forbidden lore that represented the vast body of theory for which necromantic spells were the practice. When he began asking discrete questions about lichdom and the Ritual of Crucimigration, his access to the library was entirely revoked.
Undeterred, Vrai continued his studies in secret. It wasn’t long before the residents of the city began to rejoice in the fact that their stray dog and cat populations, always nuisances, were virtually eliminated. When families’ household pets began to vanish, however, the guards began to take a keener interest in late night foot traffic throughout the city. For a time the disappearance of families’ animals stopped, before slowly beginning again. Efforts to stamp out the practice, completely, met with failure, as eye witness reports always described a lone individual, but none could agree on facts as basic as the individual’s gender, let alone his height, hair color or physical mannerisms. For a time the authorities suspected that an entire cult had taken up residence in the city, but they were unable to find and arrest a single member. Still without any solid leads on the cult months later, the guards were satisfied that the cult had moved on to another city once the rash of pet disappearances slowed and then stopped completely.
Then the first child disappeared.
An extensive search of the city turned up no trace of the missing girl. Few made any connection between the supposed cult’s activities and the missing girl; people wanted, very badly, to believe that the girl was still alive and would be found. She never was. The city was again shocked when, on the next equinox, a small boy went missing. The guards proved unable to locate either the boy, his body, or whoever was responsible for his disappearance. For the next several years, every equinox or solstice was marked by another vanished child. Parents began locking their children indoors days before the solstices and equinoxes, and not letting then out for days afterwards.
The city guard made no headway, but a party of rangers finally unearthed a mass grave miles outside of the city in trackless wilderness. The pit was filled with hundreds of animal corpses. The oldest corpses, those in the lowest strata, were in a state of purification but higher strata of corpses revealed animals who were well preserved, with taut leathery skin and rictus grins. The bodies of the missing children were also discovered, vivisected and with strange runes inscribed onto certain internal organs and blasphemous glyphs carved into their bones, their skin supple but solid as worn leather.
The guard was doubled on the city streets and the mage’s college performed their own internal investigation. While Vrai was queried about his knowledge of events, his answers convinced the faculty that while he was a deeply disturbed individual, he was not a murderer. .The increased presence of the guards seemed to have the desired effect, and the next equinox went without any of the city’s residents being lost. One of the apprentices at the mage’s college, however, abruptly took his leave of the college and left a hastily scrawled note explaining that he had decided to relocate to the village he was from and would not be finishing his studies.
After the groundskeepers began complaining about an awful stench coming from inside an old wall, the bricks were removed and the near-perfectly preserved corpse of the apprentice was found. His body has been prepared the same way that the children’s corpses had and possessed no discernible odor other than that of fresh leather, but the glyphs carved into his bones oozed a thick, oily black fluid which gave the corpse its unearthly stench.
During the commotion of the corpse’s discovery, Vrai fled the college with only the possessions he could carry and a handful of gold pieces. It was several hours before anybody noticed that Vrai had fled, but by then it was too late. By the time the alarm was raised he had already managed to book passage on an outbound ship. The hasty disguise he’d fitted himself with was enough to fool the ship’s captain when a member of the guard came by with a charcoal sketch of the fugitive mage’s face.
Vrai began taking on odd jobs and moving from village to village once he reached the central continent. He always remained one step ahead of disturbing rumors involving missing pets, and people, but the rumors were always contradictory. Here a few feral cats were found gutted and displayed in a strange tableau and a young, scowling man moved on hastily. There a guard dog was found ritually strangled and a mannish, but ample-breasted woman quickly hit the road.
In one town, before Vrai had had a chance to begin conducting his research, an agitated throng of villagers frightened Vrai into hiding in an old, burnt out and abandoned shack. After listening intently for a short while and hearing talk about a “Drow devil”, Vrai decided that they weren’t looking for him after all. Never the less, Vrai chose to take the opportunity to leave town ahead of an alert and wary populace. As Vrai was doing his best to make a stealthy retreat from the town, a figure in the shadows spotted him and called out in broken, pidgin Elvish. After a short conversation in Common Vrai discovered that the person in the shadows was [D_Odds char name], a half-Drow on the run from the angry mob. When Vrai tried to confirm whether the mob was chasing him because of his heritage, or because he’d done something to piss them off, all [D_Odds char name] would answer was “I do not run away. I was strategically withdrawing.”
Figuring that two heads are better than one (which gave him ideas for new experiments), that having someone around who was more stealthy might help, and that in a pinch people would be much more likely to believe that random murders were committed by a half-drow rather than a pureblood elf, Vrai decided to tag along with [D_Odds char name].
And, Vrai figures, while villagers tend to get enraged if a few children go missing, they practically shower you with virgins and money if a few goblins go missing. What’s better, they don’t care what you do to the goblin corpses as long as you don’t do it in the center of town. Vrai figures that, dangerous as adventuring is, it’s probably a good bit less risky than conducting his research on humans. He thinks he might just learn to like this ‘adventuring’ thing. [/spoiler]
