I tease our DM about Maragni the vampire's long hair. Nina must be so fidgety every time she visits him, trying to keep from playing with it. But that wouldn't go over very well...

He went away for the winter but it's spring in the game now and I'm sure we'll be seeing him again soon.

I'm glad this one is finally finished! Since Maragni would fry in the sun I have to think of colour schemes that work for nighttime. He also shows practically zero expression, which is annoying for pictures, haha. Drives Nina crazy too.


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Maragni's story is kind of...long and bizarre. But for the sake of interest/boredom, this is it, as short as I can make it.

He used to be a good person in the service of a noble king. When his king sent he and his fellow guardians on a mission to find the secret of immortality he was unfortunate enough to find it -- a demon captured him and transformed him into a feral blood crazed vampire. At first he was borne along by chaos and did terrible things throughout the neighboring empire; many years later he was informed that his king was dead and the shock of the news reminded him of who he had been before his soul was taken. He went to pay respects at the tomb of his dead master; an ambush was planned, and Maragni was sealed away for three hundred years by a wall of enchanted bricks that screamed ceaselessly in the voices of his victims. (Don't look at me like that, our DM is a twisted guy!)

Three hundred years in a screaming cell cohabited by the restless ghost of a friend can do wonders for a dead guy's patience. Maragni endured, spending most of his time in hibernation with no creature to feed upon, until the dead king's tomb was eventually rediscovered by humanity.

The first groups of tomb raiders to enter met bloody ends. Once he had recovered somewhat, Maragni bothered trying to speak with some of the later groups. The ones who came did not speak his language, and misinterpreted him. They became convinced they had found the tomb of the lost Norse god Magni. Though he became more proficient in their language as time passed, Maragni was never able to sort out this mistake. Years later he had a sizable cult following, training them as fighters in exchange for blood. (He didn't specify who from and they rarely shed their own.) Eventually the tomb no longer sealed him, but he remained there. He felt obligated to stay by his king until his master's soul was at rest.

Nina's party member Garneth met the vampire during this time. Mistakes were made and the encounter ended in a battle, during which the vampire lay a compulsion on Garneth to return to him when he was near to death. Garneth being who he is, it didn't take him long to fall into such a state. He found his way to the vampire in a haze of enchantment, and Maragni offered to pull him back from the brink in exchange for a service. He asked Garneth to find for him his king's closest descendant, which he thought might help ease the ghost.

While Garneth was off searching, trouble brewed in the batcave. The leader of the cult of Magni began to have feelings of doubt about his faith, and left to explore them. Unfortunately, he left with the armour of the dead king, and when Garneth returned successfully with the descendant, that was of course what the spirit wished him to find. (Come on now, this is Dungeons and Dragons after all! A quest!)

Garneth was adamant that his service to the vampire was now fulfilled and he need not have anything further to do with him. The armour was up to the descendant. It would have been all well and good to leave it at that, until some time later the party crossed paths with the errant leader of the cult of Magni. While Garneth had been playing with the vampire in that long ago fight, Nina and Komitadji, (another party member,) had tangled with the cult leader in the lake bed above the tomb. During the battle, Komitadji had taken his left eye, and apparently his good sense with it. Now a fully-fledged villain, he believed he was the reincarnation of the god Odin, and it was his job to cleanse the world. In the dead king's heavily magical armour no less. (Are you keeping up with me here? I warned you it was complicated.)

SO the party chased him all over hell's half acre. They lost him for a little while when Nina had to teleport them out of massive firey danger. Trying to anticipate where he might go, the party decided to ask Maragni, who had taught him and therefore might have some insight. Normally approaching the vampire would be a dicey plan, but since they could return the king's armour if they caught the cult leader, they decided to risk it. What they found was one very dead looking vampire, stapled to the floor by the cult leader's spear.

Garneth found himself in a moral quandary. Attempt to revive the man that had once returned his life to him, or drag the admittedly evil bastard into the sun and rid the world of him.

It was fifty fifty, but he opted for revival at last. Garneth pulled the spear out of Maragni and cut himself open with the intent to bleed life into the battered vampire. But he had forgotten his system worked in odd ways now. How that happened is a story for another day. Long story short, he tried to bleed on the vampire but his blood climbed right back in the wound as fast as it came out. Weird? Yes. Perpetually curious, Nina thought so too, and she was so foolish as to come for a closer look at the phenomenon. Garneth may or may not have given much thought to her survivability before he grabbed and cut, we'll never know for sure. Maybe he just thought the vampire was too weak to do much damage, if he revived at all. In any case when he dribbled delicious wizard blood into Maragni's mouth the vampire practiacally flew to life and latched on. Nina passed out before they got him off and didn't find out until later what had happened.

Apparently the cult leader had paid a visit to Maragni, full of righteous indignation, sure that 'Magni' and the other gods of the Norse pantheon had been keeping him from realizing his godly potential. Where he got the power to kick down a high level vampire is still a matter of some debate. But a heady combination of wizard/were-fox blood was enough to bring him back and full of vengence.

Fast forward through many schemes and battles. Once the cult leader was dead, armour given to the descendant, and dust settled, Maragni was left purposeless. And a purposeless vampire is basically a killing machine waiting to happen. So Nina tracked him down and struck up a deal. If he could promise not to harm any citizen of the empire, she would keep him fed. After the first time, they had already established that she could give him a meal with quite a kick and keep going. Weird problems and situations have been occurring ever since, but more on that later, it's bedtime.