Vampire Coast

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.

The most feared of all pirates who menace the waters surrounding the city-port of Sartosa and beyond is the ‘Queen of Tides’, Aranessa Anja Saltspite. Rumour has it that she was not sired by mortal man, but is actually the daughter of the Sea-God Manann, the ‘Seafather’ himself; that she rose fully grown out of the waves in a froth of gore, with seawater flowing through her veins instead of blood. Having been cast out by her Norscan tribe as a baby, she is said to have cut off her own fishtail before heading out to sea to seek her fortune, biding her time until she was strong enough – in every sense – to take her bloody revenge upon the people who left her for dead. Whatever Aranessa’s origins, there can be no doubt that she is greatly favoured by the Sea-God, and that a peculiar connection exists between them, for she has sailed the Great Ocean to the very ends of the world and back, through the most violent of tempests, yet always emerges unscathed. Aranessa knows that it is her duty to protect the Seafather’s realm as he protects her, but the sea is vast, and such a task would take countless lifetimes, so Manann has granted her some of the world’s most powerful seafarers – Vampire Admirals, with whom he has made pacts in exchange for their aid. Aranessa is not entirely comfortable with this alliance, but knows her Necromantic officers are undeniably useful. As Manann washes the corpses of dead sailors against the Swordfysh’s hull and upon the shores of Sartosa, her allies breathe Unlife into them, thus fortifying her crew with shipmates Manann considers more ‘permanent’. Associations with the Undead aside, those who have met Aranessa and lived say she is a strange character indeed. Peg-legged from her long career as a buccaneer, she has no warmth in her soul and absolutely no love for man. Only the open seas and the glitter of gems can melt her scowl, but as Aranessa’s crew maintain, on those rare occasions where she deigns to smile it is like a new dawn. But what manner of dawn? A dawn of merciless, cutthroat violence, theft and murder, which rages without end – that sort of dawn. Beholden to no man, be he living or dead, Captain Aranessa Saltspite – the self-styled ‘Pirate Queen’ – is every bit as merciless as the Great Ocean itself!

Cylostra Direfin is the vengeful spirit who commands the Lamprey, a cursed ship of rotten wood and tattered sails that oft appears out of the raging tempests of the open sea. Many decades ago, Cylostra was the favourite court singer of Bretonnian royalty, a prima donna of considerable size and with the proverbial ‘artistic temperament’ in spades, who never accepted anything less than having things all her own way. Her great volatility and intimidating demeanour meant that no-one ever dared refuse her demands. Unfortunately for both Cylostra and ultimately the world, she was a passenger aboard the Lamprey during an important diplomatic voyage to perform for the Phoenix King. Amid a gale of truly epic proportions, the Bretonnian galleon went down in a violent electrical storm, drowning everyone on board, but as the legend goes, Cylostra had already usurped the ship’s meek captain before it sank, simply for daring to delay her performance by attempting to circumvent the dangerous weather! In a fit of rage, and demonstrating a near-unnatural physical strength born of her passion for music, she threw him overboard in what was, up to that point in her life, an uncharacteristic act of cold-blooded murder. Ordering the subjugated crew to keep the ship on course directly into the storm, Cylostra’s delusions of grandeur even made her believe that she could demand safe passage from the tempest itself by singing determinedly over the howling gales. Sadly, for her, the elements cannot so easily be tamed. As the Lamprey sank down beneath the waves, her futile, pitch-perfect notes turned to shrill, gurgled screaming. Under normal circumstances, that would’ve been the end for most beings, but Cylostra’s bloated ego refused Morr’s embrace and she rose again in the ultimate act of diva-like defiance. Now, her tortured soul roams the seas, eternally searching for an appreciative audience. Those who know the legend of the ‘Siren of the Storm’ flee in terror at the sight of her ghostly, barnacle-strewn galleon, for it is said that when it appears with Cylostra singing upon its bow like a dreadful, Unliving figurehead, her songs of death paralyse all those unfortunate enough to hear them before her Undead crew – whom she refers to rather theatrically as ‘The Drowned’ – appear to drag them down into a watery grave, before they are raised again to join the Madame-Captain’s ratings for a life of unfettered piracy and murder!

Piracy was not Luthor Harkon’s initial career choice. The Vampire, whose origins are shrouded in mystery, was travelling in his sarcophagus across the Great Ocean, aboard an Empire merchant ship, when it was attacked by a band of savage Norscan raiders. Unfortunately for them, in their rabid scramble for loot they prised open Harkon’s burial chest, awakening him from his dreamless slumber. By the time the ship broke up on the rocky Lustrian coastline, all the ‘surviving’ crew had undergone something of a change, in both their allegiance and their vital signs… Since that day, Harkon has ruled the region now known as the Vampire Coast, setting sail upon the Great Ocean in search of loot, plunder, and fresh recruits to raise into his service. As leader of a pirate fleet crewed exclusively by the dead and damned, he holds sway over a sea region of high winds and perilous currents that have proven to be incredibly treacherous to many unwary vessels, swelling his horde of Undead mariners with the reanimated corpses of shipwrecked unfortunates. Luthor Harkon teeters constantly on the very brink of insanity due in no small part to his colossal pride and greed, qualities which on one devastating, fateful occasion led him to almost lose his life as well as his mind, and certainly lost him all of his magical abilities short of the power to raise his minions and bind them to his inexorable will. The story goes that, while on a fateful quest to further augment his already not-inconsiderable might, Harkon attempted to use his Dark Magic to enter a chamber inside a Lizardman temple buried deep within the deadly Lustrian jungle. Powerful glyphs barred his way, but he pushed onwards in spite of the barriers and driven by his fatal flaw – his great arrogance and hubris - causing the magical seals to retaliate and drain his magical power and then his lifeforce, whilst the walls of the ancient ritual chamber began to crumble. With supreme effort, Harkon managed to break free and stagger outside as the passageway collapsed behind him, but the damage had been done – his connection to the Winds of Magic was severed and his mind was shattered, leaving his personality fractured into a dozen different facets which to this day battle for dominance in his mind. In the years since, the only common goal that Luthor Harkon’s various personalities have been able to work towards is that of finding a cure for his condition. To this end, the Pirate King of the Vampire Coast has bent his obsessions to seizing Slann artefacts in the hope that their power can heal his damaged psyche!