Editing Darklord (section)

===Jack Karn===
Darklord of Farelle. Originally, the entity now called Jack Karn was a jackal from the Wildlands who hated that his people were content to be scavengers rather than hunters, a fact that saw them labeled as cowards by the beasts of the Wildlands. He convinced other Wildlands jackals to follow him, and began to incite conflict between the other animals of the Wildlands; when the two groups were fighting, he and his followers would attack their dens and drag away their children as food. This filled The Jackal Who Would Not Be A Coward with great pride - and ever-greater bloodlust. But eventually his tricks were discovered, and the vengeful animals turned upon the jackals of the Wildlands, slaughtering them and driving the survivors into the swamp of King Crocodile. When one of the elder jackals denounced him for bringing ruin upon their race, the murderous jackal attacked this elder - but was instead driven away by the other survivors, who savaged him with their fangs.

The murderous jackal escaped, pausing only to watch as his few surviving packmates were devoured to the last by King Crocodile, and then trotted off into the mists, vowing to find a new pack and teach them his vicious ways. Instead, he found himself in a strange land; a snow-bound conifer forest, where he fell afoul of a common leg trap. He would have died, had not the original Jack Karn, a kindly human tinker, stumbled across him.

Jack Karn, a peaceful soul who loved nature, instantly felt sympathy for the jackal, and tried to help him. The murderous jackal repaid his efforts by trying to kill him, failing only because of his wounded leg. Undaunted, Jack beat the jackal senseless with a length of iron, then used this as an opportunity to chain the jackal up, muzzle him, and tend his wounds. For weeks, he took the jackal along his cart, trying to befriend the creature and convince him that, together, they could help battle man's despoilment of nature. The jackal would not listen, full of bloodlust and egotism, and instead made himself a veritable devil; though Jack showed the jackal nothing but kindness and patience no matter how frustrated he grew, the jackal cursed him endlessly and terrorized the people who came to Jack's cart for their tinker needs.

Starving, Jack's patience finally gave out as he accepted that he alone could not hope to redeem the murderous jackal. So he set out in search of [[Vistani]], reasoning that they would be both willing and able to keep the jackal alive but prevent it from harming others. He soon stumbled across a clan of the Naiat tasque, who accepted the jackal for their menagerie and invited Jack to spend the night at their fire, impressed by his patience and kindness. As they supped, however, the jackal used his magical abilities to compel the Vistani's dogs to free him, and then began attacking the clan's children. However, the startled Vistani swiftly regained the upper hand, and the jackal was about to flee... when he caught Jack's scent.

Unwilling to temper his bloodlust with sense, the jackal attacked the tinker and fatally mauled him, giving the Vistani the chance to catch him. As he lay dying, the original Jack uttered a dying curse, condemning the jackal for his arrogance and declaring that he would become the thing that both the jackal and Jack despised most before that same thing would destroy the jackal. The Vistani's raunie stepped forth and added her own mystical might to the curse, guaranteeing it would take root, and commanded her people to release the jackal to suffer this curse.

Fleeing into the mists, the jackal became a [[jackalwere]], trapped almost permanently in human form - which the people of Farelle recognize as "Jack Farn". He can only resume jackal form for a few minutes at a time before he is ultimately compelled to return to human form; he can take hybrid form for ten times the duration of jackal form, but he finds this form a hideous abomination and refuses to use it unless compelled to do so. A secondary curse is that he cannot harm humans or even human-like monsters unless they attack him in anger first; so long as they are not the aggressors, he suffers crippling nausea should he try to raise a hand against them. Further compounding his curse, whilst he has total control over all canines in Farelle, they are all ordinary animals, not the intelligent animals of the Wildlands, so he finds himself as effectively the only "thinking" animal amongst a bunch of idiots.

The Jackal Who Would Not Be A Coward cannot close the borders in a conventional manner, but instead commands the canines of the realm to swarm to Farelle's edges and attack whoever tries to escape. Theoretically, nothing prevents you from fighting or magicing your way through them. Also, these closed borders only keep people ''in''; to the jackal's rage, they ignore people entering the domain, no matter how viciously he punishes them for doing so.

The curse of the original Jack Karn keeps his namesake from knowing true death; if slain, he revives a week later. However, Farelle is doomed to experience an ultimate ecological collapse, having changed from a bountiful wilderness with a few scattered hunter-gatherer tribes to a widely agricultural community centered around two massive villages of an Early Medieval level or higher in only 250 years. When the swelling tides of rampant humanity finally cause a total ecological upset of Farell, only then will the cursed jackal die, the victim of a species he has spent the last few centuries belittling.

Given "Jack Karn's" curse, it's actually best not to attack him. If he is attacked, and thus given the ability to respond in kind, the he is immune to all weapons that do not represent "civilized man" - unarmed strikes, natural weapons, clubs, arrows and any other "Savage" cultural tier weapon do nothing to him, whilst those that appear from Bronze Age or higher cultural tiers are fully effective.