Sunday, September 7, 2014

Border Prince Lore: Vampire Counts

By Alexander Bade

The Dark Pilgrim:

An excerpt on the life of Dieter Geheimnisnacht




Dieter Geheimnisnacht is a powerful Master Necromancer of virtually unknown origin or history until this past century. It is known that he battled alongside Heinrich Kemmler and Mannfred von Carstein in the Border Princes region in the year 2522 and even before that he was seen beside Kemmler as he besieged Bretonnia from the Grey Mountains. Geheimnisnacht’s earliest accounts are known from the discovery of a series of journals found at his lair at Kleiberstorf where Geheimnisnacht escaped but in such a rush he was forced to leave behind this trove of information he set down from when he first began studying the black art of Necromancy.

Geheimnisnacht was not always known by this name. His birthplace is unknown but believed to be somewhere in Averland although this is purely conjecture since no real evidence supports this except for the style of hand writing in his early journals is reminencent of a merchant upbringing in the Averland region and the fact that when Geheimnisnacht went into hiding in was in the Averland.

Geheimnisnacht was born as Dieter Fredrickson to a river merchant frequenting the Aver River. Nothing is known of his childhood or early adult life but based upon some of his first entries in his first journal we can assume he was very disillusioned of his lifestyle of constantly moving up and down the river Aver. Geheimnisnacht often expressed in hateful tones that he could not abide by his family’s living arrangements, a floating barge which housed Geheimnisnacht, his parents, and three other siblings (two brothers and a sister). Geheimnisnacht expressed affection for his family but was often at strife with his father who attempted to train Geheimnisnacht as a merchant to take over the business. Geheimnisnacht ran away around the age of seventeen and quickly fell out of known existence for several decades when presumably he sank into the clutches of some Necromancer or another where he was introduced into that black lifestyle.

Accounts show that when Geheimnisnacht was fighting in Bretonnia he was little more than a pawn to Kemmler, a low level Necromancer, but he showed an enormous talent for raising the ancient dead from the grave and so Kemmler kept Geheimnisnacht on as a supplementary aid and took great pains to teach Geheimnisnacht of the tradecraft so that by the time Kemmler was forced to retreat at the battle of Maisontaal abbey Geheimnisnacht had become one of Kemmler’s chief lieutenants, though still somewhat of a lesser caster by most standards.

For the next thirty-one years Geheimnisnacht falls from the face of records except for small skirmishes mostly involving Witch Hunter cadres and Geheimnisnacht’s forces, all of which ended in the escape of Geheimnisnacht and usually the death of the Witch Hunter in question. It seems that Geheimnisnacht is back now, in the Border Princes region where perhaps he is looking to carve his own empire and begin his own small army to join forces with Kemmler or Von Carstein yet again to wage war upon the Empire or Bretonnia once more.

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