Necromancer background for Cairn
Necromancer
You have studied sorcery and wizardry, but unlike some of the more feeble-minded of your brethren you did not fear to look into the abyss for the secret of greater power. Life and death are merely names for two sides of the same coin, so why shouldn't you profit from their intertwined secrets?
Names
Victor, Byron, Alhazred, Faust, Imhotep, Johannes, Mordus
Starting Gear
- 3d6 Gold Pieces
- Rations (3 uses)
- Torch (3 uses)
- Jagged dagger (d6)
- Create Unlife spellbook
- Shovel
- Sable robes (petty)
What Dark Power guides you? Roll 1d6:
- The Dark Lady of Eternal Sleep. You have an affinity with the slumbering otherworld and can ask one question per day of any who sleep in the Dark Lady's embrace.
- The Lord of Eternal Torment. You have long studied the pain of the afterlife and once per day you can inflict the chill touch of its dread lord upon your foes (1d6 STR damage to foes you touch with a 2-in-6 chance of rendering them immobile).
- The Shambling Lord of Decay. Even the rot of death is merely one aspect of the cycle of life. Once per day you can invoke the name of the Shambling Lord in order to inflict those around you with his diseased touch, or to reduce any undead to a pile of bones and flesh. (1d10 blast damage to living beings, or decompose undead in a semi-circle around you.)
- Father-Dark, the Lord of Suffering. You take sustenance from pain – killing or critically damaging an enemy gains you 1d3 HP.
- The Shining-Scaled Lord of the Deeps. Once a day you can breathe underwater, but you feel pain if anyone eats fish within 1 mile of you.
- The Many-Tentacled Lord of Chaos. You see much that is hidden and any illusions you perceive may become real, but you often have difficulty in perceiving what the vulgar call ‘reality’.
What have you learned from the dead? Roll 1d6:
- Esoteric knowledge and the secrets of the transmundane are your forte, you have a lens that allows you to decipher ancient or forbidden writing (petty).
- You’ve been involved in enough forbidden rituals to know your business, you can sense nearby abnormality or cosmic disorder.
- Your study of the science of the ancients is voluminous and has made the strange second nature, you can sense nearby relics.
- Your rituals and ceremonies have allowed you to pierce the veil between worlds, you have a third eye that can see through invisibility and cloaking.
- You know the secrets of the inner pathways of the mind, you can walk inside the dreams of others.
- What you have seen would have destroyed lesser minds and yet you endure, you are unaffected by insanity or mental manipulation.