The Dreadfleet

The immortal Vampire Counts of Sylvania – known to most as the Midnight Aristocracy – seldom venture from the comfort of their dank castles and certainly very few have been known to leave their fell feeding grounds for the uncertain life of the sea-borne adventurer. Nyklaus von Carstein, therefore, is something of an anomaly among his kind… The infamous fleet commander now known as Count Noctilus is leader of the Dreadfleet – a malevolent gathering of dissolute (and desiccated) Undead warship captains, including notorious privateers such as the Shadewraith, the Skabrus, the Black Kraken and the Curse of Zandri, among others, who bring abject ruin to the high seas and damnation to living seafarers. Although once a member of Sylvania’s aristocratic Vampire dynasty, he had a markedly different vision from his squabbling peers of how he would achieve Necromantic supremacy. After studying the countless charts which map the ebb and flow of magic across the world, von Carstein realised that by mastering the art of seafaring he would be able to harness the magical gales that whirl and cascade across the oceans. This newfound route to power eventually led him to translocate himself and his Undead minions to the bone-choked morass of the Galleon’s Graveyard, a fell sea-based realm of the Unliving between the tangible and intangible worlds that entraps shipwrecked vessels from across the Great Ocean. It was in this mysterious place that Nyklaus von Carstein founded his darkling empire and renamed himself Count Noctilus. At the centre of the Galleon’s Graveyard, Noctilus has feasted upon the magic of a sentient whirlpool known as the Maelstrom – a skull-strewn tempest of magic that sucks in shipwrecks, plunder, and drowned sailors from beyond the veil like a giant lodestone. By using the whirlpool’s raw power to draw in the shattered remains of dead warships, he has forged a grotesque seafaring vessel of his own – the Bloody Reaver, an amalgam of rotting galleons and eldritch power upon which sits the dark and jagged crag of his floating castle, standing proudly like a conqueror’s statue! As the clock strikes midnight, the Dreadfleet heads out to sea, its Undead captains eager to slake their unholy thirsts. Their warships of the damned emerge from banks of sulphurous fog, illuminated only by flickering, pallid ghostlights, drawing closer with the sickening slowness of a recurring nightmare before the silence is broken by the thunderous roar of their lethal broadsides! After each raid, the Dreadfleet disappears back into its watery lair as quickly and silently as it first appeared, far from the reach of the living.