A dark lord for an epic campaign
Aurrian the Second Reign
Revenant · the Undimmed
- World-ending
- Kin
- Mercenary legion
Seed: ashen-crown
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Identity
- Name or alias
- Aurrian the Second Reign
- Known as
- the Undimmed
- Pronunciation
- AUR-rian
- Public identity
- A saint whose incorrupt body has begun giving instructions
- Presence
- Revenant who speaks as if every sentence will be quoted, because it will be.
Goal and motive
Aurrian the Second Reign wants to return the land to a golden age that only their records describe.
They are the last of something and refuse to let it end quietly. The present is an occupation, and they are the resistance.
In their own words
“History will not ask whether I was kind. It will ask whether I was right. This present of yours is an occupation. I am simply the resistance that remembers. You keep saying "the past." I was there. It is not past to me.”
Methods
- Tombs opened as recruitment offices for the loyal dead
- The realm's own founding myths rewritten by the one person who was there
- Historical grievances revived word for word until the living adopt them
Power base and followers
- Seat of power
- A winter camp that has become a town with walls
- Followers
- A cavalry wing that swore personal, not contractual, loyalty
- Right hand
- Malzar, a grizzled captain who handles discipline so the villain can be merciful
- Key resource
- Siege engines the realm assumed were dismantled
- Reach
- A threat to the age itself: every prophecy of the ending has started coming true on schedule.
Sigil and signature
- Mark
- A door drawn in a wall where no door is
- Calling card
- Their followers speak in the old calendar and correct anyone who does not
- Colors
- Candle yellow and shroud white
Relationship to the hero
Their blood is the same, and the villain's plan requires exactly that blood.
First encounter
A funeral neither of them wanted to attend, standing on opposite sides of the same grave.
Moral boundary
They honor the customs of their own age absolutely, including ones no one alive remembers.
Secret
The golden age was a tyranny, and the archives that prove it are in their own vault.
Vulnerability
They do not understand the present and can be misled by anything invented after their death.
Current scheme
Right now Aurrian the Second Reign is working toward the reopening of a war the history books say they won.
Escalation plan
- Stage 1: A minor official is replaced, quietly, with someone nobody remembers hiring.
- Stage 2: A public event goes exactly as the villain planned and exactly as the hero feared, and nobody else notices.
- Stage 3: The hero is offered everything they want in exchange for stepping aside, and the offer is sincere.
- Stage 4: The realm must choose between the villain's order and the chaos of their fall, and it is not choosing the hero.
Story arc: The long shadow
- Act one: the villain is a rumor, a pattern, a name in the wrong ledger. The hero solves smaller problems that all point one way.
- Act two: the villain is met, understood, and nearly joined. The hero loses something the villain warned them about.
- Act three: the villain's scheme becomes irreversible unless the hero pays the price the villain has been paying all along.
- Stakes: Defeat means not a new ruler but a new world with no room for the old one.
Story hooks
- The villain's scheme has already saved a village the hero could not, and the village knows who to thank.
- The villain wants one thing from the hero personally and is willing to pause everything to negotiate for it.
- A former follower defects with proof of the villain's vulnerability, and with a price that is not money.
Alternate names
Zanrion the Pale Return
ZAN-rion · the Magnificent Ruin
Caelvane the Second Reign
CAEL-vane · Crowned Twice
Seramir the Pale Return
SE-ra-mir · Crowned Twice
Xeriazar the Unburied
XE-ria-zar · the Radiant Sovereign
