Heresiarchs

As I said in my last post, I've been making images of the Heresiarchs lately in ChatGPT. I originally had 12 of them, but I've added one or two over the years, and I've also picked up characters who weren't originally meant to be Heresiarchs, but who effectively are.

What exactly is a Heresiarch? In theory it is some kind of undead supervillain, but maybe undead is too limiting a concept. I originally conceived of them as having most of the benefits of both a lich and a vampire, but few if any of the drawbacks of either. The real model is Glen Cook's Black Company book; the Heresarchs are essentially the Ten Who Were Taken and their peers, few though they may be. Many of them are warped, rotted, or obviously undead, but some of them are still vain enough to maintain a pleasant exterior, and their magic means that they can do so. Heck, even Voldemort can qualify, sorta. Any sorcerer or other magic user powerful enough to cheat death which is a step above either a vampire or a lich is a Heresiarch. They have means to return if they are somehow killed (phylactery, horcrux, or canopic talisman in my case). They are powerful in both magic and physical combat capabilities. They lack the weaknesses of vampires, for instance, i.e., they can walk out in the sun as they please and otherwise act like a normal person to the extent that they want to. Many of them are rotted because they don't care about their appearance, and they have returned from the dead. Others of them have never died, and have never rotted; they've used their magic to not only preserve to enervate and perfect their physical forms. But ultimately, like the Ten Who Were Taken, they are notoriously difficult to kill, and even if you think that you have done so, you usually find to your tragic end that you have not; you've only made one of the most powerful enemies that you can make. The Limper, for example, was already an extremely powerful undead-looking creature that seemed to not be able to be killed. Even when he was decapitated, he didn't die, and his head was attached to golem-bodies and he continued to terrorize the northern continent until the fake body was destroyed (multiple times) and his head and other parts were buried in the cosmic abyss of the spike along with the Dominator. Soulcatcher also survived beheading, and for years carried her head around in a box, her power reduced, until she could get someone manipulated into surgically re-attaching it. This restored most of her power. 

Seriously, these guys are insane. Their magic makes them almost impossible to kill, and capable of taking on entire armies of normal people with the confidence that they can defeat them. The Heresiarchs, obviously a title derived from being purveyors of Heresy, and the word is a real word in Catholic circles for the founder of a specific heresy or heretical sect. My heresiarchs are worse, at least in terms of being supervillains, if you will.

Jairan Neferirkare

But what do I do with them? Given that I'm a relatively low level low power game and setting relative to D&D, you certainly are never really expected to take on a Heresiarch in toe-to-toe combat. If you ever get to that point, you have failed dramatically and are cruisin' for a bruisin'. They can be outmaneuvered strategically or politically, of course. Mostly, they should be shadowy figures deep in the background who pull strings, but because of their rivalries with each other and other comparably powered beings like certain daemons or Fey Lords like the Erlking, etc. they almost never stick their necks out to such a degree that they are at risk of getting in to combat themselves. In other words, a combination of how the Ten Who Were Taken are treated in the Black Company books and how the monstrous daemons etc. of Lovecraft, who mostly slumber menacingly deep in the background, etc. The Heresiarchs therefore are much more like plot devices than they are like actual characters, honestly. But I tend to like them more than I really should or need to. I don't really have a lot of plans for them, although one of them at least lingers as a significant background element in Darkness in the Hill Country (Jairan Neferirkare). I'm also thinking of making Amrruk the Ancient be the entity in the Eltdown Fens that Otto von Szell is attempting to either summon, or siphon power from, more likely. This would be a change, but it would also make Cult of Undeath more accurate; I'm not quite sure in retrospect how I ended up with the final thing of the Cult summoning a Lovecraftian daemon rather than, y'know, something undead. It makes it the only way that it works, honestly, but sometimes that isn't apparent while I'm working on it until I'm done, and look at it big picture and then wonder what in the world I was thinking when I added that element after all, because it doesn't really fit. 

I also like that at some point, I want a Heresiarch, and usually a different one to be involved in some way with every campaign. Jairan is Darkness in the Hill Country. Amrruk will be Cult of Undeath. Mind-Wizards of the Daemon Wastes will either be Hutran Kutir or ... unsurprisingly, Gothan the Mind-Wizard. And so on and so forth.

So, of my own Heresiarchs, I have this group. Original Heresiarchs in bold; others added were long-time NPCs or whatever, but I added them to the list just because functionally they were indistinguishable:

1. Arzana the Feral
2. Bartolomeo the Many Angled
3. Amrruk the Ancient
4. Bernat Haspar de Ruze
5. Chernavog, the First Kemling
6. Dommik Sébastien, the Primeval Vampire
7. Djemma Mennefer, the Gnomic
8. Gothan the Mind-Wizard
9. Esmeraude, the Apocalyptic Fire
10. Hutran Kutir, the Hex-King
11. Jairan Neferirkare, the Shadow Queen
12. Kefte Taran, the Mistress of Forgotten Secrets
13. Kadashman, Who Peers Into the Void
14. Seggeir, the Hoarfell King
15. Shimut the Flesh-eater
16. Master of Vermin

Twelve somehow expanded to sixteen from my original list when I made Gothan, the Ghost Pirate, the First Kemling and Hutran Kutir all into Heresiarchs, who were added to the original list of twelve.

But I actually have more characters who would effectively be Heresiarchs, but I haven't used them for anything at all. I didn't create them, and some of them I can use, like the King in Yellow, but some of them I'd have to file the serial numbers off to use, like Tar-Baphon, which is a Heresiarch-level threat from Pathfinder. But, I have images for them, and because they are effectively equivalent to Heresiarchs, I have them ready to go sorta if I ever need to.

1. The King in Yellow (a Lovecraftian entity)
2. Tar-Baphon, the arch-lich of the Pathfinder setting
3. Kyuss, a name associated with the Worm That Walks, which is actually a Lovecraftian entity
4. Hakotep I, a mummy lord and ancient Pharoah returned to life.

If I wanted to, I could add Karzoug the Runelord here too, but he's really a bit too unique to be someone I'd like to use. Tar-Baphon and Hakotep I may well be Pathfinder characters, but they're just specific iterations of famous monster types; a super-lich and a super-mummy, essentially. A rename and reskin, and I can use the images just fine if I want to. And Kyuss is a specific name associated with a concept that Lovecraft invented, and which has floated around under slightly different names in both Call of Cthulhu and Dungeons & Dragons. Again, a rename and he's good to go.

I don't need any of these "expansion" Heresiarchs; honestly, sixteen is probably more than I can reasonably use already, but since I have images that I like, y'know... I can.

I'm attaching two images of Amrruk the Ancient. The first one I generated is arguably a better image, but I wanted him to be even more oozy and slimy, so I had it do another iteration. I'll add more of these images over along with my posts for the next little bit. I don't want to do a giant image dump, but I want to get these out there a bit.

I have, in the past, given a brief paragraph or so description of each of them and their methods and history, but I should probably review and update that, especially now that I have more of them that didn't get that treatment officially before.