Citizen Steve of this our Dominion is soon to take his first step into the much larger world of Dungeon Mastership. May his rule be just, his stories engaging and his dice roll low against me.

Wisely sticking to what he knows the campaign will be D&D 3.5, evil themed, and with an undead party. We’ll all be bound to some lord vampire but the curse allows us to be different forms of the damned. I’ve played a vamp in Vampire the Masquerade Dark Ages, a smooth and manipulative Moor Lasombra – getting my Goth on - but I wanted something different.

I chose ghoul rogue gestalt – under the second level limit imposed – for the insatiably stalking predatory image it evokes. Abilities placed to taste and adding the Str +2, Dex +2 and Cha +2 of the ghoul racial class – a la the Libris Mortis supplement, whose spooky cover sets back popular acceptance of the hobby 15 years – he’s rolling with 17 18 Int 12 15 and 14. Two claws, a bite, paralysis ghoul goodness (err, devilishness) with sneak attacks and evasion rogue tricks and finished with Weapon Finesse and Improved Initiative for feats. Stalk up; sneak attack; paralyze; FEED! What he does and how are clear, but who is this creature?

Let’s go with the outside in. Unlike the other vamps, he’s no effeminate moody pretty boy destined to upgrade to Angelina Jolie from mundane Aniston, nor David Boreanaz. Ghouls are … well, ghoulishly ugly. No fitting in with polite society. I’m thinking the guise of a leper, with bandages and tattered rags concealing his true depravity. Steve has said that the change is something recent too. So a lot of who he is stems from who he was, a rogue. Criminals usually don’t come from the upper crust of medieval society – whom make the rules therefore can’t really break’em. An urban setting is the playground of these types providing the economic surplus to graft from, so I’m thinking son of a failed merchant.

This is an EVIL campaign too and I don’t subscribe to the bad seed idea cause it’s less dramatic and makes characters less empathetic – hence my commitment to watching all the Star Wars prequels despite they‘re drop in quality (LAWRENCE KASDAN, WHY DIDST THOU FORSAKE US?!). Father failed so bad he had to sell his son to strong-arm debtors whom raised him as property.

Labor built up his strength and the need to please his masters gave birth to a sly charisma. Initiative, improved at that, led him to hustle for more than meager scraps allowed to him. He steals to give himself value, more than what he was sold for – the bargained worth of a priceless child. This loss of a most basic love leads to a huge sense of entitlement, robbed of this he feels anything is his for the taking. This great need, and the skill it develops in practice, creates the cut above the ordinary character that is an adventurer.

After failing to con a young paladin, the youth is recruited into his adventuring group to repent for the transgression. He could’ve eluded them in his city, but the lure of great treasure and riches is too enticing so he submits to the knight’s authority. In the presence of other exceptionals, he begins to feel a kind of kinship he’s denied himself for most his life. One can’t be abandoned if one let’s none close enough. Amongst the teamwork needed to survive a dungeon crawl with all risking everything to protect each other it’s only natural, as is his attraction to another of the group.

A nightmarish foe fought and a teammate, perhaps a special person whom can understand him and fully accept him, is wounded badly in the fight. The risk of what he’s gained in friendship is too much and the gold recovered will never leave him nor reject him. He takes the treasure he can swiftly carry and leaves mid-fight. Safe sole survivor, which a fool would label “coward”, but a lonely soul again. Trying to make his way out alone without the map led him yet deeper in the depths, until something truly dark finds and does indeed take him for what he is … into undeath.

The driving need I plan to incorporate into his character by the constant hunger a ghoul is said to have. More so than being without nourishment of the body, but a deep spiritual need made incarnate – the hungry ghost of asian mysticism. The core concept of a fiendish hunger we encapsulate into the phrase “fiend starve” to form the name Venarvus – the lone, the betrayer, the empty.

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