Undead in Dark•Heritage

I've blogged before about my love in general for the Undead as a monster type.  Here, for instance.  And I've talked plenty about the Warhammer setting, which I think is pretty nifty, and does a number of things that I also like, including (but not limited to) their interpretation of the Undead, which in many ways I'd like to borrow from rather heavily.  As this Halloween season is upon us, I'd like to talk just a bit more about the Undead, the Warhammer Undead in particular, and what use I can get from them.

Now.  I'm also on record (see my first link above) as thinking that there are too many Undead monsters in general.  Most of them are minor variations on only a handful of original themes.  And Warhammer has a lot of Undead.

To recap, for those who aren't already familiar with it, the Warhammer game has had Undead from pretty much its inception in the early 80s.  Back then, the Undead were a single army list, and things like mummies and vampires were assumed to march together.  Keep in mind that Warhammer is primarily a miniatures battle game, and therefore its goal was to create interesting army lists rather than to necessarily represent a coherent setting.

But this seems to have gradually changed somewhat; a number of "lumped" armies were split into different thematic elements in order to better align with the fiction of the setting.  Chaos, for instance, became three armies: warriors, daemons and beastmen, which are all separate, but who sometimes ally with each other.  This happened to the Undead as well, and they split into two armies, the skeletal Tomb Kings with a dry, Egyptian-like theme, and the Vampire Counts with a more eastern European Dracula and whatnot type feel.  This change didn't happen until the 6th edition, though—in Y2k—so it's a relatively recent change.

More recently yet, for the End Times, Nagash has been reborn, and with him are a handful of his most important and infamous generals—Arkhan the Black, his most trusted lieutenant while yet alive, Neferata, the first of the vampires, and Mannfred von Carstein, arguably the most powerful of the vampires.  Under the influence of these most powerful of Undead, including Nagash, the founder of the entire art of Necromancy and the Father of the Undead (both types) the two armies were, again, brought together in alliance, at least, and you can again create an army list that mixes Tomb Kings and Vampire Counts forces under the aegis of a reunited Undead.

What I'd like to do is go through the entire list, including links to images of the miniatures (I wish they had art instead of miniatures, but finding really good art of the miniatures themselves is harder than it should be).  I'll summarize what each type of monster is, and then briefly talk about whether or not I think there's a place for it in the DARK•HERITAGE setting or not, and if so, what kind of place.  For my money, I'd prefer to see many of these as almost individualistic creatures rather than "troop types" if I use them, or I'd use various of them as merely variants on the same theme.  But let's get to it, shall we?

Nagash, Supreme Lord of the Undead

Click on the images to make them larger, if needed.  The first here is Nagash himself.  As the Father of All Undead, now reborn as a kind of God of Undeath, if you will, he's a towering figure both literally and figuratively in the setting of Warhammer.  Monstrously sized, and still bearing the Egyptian like iconography that was his birthright in life, Nagash is an awesome piece of sculpture, and one of the few characters to have really great artwork associated with him—although don't take my word for it.  Do some Google Image Search for yourself!  I'd post some, but I already have many times.

As discussed with my CULT OF UNDEATH thread and mini-setting, which is set in Tarush Noptii, my own vampiric kingdom more closely resembles the Vampire Counts in tone and theme than the Tomb Kings (although the Tomb Kings could represent even more ancient vampiric expansions of the distant past.) My closest analog to a Nagash like figure is probably Tarush himself.  I've never really described exactly what he is.  Is he a god?  Is he a mortal Necromancer turned larger than life due to his own fell sorcery?  I think of Tarush as somewhat like Kina from the Black Company in most respects, and those questions about her are not necessarily clearly answered either.

Going through the list of miniatures online (which doesn't necessarily have an order that makes sense) we get next to the Blood Knights, semi-feudal vampires that ride on horses and fight as knights, basically.  Being vampires, of course, they are rather savage and bloodthirsty (literally) compared to other knights, and have a host of supernatural abilities.

My conception of Tarush Noptii is that it is primarily a mortal kingdom, although certainly ruled over by an undead (i.e., vampire) aristocracy.  The notion that there could be some of these vampires who are sadistic and bloodthirsty hand to hand combat juggernauts is not in the least out of character, although ranking them up as heavy cavalry probably is.  The nature of the the vampire aristocracy is that they tend to be very individualistic.

Neferata mounted on Dread Abyssal

Neferata, the Mortarch of Blood is next in our list.  The same kit can also render either of the other two Mortarchs, Mannfred von Carstein or Arkhan the Black, but rather than post images of all three, just click on the links above to see them.  They're all quite similar.  Arkhan is perhaps a little different to the other two, as they're vampires and Arkhan is a lich.  As such, he has a much more skeletal visage and doesn't need to drink blood, but that's more cosmetic than anything else.  All three are potent warriors and sorcerers who are almost impossible to kill—really the main feature of any evil champion.

All three ride on dread abyssals; some kind of demonic creature in a skeletal monster form, stuffed with the ethereal skulls of souls that they devoured in the afterlife or something like that.  These monstrous skeletal bodies were wrought by Nagash himself, in part as a display of his mastery over the concept of Undeath and his godlike power.  I could certainly see the dread abyssals, or something very like them, having a place somewhere in DARK•HERITAGE.  They're cool.  As for characters like Arkhan or Neferata or Mannfred; again, I don't make so many distinctions between types of "supervillains."  All three could qualify as equivalents of the Ten Who Were Taken in the Black Company, and therefore all three could qualify as part of the Heresiarchy of the Twelve in DARK•HERITAGE which is a similar concept.  The first thing any sorcerer who aspires to that level of power does is to make himself functionally immortal.  Whether that's through something like conventional lich-hood or vampirism or some other method is less important than the end result, really.

Mortis Engine

The Mortis Engine is a massive model, but basically it's a Corpsemaster, a master necromancer, sitting on a throne that's borne into battle by a horde of banshees and other spectral ghost-like creatures.  To be honest with you, I prefer to again minimize the distinctiveness of various creatures. Ghosts, banshees, wraiths, spirits, phantoms, spooks, poltergeists, etc.—they're all really just disembodied spirits of some kind.  While the details of the manifestation of any such disembodied spirit may differ somewhat, is there really a conceptual difference between any of these?  I think not.  In DARK•HERITAGE while certainly a ghost may have a banshee scream, or a wraith's life-draining touch, they really aren't different classes of monster; that's just individual variation among them.

The Coven Throne is another variation on this same model, and it's also a variation on the same concept.  Rather than a Corpsemaster, it has a reclining female vampire attended to by her attendants, on a palanquin carried by the same types of spirits (literally the same models, of course) as that of the Mortis Engine.  I can see why from an army list standpoint they'd maybe be separate, but I can't imagine any reason why my setting would need to make a distinction between a Coven Throne and a Mortis Engine.  And since open battle between monsters is more of a Warhammer thing than a DARK•HERITAGE thing anyway, I'm not sure that I'd ever have any need for either of them anyway except as a bit of color.

Morghast Archai

The difference between the Morghast Archai and Morghast Harbingers is really more about having different weapons; this big Grim Reaper-like pole-arm with a ghostly wailing haft (pictured, left), or big paired sword-like blades.  The Morghasts are supposedly the corpses of some type of pseudo-angelic being sent by the Egyptian-esque god Ptra to kill Nagash many thousands of years ago.  He killed them instead and turned them into monstrous, flying undead things.  Their bodies are stuffed with the ethereal skulls of the victims of their deadly blades.

These are a really arcane and esoteric type of creature, but they also are not terribly unlike the dread abyssals, which I can see a place for.  I do have angelic like creatures already in DARK•HERITAGE and I can see a place for a real master of the undead to turn them into a cruel, blasphemous parody of their original purpose as an undead creature, not unlike the morghast.  Mor-, of course, is probably from Tolkien's own use of the prefix (as in Mordor) because it has the proper sound to readers of fantasy to be "evil."  Because it also sounds like mortis, the Latin word for death, it gets double the exposure as sounding "bad."  Ghast is a D&D creature; a kind of more powerful ghoul, but the name seems to have been coined originally by H. P. Lovecraft in his Dreamlands stories.  It's obviously a based on the word ghastly, which actually comes from the Middle English word gast which led to—not only ghastly but also the English word ghost.  A ghast is just, then, an alternate spelling, if you will, that never quite made it into being a real word, of ghost, and it is meant to be the same thing.  It's also cognate with the German word geist, as in poltergeist.  Keep that thought in mind as we proceed to more creatures....

Ghoul King mounted on Terrorgheist

The next kit is the Zombie Dragon with Vampire Lord or Terrorgheist with Ghoul King.  A zombie dragon is pretty much what it sounds like (although animated mummified dragon would probably better describe the model) and the terrorgheist is supposedly some kind of pseudo-skeletal super-gigantic bat creature.  In reality, conceptually the terrorgheist is no different than the fell beasts from Lord of the Rings, although with a less overtly scaly dragon-like appearance than the movie gave them (which is fine.  I'm a much bigger fan of the books than I am of the movies.)  The name terrorgheist is actually kind of interesting, because gheist is very similar (deliberately) to geist, but with the added [h] it makes it look more like ghost.  I like the concept that poltergeists are merely one manifestation of the the concept of different kinds of -geists.  But -geists should be ghosts, not gigantic bat things.  I love the concept of the gigantic undead skeletal bat thing, but it's not unique to Warhammer, just the specific visual.

I also don't think that there's really a difference between a "vampire lord" and a "ghoul king" other than a bit of thematic cosmetics.  A ghoul king is a more savage flesh-eating, ugly type of vampire, while a vampire lord is a more traditional, romanticized Dracula-style vampire.  But they're both vampiric monsters.

The Casket of Skulls is basically the Ark of the Covenant from Raiders of the Lost Ark except instead of a French archaeologist allied with Nazis opening it, it's a Lich King.  While the Ark of the Covenant is a bit too "done already" for my taste to be used without being an obvious call-back to Raiders, the Lich Kings are important.  In reality, from my perspective there's only minor differences between a lich and a vampire.  The vampires are more human-like in appearance in most respects; the liches bodies having rotted away to a skeletal, mummified husk, and the vampires require feeding on the blood, flesh or life-force of the living, whereas liches merely hate the living, but do not require anything of them.  Ideally, for a master sorcerer, he'd have neither the weakness of needing human life force to sustain him, nor the weakness of a wasted physical appearance, but in reality, even the greatest of sorcerers usually fail to completely implement that, so they're left with at least one of the two drawbacks.  This is the primary difference between liches and vampires.

The Black Coach is a very iconic Dracula moment.  A haunted coach picked up Jonathan Harker and bore him to Castle Dracula.  Games Workshop has reimagined this as a war machine of sorts; the coach bears the coffin with the vampire in it, and rides over the battlefield, sucking the life and even blood from enemy troops that it runs down.  This is... well, it's a miniatures wargame, right?  It makes sense in that regard.

Of course, the concept of haunted coaches drawn by skeletal steeds and manned with wraith-like coachman is perfectly acceptable in DARK•HERITAGE, or as far as I'm concerned, just about any fantasy setting that is even tangentially related to Western civilization.

The Bone Giant is, surprisingly, not merely the animated skeleton of a giant, according to the Tomb Kings army book.  It is instead, basically, a really big golem made out of bones.

I'm a big fan of the notion that there isn't a real difference between golems and the animated undead.  Undead that actually feature the trapped soul of people are one thing, but being merely an animated corpse or whatever is no different than being an animated anything else, therefore you could almost consider any mindless undead as merely a golem made from a human body.  Of course, in many systems, such as D&D, golems are very powerful adversaries whereas skeletons and zombies and other mere animated corpses are not.  Do with them as you will.  I actually prefer zombies to be more like the original Haitian folklore of zombies.  Zombies of modern zombie pop culture have actually picked up a number of traits that were originally more associated with vampires and other revenants.  I like the notion of undead creatures being somewhat more like Frankenstein's monster or Herbert West's reanimated corpses, which are—as it happens—basically flesh golems in D&D terms.

Sepulchral Stalkers

The Sepuchral Stalkers and Necropolis Knights are two different troop types in the same kit.  As above, they have a golem-like quality to them—they are basically animated snake statues with an undead patina laid over top of them.  The Necropolis Knights are animated statues of cobras with a golden human skull-like (but fanged) mask, ridden by skeleton warriors.  The Sepuchral Stalkers use most of the same parts in the kit, but they actually have a core of a human corpse in their torso and carry weapons with bony human arms, as pictured there to the right. The latter even hide beneath the desert sands, rising up in ambush.  The idea of human corpses merged with animalistic statues and animated isn't something that would be foreign to DARK•HERITAGE. In fact, I can see expanding this beyond the merely snake-like into other animal forms as well, maybe.  Heck, the Soulhunters from Privateer Press's Cryx armies (worthy of another similar post someday, for sure!) are kind of the same concept, except in "undead centaur" form.

Necrosphinx

Speaking of which, the Necrosphinx is another animated golem in human-animal hybrid form.  Shaped like a leonine centaur with a massive humanoid torso and muscular arms bearing ghastly gigantic blades, and Egyptian sarcophagus like iconography, the Necrosphinx is a real showpiece of a miniature and monster—although again, unless you decide that "undead" and "animated statue" aren't really significantly different from each other, exactly how it fits into an "undead" army is a little obscure, in my opinion.

The model can also be made as a Khemrian Warsphinx, which uses the same leonine body, but instead of the human-like torso, it has a neck and skeletal sabertooth-like head, and on its back is a howdah for skeletal warriors.  If golems and sepulchral stalkers or Necropolis knights can fit in DARK•HERITAGE than certainly something like this can as well—although maybe it's a bit too distinctive to the Warhammer world at this point.

Carrion are gigantic undead vultures.  I'm not even going to link to the image, because I actually think the models aren't that great, and because they're already similar to fell beasts, as noted above.  Conceptually they're no different, although the terrorgheist model is certainly much larger and more impressive than the carrion models.

Vargheists

Another one I won't link to an image to is the ushabti, either with great weapons or with gigantic bows.  They are also stone golems, basically—9-10 foot tall statues of animal-headed warriors with a very Egyptian like look.  Since clearly in Warhammer, at least for the Tomb Kings army, golems and undead are basically the same, these fit into that same kind of niche.

Yet another one that doesn't need linking to an image: fell bats.  Described as such: "Fell bats bear as much resemblance to ordinary bats as maddened lion bears to a domestic cat."  You get the idea.  Really big, monstrous bats.

Crypt Horrors are basically super-ghouls.  They bear a strong resemblance to ghouls, except for the ruptured spines with bone spurs and stuff sticking out of their backs.  The kit can also be used to create vargheists, which are basically devolved vampires that have succumbed to savagery and bestiality until any aspect of their humanity has been stripped away.  Vargheists are also winged, but the concept doesn't require that they be.  In fact, I think that ghouls are basically just uglier and more savage versions of the vampire concept to begin with, so they're on the same spectrum as vargheists in that regard.  I really don't see any compelling reason to keep them separate, especially if I want my vampires to not be too cliche and be stuck with all of the Dracula conceits, which to be fair, most vampires in fiction do.  Varghulfs, on the other hand, seem to be conceptually the exact same as the vargheists, but they're bigger and more powerful, looking even less like anything humanoid and even more like some kind of gigantic bat-monster.

Varghulf

I'll skip the Screaming Skulls catapult as a warmachine more geared towards an army game than one that I'd have any need for.  The Tomb Guard come next, and they're basically the same as those mummified priests that Brendan Frasier has to fight in The Mummy.  No need to picture them again here.  The Grave Guard are the Vampire Counts equivalent to them Tomb Guard, and they are specifically called out as wights; embodied and relatively powerful undead best exemplified by the barrow-wights of Tolkien or the draugr of Norse mythology and several Norse sagas—ultimately Tolkien's source too.  Warhammer also has Tomb Heralds, but these are just standard bearing Tomb Guard champions, not another concept.

I'll also skip the named characters, such as Settra the Imperishable, or Count Mannfred (actually the same character as the Mannfred named above, but this is an earlier version of him, and one not mounted on a dread abyssal.)  There's also a third version of Mannfred, as well as other von Carsteins—Isabella, Vlad, etc. and many other characters.  I'll skip them all in favor of coming up with my own unique characters, thankyouverymuch.

Corpse cart

I'm also going to skip the next few entries, after merely acknowledging their obvious existence—the humble foot soldiers of the undead: animated corpses.  Zombies, skeletons, armored skeletons, skeleton cavalry mounted on skeletal horses, skeletons on bone chariots drawn by skeletal horses, etc.  I will acknowledge the most unique among these types of models, though—the corpse cart.  Drawn by zombies and covered in impaled zombies writhing on its frame, and driven by a "macabre, shrouded figure" that could be a necromancer or something else, it's a real visual treat, if nothing else.

And I'm also going to skip solo models that are not really unique.  I've already talked about vampires, liches, wights and ghouls, for instance, plenty, so there's no need to point out that yes, there is a Vampire Lord and a Mounted Vampire Lord; there are Tomb Kings and a Lich Priest, and Wight Kings, and Necromancers.  Duh.  The models have to exist, but I've already talked about them in connection with something else, so I'll skip those entries.  There actually aren't too many left that I haven't already covered, and of those, even fewer yet that aren't merely variations on a theme that we've already talked about.

For instance, Black Knights are visually obviously drawn from the Black Riders of Tolkien, but in reality, conceptually they are simply mounted barrow-wights.

There's the Spirit Host and the Banshee, but I'll call them variations on the ghost theme and be done with it.  Swarms of bats, giant scorpions, and zombie undead wolves round out much of what else you'd expect (or maybe not, giant scorpion?  I guess that sounds vaguely fantasy Egypt like or something) from an undead army, and the final pieces are cairn wraiths and hexwraiths, although the only difference seems to be that the latter is mounted and the former is not.  An amalgam of archetypes including the ghost, the Ringwraiths and the Grim Reaper, these are relatively powerful, incorporeal creatures.

While a few of these concepts are probably too specific to the Warhammer setting to sit very comfortably elsewhere, most others (as is typical of that setting) come from somewhere else originally anyway, and can easily be ported into any fantasy setting without too much explanation of where they fit, assuming of course, that any kind of undeath is a thing in said fantasy setting to begin with.

Mourngul

Having a quick look at Forge World for alternate and rarer miniatures, we get the Mourngul, which is conceptually very similar to the wendigo myth; a famine spirit, if you will, eternally hungry and more solo; less likely to be part of any type of army.

This brings to mind another point, which I'm make briefly, but which is only tangentially related.  In the Iron Kingdoms setting, there were a number of monsters that were meant to be "solos" if you will.  As the Warmachine game became more popular, there was increasing pressure to use some of these monsters and ally them with one of the existing factions.  Therefore, guys like the pistol wraiths, machine wraiths, the cephalyx, etc. had to be shoe-horned into an existing armies.  Some of them (the cephalyx) they later backed off from on that, and made them "mercenaries" i.e., unaligned with any specific faction after all.

This is of course a problem with Warhammer, where all of these monsters are meant to be troop types in a fantasy army.  Some of them fit that archetype somewhat poorly, being essentially big monsters, or scary monsters, rather than troops.  But in many ways, if they fit the concept too poorly, they don't get added to the line-up in the first place.  One thing that is important for DARK•HERITAGE is to remember to decouple anything, regardless of source, from that paradigm.  There aren't armies of undead monsters marching through the setting.  Undead tend to be more individualistic and frightening monsters, not troops.

Undead revisited

Although DARK•HERITAGE is, of course, a setting that purposefully eschews some of the standard conventions of fantasy, it doesn't abandon them completely, and there are a few that I really like and can't help but put in place.  A lot of these come from D&D which makes sense since my setting is an evolved cadet line of D&D, if you will, in the first place.  I'm also a fan of a lot of the stuff found in Warhammer (as a setting) however, as well as stuff found in Iron Kingdoms.

I stumbled into a game store on Friday afternoon--the first time I've been in one in months--with the intent of flipping through the 5e books.  I did do that--the Monster Manual in particular--but what really caught my eye was stuff going on in Warhammer that I hadn't been aware of, namely the return of Nagash and the End Times supplement.

Sauron is, of course, the original Dark Lord of modern fantasy fiction, but Nagash is probably the original Dark Lord of the Warhammer setting, at least, and a great classical expression of the Dark Lord motif.  I've long been a fan of Nagash.  Of course, it's a lot easier now with really cool new art and really cool new models.  There are other cool models released recently too, Arkhan and others on Dread Abyssals, some kind of undead creature that looks sort of like a short-nosed dragon skeleton with the ribcage completely filled up with ethereal skulls.

I don't play Warhammer, nor do I have stats for a lot of these monsters, but I love the visuals and the concepts behind them.  Not just the dread abyssals, but all kinds of critters from the Tomb Kings and Vampire Counts armies--I've long been tempted to stat up a terrorgheist or a necrosphinx in m20.  This latest batch of releases will probably be the tipping point that causes me to add some of these Warhammer monsters to DARK•HERITAGE, at least as options.

Of course, while I'm at it, it's not like the Undead are the only Warhammer armies that I like.  I'm a big fan of both skaven and the beastmen, and for that matter, the Chaos daemons are philosophically very interesting (although when it comes time to advance specific daemons, I tend to fall back more on D&D conventions than follow Warhammer notions.)

But if I'm going to be statting up Warhammer undead, why not add some of the Cryxian undead from Warmachine while I'm at it?

Last night, I made a list of troop types from both armies, based on what was available on their online catalog of miniatures (minus actual warmachines--those are too specific to Iron Kingdoms to be able to translate well into any other setting without being obvious that they're "stolen.")  Over the next few days or weeks, I'm going to stat up some of these critters as m20 monsters, usable in DARK•HERITAGE.  Of course, I haven't really developed the concept of undead in DARK•HERITAGE very well yet, other than establish that Tarush is some kind of slumbering undead god under the capital of the nation of Tarush Noptii, which is ruled by vampires.  Does that mean other undead would be in Tarush, or be rivals of the Tarushans?  Don't know.  I've only obliquely mentioned undead in the setting so far.

I do have a few ideas, but let me stat some guys up first, and then I'll worry about exactly where they fit in after that...

The Watcher

There is a spirit that comes from before the foundation of the world of DARK•HERITAGE, but which lingers still nonetheless.  This spirit is sometimes called Grigori, the Watcher, and it is primarily known as being a spirit of hunger.  No one knows for sure how Grigori came to be such a near-personification of appetite, but it is so today.

Grigori is often disembodied.  Some ancient rumors amongst the Tarushan gypsies say that Grigori was once a powerful servitor of the Old Ones who rule in Kadath, long before mortal man lived in the area.  He watched and observed the arrival of men, with characteristic lack of emotion, and cataloged their many comings, goings and doings.  For reasons that are unknown, Grigori lost his spiritual, otherworldly disinterested facade and came down among men, passing his time in riotous living with their fair daughters and wives.  For this Grigori was cursed and forever cast out of Kadath.  But also cursed with insubstantiality, so that the appetites and temptations which beset him would be forever denied him as well.  Driven insane by being constantly exposed to mortal temptations and unable to act on them, Grigori gradually devolved into little more than a cannibal spirit.

Now, Grigori comes shrieking and howling from the highlands in the mountains when winter thunderstorms rage throughout the peaks.  If he finds a person, alone and unprotected, he can possess that person, and reshape his body into a fearsome form, full of muscles, sinews, teeth and claws.  He's often been described as centaur-like, and with gigantic antlers, although other descriptions have, at times, been given as well.

When this happens, all who live in the area need beware, for Grigori, now embodied, goes on an orgy of rape, violence and hunger, killing all in the area before his host body dies from the strain (this usually only takes a few days, luckily.)  It is possible, although extremely difficult, to kill Grigori's host body, which expels the spirit and banishes it back to its frozen mountain haunts again for a time, but Grigori is immortal and immune to any weapon or magic that men can wield--only his possessed body is vulnerable, and even then, not very.  While possessed, a mortal body becomes terrifyingly potent--strong, nearly invincible and horrible.  An entire squadron of tough mercenaries was known to have been killed by The Watcher, their desecrated and violated bodies and body parts strewn across a snow-covered landscape to be found several days later by another patrol.  This took place in the Caurs Mountains during the reign of King Guilhem Huc des Peyrasmortas, during one of the interminable border squabbles between nobles in the area.  The incident raised awareness of the Watcher amongst the members of the King's Inquisition--which was a slightly different organization than the one formed later by Huc des Peyrasmortas descendant following the scandal of the only public performance of "The King in Yellow" and the King's only brother revealed as a demoniac heretic.  Secretive scholars have tracked incidents that match the modus operandi of Grigori, and cataloged them, although such records are kept under lock and key at the Academies at Razina and Terassa.  Rumored copies in the hands of private collectors, and floating around somewhere in Porto Liure also abound.

Reports of Grigori's activities range rather widely in the circum-Mezzovian region, but always come from high in the mountains, and fierce thunderstorms and the advent of cold weather seem to be a common correlating theme.   Professor Alfons Gombal of Razina believes that Grigori goes into long periods of torpor where he attempts to rejoin his brothers in the mountains, or at least replicate the conditions that he enjoyed in Kadath before his exile.  He cannot return to Kadath, or even come near it, so he languishes in what mountains he can climb.

Although not meant to be a reflection of such, Grigori can best be represented in d20 by the Lord of the Feast, a creature detailed in Privateer Press's Monsternomicon II.  For other systems, such as m20, you will have to convert as best you can, based on the detail given here--although, of course, one of the main attractions of m20 is that you can use d20 material more or less as is.

Samyassa

One of the more curious powers that wanders, unknown to most, the wild places of the Land of Three Empires is Samyassa, the Fallen Angel.  It is unknown exactly what his story is, and he tells very little of it to the few he will speak with.  But what little lore that is said about him suggests that he was the leader of an entire host of Watchers, who lived in a City of Gold in heaven (see the Unmoving Watchers post on the A to Z tab.)

Supposedly, he lusted after mortal women many eons ago.  Descending from heaven with 200 of the Watchers, he spent his time in riotous living with them.  Seduced by their beauty, these Watchers taught the early humans the basics of civilization: weapon-making, building-making... and magic.  It was this last, in particular, that threatened the City of Gold and its angelic inhabitants, as well as all of the other civilizations of non-humans in the Near Realms.

War threatened the City of Gold, as other Near Realms found themselves suddenly potentially threatened by humanity, and angels were revealed to be the source of the threat.  Although Samyassa and his fallen Watchers were renegades, and not representative of the angels overall, the entire City of Gold was blamed for the affair, and the angels went to war against the sylphs and genies of the City of Silver.

As a result of this, Samyassa remains an exile, and there is, in fact, a death warrant on his head if he were to encounter any angel today.

However, that is not the only story of Samyassa and his origin.  Some scholars, in fact, dispute that the Cities of Gold, Silver and Brass are actual places at all.  According to these scholars, Samyassa is instead an exile from Kadath, the dark city that overlooks the sinister Plateau of Leng.  The Great Ones of Kadath are beings like Samyassa himself, sometimes called angels by the ignorant.  Designed to protect The Gate from encroachment of things from the Realms Beyond, Kadath is their stewardship and also their prison.

Samyassa's exile from Kadath, in this theory, is mysterious, although notions of temptation of human women remain strong as a character trait associated with Samyassa regardless of anyone's interpretation of him.  Some darkly whisper that Kefte Taraan, of the Heresiarchy of the Twelve, is the original woman who tempted him to abandon his duty, and that if it can be found at all, it is with her. (They fail to mention that finding Kefte Taraan is just as difficult a prospect as finding Samyassa, since the Heresiarchy are at least semi-legendary themselves.)

The scholar Bertran Montcado of the Universitat in Terassa favors this second interpretation, and even claims to have seen Samyassa--from a distance--while on an archeological dig in the Untash grasslands.  He has theorized that Kefte Taraan, despite her Hamazi-sounding name, might originally have been a princess of Kinzassál.

Vermin Lord

One of the most bizarre characters of DARK•HERITAGE is Vermin Lord, a nameless sorcerer billed as a member of the Heresiarchy.  Although he's often considered--by those few who know of him--as unconcerned with mortal affair and either above (or beneath) them, this is a dangerous affectation to hold.  A common conceit of many sorcerers, and almost certainly true of the folks who merit the label of Heresiarchy members, is that the "gods" are merely mortal sorcerers grown beyond the confines of this world, and that their time may yet come, and a new generation of "gods" may yet replace them.  Vermin Lord certainly believes this, and perhaps more than any other of the Heresiarchy, has taken action to ensure that when that time comes, he's at the forefront of the replacement of the current generation of gods.

This is not good news for humanity, since Vermin Lord has no use for them.  Vermin Lord is a scion of numerous other repugnant forms of life--rats and spiders being among his favorite.  Many have wondered at a possible link between Vermin Lord and the giant carnivorous spiders that prowl the Plateau of Leng.  But his most foul creation are the ratlings.  Large varieties of filthy rats, fed on human carrion and blasted with foul magicks, have--over generations of shepherding at Vermin Lord's hand, become vaguely anthropomorphic.  Walking on two legs and using their front paws as hands, the ratlings are as intelligent as humans, and as inventive, but they know nothing but filth, hatred, and cruelty.  Vermin Lord has clearly set them up to replace humanity when the time is right.  In the meantime, they spread in small groups from their home in Leng, feeding on carrion and rotting flesh--human when they can get it--and hiding in the sewers and midden heaps of humanities cities, poised to spread their plagues and diseases like the rats from which they were engineered by this mad sorcerer.

Perhaps the most frightening aspect of the ratlings, however, is the extent to which their exposure to foul magicks has made them surprising mutile, or subject to mutation.  Most of these revolting mutants are unfit for even the ghastly life that the ratlings currently live, but some are actually quite fearsome.  Gigantic, pustule-swollen rats larger than horses, long-legged "wolfrats"--capable of pack hunting over long distances, "aperats" that are much larger than a man--weighing up to 1,000 lbs. of muscle and mangy fur, with claws and teeth of hardened enamel.  Thankfully, these mutants rarely are intelligent, but their fearsome strength and constant rage can be harnessed by their more intelligent overseers.

Among the most fearsome are the ratling-spawn that are able to develop some of the features of Vermin Lords' other passion--spiders.  Dog-sized rats with eight-eyes, or ratlings who's bites are laced with venom, or who can scale walls like spiders, or even spin fetid silk are reported by the few who even know of the ratlings or their doings, and it is indeed an ominous development.

Vermin Lord himself has turned into a grotesque, post-human mockery of his previous form, which is now unremembered.  Constant exposure to unclean magical forces have mutated his bones and sloughed off his flesh--he now appears as a monstrous parody of human and ratling features that has died and rotted, yet somehow still moves.  Horns and spines jut from his exposed skull, and his teeth have been replaced by bone spurs directly in his jaw.  He truly is one of the most unsettling of the Heresiarchy to see (worthy of a SAN check, believe you me!)

Naiadi della fontana

A number of backwoods waterways are infamous as the supposed haunting place of the naiadi.  These naiads are beings of unknown provenance.  The balshatoi kindgoms knew of them and called them rusalka in their language--they believed that these eerie and beautiful women of the waters were the vengeful spirits of drowned or spurned women who committed suicide, then came back to haunt and kill men especially.

A man led to his death by naiads

There is an old Tarushan tale about them, though, which is the most intriguing.  The Tarushan legend links the naiads with the river gods; chthonic and inhuman entities that live in freshwater, and prove remarkably difficult to kill (or to find, for that matter.)  The river gods were exclusively male, and procreated asexually via budding, like some kind of protean creature.  As the waterways became increasingly congested with the traffic of humans, the river gods became increasingly angry at this trespass on their domain.  They took to hunting humanity in the waters, and became greatly feared.

Like the situation summed up by the (alleged) quote of Admiral Yamamoto, these attacks accomplished little other than to "wake the sleeping giant."  The river gods, while powerful, could not contend with humanity openly, because they were so vastly outnumbered, and because humanity could retreat to drier terrain to recover and plan more assaults.  The most disastrous were the repeated dryings and floodings of the Eibon River which flows through what is now Tarush Noptii by damming.  In retreat, and scattered, the river gods settled on a plan of deadly, menacing stealth.  Feigning their own extinction, or nearly so, some of the asexual beings transformed themselves via their magic into the first rusalka.  In this form, they appeared as beautiful, young women, bathing naked in the waters, and singing and dancing with ethereal, hauntingly beautiful voices.

River gods in their natural form

In this form, they were able to even insert themselves for a time in human society, and hide in plain sight, although too long a time away from their waters still caused them great distress and eventual death.  Many men were lured to their death before anyone even suspected that anything other than tragically accidental drownings might be at fault.  Even today, the naiads are considered to be semi-mythical, and most people aren't sure that they believe that they exist.

One caution, the Tarushan folktale warns: as a result of their magical transformation, the naiads are capable of concieving and bearing children with human lovers.  Such children are born normal, and grow up that way.  At some point, however, midway through their adult lives, the ancient heritage of their river god ancestors starts to catch up with them, and they begin a slow transformation into something inhuman--they become river gods themselves.  In this way, the river gods have managed to stealthily and malevolently infiltrate human society, and prolong the life of their population.

But all of that is merely a strange, Gypsy folktale, right?

The Shape

After taking the kids trick-or-treating, and then putting them to bed, my wife and I watched the second half of Halloween V: The Revenge of Michael Myers last night.  This post is partially based on that.

Disease and illness are always a problem in DARK•HERITAGE, and many have been brought down by the ravages of plagues and disease.  But among the most frightening and least understood are those that ravage the mind rather than the body.  Sometimes insanity can be explained--somewhat--the experience of severe trauma, for instance, leads to a somewhat understandable insanity.  Sometimes, though, it occurs for no reason that anyone can discern.  People are occasionally simply crazy.  Messed-up.  Something is born wrong with them, and it never gets better.  And sometimes, this can turn into violent fixations that put others around them at risk as well.

While a serial killer is frightening enough, there are times, for reasons that are completely unknown, when a serial killer with a fixation for violent death, when a serial killer becomes something less--and yet in other ways frighteningly more--than human.  Killers that seem unstoppable.  Endowed with superhuman strength, cunning, and a fiendish ability to be at the wrong place and the wrong time, these individuals become nearly unkillable, able to shrug off or heal from wounds that would kill a normal person many times over.

For reasons that are unknown, these Shapes--as they're sometimes called--become faceless and voiceless as well; in losing their humanity, they don faceless masks and utter no word or sound.  Some believe that this is some kind of ritual or curse that gives them their powers, others believe its a conscious choice, or even merely a coincidence.  But since nobody can say what gives these killers their seeming supernatural powers, nobody knows.

Numerous theories abound, and myths and urban legends are multiple.  Some say that these killers are not alive at all, but are some kind of ghost or other undead creature.  Others think them possessed by daemons or other evil spirits.  Others believe that they somehow accrue their own magic, and remain mortals--just magically augmented ones.  And there are many who dismiss any notion of supernatural powers at all, saying that the appearance of such is merely a side-effect of their mental pathology.

It is usually said that these Shapes can't be defeated.  They can be set back.  They can turn quiescent.  You can escape them, but not defeat them.

One of the most famous was one in Porto Liure who was originally called the Shape, and hence the source of the name.  As a "John Doe" in the Arcamo Asylum for many years, it is unknown who he was or where he came from, only that he had suffered some kind of serious injury as a child, since he was missing a hand and was fitted with the asylum doctors with a blunted hook.  But when he escaped, he focused on a small neighborhood in the outskirts of town, killing 11 civilians, mostly teenagers, and several City Watch guardsmen with a matchet and his hook, now mysteriously sharpened to a deadly weapon.  Although he was finally stopped, his body was not found, and occasionally rumors surface that he has come back to murder some more.  Frequently, these rumors are associated with illicit rendezvous by the unmarried young, prompting the belief that such can actually resurrect his spirit, others dismiss that as merely a cautionary tale invented to prevent youngsters from getting ideas.

The now aged Doctor Enrique Lumiço may be the only person alive who can shed any light on the mystery of the original Shape, or perhaps give some straight answers on what causes this phenomena, which has now been reported in other cities on occasion as well.  But he's notoriously reticent, and refuses to speak to most about the events some years ago which created the first mystery of the Shape.

The Wild Hunt

For my first post about some specific "wights" of DARK•HERITAGE, I'm going to refer you back to the discussion I had earlier on the major portion of the pantheon of spirits that people in the Land of the Three Empires worship as deities.  I'll also point out, however, that that was never meant to be seen as a comprehensive list of the "wights" that are known and receive at least some form of reverence, fear or propitiation, or who figure in the stories and folklore of the people who live in the area.

One specific other figure is Herne, the Green Man, a sometimes vassal of Selvans, the god of the wilderness.  Herne appears as a man cloaked, hooded and masked in leaves.  According to folklore, he was an indepedent deity of no mean strength who challenged Selvans for rulership of his lands.  He was badly beaten and hanged from the tallest tree in Selvans forest for a thousand years, where the leaves grew over his body and merged with it, and the crows, ravens, buzzards and condors picked at his flesh incessantly.  Finally released by Selvans himself, he is now a trucculent lord of the forest, who reluctantly comes when Selvans calls.

Other than this origin story, Herne is best known as a hunter.  When not called by Selvans (which happens infrequently) he prefers to wander the mystical dark and tangled woodlands of his Otherworldly home hunting anything that passes through it. While doing so, it is said that sometimes his Otherwordly woods cross over into the real world, and Herne himself wanders the darkest, thickest and wildest of woods deep on moonless nights.  His favorite prey is human trespasser.

In addition to hunting by himself, Herne is the kennelmaster of the Wild Hunt.  The Wild Hunt itself rarely rides forth without it's true lord, none other than Selvans himself, at its head, but sometimes Herne can lead it too (it is said that before his defeat at the hands of Selvans, Herne was the Master of the Hunt, a title that he still retains in some tellings, although it is a vassalge title under Selvans now.)  The Wild Hunt itself is made up of damned souls who fell deep in the wilderness to strange and Otherwordly predators--including Herne himself.  Many of them retain much of their visage in life, although made more savage, feral, or decayed and rotted.  These can ride Otherworldly horses or elk-stags, beasts that superficially resemble their real world counterparts but which often have a sense of wrongness or mutation to them.  Some of them appear as little more than mummified or skeletal husks of beasts of burden, prompting some to posit a link between Herne and Caronte, the King in Yellow.

The more devolved predators in the Wild Hunt, any who run with it for too long, become first animalistic ghouls, and finally become black shucks--Otherworldly apparitions that look like massive black hounds or wolves with glowing red eyes.

It's not known if the hunters are damned forever, or if its a kind of Purgatory from which these poor souls can eventually escape and find their way back to the afterlife that they've earned.  Depending on which occult expert you ask, you may get either answer.

Wights

Wights is an old English word (not Old English, or Anglo-Saxon--although it is descended from an Old English word, wiht) for a being.  It is a cognate with other Germanic words, such as Dutch wicht, German Wicht, Old Norse vættir, Swedish vätte, and Danish vætte.  Today, the word is a bit confused, depending on which language you want to look at.  In Low German, it reportedly means "girl" (not being a speaker of Low German myself, I can't attest to the accuracy of that report.)  In many of the other languages, it refers to various spirits, often mischievous or unfriendly--occasionally translated into English as imp, but bearing most resemblance to various little fairyfolk of English folklore; the elves of the shoemaker's fame being among the most famous (and pleasant.)  The Old Norse word, vættr, in fact seems to refer to any humanoid spirit, and is an inclusive word that has under it's big tent not only the elves and dwarves, but the jotunns or giants, and the two families of gods, the Vanir and the Æsir.  So to the vikings, not only would little nature spirits and dwarves be wights, but so would Odin and Thor.

Of course, in modern times, this usage has fallen out of favor and is only remembered by either historical or comparative linguists, for the most part.  Rather, the word has taken on a new lease on life in the works of fantasy fiction, thanks to John Ronald Reuel himself, who of course, brought the word back into usage when he described the Barrow-wights—some kind of animated corpse.  Curiously, Tolkien did not call them Barrow-draugs or Barrow-dréags (ideally, I would translate the Old English word from standard Old English to the Mercian dialect, which didn't really use the [éa] diphthong much--but I'm not linguist enough to know how to do that properly.  Tolkien himself did for most of the Old English words he used.) I suppose it was because he was borrowing the usage of earlier proto-fantasty author William Morris who, although not responsible for bringing the word barrow-wight into the popular conscious, actually seems to have coined the term as a translation for draugr in the Grettis Saga, which he translated into English along with Eirikr Magnusson.) The concept behind the Barrow-wights clearly seems to be the Old English word dréag, better known to us through its Old Norse cognate draugr, or land-draugr, and the traits and abilities that the Barrow-wights display seem to follow the Norse concept of the land-draugr almost to the letter.  (There were also sea-draugr, but other than their manner of death and place of burial, they seem to have been viewed as very similar.)

To be perfectly honest, I doubt many of my readers really care overly much about the linguistics involved.  Why did Tolkien call his draugr Barrow-wights, thus ensuring that wights in games like D&D and Warhammer are forever considered undead creatures?  And why did Tolkien also so casually give us the word dwimmerlaik (based on a Middle English attested word, dweomerlak) which has had no traction, even though it also means something animated by necromancy or magic?  Well, who cares?  The concepts are more important than the names, aren't they?

Probably so.

So, in that spirit, what do I want to talk about in relationship to the DARK•HERITAGE setting today?  While I've often interpreted the setting as quite supernatural poor in relationship to much of fantasy, it's rather that the supernatural is more discrete and stealthy.  Rather than there being extremely rare supernatural, a la Dracula, think of much more careful supernatural, a la The Dresden Files.  There's not just one or two vampires, but you may be certainly forgiven for not really believing in literal vampires anyway in DARK•HERITAGE.  Many people don't, Tarush Noptii notwithstanding.  Dresden's stories are chock full of the supernatural, and yet they take place in the real world, where belief in the supernatural consists of dubious ghost and angel stories, and of course, religion and the occasional disputed Bigfoot sighting.  There's precious little in the way of direct evidence of the supernatural, and even those who believe in it are more often than not sceptical about any specific claims of having witnessed it.  In that sense, there are a great many wights, as defined by the Old Norse and Old English forms of the word, see above, that one may come across in DARK•HERITAGE.  Many of them will not be native to the world, coming from one of the various places described in the cosmology, but many of them are simply discrete nature spirits, or Chthonic beings who dwell just out of sight.  You may not see or hear of them much, but some of the old stories and ghost tales are quite true.

And I like incorporating some elements of classic mythology and folklore to the setting.  It's always been one of the great attractions of fantasy, and I love the notion of the "dark fairytale" lurking just behind the Disneyfication.  This doesn't represent a change in direction to the tone of DARK•HERITAGE at all, but I do want to spend some time going over what kinds of "wights" one could expect to possibly come across  in the setting.  I've created a new heading, and in honor of my linguistic nerdery, I've given it the tag of wights--but this isn't Warhammer wights, or D&D wights, or barrow-haunting wights--this is an exploration of some of the non-human, supernatural creatures that hide in the quiet or dark places of the world.  Although to be fair... some of them could be draugr-like creatures as well, in which case, yeah, they would be wights after all.

Heh.  Linguistics.  Anyway, here's a picture of a Barrow-wight molesting a hobbit.  Just because after all that, you deserve it.