Nizrekh capsule review; updated

Nizrekh has become more and more part of the Three Realms+; where it was originally just a reference, it's now a probable destination in two of the 5x5 Fronts; Curse of the Corsair Coast and Terror in Timischburg both, and the Mind-Wizards—especially Gothan, the Mind-Wizard, one of the Heresiarchs, is meant specifically to be an ancient Atlantean. Although I don't know that Gothan is the Mind-wizard of Mind-Wizards of the Daemon Wastes, but if he is, then heck; they could go to Nizrekh in that one too. That said, my old capsule review is woefully out of date. I don't necessarily mean to expand on it, but I do want to at least update it. The expansion can come later.

What is Nizrekh? In short, it's a part of the Old Night setting that is an island nation off the coast (to the south and a bit to the west) of Timischburg itself. An archipelago nation, Nizrekh was once a much larger island nearly the size of Greenland, and the very first High Civilization of Mankind lived on it. Atlantis, it was called, and they ruled with an iron fist over the continent that is now the Three Realms, although they were little interested in the people there except to take them occasionally as slaves, or to exploit the natural resources of their lands. Mighty in technology and in magic, the Atlanteans were unchallenged for centuries. When their Doom came, it came because of the curse that befell one of their own.

A princess of Atlantis named Medusa brought a curse down on the people for reasons that are now forgotten. The ancient, heathen chthonic entities that the Atlanteans worshipped turned her into a horrifying monster for her crimes, her body below the waist transformed into that of the thick snake, her hair turned into a nest of vipers, and her malicious gaze would turn those who beheld her to stone. Full of hatred and bitterness for what happened to her she took her revenge on her people, and waged war against them. Although it's not clear how this happened, she did in fact bear children after her transformation, and these are called the lesser medusae, or sometimes the gorgons. Their own petrification abilities were similar to that of their monstrous mother, although less potent, and those of sufficiently strong will could resist it. Medusa herself was finally killed by the Atlanteans, but her vile progeny, which now included even more debased warlike serpent men continued a bitter war of attrition.

Disgusted with the behavior of the Atlanteans in the wake of this chaos, who had fallen into bitter rejection of their gods, a massive sea monster known as Megaketos destroyed their island, killing most Atlanteans and snake-men both. There are disturbing rumors that Megaketos was not related to Ketos, but was rather Cthulhu itself, awakened for a short time by the gods. If so, the devastation to Atlantis makes more sense; the majority of the land was sunk and only the current sun-bleached archipelago as fragments of it remain. A single structure, the great pyramid of Halkatash is the only vestige of ancient Atlantean culture that is widely recognized and which somehow remains relatively undamaged and above sea level on the archipelago.

New peoples came to these islands many generations later. These were mostly simple fishermen and other coastal types, but they grew in power and influence as well, becoming wealthy traders and sailors. Occasionally, they would find nests of snake-men still lingering in the islands, but mostly the survivors of that Pyrrhic war had fled for foreign parts. But at the height of their power, they discovered that not all of the Atlanteans were dead. Some of the wisest and most powerful (and the most blasphemous and corrupt) knew that their destruction was imminent. Sacrificing many of their lesser brethren's lives and souls in foul rituals, they turned themselves into the so-called Mind-Wizards—arch undead that combine the strengths of both vampires and liches with few of their weaknesses—and sealed themselves in thick sarcophagi that would be able to survive the sinking of their land, slumbering for centuries or even millennia on the bottom of the sea.

Nobody knows how many of these there are, but at least one, Gothan, returned to his former lands (or what was left of them) and quickly conquered it with his foul and powerful magic, establishing himself as a new undead Pharaoh over the Nizrekhs who lived here now. He has been content to rule openly yet quietly. The world is not as primitive as it was in his time, and much of the old Atlantean science (if not their magic) was lost in the destruction of their world, so Gothan bides his time, attempting to locate and raise the rest of his lost brethren and fortify his power base with them  before they make any attempt to expand their influence through conquest yet again.

Today, his foul influence has warped even the Nizrekhs who rebel against his rule. He maintains one city-state on the island, a strange place where necromantic magic rules and Immortal soldiers (mummies) patrol the streets. But along the coasts are lawless communities of savage cannibals; and the Nizrekhs have gradually been corrupted and transformed into Tcho-tcho. Few foreigners visit these anarchic, violent tribes and fewer still leave them, but they are even less welcome in the urban centers ruled by the Heresiarchs. In addition to these savage natives who occasionally raid coastlines nearby in their war outrigger pirogues, other tribes of natives who live in rebellion against Gothan wander the plains and other inland rural areas of the islands. For some reason they are tolerated, to a point, probably because they cause very little actual harm. However, unknown (presumably, at least) to Gothan, these nomadic rebels have made contact with a cell of medusae and their snake-men soldiers, and may have found a means to wage a more successful rebellion—even if the cost is what little is left of their own humanity, ultimately.

Anyway; that's Nizrekh in a nutshell. The advent of Gothan spawned a new "Golden Age" of necromancy among the people, and a recognition of the Atlanteans' past dealings with the snake-men has also spawned numerous odd details, including the worship of many snakes and snake-like entities, even as actual snake-men and their medusae rulers gather to threaten them yet again.

Some Nizrekh have ethnic enclaves in some other cities, especially on the west coast of the Three Realms+, like Grozavest, Port Liure (and all of the Corsair city-states of Baix Pallar), etc. These expat Tcho-tcho belong to equally vile cults of Shugoran, Rhan-Tegoth and others, and see humans as—at best—prey to be subject to their cannibal feasts. Although they are mostly unfriendly to Gothan, his spies are certainly among them. The Nizrekh Tcho-tcho are sufficiently repugnant on their own right whether part of Gothan's contingent or someone else's.

Sandy Petersen's Cthulhu Mythos

I just finished reading this book, which I really didn't even intend to read (yet), and it ends up being an almost singular object lesson of how sometimes when you want something so much, and then you get it, you find out that you didn't actually want it after all.

By this I mean that combining explicit Yog-Sothothery, Cthulhu Mythos and Lovecraftian elements with D&D sounds like exactly what I want... but after reading this, I don't end up thinking it's all that compelling after all. To be fair, I said singular above, but it's not exactly true. The "Strange Aeons" adventure path, which I have only read half of (but will read as part of my Adventure Path trawl now) is also explicitly Lovecraftian D&D, and it's not that exciting either. And I also just finished Mike Mearls' Cthulhu by Torchlight supplement from D&D Beyond, but that one is oddly mechanical, so it feels even less like what I want than the SPCM book; it's just new subclasses, feats, spells, mechanics and monsters.

Part of that is that the D&D game isn't really meant to mesh well with these themes, at least not the modern, 5e D&D game. Although there are a lot of house rules in this book, like a dread mechanic that replaces Sanity checks, and works like an exhaustion ladder, and a few other things, but a few house rules on a complex system don't quite manage to change the feel of the system. Now, I'm not one of those guys who believes that D&D can't be modified to fit different themes and tones, but here they're specifically trying not to change the basic management of the game. You can play with regular characters who aren't really using any house rules to speak of. I'm a little skeptical on how well that will really work. And granted, you could integrate Lovecraftian elements without Lovecraftian themes, but they're not actually trying to do that here, they're trying to layer Lovecraft on top of D&D without changing D&D, and expecting them to both work alongside each other seamlessly. I don't think that's likely to be very satisfying. 

Secondly, I just don't think it works very well because too many of the Lovecraftian themes are too repetitive, and too many of the elements feel like rehashed warmed up leftovers. How many monsters that are made up of pseudopods and tentacles who are aliens and don't obey the normal laws of physics (or magic) do we really need before it starts to feel very tedious? Less than we got here, I'd venture to say. It also reiterated to me (even more than reading a bunch of Lovecraft himself) how trite the notion that Lovecraft promoted can often be. He famously said that the greatest fear is fear of the unknown, and then decided to pursue writing horror with stuff that made no sense, with only the "OoooOOO, aliens and unknowableness!" was supposed to stand in for actual horror. Stories like "Call of Cthulhu" are effective for reasons that have nothing to do with Cthulhu-'s gelatinous dismissal of physics and weird references to non-Euclidean geometry. The rather vulgar references to backwoods swampie cults, global conspiracies, and secret histories—long before The X-files made those two ideas mainstream—are what make the story compelling. The part about the brief exploration of R'lyeh and the confrontation with Cthulhu itself is actually in most respects, the weakest part of the story. 

In any case, that's what SPCM—Sandy Petersen's Cthulhu Mythos attempts to do; just stat up every obscure reference to anything that one of the Lovecraft Circle ever mentioned. It... well, it got old before I got done with it.

The best part of the book, I think, was the idea of using Mythos entities as a kind of Elder Evil campaign threat that didn't work exactly like a monster, but mostly so—frankly, I think any kind of darkish fantasy should use something similar. And archfiends and demon lords, etc. should be treated the exact same way. The stuff that I found least interesting, although I think it was a brave go, was the attempt to create Lovecrafian races, mostly cribbed from "The DreamQuest of Unknown Kadath." In fact, like "Strange Aeons" there's altogether too much leaning into the Dreamlands, which is a concept that doesn't really fit with D&D very well. And playing as a cat-person is ridiculous enough in "regular" modern D&D, but playing as literally an actual housecat? It's really weird. 

That said, now that I'm done, I'm thinking that my trawl of the six Cthulhu Mythos Saga campaigns can proceed smoothly. I was concerned that without having read the SPCM book first, I'd find too many things in the Sagas that begged questions because it was supposed that I'd read the SPCM book first. I think, in retrospect, that that's probably not going to be true. I have, after all, read pretty much everything Lovecraft ever wrote, so I can refer to ideas directly from the source. I'm not interested in the mechanics of the adventure paths and camapigns I'm reading anyway, after all. If I actually use them at all, I'm not going to use them in the native mechanical system that any of them were written for.

As an aside; one unexpected side effect of reading the last few pages of the SPCM; the tcho-tcho monster entry is, I think, pretty much what I want my Nizrekhi population to be like. I had only given pretty vague thought to exactly what a Nizrekh population was like, but now if I can borrow any missing holes from the tcho-tcho—like Jurassic Park scientists borrowing missing genetic holes from frogs, maybe—they're suddenly much more fleshed out and ready to run than they were. So, I present—because lately I always do—a very old Nizrekh cultist Hero Forge model and next to that a very newly made tcho-tcho barbarian. Yeah, close enough, I think.

I also suspect that there are minor ethnic tcho-tcho enclaves in at least Port Liure, Simashki, and maybe some other of the Corsair Coast cities. Maybe Grozavest has them as well; the tcho-tcho would like the darkness, but not appreciate the competition from even better predators on humanity in the form of the vampires. I wonder if using the tcho-tcho kinda sorta in the role of the goblinoids from Freeport in Port Liure would work. Rivals to the orclings in the neighborhood of Bloodsalt or something? I dunno. I'll worry about that in the future. 

Terror in Timischburg 5x5

I really should focus on finishing my Cult of Undeath 5x5, but instead, I made some high level notes for a another 5x5 Front that features the Corsair Coast at least a little. Better transfer them from my portable little journal to online! I say "Corsair Coast" but it really mostly takes place on the Timischburg coast to the north and even the southernmost port of Baal Hamazi to the north even of that, as well as at least a stopover on Nizrekh.

1) The "white whale"—some kind of large, nasty sea monster that's been threatening the coast and shipping. It needs to be found and hunted. 

2) The city-state of Rozovka has often born the brunt of vampiric slave raids, clandestinely. Joining up with Inganok, another victim, they are hoping to discourage them militarily. Although not capable of fighting them, they're looking to commission privateers via letters of marque against Timischburg's clandestine vampire raids. It's worth noting that the idea that vampires clandestinely rule Timischbrg is secret(ish), hidden behind plausible deniability, and many people don't believe in vampires.

3) Pirates have been hiding out in remote coves on the Nizrekh Islands and even hiding their treasure haul there. Of course, the locals are unfriendly, hostile, and xenophobic. And snake cultists, and cannibals. Seriously bad news. Probably undead too, some of them. And, well, Nizrekh is what's left of Atlantis, so there's even more bad news there too.

4) The seal mentioned elsewhere at Grozavest that keeps Tarush, the undead godling trapped underground, is weakening, and nastier, more primal and feral ghouls/vampires are slipping through. Not only in the wilds of Timischburg, but also in Nizrekh, and in the jungles to the east of the corsair cities can the PCs find out how to tighten up the seals and keep the already horrifying enough "secret" vampire aristocracy of Timischburg from being replaced by a ravening horde of daemons and undead.

5) The Godfather in Port Liure. A patron sends the PCs to disrupt dangerous drug and occult trade in the city of thieves which is wreaking havoc on more innocent Timischer people, and they get caught up in a gang war, among other problems.

(Bonus) Innsburough in the Orlok Marches is deliberately meant to evoke Innsmouth of Lovecraft fame. Cults of Dagon threaten the entire coast, centered on this horrible town. Sea devils and deep ones and cultists. Can they be disrupted without it being fatal?

Porhomok and more

A minor update has caused me to reevaluate my worldbuilding/development schedule. The campaign I was going to start on Friday (right after literally touching down from my work trip to Texas/Mexico an hour before) got cancelled last minute, as two of my three players were having car trouble and weren’t going to be able to arrive. I rescheduled tentatively for this coming week, but now it’s been pushed back one more week due to the two of three players’ availability again. I need to reread The Skinsaw Murders, since I’m hoping to adopt some of it for the session, but just for my own sake, I thought that if I’m going to reread that, I should reread Burnt Offerings, the module that precedes it before I do. I’m kinda inclined to reread the entire Rise of the Runelords campaign of six modules, honestly. Last time I read it, I read the Anniversary Edition where it was updated to the Pathfinder rules, with new art and a few expanded elements, but this time, I’m going through in the OG 3.5 version in the individual “magazine”-like format. There’s some really bad “cubist anime” art in this version that they didn’t carry forward, and I might actually miss stuff (not that I’ll remember or notice it) that was filled out in the revised version.

Anyway, that’s rambly. The point is, What am I going to do next? First, before the end of the week, I want to make two new videos; one will be an explanation of the new areas I’ve added on my newest version of the map: Porhomok, Nizrekh, Hyperborea, Gunaakt, and “Easternesse”, a neologism I created from Tolkien’s usage of Westernesse, which is also his own neologism based on Middle English from words like Lyonesse and Elvenesse. However, Easternesse isn’t meant to be a setting element that anyone actually goes and explores; that would be silly. It’s more a just-so story that explains why certain things in the setting are the way that they are. Gunaakt is also not going to be an element that I want to develop, other than to mention that it exists and it’s the source of the orcling race. Like Khand on the Middle-earth map, it’s just a label, and the Variags that come from it, while the source of a lot of intriguing and hot speculation from fans, never got any development in its own right. Gunaakt will be the same. It’s just there as a reference, and a place where the orclings come from, but I have no intention of adding more to the development of Gunaakt itself than I have already done.

I’ll also revisit what I’ve already said about Nizrekh, and possibly add to it, although I certainly don’t have any immediate plans for anything to ever be set in Nizrekh. However, I do want to talk briefly about some minor changes to the Leng and Pnath area up north of the Goldenwolds, and targets for future development include my newly added Hyperborean region (located up above Burlharrow, outside of the scope of the original map, but closer than I originally intended it to be. I may yet move it further north yet before I’m done with it…) and Porhomok. Porhomok is a brand newly defined region. Hyperborea has been around for a long time, albeit undeveloped, and Nizrekh and Gunaakt too, but Porhomok is new. The word is a combination of some stuff I looked up in a Hungarian dictionary, and I expect, which makes sense given its location, that the people of Porhomok are distantly related in some way or another to the Tarushans. The main reason for the introduction of Porhomok as a region, however, is to allow myself to have classical pirate themed stuff in a classic Golden Age of piracy tropical, or at least subtropical, environment. I may well call the coastline the Corsair Coast, and it’ll have a bunch of anarchic city-states, maybe even of more northerly based peoples. Timischer and hillmen foreigners with their Tortuga-like settlements; the natives of Porhomok being more like savages in the interior swamps, bayous and maybe even outright jungles. The people of Porhomok could be seen, at least deep in the boonies, as the classic adventure story savage; headhunters, cannibals, and the like, like you see in old 50s movies like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, for instance.

Then, I’ll make a different video also hopefully later this week, where I start talking about some of my setting’s ”supervillains.” I’m not sure if I want to start with a summary of all of them first, or do them one video at a time, but the characters I intend to cover include:

• Amrruk the Ancient, the “Oozemaster” who almost certainly belongs in the swamps either around Innsborough in Timischburg, or near the Corsair Coast.
• The Flying Dutchman (who obviously needs a new name), an undead pirate captain
• Hutran Kutir, the Hex-King and “founder” of Baal Hamazi, who still lingers as an undead lich
• Jairan Neferirkare, kind of Soul-catcher or The Lady from The Black Company is the main inspiration.
• Kadashman, He Who Peers Into the Void, based on the alienist concept from old 3e material; a strange and disturbing transhuman creature of some kind.
• Kefte Taran, the Witch-lich. Not her real name; I just like it as a catchy rhyme
• Master of Vermin, an unnamed disturbing individual, probably the creator in some way or other of the ratmen
• Seggeir Sherihum, the Mind-Wizard. Same concept as Kathulos, the villain of Robert E. Howard’s Skull-face. Maybe I should just use that name.

Speaking of that last guy, the Mind-Wizards of the Daemon Wastes will almost certainly not end up being of the Daemon Wastes after all, but related more to the south, Nizrekh or the Corsair Coast. I’ll probably do something else, or at least feature a different villain (and therefore title). But the campaign seed I have in mind for the Daemon Wastes would work quite well with a Mind-Wizard, so maybe it can travel between the Daemon Wastes and either Nizrekh or the Corsair Coast.

Undead pirate ship at Port

Capsule review of Nizrekh

What is Nizrekh?  In short, it's a part of the TIMISCHBURG setting that is an island nation off the coast (so to the south and a bit to the west) of Timischburg itself.  I expect that it's kind of a satellite to Timischburg itself in terms of importance, but it's going to be sending agents and more to the benighted shores of my fake Transylvania from time to time.

In the language of the "Hollywood pitch" Nizrekh is "Undead and pirates from ancient Egypt."

An archipelago nation, Nizrekh was once a much larger island, and the very first High Civilization of Mankind lived on it.  Terra Atlans, it was called, and they ruled with an iron fist over the continent, although they were little interested in the people there except to take them occasionally as slaves, or to exploit the natural resources of their lands.  Mighty in technology and in magic, the Atlaneans were unchallenged for centuries.  When their Doom came, it came because of the curse that befell one of their own.

A princess of Atlans named Medusa brought a curse down on the people for reasons that are now forgotten (or better said; there are competing accounts of what happened.)  The ancient, heathen chthonian entities that the Atlaneans worshiped turned her into a horrifying monster for her crimes, her body below the waist transformed into that of the thick snake, her hair turned into a nest of vipers, and her malicious gaze would turn those who beheld her to stone.  Full of hatred and bitterness for what happened to her she took her revenge on her people, and waged war against them.  Although it's not clear how this happened, she did in fact bear children after her transformation, and these are called the lesser medusae, or sometimes the gorgons.  Their own petrification abilities were similar to that of their monstrous mother, although less potent, and those of sufficiently strong will could resist it.  Medusa herself was finally killed by a hero, but her vile progeny, which now included the warlike snake-men continued a bitter war of attrition against the Atlaneans.

Disgusted with the behavior of the Atlaneans, who had fallen into bitter rejection of their gods, a massive sea monster known as Mekaketos destroyed their island, killing most Atlaneans and snake-men both.  There are disturbing rumors that Megaketos was not related to Ketos, but was rather Cthulhu itself, awakened for a short time by the gods.  If so, the devastation to Terra Atlans makes more sense; the majority of the land was sunk and only sun-bleached fragments of it remain.  A single structure, the great pyramid of Halkatash is all that remains.

New peoples came to these islands, peoples from the shoreline of what would later become the countries of Gunaakt, Baal Hamazi and parts of Timischburg itself.  These were mostly simple fishermen and other coastal types, but they grew in power and influence as well, becoming wealthy traders and sailors.  Occasionally, they would find nests of snake-men still lingering in the islands, but mostly the survivors of that Pyrrhic war had fled for foreign parts.  But at the height of their power, they discovered that not all of the Atlaneans were dead.  Some of the wisest and most powerful (and the most blasphemous and corrupt) knew that their destruction was imminent.  Sacrificing many of their lesser brethren's lives and souls in foul rituals, they turned themselves in the Heresiarch's—arch undead that combine the strengths of both vampires and liches with few of their weaknesses—and sealed themselves in thick sarcophagi that would be able to survive the sinking of their land, slumbering for centuries or even millennia on the bottom of the sea.

Nobody knows how many of these there are, but about half a dozen or so returned to their former lands (or what was left of them) and quickly conquered it with their foul and powerful magic, establishing themselves as undead Pharaohs over the Nizrekhs who lived here now.  They did, however, not disrupt the native Nizrekh culture too much, and are content to rule openly yet quietly.  The world is not as primitive as it was in their time, and much of their science (if not their magic) was lost in the destruction of their world, so they bide their time, attempting to locate and raise the rest of their brethren and fortify their power base before they make any attempt to expand their influence through conquest yet again.

The Court of the Heresiarchs

Today, they rule over an aristocratic urban Nizrekh, a strange place where necromantic magic, Immortal soldiers (mummies) patrol the streets, and powerful traders still make their living.  But more along the coasts are lawless communities, which have gradually become more mixed and cosmopolitan—havens for pirates and other worse riffraff who make of themselves a nuisance across the entire Mezzovian Sea.  Few foreigners leave these anarchic, violent pirate cities, as they are rarely welcomed in the urban centers ruled by the Heresiarchs.  In addition to these pirates, natives who live in rebellion against the Heresiarchs wander the plains and other inland rural areas of the islands.  For some reason they are tolerated, to a point, probably because they cause very little actual harm.  However, unknown (presumably, at least) to the Heresiarchs, these nomadic rebels have made contact with a cell of medusae and their snake-men soldiers, and may have found a means to wage a more successful rebellion—even if the cost is their own humanity, ultimately.

Anyway; that's Nizrekh in a nutshell. The advent of the Heresiarchs spawned a "Golden Age" of necromancy among the people, and a recognition of their past dealings with the snake-men has also spawned numerous odd details, including the worship of many snakes and snake-like entities, even as actual snake-men and their medusae rulers gather to threaten them yet again.

More details on some aspects of it will be forthcoming in future posts.

Cult of Undeath review

Here's a direct quote from a sidebar from the third Carrion Crown adventure path module, and a great example of why I struggle so much to figure out how to do anything useful with this Paizo material, which is fundamentally unsuited to gaming, quite frankly.

Running on the Rails The sequence of events in this section places this portion of the adventure on a "railroad." You should attempt to keep the PCs "on the rails," but without obviously strong-arming them or manipulating their actions. You can use Duristan, Graydon, and other potential NPC allies to guide and support the PCs’ actions, while still leaving them free to make their own choices regarding their investigations. Should the PCs take some sort of drastic action that threatens to derail the adventure, these wealthy nobles can step in and play the voice of reason. If necessary, they can even offer the PCs a reward or bribe to keep them focused, in the form of money, a minor magic item, or even property or another type of holding (likely worth no more than 3,000 gp), to be presented once the PCs properly finish their business in Ascanor. Regardless of whom the PCs side with, none of the nobles at Ascanor desire to see the lodge destroyed or overrun by an outside agency that would threaten to destroy the sanctity and privacy of their exclusive retreat.

Ridiculous.  As much as everyone knows that railroading is bad adventure design and even worse GMing advice, Paizo still writes what they clearly admit is a railroad—and their excuse is that you can mitigate this by merely not being obvious about it!

Even so, what I find much harder to adapt is the repeated insinuation that the monsters are merely misunderstood and the real villains are transparent proxies for white, male, conservative, Christians most of the time.

It's made it very difficult to figure out what to do with a setting and premises that I actually quite like, because Paizo simply cannot stop crapping in their own bed.  It's been a fair while now since I've routinely bought very much of what they're selling, and I've found completing this CULT OF UNDEATH project was actually harder than I anticipated because so much of it is simply unusable to a normal, healthy, psychologically functional gamer.  This is why it continues to lapse as I get tired of trying to fight the material into being something worthwhile.

But, I committed to doing it, and I'm going to see it through!  I'm reviewing modules three and four for what I want to pull out of them, and I'll have them converted into a bullet point outline of the type that I actually would use to run the game.  Sometime soon.  I am working on it.  I promise.

In the meantime, since I'm lagging so far behind where I hoped to be, here's an image or two from Adrian Smith just for the heck of it, a great fantasy artist who got his name doing Warhammer stuff, and who did a lot of great work for Monolith Games' Conan.  I'm going to use some of this stuff to represent Nizrekh, an island kingdom in the sea south-southwest of Timischburg that represents a different tone of undeath.  While Timischburg has the classic Dracula vibe, set in pseudo-Medieval fantasy—where vampire overlords and tyrants are under the surface of what could otherwise perhaps be mistaken for merely a disquieting normal environment, Nizrekh is much more blatant and overt; it's Warhammer's Nehekhara (host of the now defunct Tomb Kings army; a skeletonized ancient Egypt, basically) combined with the Iron Kingdoms' Cryx—a steampunk undead pirate nation.

A Nizrekh Immortal soldier (a mummy, stat-wise)

Another Nizrekh Immortal, with poisoned claws

One of the Nizrekh Necromancers (and possibly a ghoul)

Nizrekh royalty (think of The Lady from The Black Company)

I'd actually have to hybridize the stats of a lich and a vampire to create the Nizrekh royalty.  Here:

NIZREKH ROYAL HERESIARCH: AC: 17 HD: 10d6 (40 hp) AT: touch +5 (1d6) STR: +4, DEX: +2, MND: +3, S: undead immunities, only takes half damage from non-silver weapons, regenerate 3 hp per round, on a successful hit (MND + level to resist, DC 19) does 1d4 STR damage, can hypnotize (MND + level check, DC 19), avoids garlic and mirrors, immobilized and apparently dead if a stake is driven through its heart, drowns underwater in one round, cause fear in creatures under 4th level/HD, can cast spells up to 5th level 

While the vampires of Timischburg have a powerful undead grip on immortality (of a sort) they are pale shadows of the true masters of undeath, the Royal Nizrekh Heresiarchs.  There are only a handful such that exist, but all are powerful scions of undeath and thaumaturgy, and attack with powerful physical as well as magical abilities when they are spurred to combat.  They rather spend their time in Machiavellian manipulation against each other and other rivals, however—if they are reduced to fighting for their lives, usually something has gone really wrong for them. 

Like Liches, Heresiarchs have horcruxes that make their total destruction extremely difficult, and many enemies that think that they have destroyed one find to their fatal chagrin that they just keep coming back. 

The best literary comparison to the Heresiarchs is the Ten Who Were Taken from Glen Cook's The Black Company.