Editing Darklord (section)

==Fanmade Darklords==
These darklords represent the rulers of fan-made domains from [[netbook]]s such as the [[Books of S]], the [[Undead Sea Scrolls]], [[Quoth the Raven]], and other projects from the [[Fraternity of Shadows]].

===Abdul the Damned===
Darklord of Aljaugasba. Long ago on a far away world, a peasant boy was born in the great city-state of Aljaugasba. Abdul Iben Azed had one thing going for him: from an early age, it was evidenced that he was a powerful [[psion]], with mighty telepathic abilities. So the city's ruler, Sultan Amuraba, bought Abdul from his parents, had him gelded, and forced him to become a eunuch advisor, sworn by tradition to forsake all aspects of a normal life and instead devote himself to serving the sultan and the people of his city-state.

If taking a powerful [[psion]], gelding him, then commanding him to be your slave-advisor sounds like a recipe for disaster, then congratulations; you're smarter than Sultan Amuraba.

Abdul was trained in the most prestigious academies, and became one of the greatest diplomats and advisors that Aljaugasba had ever seen. Unfortuantely, the vizier's experiences led him inevitably to corruption. Unable to pursue normal vices, he instead embraced the only vice that he could - power - whilst coming to resent and envy the normal people around him. Consumed by bitterness and megalomania, Abdul broke his sacred oaths and crushed Sultan Amuraba's mind to his own whims, creating the brutally enforced morality code that lives on in Aljaugasba to this day as "Amuraba's Code". Vicariously attacking those who dared to enjoy such pleasures, Abdul strangled the flow of commerce, breeding panic and resentment amongst the nobles of Aljaugasba - eventually provoking the most corrupt of them to follow the Sultan's debauhed and depraved son, Prince Iben Amar, in a plan to assassinate his father.

In a masterful combination of planning and luck, the Prince struck when Abdul's powers were exhausted after a day of having controlled the Sultan. With a knife at his throat, Abdul immediately turned on and killed his former master, reckoning he could simply control the son in turn, only to inadvertently set himself up to take the blame as the true traitor. Before Abdul could reveal the Prince's complicity in his father's death, Iben Amar struck off the vizier's head, and unwittingly promoted him to the role of Darklord.

Abdul now exists as a psionic [[ghost]], his life essence bound within a heart-shaped ruby that adorns the sultan's scepter. Now only able to use his powers on foreign-born targets, Abdul can only watch and weep as Aljaugasba gleefully embraces the same decadent pleasures that he tried so hard to stamp out, an impotent shade who can do nothing. Worse, he is compelled to protect his slayer to preserve his own existence, for if the ruby is shattered, then Abdul the Damned will finally perish.

When Abdul wishes to close his domain's borders, blinding storms encircle both the land and the sea, transporting any who try to flee back into the domain's interior.

===Ahasveros===
Darklord of Incitatus. Once, Ahasveros (male human) was the greatest scientist of his civilization, until the day his homeland was drawn into a great war against a rival nation. He invented the Adamas theory, a device that could be used to generate a mighty tidal wave to devaste the enemy's fleets and harbors.

But that wasn't enough for Ahasveros; he became obsessed with improving the device, banishing his assistants when they protested the potential dangers of doing so, cutting off all contact with those who might challenge his beliefs, and reducing the time he spent running his calculations.

The result was, when the device was used, Ahasveros lost control of it and the tidal wave annihilated ''his'' homeland as well, drowning him in the tower from whence he'd launched it.

Ever since then, the bussengeist he became has lingered in his tower, unable to decide whose fault the mess was, alternating between blaming his associates and himself. Honestly, he's not much of a darklord, and this is reflected by how empty and meaningless Incitatus is. He currently occupies a limbo; too dull to be truly absorbed into the [[Demiplane of Dread]], but still too evil and in denial of what he did to be released, either.

Ahasveros' existence is completely tied to the remnants of the Adamas machine. Only by destroying it, which will unshackle his spirit, and performing a brief rite to the long-forgotten sea god of ruined Misenos, which requires lighting the lanterns in the temple and praying for both Misenos and Ahasveros, will his torment end.

If Ahasveros wishes to seal his domain's borders, those attempting to cross it are overwhelmed by misery and the urge to seek comfort, which only those outside of the border can give them.

===Anibal Coronado===
Darklord of Cumbre de Oro. Arguably the oldest darklord of the Holy Imperial Colonies domains, Anibal Coronado was a infamous mercenary captain who had made a name for himself in the civil wars of the Holy Empire some 170 years ago, amassing a reputation that he parlayed into becoming a famous explorer. After building his reputation there, to the point that the name "Coronado" became synonymous with exotic lands, strange adventures, and foreign wealth, he attempted the most infamous expedition ever: to become the first man to successfully explore beyond the Sierra Acora mountains.

Previous expeditions had all launched in early spring, hoping to cross during midsummer and then return before winter snows closed the passes. They had all failed, as the mountain passes didn't clear up ''until'' midsummer. Coronado proposed instead that he launch his expedition in midsummer, cross the mountains, winter in the lands beyond the Sierra Acora, and then return in the midsummer of the following year.

Long story short, it worked! Coronado became the first man to discover the realms that would become known as Mictlan, but he never would return to claim that prize. In one of his meetings with the natives of this strange tropical rainforest realm, he learned of a mysterious city of gold hidden in the mountains from a chieftain named Jucataan. Coronado's avarice was immediately enflamed with discussions of this city, said to hold wealth beyond that of the Holy Empire itself, and when chief Jucataan warned that the city was taboo and his tribe would prevent any attempt to pursue it, that avarice turned murderous.

Arranging things with his men, Coronado held a banquet in which he invited Chief Jucataan and all the men of his tribe. There, after he got the chief drunk enough to reveal the way to the city of gold, he and his men massacred them all. Once that was done, they set off in pursuit of what they had come to call "Cumbre de Oro"; "Gold Peak".

The expedition swiftly turned into a disaster. Their supplies hadn't been chosen with the tropical rainforest climate in mind, and quickly spoiled. They had no idea what foods were edible or how to find fresh drinking water. Tropical diseases swept through the men. All the while, Coronado drove them on with images of the fabulous wealth they would attain. But when these dreams became insufficient and murmurs of mutiny began circulating, Corando turned on his own men: selecting those he believed to be the ringleaders, he invited them to "discuss" the matter, only to poison their wine. Once they were dead, he paraded their corpses before the survivors, screaming blasphemies and promising the same fate to any who dared rebel, before forcing the terrorized, defeated men to cannibalize their former comrades.

With his men now utterly will-broken, and steadily losing what was left of his mind to sheer avarice, Coranado plunged on into the jungle, his men dropping like flies as he searched and searched. Finally, with only Coranado and two of his original 56 men still alive, they found it: Cumbre de Oro. It was everything that Jucataan had described as being and more. Now totally insane, Coranado turned on his exhausted companions and killed them, before plunging into the city to begin plundering.

That was when he discovered why the natives had left the golden city to the wilderness: it was a necropolis, its people having died and then become [[undead]]. The [[mummy]] of Emperor Maxaantii rose from his tomb at the central step pyramid and attempted to detain Coranado, who fought back with literal lunatic strength. He struck down the mummified emperor and fled with a bag of gold and jewels, but as he did, Maxaantii cursed Coranado that he would never succeed in leaving the city with his treasure. Sure enough, weakened by his trials, the excitement of finding the city, the stress of combat and the effort of hauling his heavy load, the feverish and dehydrated explorer collapsed at the city's outskirts. He could hear a brook just out sight, and if he'd abandoned the treasure to drag himself to the cool, clear water, he probably would have reached it... instead, he refused to let go of his ill-gotten gains, exhausting what little left of his strength in an effort to drag it with him as he crawled along.

As he lay dying, the sounds of the brook still echoing in his ears, Coronado cursed all the gods for taunting him by giving him such wealth only to then take it from him at the last moment. With the last of his strength, he raged and wept, begging any power that would listen to give him one last chance to make the treasures of Cumbre de Oro his.

As Coronado died, head pillowed on the treasure he had given his life to win, the valley was wrenched into the Demiplane of Dread, floating on its own in the mists as an Island of Terror until its former resting place followed it as the land of Mictlan, whereupon it fused back together. Coranado rose from his grave, found his men returned to him as [[avaricio]]s, and began his stint as darklord.

A casual observer might take Anibal Coronado in his present state for a living man, albeit horribly emaciated and clearly disased, with yellowed skin drawn tightly against the bone and yellowed, bloodshot irises. He still wears the ancient, tattered clothing and armor he wore as a living man. Under the AD&D mechanics, he's a unique corporeal undead, similar in many ways to a [[Death Knight]]; in addition to retaining his skills as a 14th level [[Fighter]] and wielding the dread blade Corrupcion (+2 longsword that inflicts magical disease), he has 75% magic resistance, a 10% chance to reflect spells cast against him back on their casters, immunity to mundane weapons, a 5ft aura of fear, the ability to cast Detect Magic and Detect Invisibility at will, to cast Dispel Magic, Harm and Wall of Thorns 2/day, and both Creeping Doom and Symbol of Discord 1/day. If defeated in combat, he dissolves into mist; he will reform 1d4+1 days later, but during that time, he cannot close Cumbre de Oro's borders and his avaricios will ignore intruders unless personally disturbed. There is no known way to permanently destroy him.

Coranado is consumed by his paranoid terror that somebody will steal "his" treasure, and so he prowls the city endlessly on a hunt for intruders. His curse is simple and effective: he physically can't touch the treasures of Cumbre de Oro, and neither can his Avaricios. Add to it that their relatively weak abilities against non-living foes makes them little threat to Maxaantii and his forces, which include both undead and stone [[golem]]s, and all Coranado can really do is drift from cache to catch and vent his paranoid wrath on any living intruders he catches. As a part of this curse, his ability to close the domain borders is limited; when he does so, his avaricios move to begin patrolling the border of the city, attacking anything they see in an effort to kill or capture them. If travelers can break past these patrols, the avaricios cannot pursue them any further than 3 miles beyond the city's edge - of course, fleeing from pursuing undead through dense jungle that doesn't impede ''their'' movement isn't exactly a picnic stroll!

===Anna Sparatoga===
Darklord of Okraina. Once a humble blacksmith's daughter, Anna's life changed when a mischievous fiend named Chort decided to offer her a fiendish bargain, trading her soul for arcane magic. Using her new powers, Anna amassed a small army of evil [[fey]] minions and began climbing to power; her father was her first victim, followed by the wife of a village elder whom Anna seduced for his wealth and power. When her new husband's daughter returned and suspected Anna of black magic, Anna once more comitted murder, and damned the realm of Okraina to the [[Demiplane of Dread]].

Anna wields the power of a 10th level [[Sorcerer (Dungeons & Dragons)|Sorcerer]], specializing in [[Enchanter|Enchantment]] and [[Necromancer|Necromancy]] spells, backed by her trusty Summon Monster V spell (note that Anna was made before the [[Warlock]] arrived in 3rd edition). Terrified of damaging her lovely face, Anna avoids conflict whenever possible; when she needs someone dead, she prefers to use summoned fey to attack the object of her ire whilst she is publically seen elsewhere, giving her a perfect alibi - this was the methodology she used to murder her father, the village elder's wife, and her stepdaughter.

Her Curse is two-fold. Firstly, her powers depend on her continued alliance with Chort, and the fiend is understandably rather pissed about being stuck in the [[Demiplane of Dread]] - unfortunately, she tricked him into giving her his phylactery, so she is able to compel him to continue obeying her. Secondly, she must ritually sacrifice a young man once a week by seducing him, riding on his back all night, and then slaying him at dawn - if she doesn't, she grows progressively uglier and uglier. And since Okraina isn't the most heavily populated of domains, she must often wait months or more between kills, using cosmetics to disguise her growing deformities.

Fortunately for her slayers, Anna is one of the weaker Darklords, lacking both the Undying Soul ability and even the ability to close her realm's borders.

===Captain Anton Dusard===
Darklord of Locknar Cove. Born impoverished and raised in the slums of a busy port, Anton Dusard learned to treasure gold over everything, especially human life. At age 16, he betrayed his parents to their creditors and used the bounty to invest in a merchant ship. He then proceeded to take sole captaincy of the vessel through murder and extortion. When war came to his native kingdom, he avoided financial ruin by becoming a privateer. Though he amassed a significant fortune, his avarice was insatiable; when his patron monarch demanded taxes on Anton's looted plunder, the privateer went renegade rather than part with so much as a single coin, bombarding and looting his own homeport before sailing away to become a feared pirate.

Establishing a hidden stronghold in the set of islands known as the Dismal Four, specifically on Locknar Cove, he continued to prey on merchant ships and amassed an enormous fortune. So much so that his own men began to dream of stealing it for themselves. One misty night, as Dusard's ship the Grasping Claw sailed into Locknar Cove, they mutineed. Though Dusard fought like a demon, he was outnumbered with few supportors; in a final act of spite, he ignited the ship's powder magazine and blasted them all to splinters.

The explosion flung his maimed body into the cold, black sea, where the dying man floated. He clung to life long enough to see a single lifeboat sail past, bearing with it the crew's sole survivor. That sight snapped Dusard's mind, and he called upon every ounce of his being, swearing to keep his treasure from beyond the grave. As he slowly sank into the waves, the mists closed in.

Ever since that day, Dusard has lurked in the depths of his fortified, trap-laden labyrinth on Locknar Cove, a [[ghost]] [[pirate]] jealously guarding his treasure. His curse is simple: the absolute terror of knowing he can ''never'' end his vigilance. To heighten his fears, he instinctively knows when somebody else in Locknar Trove is aware of his treasure's existence, although not who they are or where they are. Furthermore, the sole survivor of his crew, William Copperplate, still lives an unnaturally preserved life, and wants Dusard's treasure for himself, and is eager to manipulate others into doing the dirty work for him. As for the crew who died when the Grasping Claw blew up? They rise from their watery graves as ghosts once a year, and immediately launch an attack on the island, hoping to plunder the horde they gave their lives to try and win. Although Dusard can banish them with a touch, their efforts stoke his terror. Furthermore, the ghostly crew is also instantly returned to undeath and given a chance to assault his hoard whenever Dusard uses his "horrifying appearance" ghostly power, and so he is loathe to use it.

When he wills the closure of the cove, the seas become dangerously turbulent and choked in an impenetrable mist, whilst the forests of the western border become twisted walls of gnarled wood and the roads twist back on themselves, so every step only leads a traveler back to Ruttledge village.

If defeated, Dusard will reform in a single night. Only by plundering the entirety of his hoard, down to the last coin, will he be banished to the afterlife forever.

===Queen Avarein===
The Darklord of Fairhafen is best described as what you might get if you blend the Evil Queen from Snow White, the Wicked Fairy from Sleeping Beauty, and the Cruel Stepmother from Cinderella.

She first appeared in Fairhafen as a wife brought from far abroad by a nobleman, who mysteriously sickened and died even as she came to term with twin [[Caliban (Race)|caliban]] daughters. Despising her children, she attempted to live the life of luxury, but went bankrupt by living well above her means. Fortune smiled when she encountered the widowed king of Fairhafen, Drosselbart, and seduced him into making her his new queen before he mysteriously died too. But this left her only as regent of Fairhafen, with all her power depending on the survival of King Drosselbart's firstborn, Princess Rosenbriar... the same princess who would dethrone Queen Avarein when she came of age.

So Avarein sealed her away in an enchanted slumber before entrapping her in a crystal coffin, thus keeping her alive but incapable of ruling, and damning herself to the [[Demiplane of Dread]]. Her curse is that she can never wallow in luxury as she yearns to do so; she mus constantly struggle to present the proper facade of a ruling queen, keeping her people happy and her enemies at bay, forcing her to toil and sweat to keep her crown without ever enjoying it. As an aspect of this curse, she is forced to depend on people whom she loathes personally and wants nothing to do with - in particular her daughters Brunhild and Beatrix, whom she spoils rotten as an excuse to not have to actally express true love for them, and whom she needs because her [[Sorcerer (Dungeons & Dragons)|sorceress]] powers are heightened by their presence, in a manner akin to a [[hag]] covey.

When Avarein wishes to seal off her domain, an impossibly tall and thick hedge of bramble vines with razor-sharp thorns springs from the earth.

===Benada Nameless===
Darklord of Vin'Ejal. Conceived when the Eye of Toldun, the fake prophet of a phony goddess called Appissa (actually a powerful half-breed [[yuan-ti]] [[psion]] magically held in stasis), used a potion given to him by his goddess to drug and rape a woman named Dillura Ogfenhauer, Benada's mother despised her daughter from the moment she was born. Only Benada's uncle, Dillura's 12-year-old brother Ekkim, cared for her, and he raised her throughout her life, even taking her off with him to be his squire when he went to war after discovering her nature as a [[psion]]icist [[weresnake]]. Even when they returned, however, Dillura wanted nothing to do with her bastard daughter.

Finally, the enraged Benada sought to confront her mother one evening, only to track her to the Shrine of the Eye. When she saw Dillura embracing the Eye, she realized that this man was her father. Filled with hatred, she grabbed a bone knife and fatally stabbed her mother, before psionically torturing her father to death. As she turned to leave, she found herself confronted by her uncle Ekkim, who had seen everything. Realizing she couldn't let him live now, a weeping Benada killed the only person to ever show her love, transporting Vin'Ejal to the Misty Realm.

Benada's curse seems to be an insatiable hunger that only human flesh can sate; she only gives in to its demands once per month, however, as she fears depleting her domain's population. If she wishes to close the domain, the waters around Vin'Ejal decrease in temperature to the point that would-be swimmers will freeze solid, whilst hail begins savagely pelting down from above.

===Baroness Ilsabet Obour===
Darklord of Kislova. This female human [[alchemist]] was born the youngest daughter and favored child of Baron Janosk Obour of Kislova, and remained loyal and obedient to him even as he descended into brutal tyranny and made a failed attempt to conquer a neighboring barony, only to be crushed, captured and executed. Before he died, Janosk commanded each of his three children to take steps to both preserve their family and avenge the loss of their power.

Of the three, Ilsabet was the most loyal to her father, honing her alchemical skills and delving into dark alchemical practices, focusing on hideous poisons and the creation of alchemical undead. She crippled and maimed many prisoners who had dared to rebel against her father's rule before his conquest by Baron Peto, created a unique strain of alchemical vampires, fatally poisoned her elder siblings for perceived disloyalty to their father's dying wishes, and finally married Baron Peto herself and bore him a son in order to gain the opportunity to poison him with a paralytic venom. It was only as she administered what she intended to be the final, fatal dose, killing her mentor (and true love) to do so, that the Mists finally claimed her.

Ilsabet currently suffers two curses. Her most direct darklord-related curse is that her desire for power and revenge are thwarted; though her husband, Baron Peto, remains incurably paralyzed, he also remains unkillable - no matter what she does, he always returns to life. As a result, she remains forever his regent, rather than the true Baroness of Kislova, which she regards as unacceptable; she yearns to resume the interrupted reign of her own family. Secondly, Ilsabet has become a vampire-like creature that feeds on pain, and must have one person killed every day in order to survive.

Unlike many Darklords, Ilsabet has no particular powers of supernatural survival. If you can beat an 11th level [[wizard]] protected by her guard of alchemical vampires, you can kill her.

When Ilsabet closes the borders, a poisonous green mist surrounds Kislova, inflicting irresistable damage per round until the would-be escapee returns to Kislova.

===Bethany Stone===
Darklord of Stonewall. A sad, broken, bitter woman, Bethany was born the daughter of a family of puritans, self-righteous and obsessed with sin. When her father discovered the child Bethany, a cheerful, whimsical young girl, had dreams of leaving the family home to become a dollmaker, he destroyed the dolls she had painstakingly constructed over years of work and beat her within an inch of her life. Later, when she came of age, he arranged her marriage to a man of high standing.

After long years of often-lonely marriage, pregnant with her sixth child, Bethany's father and husband were caught in a terrible accident, with the former dying and the latter being left in a coma. That was hardship enough, but as she cared for her husband, Bethany discovered his diary, in which he revealed he had only wed her to cover up his "sinful" nature as a homosexual. Enraged, Bethany began tampering with her husband's medicine to ensure he remained comatose, and then launched her own moral crusade, something aided by the fact she established her charismatic but broken-willed son Clarence as the town's minister.

When the Salem Witch trials broke out, Bethany eagerly spread their madness to Stonewall. But the tenth victim was the friend of Bethany's youngest daughter, Katherine, who unearthed evidence that this was really a way for Bethany to resolve a land-dispute between their families in the Stone's favor. When Katherine tried to intervene, she called out her mother for the cold, twisted monster that she was. Bethany promptly stabbed Katherine in the heart, and that was when the Mists took the town.

Bethany Stone is now a [[harpy]], although she has limited shapeshifting abilities that let her masquerade as a human. Her curse is that she will be forever doomed to lose her children before they are fully ready, whether by death, betrayal or abandonment. Though she doesn't know it yet, as part of this curse, she will become spontaneously pregnant and give birth to a human child every 5 years. Both of her arms are permanently blood-red from the elbow down, although she considers it a sign of her righteousness and so doesn't hide it.

The borders of Stonewall are permanently closed; unless the departee has the approval of either Bethany or Clarence to leave, they will be struck by lightning bolts until they turn back. It's unknown if lightning immunity will nullify this border, but it's not explicitly countered.

Nothing explicitly says that Bethany cannot just be killed in a fight (and, frankly, Stonewall is described as the kind of place where wiping out everybody is actually the heroic thing to do), but she ''does'' have an explicit method of redemption. If the party can find one of the dolls she made as a child, as one survived her father's wrath, and present it to her, she will break down in tears. If consoled and successfully reminded of her long-lost dreams, the rest of the town will break down weeping with her, and then Stonewall will slide out of the Mists and back to the prime material. On the other hand, if they fail, then she'll destroy the doll herself and become even more fanatical.

===Caleb Wicks===
Darklord of Wayward on the Bone Sands. Even at the age of 10, Caleb was a fearless, stubborn, trouble-making brat. The only thing able to scare him into obedience were stories of a local boogeyman: Black Hat the Swordslinger.

Caleb's transformation from mere brat to full-blown Darklord came when his family were hired by the lord of the distant Hangingshire, which required a long trek that passed through a desert region known as the Bone Sands. During this leg of the journey, Caleb's family were seperated from the caravan and veered their wagon over a tall, steep dune as a result of a sudden sandstorm. The wagon was destroyed, their horses killed, and Caleb's elder brother Horatio was severely injured. Though they initially settled in to wait for the caravan to send a rescue party after them, their food swiftly ran out and they realized they would have to try and walk out of the desert on foot... a journey that Horatio couldn't make.

The senior Wicks came to a grim realization: Horatio wasn't going to live much longer anyway, so when he died, the family would eat his body for sustenane before making their trek towards safety. They were content to wait... but Caleb found out about their plans, and taunted his brother with this fact; when Horatio began to scream and cry, Caleb panicked and stabbed him to death with a cooking knife. Caleb's parents were horrified, but ultimately decided there was nothing left to do. They ate their dead son, and then broke camp the next morning.

As they were traveling, Caleb found himself separated from his family by another sandstorm, wandering on his own for days before he stumbled across a small town called "Wayward". Mad with hunger, he murdered the first townsman who tried to offer him help, devouring as much of the man's flesh as he could before fleeing into the night. The next morning, he revealed himself to the horrified townsfolk and claimed that he had witnessed Black Hat kill and eat the man. Unable to believe a youngster like Caleb could be responsible for so monstrous a crime, the townsfolk believed him, and opened their homes to the young cannibal.

Caleb became a beloved fixture of the community... and then, the neighboring [[gnome]] community of Rumbleton was destroyed in an earthquake that crushed the subterranean village like an egg. They begged Wayward for shelter whilst they tried to rebuild, and the humans took them in. But rebuilding a new gnomish settlement wasn't easy, as Rumbleton had already been built in what was considered the most stable, accessible ground for miles around. With little choice, the gnomes began to put down roots in Wayward.

Which was a problem: Wayward already had troubles supporting its own population before the gnomes came in, and now things were worse than ever. The population increase led to a famine, known as "The Lean Times" by the locals, and tensions began to grow between humans and gnomes... tensions only fanned by Caleb, who began advocating the humans of Wayward should eat the baby gnomes born after the refugees settled in their village. Whilst initially this proposal was rejected, the gnomes took affront when they learned of its proposal at all, and relations only continued to deteriorate... especially because Caleb was continuing to egg things on, pushing his cannibalistic plan in secret.

Finally, it all came to a head; on the first night of the full moon, the Waywarders, driven mad with hunger, descended on the gnome shantytown and abducted as many gnomish children as they could, cannibalizing them in a disgusting, bloody orgy. Over the next two days they massacred the surviving gnomes and ate them as well, then they ate the few Waywarders who had protested "The Feast", as it was dubbed. And on that final full moon night, as the cannibal villagers slept off their full bellies, Wayward on the Bone Sands was pulled into the [[Demiplane of Dread]].

Caleb and the other villagers are now [[quevari]]. They spend most of their time in an enchanted slumber, only waking when visitors come to town. Like all quevari, they are peaceful and innocent-seeming during the day, but revert to bloodthirsty cannibals at night, as the first three nights after outsiders arrive are all full moons - after those three nights, they fall back into slumber until disturbed again. It's unclear what happens if a survivor somehow avoids being killed on that third night. 

Wayward itself has a couple of curses. Firstly, there are no children here; all of their youths were left behind when the village was pulled into the Misty Realms, and none of the women ever fall pregnant, save when Caleb is killed (we'll get to that). Secondly, all food and drink in the domain is inherently inedible - even foods brought in from outside instantly spoil, although the look and smell perfectly fine. Finally, none of the villagers will ever age beyond the day they were when they committed their sins.

Caleb himself is a 5th level [[quevari]] [[thief]] who wields an enchanted knife +3 of bleeding. He can Charm Person 1/day by speaking to them, and still carries the Triangle of the Feast - the triangular dinner bell he played before the cannibalism of the gnomes. This can function as a Chime of Hunger that only affects non-Waywarders 3/day, and can also summon 2d6 Waywarders to his aid at will. The other quevari only openly recognize him as their lord and master during the night, but still are fiercely protective of him during the day. He can potentially be driven away in fear by forcefully invoking Black Hat - this requires something like disguising yourself ''as'' the boogeyman or telling a Black Hat story, simply saying the name won't scare him.

If killed, one of the Wayward women will find herself pregnant within a week, and give birth to Caleb's reincarnation a month later. Caleb will resume his true form as an elven year old a month after being born. The only way to kill Caleb for good is to wipe out the entire town of Wayward, which frankly you should be wanting to do anyway.

Caleb can close the borders by summoning tornadoes that lash all around the domain's periphery, kicking up lethal sandstorms and making it impossible to flee.

===Cassandre Desesprits===
Darklord of Miseria. Born to a humble farmer's family, Cassandre was gifted with the ability to see and communicate with the spirits of the dead, which also made her a very effective seer. When this was revealed to her village, she became an immediate celebrity, and this situation - never permitted time to herself or any true friends, but also showered in displays of good will and thanks - twisted her heart. She became completely self-centered, egotistical and immoral, regarding all others as nothing more than things to use for her own amusement and gratification.

When a war broke out amongst the local villages over the ability to use her seer powers, Cassandre exploited this to become a veritable queen, feeding just the right predictions to all factions to keep the war dragging on perpetually for over two years, wallowing in opulence whilst others bled, died and starved over her. Inevitably, the war drew to its climax, with both factions preparing to launch a decisive blow with a super-spell; Cassandre manipulated them into both acting at the exact same time, figuring that this would cause the spells to negate each other and stalemate, thus preserving the war and her power. Instead, they magnified each other, resulting in the annihilation of the warring armies and Cassandre being blown into Miseria.

Cassandre's curse is, fundamentally, that she will never again enjoy the lifestyle she once enjoyed. Although surrounded by people who genuinely like and care for her rather than her gifts, she pines for the days when people doted upon her every wish and resents being forced to work for a living as a barmaid. Her [[diviner]] powers have dwindled and become almost useless, but her spiritual powers have expanded; she now commands incorporeal [[undead]] with the proficiency of a master [[necromancer]], and her life is supplement with the years drained by her [[ghost]]ly minions. None of her schemes to regain her "royal" status will ever work, and so she seems doomed to an eternity as a beloved but otherwise unremarkable barmaid.

When she closes the borders, Miseria is surrounded by thick red fog that causes those who try to leave to age and eventually crumble to dust, whereupon they become ghosts under her command.

If slain, Cassandre becomes a ghost herself, but then resurrects 2d4 days later. Only if she is confronted in ghost form by an exorcist of the local deity Saint-Ambroise who can denounce her for her crimes in life will she be banished from the world of the living forever.

===Coyote===
Darklord of Yatehcaa. Once, this animal god aided the First Man in protecting his American Aboriginal-flavored world from powerful monsters. But his greed, malice and cruelty led to him committing many dark acts, and so the gods declared him unfit to remain amongst their ranks. First Man took back Coyote's cloak of stars, condemning him to stay forever on the world and be vulnerable to the monsters he had once battled. But Coyote showed no regret, no compassion, no willingness to learn from his mistakes or to try and make amends, and so he found himself trapped in the [[Demiplane of Dread]].

Ever since, he has continued his old ways, playing cruel, malicious tricks on the people of Yatehcaa, all the while trying to distract himself from how afraid he is that some day, he might be caught and killed by "The Dark Watchers", the antediluvian monsters whom he once battled alongside First Man.

Technically, nothing protects Coyote from death, but between his lack of shame and utter cowardice combined with his powerful magical abilities, actually killing him in a fight is easier said than done.

===Dr. Dorothy Hemphyll===
Darklord of Immerabt. This female human alchemist could in many ways be considered a mirror to Dr. Mordenheim of Lamordia. Like him, she was born a scientific prodigy who had neither time nor patience for religions and matters of faith. When she was twelve, Dorothy's mother died in childbirth giving birth to a son, something Dorothy blamed upon both the local priest - for he had both refused to allow Dorothy to be present at the birth, despite her knowledge of herbs and medicines, for her lack of faith, and proven unable to save Lady Hemphyll's life with his limited divine magic - and her father, for he had listened to the priest.

This became the cornerstone of Dorothy's growing loathing for religion, something that grew ever stronger as she aged. She went abroad to study medical sciencies, [[transmuter|transmutation magic]] and [[alchemist|philosophical alchemy]], always seeking to refine her medical skills. She also visited the dark, seedy corners of society: brothels, dog-fighting arenas, drug-fueled parties and other such realms that further convinced her of the absence of divine intervention.

The kicker was when she met and fell in love with another medical student of noble ancestry; Hermann Leawly. Despite her feelings, she refused to marry him, for that would require submitting to a religious ceremony she wanted nothing to do with. But he bent under the pressure from his traditional family and returned to their home, something that enraged Dorothy, who now derided him as a weakling.

After a long, bloody war, a terrible plague gripped her homeland, and Dorothy came up with an idea for a new method to care for the terminally ill. She purchased an abandoned penitentiary on a small rocky island and converted it into a sickbay, hiring the best healers she could find (so long as they weren't divine spellcasters). One of those she hired was Hermann. She became ever-more obsessive, pushing her followers brutally, and gaining the first attention of the [[Dark Powers]]. When she perfected her prototype life support mechanisms and began abducting the terminally ill from her hospice to install them in the devices, trapping them at the brink of life and death in a state of constant, unrelenting pain, they grew anticipatory. But it wasn't until she got drunk at a party celebrating her newly produced plague vaccine, and revealed to Hermann her monstrous experiments, injecting him with concentrated plague serum and deliberately waiting for him to reach the still-incurable terminal stage of the disease before strapping him into one of her hideous living death machines that they seized her and transformed goal island into Immerabt.

Dorothy's curse is three-fold, and could be a considered a blend of Mordenheim's and Azalin's. Though she is well-aware of the fact that the local industries of Immerabt are poisoning the population, her attempts to plan and execute social projects to counter the pollution invariably fail due to being rejected or ignored. Secondly, she is kept so busy working her daily job that she cannot devote the time to furthering her understandings of magic and alchemy, preventing her from attaining the greater power she needs to pursue her goal of the ultimate curatives. Finally, she is unable to invent a vaccine to cure those suffering from the terminal effects of the plague, which means she cannot cure Hermann, who remains bound and suffering in his life-support in the depths of her sanitarium.

Unlike many darklords, Dorothy has no inherent abilities that make her unkillable, although her disease-bearing touch and biomechanical golem guards make her a force to be reckoned with in combat. She can regenerate, but she's vulnerable to fire.

If she wishes to close the borders of Immerabt, violent storms with strong winds and heavy rain surround the archipelago, whilst the waters boil with mutated [[shark]]s and other aquatic predators.

===Elizabeth Michelle Cole III===
Darklord of Hibernate. This female human [[vampire]] was born to the noble family of the Coles in the land of Hybernaya on Boram'ith. Despite her aristocratic lineage, she did not believe in the inherent superiority of her bloodline, and fell in love with a peasant boy, whom her parents had executed on trumped-up charges. This engendered a deep hatred for her parents in Elizabeth's heart, and at the age of 28, she left home to "think about things".

In her wanderings, she met and fell in love with a man named Alexander Berzinski, a [[vampire]] who converted her into one as well. They traveled together for seven years before parting, whereupon Elizaeth returned home, murdered her parents, and ruled  their lands with an iron first for a decade.

During this time, she became a high priestess of [[Thanatos]], and attempted to lure a prophesied warrior known as "The Son of the Black Moon" into Thanatos' service. A task she delighted in, for she fell in love with him when she met him - a one-sided love, for he was devoted to his [[half-elf]] girlfriend. When he died escaping from his contract with the dark god, Elizabeth had him resurrected and attempted to lure him through a portal to the [[Lower Planes]], only to find herself alone in Darkon. Here, she fell afoul of the Kargat and fled to the Sea of Sorrows, only to find herself bound to the newly formed isle of Hibernate when she set foot there.

She has risen to power as the madame of the most well-respected brothel in Hibernate, leading a force of twenty eight call girls, all of whom she has turned into [[vampire]]s. Her curse is that she yearns to find the Son of the Black Moon and claim him for herself, but he has never materialized in the [[Demiplane of Dread]].

Elizabeth is unaffected by Hibernatian holy symbols, due to the combined facts that they represent a non-existant god and the lack of true faith endemic in Hibernate's people, but can be slain by a pine wood stake, or paralyzed with any other kind of stake. If Elizabeth is killed, one of her vampire prostitutes will fall into a month-long coma, during which she will physically and mentally be subsumed and transformed into a new incarnation of Elizabeth. It's unclear how this can be prevented.

When she wishes to close the domain, Hibernate's borders are choked by a thick fog that is impossible to navigate; those who try only find themselves circling back to Hibernate, no matter how hard they try.

The [[Undead Sea Scrolls]] 2002 version of Elizabeth emphasizes her fundamental selfishness and cruelty, and also notes that her Undying Soul will allow her to possess any woman in Hibernate should all of her prostitutes be killed.

===Gatwe and Mr. Klein===
The domain of Nzari is home to two darklords, struggling for dominance.

'''Gatwe''' is the original Darklord; an Mwele man who was forever questioning the traditions of his people even from a youth and who burned to hold power. He apprenticed himself to the tribal shaman, whom he perceived held the true power, but his ambitions remained unchecked. When the most beautiful woman in the village chose to marry a respected hunter, that was the last straw; he forsook all the traditional limits on the shaman and began practicing sorcery. He used curses to sicken and kill those he hated, and goad the tribe into war, slowly building an empire from the scattered tribes of the Mwele. When suspicion began to fall upon him, he murdered his own family to try and throw it off, assuming the form of a leopard to plant a curse-bundle that would kill them all slowly and painfully. When he began to resume his human form, that was when the [[Dark Powers]] struck, trapping him in a twisted [[Broken One|nightmarish conglomerate form]], incapable of wielding his former magic, and launching Nzari into the Misty Realm.

'''Mr. Klein''' came to Nzari after its appearance in the [[Demiplane of Dread]]. A fanatical devotee of [[Ezra]], he yearned to be a missionary, but found that goal stymied during the initial rush to explore the Sea of Sorrows; the merchants who controlled the expedition wanted profits, not proselytizing. Only when Nzari was discovered, with its savage cannibal tribes and vast wealth of ivory, did Mr. Klein finally find his desire within his grasp. He founded the Dementlieur Exploration Company, and led its first expedition to Nzari. The Mwele naturally resisted this foreign invasion, but Klein had the zeal of a fanatic and pressed on, resorting to ever-more brutal tactics as months of battle and disease took its toll on his followers. Eventually, he caught the attention of Gatwe, but managed to fight the feared "leopard-devil" off - an act that won him inroads amongst the Mwele. His followers swelled in numbers, and he seemed to make real progress in "civilizing" Nzari... until he realized that his followers were not worshipping Ezra, but Klein himself, and that those he conquered were merely paying lip service to his commands. Furious, he resorted to to ever-more draconian methods to "stamp out the heathenism", but succeeded only in pushing the Mwele to rebel. Klein counter-attacked viciously with his own forces, and responded by flaying every last one of them alive before he had them beheaded, their bodies cast into the river, and their heads impaled on stakes around his house.

In the face of such brutality, the Dark Powers aren't sure ''which'' of the two better deserves the title of Darklord.

Gatwe's curse is simple: he is forever cut off from the adoration and power he changes. No Mwele will have anything to do with one so obviously marked as a sorcerer, and he cannot change or disguise his form regardless of what artifice he tries. Mr. Klein, on the other hand, is cursed that when he sleeps, he sees the world through Gatwe's eyes, experiencing the broken one's life as he lives it. Both, ironically, share the curse of wanting to change the Mwele culture, but being completely incapable of doing so.

The two Darklords ''despise'' each other. Gatwe has become convinced that if he can kill Klein, his full powers will be restored to him. Klein, on the other hand, believes that Gatwe is a literal demon, a symbol of the savagery hidden in humanity's heart, and that only by "civilizing" the Mwele will the nightmarish dream-visions cease.

Unusually for co-darklords, they can both close Nzari's borders; Gatwe surrounds the domain an impenetrable thicket of vegetation, whilst those trying to flee against Klein's wishes find themselves lost in thick fog and eventually attacked by an endless hail of arrows.

Both darklords also have their own unique forms of immortality. If Gatwe is killed, one of the leopards of Nzari will become his reincarnation a day later. Klein, on the other hand, is simply impervious to all attacks not dealt with an ivory weapon (a ''blessed'' ivory weapon deals double damage!) and will not return if slain.

===Geren Horstadt===
Darklord of Seradan.  Born the favored son of a minor noble family, Geren was a bullying braggart in private, but a charming and idolized peer in public. All that changed when, at the age of 17, he was struck by a strange wasting disease that crippled him irreversibly; he lost use of his legs, his muscles withered, and all his senses faded. Though his family bankrupted themselves to try and cure him, nothing worked. He spent fifteen years in his own personal hell, watching and envying those with normal lives, and resenting his family despite the love and care they still showered him with.

His true descent into damnation came when one of his brothers brought down a trunk full of books from the attack, and Geren learned one of his great-grandfathers had been a powerful [[wizard]] - one with considerable experience in summoning beings from the [[Lower Planes]]. When his family refused to hire a wizard to tutor Geren in magic, he decided to try summoning a [[fiend]] on his own. He called forth a [[yugoloth]], who was so surprised by the venomous manner in which Geren pleaded his case that he offered Geren a trade: the souls of Geren's famiy in exchange for the ability to "help Geren feel what others feel". 

It was a bargain Geren made without hesitation. He hired an [[assassin]] to kill every last member of his family, other than his mother. In exchange, the yugoloth gifted him with the ability to possess others, which allowed him to vicariously experience life as a normal person again. He slowly began to rebuild the family's fortunes by using possessed thralls to commit acts of murder and theft... then the townsfolk began to suspect his mother was involved, and she in turn wondered if Geren was responsible. When she confronted him, however, Geren petuantly seized control of her mind and made her kill herself. But some of the townsfolk had just arrived to question her again, and they discovered her slumping over the infamous and now-hated cripple. Realizing that Geren had been responsible, they beat him with clubs and then dragged him into the streets, where the mob lynched him; hanging him from a tree and beating him to death as they burned his family's home and himself. 

Such was Geren's rage at this fate that he returned from the grave as a powerful haunt - a [[Ravenloft]] strain of [[ghost]]. With his possession abilities enhanced, he used them to massacre the entire population of the village... which was when the Mists rolled in and claimed him for Seradan.

Geren's darklord status brings with it a cocktail of curses. The standard Darklord curse of being unable to leave his domain chafes him particularly, being that he yearns to explore and experience the world. Making matters worse is that he is now trapped in a realm of dullards, so docile, unimaginative and unfeeling that possessing them is little better than staying a ghost. For further insult, Geren can now only possess hosts for short periods of time, or else they die of a supernaturally induced fever, forcing him to largely avoid using his possession abilities.

Geren always reforms one week after being destroyed. Only if he is allowed to kill Wilhelm Braugh, the only survivor of Geren's hometown and the inspector who gave him over to the mob, will he cease to exist, having decided that there is nothing left to live for. If he closes the borders, supernatural exhaustion claims any who try to leave the domain, sapping their strength until they are left helpless.

===Jarl Gravstein Hansen===
Darklord of the Northlands. This male human was born to the Gand tribe, son of the man who had founded the trade guild known as the Key, which was bringing much-needed prosperity to the realm. He railed against the tradition by which the Gand and Kosti tribes alternated ownership of the capital city of Miklaheim every five years, and was determined to keep ownership of the city for himself.

To do so, he launched a brutal campaign against the Gand tribe, taxing his own people into famine and ruin to do so. When they were devastated, he turned his back on the traditional religion of the seidmen, secretly siphoning away funds from the church who thought he was supporting them. Finally, he began taxing the trade guild to borderline ruin itself. Through his short-sighted greed and selfishness, the realm was drawn into the [[Demiplane of Dread]].

Secretly, Gravstein yearns to be respected and loved, but he cannot attain it - only if he returns all the land of the Gand to them will this curse be broken, which mechanically manifests as an automatic failure on any Charisma check other than Intimidation. He doesn't have any magical powers to preserve his life, but whoever takes up the mantle of leadership should he die will be cursed in the same manner.

Closing the borders results in a vast army of warrior spirits descending from the heavens and physically blocking passage.

===The Barons Gustav===
Darklords of Gustavstan.

Baron Gustav the Elder is a male human ghost who once ruled a small kingdom in his homeland. Though he had intended to pass his holdings on to his younger brother Klaus, the younger sibling had no interest in ruling, so the elderly Gustav took a wife and fathered a son, Gustav the Younger. Then, when his son was fifteen, Gustav the Elder stepped on a snake in his garden and was fatally bitten.

Gustav the Younger (male human [[Fighter]]) was inconsolable, his mind fracturing under the sudden death of his beloved father. In his grief, he refused to take up the throne, forcing his uncle Klaus to become Baron in his place - as well as to wed Ingrid, Gustav the Elder's widow and Gustav the Younger's mother, to secure the Younger's inheritance. Unfortunately, this gesture was misunderstood by ''both'' Gustavs; the Younger began to despise his uncle and mother for their apparent disloyalty, whilst the Elder's restless spirit also became incensed at Klaus's apparent betrayal. He seized upon the idea of exploiting his son's fractured mind to both weaponize him against Klaus and to make him vulnerable, so the Elder could live again by stealing his son's body.

This domain is basically [[grimdark]] Hamlet, in case it's not obvious already.

So Gustav the Elder manifests to his son, lies that he was murdered by Klaus, and convinces his half-crazed son that Klaus wants to steal the throne for himself. Klaus the Younger swallows this bullshit hook, line and sinker, and pretending to be even madder than he actually was, he began preparing to kill his uncle and his mother both - ignoring that Gustav the Elder wanted Ingrid spared, having figured that once he stole his son's body, [[/d/|he could reclaim her as his wife]].

This led to Gustav the Younger murdering the father of Elaine, the woman he loved, and driving her so insane that she ended up committing suicide by throwing herself off the battlements of the castle - which didn't do Gustav Junior's sanity any great shakes. Instead, it provoked him into finally battling his uncle, killing Klaus and his mother in the process. Which was when Gustav the Eldler showed up and, horrified at his wife's death, he revealed the truth about how he'd played his son for a fool. Enraged, the son attacked his father's ghost, and that was when Gustavstan was snatched up by the mists.

Gustav the Younger now burns with the urge to hunt his father's spirit down and destroy him, a task not helped by his paranoia. Every night, he is haunted by the angry ghosts of Elaine and Klaus, who spend the night cursing him out for their murders.

Gustav the Elder now spends his days haunting the local insane asylum, where Ingrid - who actually survived her son's attack, but was left a raving madwoman - is now kept. At night, he strives to manipulate others into killing his son.

Neither darklord can be permanently destroyed by violence; they regenerate and revive from destruction. Only by killing Ingrid will their resurrective regeneration cease... but doing this will cause the killer to immediately suffer a failed [[Powers Check]], whilst those who watch get to roll one. 

===Hakaan na Uruk===
Darklord of Saarkaath. This male [[half-orc]] was born to an unknown human slave and her orcish master in the [[orc]] stronghold known as the Dark Fork Holding. When Hakaan was young, the Holding was put to the torch by a [[paladin]] order called the Storm Templars; whilst the orcish women and children fled, Hakaan was left behind, and rescued by a paladin named Leith Kelbar. As Hakaan favored his human heritage in appearance, Leith took the child in and informally adopted him.

Officially, Hakaan was just Leith's "dog robber", a menial worker, but Leith showed the boy an undemonstrative but very real affection and even trained him in weapon's use and other page skills. This in turn engendered a hero's worship attitude in the young half-orc.When Hakaan entered puberty and his orcish heritage became more appropriate, the other knights of the Storm Templars began encouraging Leith to abandon the half-orc and take a human servant instead. The stubborn and idiosyncratic paladin flatly refused them, and instead made Hakaan his squire at the age of 14. The half-orc's respect for his adoptive father only increased at this decision, and he began to dream of becoming a full-fledged Storm Templar himself, determined to prove his worth despite his heritage.

The orc/human war was still raging at this point, and soon after becoming Leith's squire, Hakaan saw his father killed during a climatic battle at Shadow Mountain. Leith's dying wish was for Hakaann to take his [[Holy Avenger]] and his armor back to the Storm Templars. The half-orc fought heroically and made the 400 mile trip back to the central temple of the Storm Templars. To his dismay, he found himself coldly received and sharply censured for daring to carry Leiber's weapons and armor as a mere squire; many of the Templars even pushed for him to be expelled from the order entirely. But his actions and skills did win him the support of a few key members of the order, and so a compromise was offered: Hakaan could "prove himself" by beginning his squire's training over from the beginning, with vague promises of a future "consideration" for full knighthood.

The young half-orc was outraged and indignant, feeling he had proved his worth through his skills already. He left the order and sought membership in another elite martial unit... however, none would take a half-orc. Only a mercenary force allowed him membership, and whilst initially distressed by their monetary emphasis and neutral (at best) morality, he soon adjusted. In fact, by the time he was 30, he was the Captain-General of his own mercenary army! But he never forgot the way that the Storm Templars and the other elite forces of the human military had rejected him, and a bitter enmity grew in his heart. Things finally came to a boil when the human kingdom declared war on the southern [[hobgoblin]]s; not only was Hakaan's army hired to work alongside an offensive led by the Storm Templars, but despite his vital role, he was not invited to the meetings held by the various generals of the royal army and the order.

That was the last straw. Hakaan began secretly communicating with the hobgoblin armies, and through his treachery the human forces suffered reverse after reverse. At the final climatic battle, the humans' last gamble, Hakaan deliberately "misunderstood" a signal to reinforce the Storm Templars and fell back, allowing his former order to be annihilated and delivering a crushing defeat to the forces of humanity. He promptly surrendered to the hobgoblins and offered them the services of his forces; those mercenaries who refused to follow him were promised safe passage to the lines, but instead were betrayed and given over to the "correction officers" of the hobgoblin forces.

Fighting at the side of the hobgoblins, Hakaan's forces swelled with the addition of several hundred orcish conscripts, all eager to serve "under one of their own". Howerver, he soon fell out with the hobgoblins and tried to betray them as well, but they were better prepared than the human forces and Hakaan found himself forced to flee with less than a thousand surviving troops into the mountains, pursued the whole way by [[hobgoblin]]s, [[goblin]]s and [[worg]]s.

He escaped by fleeing into a thick mountain fog, only to emerge in a strange mountainous region completely alien to him and his followers, and magically prevented from finding their way back to more familiar ground. Discovering a massive complex of tunnels and caverns within the mountains, at the encouragement of his orcish followers, Hakaan settled into the caves and began operating like a typical orc warchief, sending his forces out to raid the surface villages for supplies, slaves and concubines; many of those slaves or their ill-favored human-looking halfbreed children subsequently escaped to the surface, and thus the domain of Saarkaath was born.

A hundred years have passed, but Hakaan's aging has been slowed, and so he only appears to be fifty... of course, even a very-well preserved fifty is still a pretty significant age for a half-orc! In mockery of Hakaan's life-long loathing of his orcish heritage only to willingly stoop to the worst behaviors associated with orcdom, his orcish traits have been exaggerated over the years, and so he now not only looks like a pureblooded [[orc]], but he suffers even worse sensitivity to sunlight than a true orc would - combined with his curse-spawned intense agoraphobia, and Hakaan can no longer bring himself to visit the surface. Hakaan attempts to hide from his self-loathing by celebrating the orcishness of his people, surrounding himself with those who most strongly favor their orc heritage and punishing the least orcy-looking denizens of Saarkath, but truthfully it still rankles him. Combined with his inability to leave Saarkaath to take revenge on his ancient human and hobgoblin foes, and his "kingdom" is a glorified prison whose bars he can never deny.

Hakaan is amongst the most vulnerable of all darklords; aside from the hitpoints of being a 12th level [[fighter]] as well as owning a +2 greatsword and a Ring of Regeneration, he has no magical protections of any sort to preserve his life. If you can kill him, he'll stay dead. Amongst his more unusual abilities, he can fly into a berserker rage similar to a [[barbarian]], and detect [[paladin]]s with perfect accuracy.

When Hakaan closes Saarkaath's borders, a forest of magical spears and swords appears at the border; those who try to force through will suffer 1d10 damage per round, which can only be restored by magical healing - and, of course, those who try to fly over will instead just drop straight onto them.

===Henry Arlington===
Darklord of Arlington Farm. Henry Arlington was a farmer who obsessed about success. Inheriting his farm after the tragic death of his parents in a house fire, he killed his own elder brothers in a duel to secure his inheritance. He proved to be a demanding, overbearing farmer, and obsessed with successful crops; when an unexpected New Year's late frost resulted in damage to a significant portion of the crops, Henry flew into a rage, even though he had more than enough funds to weather this less-than-perfect year. In his rage, he murdered one of his farmhands, concealing the crime by cutting up his body and hiding it amongst the scarecrows on the property. That year, the farm bloomed with a record-breaking bounty.

The next year saw a similar pattern: the crops failed early in the year, but when Henry killed (in this case a stray dog), they suddenly reversed fortune and flourished. Henry became convinced that his farm would reward him with bounty only in exchange for blood sacrifices, and he began a yearly ritual of murdering some human victim and stuffing their dismembered body into the scarecrows. Over a decade of this grisly work, he soon had no farmhands left to sacrifice, and so instead he slaughtered his entire family for the sake of his farm.

That was the last straw. The grisly, corpse-stuffed scarecrows came to life and burned down all his crops, then dragged Henry out into the field and mutilated him, turning him into a fleshy scarecrow like themselves. That was when the Mists swallowed the farm.

In the present, Henry still tends to his farm as an animate corpse [[scarecrow]], only to find his labors undone whatever he achieves. In addition, every harvest moon, he finds himself human once more - and subsequently butchered by his vengeful scarecrow "workers".

Henry can close the border for up to an hour at a time by summoning a vast murder of crows that attack whoever tries to leave. After an hour, however, Henry is exhausted and must rest for 3 rounds before he can resummon the swarm. If slain, Henry remains dead until the next full moon or blue moon, whereupon he will possess one of the scarecrows in his domain and return to life. Theoretically, he can be destroyed forever by destroying all of the scarecrows.

===Hercules===
Darklord of Olympus. Born the son of the High Priest of [[Zeus]] in a theocratic nation ruled over by a collective of seven temples to the Greek Gods - Zeus, [[Athena]], [[Aphrodite]], [[Hermes]], [[Ares]], [[Apollo]] and [[Hades]], the man now known only as Hercules earned great fame in his youth by speaking up against the brutal repression of the priest-lords and championing the rights of the oppressed commoners. Although originally he sought peace, the overwhelming corruption opposing him led him first to delving into the murky depths of politics, and finally into leading a full-blown revolution.

This angered the realm's rulers, the conclave of High Priests known as the Council of Seven, who came up with three plans to ruin Hercules. The High Priest of Zeus sent his son cursed gauntlets that would drive him into bloodthirsty rages under false pretence of truce. The High Priestess of Athena sought to summon a daemonic entity that would grant the Council magical powers that would allow them to crush the rebels and prove themselves the true "Voices of the Gods". Finally, the High Priestess of Aphrodite arranged for one of her serving girls to be sent to seduce Hercules, with the ultimate plan of disgracing him by tempting him into committing the blasphemous act of making love in the holy ground of the temple of Zeus.

They couldn't have expected that Dejanira, the girl chosen by the Voice of Aphrodite, would fall in love with Hercules and reveal the ploy to him. Any more than she could have expected for him to revile her as a traitorous seductress, but hide his loathing and use her to deliver a strike against the Council as they performed the summoning ritual. At the height of battle and ritual both, Hercules turned on Dejanira and stabbed her to death before throwing her into the center of the Council, then beating his father to death as he was paralyzed by the sudden influx of magical energies from the rite.

The Seven Voices of the Gods were transformed into quasi-daemons in their own right, and Hercules became the Darklord of the realm now called simply "Olympus".

Hercules is cursed both with the erratic and dangerous rages from his braces, and in that he is haunted by the terrifying spectre of Dejanira, who still loves him even in death. Worse still, his reputation continually sours due to his berserk rages.

The only way to kill Hercules for good is to force him, the six "Living Gods" of Olympus and the Forsaken One (the half-daemonic ghost of the High Priest of Zeus) to meet in the abandoned temple of Zeus and perform the fiend summoning ritual again. Only if Hercules allows himself to be sacrificed as part of the ritual will his curse be ended - which will also strip the Living Gods of their powers and make them mortal as well.

If Hercules wishes to seal the borders of Olympus, a titanic lightning storm envelops the domain, striking down any who attempt to escape.

===Heresa Heri, The Vulture King===
Darklord of Tsuu-Y-Teke. Long ago, Heresa Heri was one of the great animal lords, powerful spirits subordinate to the greater animal gods, but he betrayed his master's wishes after being named ruler over the skies: when given the ability to create permanent light from enchanted crystals, rather than sharing this light with the world, he selfishly kept them for himself, turning them into a shining feathered headdress. But his treachery was uncovered by a human hero-shaman named Kanaciwe, who captured Heresa Heri and tore out the golden and silver feathers, turning them into the sun, moon and stars. But the appearance of the sun dazed Kanaciwe, allowing Heresa Heri to break free of the shaman's grip and kill him.

This act enraged his rival, the newly empowered Haloe-Tsuu (Sun Puma), who cursed Heresa Heri; never again would he be allowed to face the sunlight, or else it would destroy him. Though the Vulture King fled into the deepest cave, he was mortally wounded, and summoned his underlings to ceremonially preserve his body and spirit. As he died, he cursed all those who had robbed him of "his" treasure, from the humans whose shaman had taken his headdress of shining light to the skies themselves for being home to the sun and moon. Thus was the domain of Tsuu-Y-Teke born.

In appearance, the Vulture King is a white-feathered giant vulture with a dark red bonnet of dried blood on his head, sickly yellow eyes that glow in the dark, and a jagged, uneven beak that gives him the appearance of fanged teeth. He is an [[undead]] creature with powers similar to those of a [[mummy]], althoug he looks like a living bird.

As Darklord, Heresa Heri is trapped in his cavern lair except during True Night, the one period of darkness that comes to Tsuu-Y-Teke once per month. He has become obsessed with the idea that if he can amass a sufficient number of gems, he can reimprison the light and restore the endless Night that the world once knew... but he knows that to do so, he needs the ''exact'' number of gems as there are stars in the sky, and he no longer remembers how many that is!

In combat, Heresa Heri is a powerhouse and all but impossible to destroy without the use of sunlight or powerful magical light. Even then, if destroyed, his spirit will possess any giant vulture within a 13 mile radius, which will transform into the Vulture King 1 week later.

When the Vulture King seeks to seal Tsuu-Y-Teke, then impenetrable magical darkness gathers on the borders; those who try to escape instead get lost in the utter blackness and stumble right back out into the domain.

===Commander Hernando Mouriros===
Darklord of Mictlan. Born into poverty, Hernando Mouriros was the son of a simple laborer; a brutal drunkard who savagely beat his wife and children. Hernando's mother died birthing Hernando's younger sister when he was ten, and six months later, his father took another wife, which pushed the embittered youth over the edge. Only the city guard's intervention kept Hernando from being beaten to death by his father, and he repaid their mercy by throwing himself into their ranks.

Despite his background, Hernando's rise was meteoric, and he soon graduated from the city guard to the Imperial Army, and from there worked his way up the ranks to captain. When the Holy Empire launched its great crusade, Hernando flung himself into the slaughter, eager to showcase his loyalty and win wealth and power for himself. He became renowned for his uncompromising nature, devious tactics, draconian authority over his men, and utter lack of mercy towards the "pagans" he battled.

After ten years of crusading, he was called back to the Empire and charged with leading the first expedition to conquer the newly discovered jungle realms beyond the Sierra Acora mountains. Hernando was honored - and the discovery of the distinctly [[Aztec]]-like native cultures, with their bloody [[theocracy]], only fueled his desire to succeed. When the first natives they met offered them peaceful greetings and a tribute of gold and gems, Hernando took the offerings and then launched an attack anyway, slaughtering the natives down to the last child - the act that finally earned him his position as Darklord.

The curse of Hernando Mouriros is similar to Vlad Drakov's: he yearns to conquer Mictlan and bring it to heel, but he is handicapped from doing so. Not only are his forces outnumbered and demoralized, but the agonizing immortality that allows them to defeat superior numbers carries its own curse; one soldier randomly dies permanently whenever Mouriros' forces conquer a city, and so their numbers shrink as he gains closer to achieving his goal. Whilst he doesn't lose his own forces if an allied force of natives conquers a city, the natives have no real respect for Hernando and constantly betray him for no reason he can determine. His own self-discipline and authoritarian control, once his greatest strengths, have become crippling weaknesses; he can't adapt to the ever-shifting chaos of life in Mictlan. The random nightmares he has of being a hapless child at his brutish father's nonexistent mercy merely adds insult to injury.

A rarity amongst Darklords, Hernando ''isn't'' protected from death, unlike his men. But, if he were to be killed, then his body would burst into enchanted, inextinguishable flames that would ignite anything they touch (although these secondary fires could be extingiuished normally). It's unclear how long Hernando's corpse would burn for, but the wildfires it would cause would almost certainly lay waste to vast swaths of Mictlan in the process.

If Hernando dies, the most likely candidate to replace him as Darklord is the cruel, unhinged high priest of [[Huitzilopochtli]], Cuxi Yapanaque.

===Irka Borova===
Darlord of Verbena. Born to a humble peasant family, Irka was short, plump, and plain looking, with a gammy leg that always impeded her movements. The one thing she had going for her was that she had inherited a natural talent for [[witch]]craft from her father's side of the family; training under her aunt Ludmilla, she became a trusted hedge mage, serving up simple spells and herbal concoctions to cure the sick and grant people petty comforts. It was a decent enough life, and it gave her a rare sense of power...

Then she fell in love with a man named Milosz. She wooed him patiently, only to disover that another girl had stolen his heart; a pretty villager named Alina. Believing she had done so with the aid of a love potion that she had "tricked" Irka into providing, the wrathful witch murdered Alina by tricking her into a false friendship that gave her the opportunity to slowly poison her to death. Then she turned her attention to Milosz, who simply mourned Alina's death for a year before Irka confessed her feelings. When he rejected her, in a fit of rage Irka told him that he was responsible for Alina's death, which caused the heartbroken man to run away and commit suicide in the forest, hanging himself with his own belt.

Alina's brother overheard this final, fatal argument, and whilst he had no proof that the homely witch-woman was to blame, he whipped the villagers into a frenzied mob. Irka fled in terror into a fog, somehow finding her way to her ancient aunt's home, and has stayed there ever since - a prisoner of her own sanctuary. She lives in constant terror of being discovered and punished for her crimes, and yearns to be wealthy and famous, but is cursed to never achieve them; she never feels respected in her guise as a humble herbalist, and whenever she comes into wealth, something always happens that forces her to spend her bounty. She cannot leave, whether because of sudden crippling pains in her leg or because of exterior threats. And she isn't even the master of her own domain; she can't close the borders any further than locking the gates and windows, and a hideous [[ratfolk|man-rat creature]] secretly lurks in the cracks and crannies of the shop, terrifying Irka.

===Isabel de Sargas===
Darklord of San Bartolome. From her earliest days, Isabel de Sargas was a natural charmer, able to get anything she wanted... until the day she met a [[monk]] named Fernando in Porta Coeli. He refused to bend to her charms, and had no desire for anything she could offer him; all he cared about was attaining self-perfection, so that his soul could become an Njelx - the local term for [[angel]]s. Intrigue at his defiance soon grew into an all-consuming obsession; Isabel became convinced that she was in love with Fernando, and determined to make him reciprocate.

Finally, she decided that the only way to make Fernando come to her was to become an Njelx herself. Soon after, the dark Njelx Ezimel began to whisper in her dreams, offering to make her dream come true; Isabel resisted at first, but ultimately succumbed. Months later, the ritual was cast and Isabel became a beautiful winged woman; under the light of the moon, she flew to Fernando's room and told him that she had been an Njelx all along, one sent to test him and determine if his soul was worthy of similar ascension. She claimed he had passed this test, and also won her love, and so they would be together forever in Coeli. Fernando was delighted, and finally yielded to her embrace...

And that was when the sun rose. A strange feeling of lightness, of somehow being detached from her body, came over Isabel, and she saw horror in Fernando's eyes. Looking about, her eyes fell on a mirror, where she saw the truth; she was no Njelx, but a bat-winged horror, with razor-clawed fingers and the legs of some monstrous flying beast - she had become a [[harpy]]. And she wasn't tenderly embracing Fernando, but instead ripping him apart with her bare hands.

As she was snatched back to reality, the mists swallowed her and brought her to the demiplane of dread.

Ever since that day, Isabel has hated the church of San Bartolome. Though she can assume the semblance of her old form, the illusion doesn't last for long and can be forcibly dispelled by the light of both sunrise and sunset - she knows that if her true form were revealed, she would be hunted as a monster. As such, she can no longer exploit her charms to enthrall men, and has been forced into a bitter, self-loathing life as a social recluse. She likes to creep about the city at night and attack couples out of her rage and jealousy. By day, she opoerates a small fishing boat, desperately hoping to accrue the funds to try and overthrow the reigning theocracy, a task she will never complete.

Unbeknownst to Isabel, when she completed her dark pact, her soul was physically removed and now lies hidden somewhere in Nove Circulae, the realm of Ezimel and his fellow fallen Njelx. Unless her soul is returned to her, rendering her mortal, Isabel is unkillable; when slain, she returns to life within a tenday.

If Isabel chooses to close her domain's borders, then a great storm lashes the seas surrounding the island, rendering it impossible to sail or fly through.

===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.

===Captain Jacobi Robertsonn===
Darklord of Whal. Born a fisherman's son on an unnamed world, Jacobi grew up in seas that were plentiful with a father who loved him and loved his life on the sea. Then, when Jacobi was young, he and his father were caught in a terrible storm whilst fishing, during which the youth spotted a giant whale - a ''leviathan'' - playing in the rough surf. Play that ended with the breaching whale crashing right on top of the small fishing boat; Jacobi awoke washed ashore, scarred, surrounded by debris, and with his father missing.

Years later, Jacobi was commanding a trading galleon called the Sailor's Blessing with his beloved only son Abram when the ship was caught in a tropical storm. On the fourth day, the ship hit something in the water and began to sink, and during the scramble to escape, Abram was swept over the side and vanished. Spotting a leviathan in the storm, Jacobi blamed his son's apparent death on the creature, and in fact convinced himself it was the same whale that had killed his father. 

Returning to port, he purchased a new ship, the Retribution, and became a whaler, venting his wrath on whales indiscriminately for the next decade. He was beginning to lose all hope of ever attaining vengeance when he finally encountered the biggest whale he'd ever seen - what he was sure was the leviathan that had killed his father and son. He personally led the hunt and harpooned the beast, only for it turn and smash his boat to pieces. Driven by rage, the wounded Jacobi hauled himself onto the beast by climbing the rope of the embedded harpoon; even as the surviving crew fled, he stabbed the whale over and over again, all the while cursing it, himself and his crew with all his soul... until everything went black.

Then he awoke and found himself on a strange, yet vaguely familiar, island; the land of Whal. A place of whalers who, to his surprise, deferred to him with their problems. He has since figured out he rules Whal, but is cursed to never leave it.

As a Darklord, Jacobi's curse is that he has become a rare oceanic [[therianthrope]]: a [[wereorca]]. He has distinctly mixed feelings about this form; he  acknowledges the appropriateness of it, but he loathes being associated with a whale. He's also been cursed to suffer from intense sea-sickness if he ever sets foot upon a water-borne vessel, so whilst he does enjoy the freedom offered by his alterante form, the fact he can only hunt as an orca means he misses the thrill of commanding his own ship. Whilst normally he has control over this changes, he is forced to assume orca form on the days of his father's and son's deaths, days that are also marked by intense storms.

Perhaps his true curse, however, is that despite his obsession with killing the leviathan he blames for ruining his life, the creature never appears in the waters off of Whal.

When Jacobi closes his borders, the sea parts down to the sea floor, creating a 300ft wide chasm between the two bodies of water. Flight is, of course, impossible. Nothing explicitly prevents you from walking across the chasm and then using water-breathing magic to escape through the water on the other side, though.

Jacobi has no life-preserving powers outside of his immunity to any weapon that isn't +1 or made from whalebone. He is a 16th level [[Avenger]], however, which combined with the aquatic capabilities of his form makes him more dangerous than you'd think.

===Jinx===
Darklord of the Lost Wizard's Tower. This male black cat was once the [[familiar]] of a [[transmuter]] named Margaret Landsdale, a caring and heroic individual, but a slightly neglectful owner, and also too hubristic for her own good. Jinx's journey into damnation began when she decided to use the cat as the test subject for an experiment in increasing the intelligence of animals.

It worked... but it also made Jinx smart enough to realize just how much more there was to Margaret's life than him. He became convinced that she had chosen him as her test subject because she simply didn't ''care'' if he lived or died, developing a burning resentment for it. Worse, he became mentally human enough to become convinced that he was in love with Margaret, and to be consumed with jealousy that she had other interests in her life.

When the region where they lived was attacked by [[barbarian]]s, Jinx went out of his way to assist Margaret, hoping to prove his worth in the hopes that she would come to reciprocate his jealous, obsessive love. She did not. Instead, she fell in love with a young warrior under her command. When she announced their upcoming marriage, he devised and enacted a plan to lead the man Margaret had fallen for to his death in battle. With no spellcasters in the region powerful enough to revive the fallen, Jinx was sure that this would be the end of his "competition".

To Jinx's fury, the death of her betrothed only filled Margaret with rage and suicidal grief. She prepared a super-powerful alchemical explosive, and made a personal assault on the horde's camp. Blind with fury, she waded through the ranks of the enemy, surviving many attacks only because Jinx fought like a hellcat to save her - to the familiar's growing rage as he realized she didn't even notice her efforts. Finally, Margaret planted the explosive, only to be attacked by the horde's leader. Though she defeated him, she was badly hurt in the process, leaving her helpless in the face of the coming explosion.

Jinx tried to pull her to safety, but was too weak to do so. Margaret told him to flee to safety, and expressed her happiness that in dying, she would meet her beloved fiancee in the afterlife. At that, the cat flew into a rage and revealed how ''he'' had arranged the warrior's death, blaming his actions on Margaret's decision to give him the curse of reason. Finally, he vowed that Margaret would neither see Jinx's death nor her beloved, raking her eyes with his claws and then fleeing his master, whose screams of pain were swiftly cut off by the explosion.

Unrepentant, yet fearful, Jinx fled all the way back to the tower where he and Margaret once lived, only to find it mysteriously deserted. He has remained there ever since.

Jinx waits endlessly now for people to visit the lost tower, hoping to claim a new master. His first preference is a female [[wizard]], then a female [[sorcerer]], then a female [[bard]] or any other arcane spellcasting clas, and then finally a male arcanist. He will do whatever he can to first persuade them to accept his presence, and then separate his chosen master from their former companions. His curse, of course, is that he will always destroy any relationship he establishes - if nothing else, he will end up killing the would-be master when they fail to meet his standards for loving and doting upon him. He prefers to use his retained spells ability, which allows him to cast Flesh to Stone one per day, to "immortalize" failed masters by petrifying them.

Jinx has no specific powers keeping him alive, so if you can kill the little beast, he's done for. He can't even close the borders properly, but instead just summons the Mists; those who flee will find themselves emerging from the mist elsewhere in the [[Demiplane of Dread]].

===Warden Jonar Tamh===
Darklord of Karss. This [[Harmonium]]-sworn male [[aasimar]] [[Fighter]] joined the Harmonium at a young age, and very quickly moved up the ranks, attaining the position of Mover One at the age of 25. When he was selected to lead the experimental Great Prison of Ortho, a reformation-focused alternative to the [[Mercykiller]]-run prison of [[Sigil]], he saw it as a great honor... until it became apparent that the majority of the cynical Sigil-originated prisoners were unwilling to cooperate with the project.

Fearful for his reputation, Jonar Tamh resorted to increasingly brutal and draconian punishments, covering up the ongoing breakdown from his superiors and replacing subordinates who dared to question him. Growing convinced that some force - the [[Mercykiller]]s, the [[Revolutionary League]], or the agents of evil - was sabotaging the Great Prison, he descended ever-deeper into brutality. Finally, his best friend, the deputy warden Zet Keffen, tried to convince Jonar to return to the Great Prison's original premise; when Jonar refused, he declared he would bring this matter to the Factol of the Harmonium.

Jonar panicked and killed Zet right then and there, covering it up by blaming the murder on two particularly troublesome prisoners and executing them for it.

But Jonar couldn't cover it up forever. Hearing that his superiors were on their way to investigate the prison, and also that there were plans for a mass uprisiong, Jonar gathered 28 of the most outspoken and problematic inmates and hanged them all, one by one. As the last expired, a great hurricane arose from nowhere, forcing the Harmonium guards indoors. When the storm ended, the Great Prison now sat on the barren island of Karss.

Jonar Tamh suffers two major curses. Firstly, although he now has the ability to mentally control large numbers of people at once, he experiences all of the pain and misery of those he is controlling. Secondly, the vengeful spirit of Zet has become bound to Jonar's sword; if Jonar inflicts 12 or more damage with it against a single foe, Zet gains the abilities of a rank 2 ghost for one hour, allowing him to attack his former best friend.

The aasimar darklord cannot close the borders of Karss.

===Kasselheim Blightlyng===
Darklord of Vulnara. This [[gnome]] [[vampire]] had the misfortune to be born a gnome with no sense of humor. Whilst other gnomes were happily running round, playing stupid pranks and making silly illusions, Kasselheim was stuck fuming over how non-gnomish races didn't treat them with the slightest respect, all whilst the other gnomes reacted to his pleas for them to just try and be a little more serious by pranking him worse than ever. Eventually, he became a [[Transmuter]], bitterly thumbing his nose at a centuries old family radition, and withdrew to the deepest depths of their underground home. Then a few years later, a great flood washed through the gnome community and drove them up onto the surface, and the survivors counted Kasselheim as one of the dead.

They didn't know that Kasselheim had severely blinded and deafened himself in an alchemical explosion during his period of isolation. Nor could they know that many of those presumed dead in the flood were actually kidnapped by Kasselheim, who began experimenting in dark magic to steal their senses for himself, ultimately transforming them into warped monsters called "tactyles". But when they finally began moving back into the tunnels years later, they found out.

They formed a great war party with the aid of [[elf]], [[dwarf]] and [[human]] adventurers from communities who had also suffered Kasselheim's depredations, and tracked him down to his underground fortress... only to be all but wiped out. Even though former friends (well, ''they'' considered themselves to be his friends, at least) and family were amongst the party, Kasselheim killed or captured them all. The last survivor was one of his sisters, a [[cleric]] of the gnome gods who threw herself to her death over a cliff whilst cursing him. An earthquake, and Kasselheim was knocked unconscious, rising to discover he had become a unique form of gnomish [[vampire]].

Kasselheim's curse is that he must ''constantly'' feed; his stolen senses of sight, hearing, scent and taste dwindle rapidly after feeding, until all that he has left is enough of a sense of touch to register pain. However, because of how fast his senses fade, and the isolated nature of his lair, he is effectively confined to a small part of his domain, and thus must go long, terrible intervals between feedings.

Killing Kasselheim can be done in two ways. First, if he is exposed to sunlight, he becomes incorporeal; if he is kept from fleeing back to his lair for two hours whilst in this form, he dissipates into nothing. Secondly, one can complete a complicated ritual, slightly altered from the traditional gnomish vampire. To achieve his permanent destruction, Kasselheim must first be immobilized by staking him with a silver spike through the heart. Then his hands must be cut off and boiled in a volcanic hot spring for 24 hours, after which his eyes must be gouged out and replaced with precious gems (100gp value minimum for each eye). Finally, his inert body must be carried to some place where it can be exposed to direct sunlight for an hour - but this will revive him in his incorporeal form, so the would-be vampire killer will need to use some method to trap him in the light for the full hour.

===The Lady of Ravens===
The Darklord of the Isle of Ravens occupies a strange and nebulous position between being a canonical darklord and a netbook darklord. Whilst she was first mentioned in the official [[splatbook]] "Domains of Dread", the last [[TSR]]-produced iteration of the [[Ravenloft]] corebook released to revise the setting in the wake of the [[Grim Harvest]], all of her actual lore expansions have been through [[netbook]]s, starting with the [[Books of S|Book of Sacrifices]] - canon simply mentions she existed and left it at that.

According to the Book of Sacrifices, the future Lady of Ravens was born the only child of a noble family who inhabited a massive, decaying castle in a remote corner of their world, scion to a once-great line fallen into steep degeneration through isolation and inbreeding. Her mother died before she could speak, and her father might as well have been dead, spending all his time either deep in a narcotic-induced stupor or drifting through his castle in the same vapid indifference as the ancestral ghosts. With servants who were forbidden by social codes to casually speak to her, she grew up alone and largely in silence, so isolated that she took the fairytales, myths and legends in her castle library to be unvarnished truth. Naturally aloof and disdainful, her circumstances merely shaped her belief that all others were beneath her, strengthening social awkwardness into full-blown narcissism and borderline solipsism.

The only friends she had, for the other children of the castle disliked her and avoided her when they could, were the ravens who inhabited the 400ft tall Tower of Flint, a spire constructed entirely of flint that was the central structure of the castle. Like all her family, the girl could talk to birds, and she fixated upon them as the only other "real" things in her life, spending much of her time telling them stories from the castle's library and hearing their stories in turn.

As she aged, the girl developed [[Sorcerer (Dungeons & Dragons)|innate magical powers]] to summon, control, transform, create and destroy, which only furthered her budding solipsism. She became convinced that she deserved to have anything she desired, and that she should always be the best at anything she cared for. At the age of eleven, she used the ravens to murder a serving girl by causing her to fall from a high parapet as she was engaging in one of the climbing games so popular amongst the children of the castle, all because she'd overheard the girl's beauty being compared favorably to her own. This was but the first of several "accidents" to bedevil the servants, and it soon became understood that any criticism of its future mistress was best kept to one's self, which only heightened her isolation.

In her late teens, the girl's father died and she retired to the Tower of Flints, rarely emerging. But one day, on one of her rare excursions into the rest of the castle, she saw one of the serving boys, who had grown into the most desirable man of her generation in the castle - handsome, graceful, cheerful and well-spoken. She fell instantly in love, and began to leave the Tower more frequently, hoping to catch glimpses of him and sometimes covertly following him. Naturally, she never once gave thought to the idea that he might not reciprocate her feelings. Soon afterwards, the outside world finally came to the castle in the form of a draft; the heiress's "lover" was amongst the young men who were taken away to fight in a foreign war, and so she spent two years pining for his return, tormenting herself with dreams. When he came home safe and sound, she was ecstatic, refusing to eat or sleep for three days prior to his arrival.

...Naturally, she was less than thrilled when the first thing he did upon his return to the castle was seek out one of the serving girls and carry her off to a secluded spot, where they exchanged vows of undying love and discussed their plans to wed.

Enraged, the narcissistic sorceress fled to the Tower of Flints and whipped up the ravens into a murderous frenzy before setting them upon the young lovers. She watched them die a horrible death at the beaks and claws of her avian friends, then retreated into the tower's depths to weep over how she had been "betrayed".

When she emerged days later, she found the entire castle gone! She now occupied the lone Tower of Flints, which sat upon a lonely island. She could no longer speak to the ravens, although she could now see through their eyes and speak through their mouths, and strangest of all... she couldn't remember her name or the name of her family.

Ever since then, the Lady of Ravens has been left in total isolation. She desperately wants to regain her friendship with the ravens, but can't do so; she is convinced that the cause is because she doesn't remember her name, and so she often sends "agents" (people who dared to land on her island) to search for her name. As a result of these unwilling emissaries, typically magically compelled to obey her, she has amassed quite a library of tomes, parchments and papers on the Demiplane of Dread, especially its folklore and its noble families. Regarding all other beings as nothing more than tools or nuisances, depending on the context, she is more alone than she has ever been in her life.

Those who dare to face the Lady of Ravens are in for a massive struggle. She's an 18th level [[Sorcerer (Dungeons & Dragons)|Sorceress]], but she can also polymorph anybody she can see into a raven 1/day, and turn people into ravens with her touch. When she wishes to close the borders, her ravens flock out over the sea and attack anyone who tries to pass, which causes an irresistable 5d4 damage per round unless you turn back. If slain, she remains dead for 1 week, during which time her minions are uncontrolled and her borders unclosable, before a random raven will transform into her. Theoretically, you could kill her for good by wiping out all of the ravens on the island, as fans have theorized is the case with Harkon Lukas.

===General Martin Jose Maconda===
Darklord of Maconda. This charismatic male human was, from his earliest days, both adept at manipulating others with his natural charm and good looks, prone to surprising moments of generosity, and feared for his grudge-holding, horrifying fits of temper, and trait for cold-blooded manipulation. It came a great surprise to him when he discovered that there were people he could not dominate at will - and worse still, his mixed heritage would forever prevent him from joining the upepr echelon of Manzanillan society.

Thus, out of a mixture of pride and genuine interest, he became involved in the growing revolutionary movement, and ultimately he became the leader of the guerilla forces fighting against the brutal suppressionist forces of Don Santiago de Quijada y Alvarez. When Maconda's beloved wife Isabel died in her childbed as a result of of Don Santiago's cruelty, Maconda went in search of the fearsome Warlok of the Peak, determined to have the power to triumph over his enemies.

And he returned with that power. Only to find, to Maconda's fury, that Don Santiago had died of fever in his sickbed mere hours before the last Royalist troops were defeated. Enraged, he ordered the Royalists massacred, cutting down a priest who dared argue against this behavior, and once the bloodshed was over, he left Resistencia for the mainland of Libertad, vowing never to return - a vow the [[Dark Powers]] were happy to fulfill for him.

A year later, he became the president of the Republic, and he soon established himself as a brutal tyrant as bad as the royalists he had overthrown.

The Warlock of the Peak transformed Maconda into a powerful [[wereanaconda]], and despite the many powers his state gives him, Maconda loathes this form, in part because he believes Isabel would be disgusted by it, and also in part because he is compellede to transform into a giant anaconda and feed on human flesh on the night of the new moon. Unusually, he cannot create other wereanacondas with his biter, but those who drink or touch his blood, even if they are spattered with it in combat, risk being turn into either were-fer-de-lanes or were-bushmasters, species of [[weresnake]] (treat as Neutral Evil [[werecobra]]s) native to Libertad and compelled to be loyal to him.

Maconda's curse is that he desperately yearns to be loved and adored, but his insistence upon doing so by repressing and removing all opposition or dissent merely stokes the hatred and fear of those he rules over.

He can be wounded by weapons made of silver or the wood of the caobo tree, and is sickened by both the smell and taste of guavas. If defeated in battle, Maconda doesn't die but instead assumes anaconda form and slithers off into the jungle, unable to regain his human form until the next new moon. There is no known way to permanently destroy him.

Maconda can close the domain borders of his island by causing the jungles and seas to become engulfed in massive swarms of lethally poisonous snakes.

===Arcapatos Miguel Agustin===
Darklord of Igid Rabi-i. Born to nobility, Miguel harbored a fascination with the exotic and the unique from his earliest day, and his ascendence into the hierachy of the Matherion priesthood of the holy empire was, personally, motivated primarily by the chance to ever expand his collection of exotic goods.

The ultimate birth of Igid Rabi-I began when a native fishing family called the Bacani discovered a strange cloth floating in the ocean, bearing a design that they instantly recognized as their people's now-outlawed elder goddess Angarab, the Great Mother Goddess. They took this relic into their home and began to worship it. News of their discovery inevitably reached Arcapatos Agustin's ears; when he came to look upon the relic, however, he was convinced that it was in fact a depiction of his own Matherion in a lesser-known aspect; the Holy Mother. Religious zeal, glory hunger and collector's lust all awoke in Miguel's heart, and he immediately tried to buy the cloth from the Bacani. But they wouldn't sell at any price.

Enraged, the Arcapatos returned to his post in Tagudin and summoned his Council, who agreed that such an obvious sacred relic must be the property of the Matherion church, and so bargaining was undertaken. But after weeks of steadfast refusal, with the Bacani vowing they would rather die than give up the sacred cloth, the Arcapatos' rage grew too great to contain any longer. Whilst publically presenting himself as patient and uinderstanding, he vowed that he would have the relic, no matter the cost.

Soon after, as a typhoon approached one night, a band of seven [[assassin]]-priests crept into the Bacani house. Minutes later, the entire family was dead, down to the smallest child. No sooner had they breathed their last than Arcapatos Agustin began ringing the great bells of the Vestibulo, sounding the call for worship. This was greatly confusing to all the peoples of Igid Rabi-i, both natives and migrant Turonites alike; it was the middle of the ''night'', for Matherion's sake, ''and'' there was a typhoon blowing in as well! But obediently they came to the church, and watched as a band of seven priests triumphantly barged through the Vestibulo's main entrance and approached the triumphant Arcapatos Agustin, bearing with them the sacred cloth. As the realization sank in for the people that the Arcapatos would do anything to get what he wanted, Miguel began the ritual of celebration. 

The typhoon surged for three days. When it was over, Igid Rabi-I was now part of the Demiplane of Dread. The sun, moon and stars had all dimmed, and monsters began to creep from the shadows. And in his personal collection, Miguel saw the Cloth of Matherion vanish in a cloud of frankincense smoke, and silently vowed that he would never rest until it was recovered.

Arcapatos Augistin has ceased to age since that fatal night, but rarely leaves the Vestibulo, instead forever focusing on chasing down rumors of the Cloth of Matherion's re-emergence amongst the people of Igid Rabi-i. Though his assassins constantly hunt it down, it magically disappears from their grasp whenever they obtain it, no matter how bloodily they do so.

In combat, Miguel is one of the rare darklords with no special life-preserving powers. He's a 14th level [[Cleric]] who broadcasts a 20ft aura of fear, he's immune to all Charm spells, and his touch and weapon attacks can both render victims insensate for 2 rounds if they fail a save vs. poison, but aside from that, if you can kill him, he'll stay dead.

Like [[Strahd von Zarovich]], Augustin has borders around both his capital city of Tagudin and around Igid Rabi-i itself. If he wishes to seal the former, the city is blanketed in an aura of fear that compels everyone to flee inside and stay there until he relents. If he wishes to seal the latter, a dense wall of frankinense smoke envelops the domain; anyone who tries to breach it instead falls unconscious a turn later, and then reawakens back inside Igid Rabi-i.

===Miles Havelocke===
Darklord of the Eternal Torture. Born in a coastal city, Miles was pressganged at the age of 15, which ruined his life; he suffered from incurable seasickness, for which his fellows tormented him mercilessly and the bullying captain only made it worse by assigning him to the worst tasks possible for somebody with his condition, ordering him severely beaten when, inevitably, he threw up. With no aptitude for mathematics, Miles couldn't master the art of navigation, and so couldn't hope to progress to the higher ranks of the navy.

Twenty years of this treatment turned Miles into a bitter, miserable bully who loathed the sea and used what little authority he could get to exact vengeance upon those few below him on the ship's pecking order. Why he never simply fled during his first shore leave, nobody knows.

Eventually, Miles' captain was chosen to make a voyage into the uncharted western ocean, to Miles' dismay. But when the captain continued in pressing on in pursuit of ever-richer islands to the west, it led to the ship becoming lost in the waters and supplies running low. Miles seized this opportunity for revenge and began spreading rumors about the ship's officers hoarding food for themselves, ultimately leading a successful mutiny. When his ineptitude at seamanship led to them being becalmed, he led his mutineers to cannibalize the captured officers, gleefully rubbing their faces in their past abuse of him and coming to relish human flesh.

And then, as this supply of food began to run low, they finally spotted land... but, as they rowed frantcially to reach it, the Mists arose and swallowed the ship. When they cleared, the mutineers found themselves in the middle of a sea in the [[Demiplane of Dread]]. Overwhelmed by misery, they sat down and waited for death... and then, a fortnight later, they arose as [[ghoul]]s under the command of Miles Havelock, a Ghoul Lord, and began searching for food and land.

Miles Havelock suffers multiple curses. Firstly, he can never reach land, no matter how desperately he tries - at best, he can get a brief glimpse of the coast before the Mists immediately rise and teleport his ship elsewhere. Secondly, his seasickness has not only survived undeath, but intensified; he is '''perpetually''' seasick and also starving hungry, and these twin pains are why he has rechristened his ship "The Eternal Torture". If destroyed, his essence will inhabit the body of a living prisoner in the ship's hold and consume them from the inside out; the only way to end his curse is to kill him, rescue all of the prisoners, and sink the Eternal Torture, then make for land at full speed.

===Mirogola===
Darklord of Shuraz'tun Kir. Before her downfall, Mirogola was a priestess to a death god worshipped by the citizens of a declining city-state, and as such she was charged with protecting the local graveyard from despoilement by [[ghoul]]s, [[necromancer]]s and similar vermin. Though diligent at her sacred duties, that same diligence ultimately brought about her downfall when she slew a pack of ghouls led by a peculiar leader that shrugged off sacred magics, but bled profusely when injured. On a whim, she claimed a ring of tarnished copper from the creature's finger, and thus sealed her fate.

The ring was a cursed variant of the ring of sustenance; she couldn't remove it herself, even when she prayed for her god to lift its curse, and it left her with an insatiable hunger that couldn't kill her, but which tormented her until she devoured human flesh... but even that only brought relief for a time. Driven mad by her self-loathing and the baleful magic of the ring, she became a monstrous humanoid creature, a living ghoul.

The most powerful priests of her temple had fled long before her transformation, and there were few amongst the citizenry with the courage to even try. When Mirogola became the queen of the local ghouls, the survivors abandoned the city in droves. Mirogola and her followers ate well of the corpses they left behind, but soon her hunger and her growing sadism caused her to begin feeding on ghoul-flesh as well, causing ''them'' to flee the city in turn!

Once she was all alone in the graveyard, the misty realm claimed her. She is now totally insane, a mindless sadist who skulks about her cave-riddled cemetary and waits for victims to stumble into her clutches. Those she doesn't eats, she raises as ghouls, but she swiftly tires of their company and eats them as well.

She keeps the borders of Shuraz'tun perpetually closed, simply making it impossible to breach the walls surrounding the cemetary. Fortunately, she's only Challenge Rating 7 and has no Undying Soul type powers, so she simply needs to be destroyed.

===Rafe Ungard===
Darklord of Callista. This male [[Half-Vistani]] [[Bard]] used his natural charm (and a complexion that allowed him to hide his hated Vistani blood) to swindle innocent women into marriage scams, start feuds amongst noble families for his own amusement, and delve into increasingly cruel and lethal manipulation. The backstory of poor Susannah Joson from [[Children of the Night]]: [[Ghost]]s is but one example of his misdeeds. When a party of [[adventurer]]s tried to bring him to justice, he continually slipped away, leaving the bodies of victims in his wake to torment them, and ultimately murdered his pursuers by burning down the inn they were staying in as they slept, which is when the Mists took him.

Rafe now possesses a strange form of immortality; he will ''always'' die once per day, no matter what steps he takes to try and avoid it, only to spontaneously return to life the next day. There is no known method to stop him from returning.

When he closes the domain, Callista's borders become a ring of boiling geysers that will kill anyone who passes through them, and which extend as high into the sky as needed to reach anyone trying to fly through.

===Don Santiago de Quijada y Alvarez===
Darklord of Resistencia. Born the son of a once-great noble family in the Holy Republic of Aragona, Santiago's family had fallen in stature to such a degree that the impoverished patricians had mortaged their lands to the hilt and lived a life barely above that of their peasant tenats. They scrimped and saved to send Santiago to court, but the Don of Quijada found himself a laughing stock, regarded as little better than a jumped up hayseed peasant. This only fueled a lifelong hatred for those lacking in noble blood.

Desperate to try and reclaim the respect he had been taught from birth his family name deserved, Santiago bought a commission in the army. He proved little better here than he had in the court; poor of health, average at best with the sword, and no genius in the command of men or the intricacies of tactics and strategy. His only saving grace was his thoroughness and dedication... but even this went sour, breeding in him an obsession with discipline, cleanliness and presentation, and a love of punishment so extreme that even the Aragonan army considered him a draconian tyrant. 

Though Santiago managed to win a few fairly creditable actions early in his career, his faults quickly stole away what his successes had won him, sending him into a self-inflicted downward spiral of ever-worsening behavior and failures as a result. He was appointed as the governor a rebellious backwater province, and only made things worse as he extended the same tyrannical, brutal law he held over his military forces to the population.

Then he was offered the chance to take up governship in a minor overseas colony called Neuva Aragona, which was also currently rebelling. Despite recognizing that this was intended to be a sentence of exile, Santiago accepted, dreaming of reversing his fortunes. Instead, he proved the absolute ''worst'' choice for the role; a born-and-bred monarchist with no sympathy for the lot of the peasants, he ignored the legitimate grievances of the rebels and remained fundamentally convinced that the isle of Manzanilla - renamed "Resistencia" by the rebels - was home to a silent majority of good, loyal followers of the kings. Ignoring all opportunities efor a diplomatic solution, he launched into his trademark brutality, which only fueled the rebellious sentiment of the natives.

Among his many atrocities, he took captive the pregnant wife of the rebel leader Martin Jose Maconda, one Isabel de Maconda. Simultaneously smitten with her and repulsed by her loyalty to the rebel's cause, he alternatively cajoled her and brutalized her, culminating in his ordering that she would be permitted no midwife when she went into labor. The birth went bad, and both mother and child died.

All his atrocities were for nothing, ineptitude and his habit of overworking his never-great health led to him dying in his sickbed, on the very day the last of his depleted forced were overwhelmed and Neuva Aragona formally seceded independence. But even as he died, he cursed that the rebels must be defeated at any cost.

Santiago now exists as a ghost, cursed to forever mentally relieve every battle he lost on Resistencia and see with perfect clarity how he could have won. And, of course, he's also cursed that no matter how he schemes and plots, on those rare moments he tears himself away from his biter memories and dreams of glory to actually try and do something, his plans to re-conquer Manzanilla are doomed to fail.

If defeated in battle, Santiago reforms in his burial chamber below Castillo Ascension, although he remains trapped there until the next full moon. The only way he can be destroyed is if his personal sword is stolen from this chamber and used to deliver the death blow in combat.

When he closes the borders, the sea surrounding Resistencia takes on an eerie, unnatural calm; sailing ships cannot move, and rowers will find that they simply can't get more than a half-mile away from the coast.

===Sean Mako & Alice/Alison Marjory===
Darklords of Carcharodon Isle. Sort of a combination of Ladyhawke and the Little Mermaid. Over a century ago, a male human fisherman named Sean Marko lived in the village of Mistlington. One day, he discovered an injured [[merfolk|mermaid]] washed up on the isle's northwest shore, unconscious and bleeding from several wounds, including a severed left hand. Unable to turn away from someone in need, he brought her to his home and nursed her back to health. The mermaid, whose name translated into Common as "Alice", explained that she was the only survivor of a tribe that had been slaughtered by [[sahuagin]].

The two fell in love, much to the displeasure of the locals; the fishermen thought Sean was foolish for pining over a mermaid, and their wives were jealous of Alice's beauty, leading to them slandering her and Sean's relationship as "unnatural". Ultimately, a bunch of the village's men took it upon themselves to "repatriate" Alice; they came to Sean's house in the night, bludgeoned him unconscious, and carried Alice away. When Sean regained consciousness, he rowed desperately to catch up to them, but by the time he did so, they'd thrown the still-bound mermaid overboard.

Enraged, Sean snatched up a boathook and attacked the men who had assaulted him and the woman he loved, butchering them. When the carnage was over, he dove into the water after Alice, and then begged the full moon above for a fins and a tail so he might never be separated from his love.

Naturally, the [[Dark Powers]] chose to be dicks about granting this wish...

Both Sean and the revived Alice, now a human calling herself Alison Marjory, have become maledictive [[therianthrope]]s. 

Sean is a giant [[wereshark]] who spends most of the month as an intelligent megalodon, unaware that he ''can'' transform and remembering nothing of his human life; only during the nights of the full moon and those nights directly before and after it does he return to his human form... which remembers everything he did as a giant killer shark. Because of his curse-spawned ignorance, the only way that shark!Sean can transform is if he is magically compelled to do so, such as by an Amulet of the Beast. He spends his days asleep and his nights hunting for food.

In contrast, Alison is a [[seawolf]] who spends most of the month as a human, but assumes her seawolf form on the nights before, during and after the full moon - the same nights when Sean regains his humanity. Like Sean, as a seawolf, she is completely ignorant of her human life. She keeps to herself, for the people of the isle still distrust and dislike her, gladly telling the nastiest stories they can think of about her to anyone who'll listen.

Neither darklord can be slain permanently through violence; they fully heal and return to life 1 round after being defeated. They also can't close the domain's borders, although since the only local vessels are small fishing boats that are no match for a giant shark or a massive seafaring wolf, they don't need to do much more than patrol the borders themselves.

Curing them simply requires breaking the curse by getting them to touch as humans, but doing so is tough; aside from the fact that they alternate human and monster forms, neither is aware of the fact that the other survives. Whichever of them is in beast form also refuses to get within 10 feet of the other one. They also won't willingly get within 5 feet of an Amulet of the Beast. So players are going to have to get creative to break their curse.

===Serenissa D'Aubliet===
Darklord of Romagna. Serenissa (female human spectre) was born an orphan; her father, a miller's son, was killed soon after her conception, and her peasant girl mother died in birthing her. She was taken in the local lord to serve as companion to his two daughters, but their initial friendship soured as they came of age and Serenissa realized the social gap between them. At the age of twelve, she was sent to the family of a neighboring lord to become a nursemaid to that lord's newly born twin children; Serenissa doted upon the children, and happily threw herself into their care.

However, she also became increasingly obsessed with fanciful daydreams about her origins, fixating on the belief that she was actually of noble birth and that her parents were both alive and desperately seeking her. She loved to tell these stories to her two charges... until the eve of their fourth birthdays, when, at the top of the Eagle's Tower, the two young children scolded her for lying and corrected her that she was nothing more than the bastard daughter of a simpleton and a millerboy, both of whom had died. Mad with rage, especially when the twins revealed that everyone in the castle claimed that this was so, she pushed them off of the tower to their deaths.

Her skill at lying allowed her to escape being blamed for what she described as a terrible accident. For two weeks she festered on the idea that people were "slandering her" behind her back, and finally, two months after the day she had murdered the twins, she set a fire in the Great Hall that night, killing everyone in the castle.

Slinking away from the carnage, she made her way to the barony of Romagna, where she seduced her way into both a respectable position as lady's maid to the younger sister of Baron Etain and into the arms of Baron Etain himself. After several months of dalliance, he gifted her with a gemstone brooch... and then announced his upcoming marriage to the Lady Fialle, daughter of a neighboring lord, the very next day.

This pushed Serenissa over the edge and soon thereafter, she drew Baron Etain to a high tower, where she grabbed him and leapt off the edge, intending that they die together so she would not live alone.

But this time, with the interference of the [[Dark Powers]], her scheme failed. Serenissa hit the ground and was killed on impact, but her body cushioned Etain's fall, and so he lived. The madwoman's spirit rose from its grave as a ghost, trapped in an endless time loop; Romagna experiences only a single year, constantly recycling itself. It starts one week before the equinox Spring Festival, when Fialle arrives in Romagna for her upcoming wedding to Baron Etain. That week is spent in feasts and celebrations, capped off by a three-day non-stop revelry for the weding proper. Then, six months later, Fialle conceives Etain's child. And then, one week before the first anniversary of the wedding, time looks back and it is the week before the Spring Festival again.

Furthering Serenissa's torment, she is completely incapable of physically interacting with the people of Romagna, although she can manipulate their emotions despite the fact they cannot see, hear or touch her. She uses her emotional control to turn them into her agents of retribution, although she can't turn them against Etain or Fialle. This ability is defined vaguely, because she herself hasn't really studied her full capabilities with it.

Only visitors to Romagna are in true danger from Serenissa, because she is fully visible and audible to them, although still intangible. She invariably attempts to seduce the handsome male visitors to the domain, luring them away if they prove receptive to try and embrace them - doing so, however, results in her draining 1 level per 2 rounds, causing them to disintegrate... but if they break free, she attacks.

Serenissa is vulnerable to holy water, +2 or stronger magic weapons, and functional weapons made of gold. She is impervious to holy symbols, but can be turned with symbols of true love and matrimony - for example, the wedding rings of people who are actually married. If destroyed, she can reform at Etain and Fialle's wedding. Exactly ho to destroy her permanently is left vague, with her entry in the Book of Sorrows concluding with this paragraph:
::''Weapons forged from symbols of love (such as rings, charms, wooden wands, or ceremonial ropes used to bind a man and woman together at their wedding) may have greater effect, rendering her helpless or immobile. Her final death is likely to involve elements of her first experience; rejection, a long fall, and/or a noble lover. Heroes should beware, though—the dark powers may look with interest upon anyone who willingly transforms a symbol of love into a weapon of war.''

===Sir Trevor Godwyn "The Mirror Man"===
Darklord of Vultharesk. There are many crimes that can earn one the unwanted title of Darklord. The ranks of the tormented "rulers" of the [[Demiplane of Dread]] include murderers of all stripes, countless variations of cannibals and torturers and sadists, and more than a few implicit rapists. But Sir Godwyn belongs to a particularly small but repugnant group: the [[Satanic Panic|authoritarian moral guardians]].

Sir Godwyn was born on a realm far removed from the Mists, to what was basically a pastiche of the Victorian British Empire; a highly technological advanced nation that began a far-reaching campaign of imperialist expansion, justifying its efforts all the while as being "for the sake of the heathens" - in their propaganda, their efforts were to bring civilization and "proper" behavior to the unfortunates beyond their boundaries, by any means necessary.

The damnation of Sir Godwyn began when he and his entire extended family were sent to a small mountain town called Vultharesk, which lay upon the very fringes of the empire's territory at the time. A true believer in the "noble cause", Sir Godwyn was assigned as the town's military governor and took to his role with brutal dictatorship, demanding execution for not only the traditional capital offenses, but all manner of moral offenses, from adultery and worship of the proscribed non-Imperial deities down to lying. Ten years, Sir Godwyn held court, determined to civilize the people of Vultharesk even if it meant killing them all himself. And then he met Olyana Volienska: a beautiful native woman.

Despite the fact they were both married, Sir Godwyn lusted after Olyana, and within weeks he succumbed to temptation and began an illicit affair with her - one that Olyana went along with in hopes of using this to seduce a better life for herself and her family. After only a handful of trysts, however, her husband suspected her of cheating on him, and managed to find her out. He didn't discover who Olyana's lover was, but he found enough to prove her guilt, and he dragged her to Sir Godwyn's court, demanding the "lord's justice". Terrified that his hypocrisy might be revealed, Trevor Godwyn agreed immediately, and executed her on the spot.

That evening, however, when Sir Godwyn glanced up at his mirror from his washbasin, he saw not his own reflection, but the shocked, accusing visage of Olyana. For months, every reflective surface in Sir Godwyn's view depicted Olyana's face, although only to him, and the haunting drove him increasingly mad. He became more vicious and brutal a ruler than ever before, executing dozens for imaginary transgressions and slaughtering Olyana's entire family in an effort to end the curse. Naturally, it failed.

Six months after Olyana's execution, damnation finally claimed Trevor Godwyn. On an unusually foggy summer's eve, as mists poured in from the mountain's peak and smothered Vultharesk, Trevor snapped and demanded his wife come to his room and look into the mirror. But when she told him that she saw nothing but their reflections, as she had done a hundred times before, Trevor grabbed her and began ramming her face into the glass over and over again, shattering the mirror and fatally cutting her to pieces on the jagged glass, all the while screaming at her to open her eyes and ''look''. And then, once he had smashed the mirror to pieces and dropped his wife's corpse on the floor, he realized that Olyana still stood in the now empty, jagged shard-lined framed. He had time for one final scream as she reached out, grabbed him by the throat, and pulled him into the mirror.

Ever since then, Trevor Godwyn has become the curse of Vultharesk. The citizens do not remember he once ruled over them, and his living relatives do not believe the "Mirror Man" is anything other than a phantom cooked up by their superstitious followers; they cannot see his face when it appears in the reflective surfaces of their domain, and he is either unable or unwilling to haunt them the way he does everybody else.

Sir Godwyn is now condemned to a life as a phantom inside of a hazy, mist-shrouded netherworld, only able to perceive the mortal world by peering through reflective surfaces, forever haunted by Olyana's sobs. To try and distract himself, he flits from reflection to reflection, looking for any who might dare to commit even the most mild of immoral acts. He punishes these individuals by afflicting them with a curse of misfortune for so long as they remain in Vultharesk - and if they ever get near a reflective surface large enough, Trevor Godwyn can step forth into the material world and attempt to banish them into the mirror world forever.

When manifesting, Sir Trevor Godwyn is a unique kind of spectral undead. He appears as a tall man dressed in a black, high-collared and longtailed frock coat trimmed in silver, with matching leather boots and pants of midnight blue. His hair, hovering on the border between blond and white, is pulled back tightly into a tail; his eyes are an utterly empty shade of icy blue. Though traces of the handsome man he once was can still be seen in his sharp features, his face now appears to be that of a man dead by starvation; skin is pulled tight over his skull, as though most of the muscle and flesh were sucked out from beneath it. Unless he actively wills it into some other expression, the tightness of his skin constantly pulls his mouth into a rictus grin.

Once he manifests, Sir Godwyn can be slain, but he can only be harmed by weapons that aren't reflective - anything made of metal will have no effect on him unless it has been dyed, blackened or otherwise made unreflective. There is no known means of killing him permanently; he will reform at the next full moon. One possibility might be exposing his history to the people of Vultharesk, robbing him of his twisted position as enforcer of morality.

Fortunately for those who have angered Godwyn, he can only close Vultharesk's borders during the 12 hours he is permitted to remain in the material world after banishing a rule-breaker. When he does close the borders, they flood with mist, and any who try to flee the village instead find themselves spat back out at their initial entry point.

===Urdogen "The Red"===
Darklord of The Raging Tears. Male Human Spectre. In life, Urdogen (who first appeared in the [[Forgotten Realms]] splat "Pirates of the Fallen Stars") was basically Faerun's version of Blackbeard - if Blackbeard was a redhead. He terrorized the Inner Sea so badly that the nations of that region united to defeat his fleet, whereupon Urdogen fled and found himself spirited away by the Mists into the Sea of Sorrows... where he promptly hit a hidden reef and sank his ship, drowning.

Ever since then, Urdogen's ghostly vessel has sailed all the seas of the Misty Realm, cursed to never be able to come within sight of land and only able to rise from his watery grave during the nocturnal hours. Further stymying his desperate desire to reclaim his former reputation as a fearsome pirate lord, any who encounter Urdogen and live to tell the tale are cursed to forget his name.

To put an end to Urdogen, the ruin of the Raging Tears must be hauled up from the seafloor and carried inland, where it must then be burned completely to ash in a funeral pyre.

Interestingly, Urdogen's ghostly ship is actually able to return to the Inner Sea of Faerun on moonless, foggy nights in his homeworld, although he must return to the Misty Realms upon dawn.

If Urdogen chooses to close the borders of his traveling domain, the waters around his ship become rough and infested with a feeding frenzy of sharks; those who try to fly away will instead find themselves sinking into the water.

===Virindus===
Virindus, the God Below, otherwise known as what you get if you combine the story of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantis Atlantis] with ''The Call of Cthulhu'', is the Darklord of the Drowning Deep, which comprises the undersea portions of the Nocturnal Sea in Ravenloft (kind of like how Captain Pieter van Riese is the Darklord of the Sea of Sorrows, Virindus is the Darklord of the Nocturnal Sea in general). Once a megalomaniacal high priest of Oceanus in the island city of Xalot (pronounced SHAY-lot), he wished to become a deity himself, and tried to enact a plan to become the greatest god of his pantheon, ascending with the power of unholy rites and repeated human sacrifices. Naturally, Oceanus was horrified by this and sunk Xalot with earthquakes and tsunamis to stop him, which both did and didn't work. The underwater ruins of Xalot, along with Virindus himself, were pulled into Ravenloft by the Dark Powers to the bottom of the Nocturnal Sea, and Virindus would never bother anyone on the Prime Material again. On the other hand, Oceanus was just a little too late, and Virindus was able to complete his apotheosis into an ageless "nightmare of flesh."

Unfortunately for Virindus, his ascension also both did and didn't work, which is unsurprising as it was twisted by the Dark Powers. It turned him into a god, sure, but not the ''type'' of god he'd envisioned being. Virindus wanted to be worshipped and adored, and to exercise power over entire worlds. Instead, the Dark Powers left him as D&D's Cthulhu-equivalent and trapped him inside his indestructible sunken temple, which in turn left him unable to directly influence the outside world, and leaving him loved by no one (except perhaps the sort of crazies he doesn't want anywhere near him). 

Given their penchant for cruel irony, the Dark Powers also "gifted" Virindus with several supernatural weaknesses. First, he has no power to supernaturally Close the Borders of his domain short of sending his mind-controlled sea creatures and fearful worshippers among the undersea races to patrol them. Second, his temple prison will remain indestructible so as long as at least one worshipper of Oceanus remains alive (who could have been dragged into Ravenloft as well, depending on how your DM wants to run a campaign centred around Virindus), and in any case, transmutation magic that would normally allow him to shrink in size enough to escape through the doors of his temple prison will simply fail to work on Virindus. Third, any weapons blessed or wielded by a Cleric of Oceanus will deal damage that he can't regenerate, as will light-based damaging spells (fitting his nature as a creature of the lightless depths). Unless or until he meets his permanent end at one of these methods, however, Virindus will remain a shadowy figure trying in vain to expand his worship among the surface and undersea races, megalomaniacally scheming away to try and either raise Xalot to the surface, or otherwise drag all the surface into his dark territory.

===Xanthos Kastigir===
Darklord of Nedragonne. Hailing from the world of [[Krynn]], Xanthos was a born loser; a [[half-elf]] on a world where such beings tend to be hated, he lost out from birth even more so be being born when the [[human]] pirate captain Waylon Kastigir raped the [[Aquatic Elf|Dargonesti]] Xzorsha. Though his mother could overlook his conception, the same couldn't be said for his infamously xenophobic kith and kin, who tormented him ruthlessly throughout his life. His only comfort in life was the company of the dolphins, who welcomed him amongst them without hesitation.

As he grew older and proved a master [[ranger]], specialized in the stalking and slaying of [[sahuagin]], life began to look up for him. He found respect, and even a beautiful wife - a Kagonesti/Dimernesti hybrid [[elf]] named Aeowyn. But it was all for nothing. Xanthos' city was attacked by an alliance of sahuagin and [[Seawolf|seawolves]], and during the battle, Xanthos was infected with seawolf therianthropy. Though he survived the battle, his people ordered him to leave their city and never return, as he was now a danger to him. Even his beloved wife refused to come with him.

That was the final straw. Xanthos snapped and a lifetime of rage boiled to the surface. He slew his kind without mercy, and even slaughtered his own mother and wife for their part in the betrayal. Then, compelled by dries beyond his understanding, he fled to the surface, and found himself making landfall on Nedragonne.

His curse is simple: Xanthos can never find a community, not even on Nedragonne. Even the simple pleasures of the dolphin pods are denied to him; on those rare occasions they do enter the waters off of Nedragonne, he is compelled to hunt and devour them. He cannot even enter the water without being compelled to assume his Seawolf form, which he privately despises.

It is unknown if Xanthos can ever know peace; if slain, he dissolves into a puddle of blood and water, only to then reform at one of three points on Nedragonne within 1d8 days (or 1d4 days if slain in the water). He can only be harmed with +2 (or higher) magic weapons, or with weapons made of whale bone.

When Xanthos commands the borders of his realm to close, vast armies of seafaring predators encircle the domain in wall that stretches from surface to seabed before flying into an insatiable feeding frenzy until Xanthos releases the closure. Naturally, any attempt to fly over the killing zone results in the flyer tumbling helplessly into the frenzy. What happens if you try to burrow beneath the border along the seafloor is unknown.