Johann Conrad Dippel

### Appearance

tall, thin, sandy blonde windswept hair and mutton chops, mustache, green eyes, soft face

## Synopsis

Dr. Johann Conrad Dippel is an alchemist, doctor, and necromancer, seeking to find a way to create a living phylactery for himself as a form of lichdom, so that he can complete his life’s work of ending mortality. He was the master of XVIII during their childhood, and is also a former member of the Weavers Conclave.

## History

Dippel was born and raised in Avallon, where he spent his youth and young adulthood studying medicine and alchemy. He served as an apothecary for the city, and was a respected physician and healer, helping to aid the community through the trying years of the Pale Death. His wife, Elene Dippel, contracted the Pale Death during these years, while pregnant with his child. Elene died from complications related to the childbirth, and Dippel’s infant son, Gabriel, died a few weeks later from the Pale Death.

After the death of his family, Dippel began to dabble in magic, and took up a special fascination with necromancy. Deeply affected by his frequent exposure to the gruesome reality of death, he became obsessed with the idea of immortality. He wished not only to stave off his own death, but to create a course of medical and alchemical treatment that would prevent death in others. He began work on an alchemical creation that would eventually become the Potion of Life.

It was during this time that Dippel was invited to join the Weavers Conclave - an offer that he gladly accepted.

Through the course of experimentation, Dippel quickly deduced that he needed living test subjects on whom to test his experiments. In order to minimize the impact of his work from a utilitarian / humanitarian perspective, he developed a plan to practice his experiments only on individuals that were already doomed to die - most often (but not always), children afflicted with the Pale Death.

In order to begin working towards his goal, Dippel purchased an ancient, long-disused castle in the Emerald Highlands, and made it into his laboratory. It was here that he spent the next two decades attempting to create a living phylactery.

The work was slow, and though he saw gradual progress, Dippel was acutely cognizant of his own mortality, and recognized that he would be unlikely to complete his experimentation before his own death. As the Pale Death subsided, he also found himself lacking the abundance of test subjects that he had been able to acquire in earlier years. He knew that he needed to find some way to stave off his own death until he could finish his work on the Potion of Life.

Researching the various methods that mages from the Age of Arcana pursued eternal life. Dippel learned of lichdom, but the idea didn't sit right with him. The notion of his immortal soul being bound to a simple object was untenable to him, as was the necessity of sacrificing souls to the phylactery in perpetuity to remain immortal. So Dippel changed course with his experiments, and set about attempting to create a living phylactery - one that had a soul of its own, and as such would not require the sacrifice of souls. He recognized the moral problem of turning a living being into a phylactery, but viewed it as a lesser evil against sacrificing souls to a phylactery for eternity.

## Experiments

Dippel's experiments to create a living phylactery, as a rule, began with very young children who were already doomed to death for one reason or another - typically due to the Pale Death. He had various sources for these children - some were orphans that he adopted, some were urchins he abducted, and some he even purchased from desperate families. He would administer a regimen of alchemical formulas to these children over years, gradually subduing their personalities, damaging their long term memory, increasing their vitality, and making them compliant. The children who survived this regimen were catalogued by number, and experimentation began. Conveniently, the chemically-altered children also functioned as servants and assistants in the laboratory.

Dippel's approach to creating a living phylactery varied as he experimented over the years. As his strategy developed, he would usually begin by using necromantic magic to turn the children into various forms of undead creatures, since to serve as eternal phylacteries, they themselves could not be mortal. This process failed more often than it succeeded to create a being with high enough sentience to serve as a phylactery, and Dippel ultimately had to dispose of many children.

### XV and XVIII

The vast majority of Dippel's experiments ended in failure, but two came closer to success than the others: XV and XVIII.

XV was the first of Dippel's experiments to successfully produce a stable, compliant, and intelligent undead creature (specifically, a revenant). Unfortunately for Dippel, while XV was the pinnacle of his work at the time, he found the child could not be turned into a phylactery. The arcane ritual that Dippel attempted to turn XV into a phylactery failed, as the boy retained too little of his own soul. Dippel chalked XV up as a loss, but kept him as a personal servant.

XVIII was the most successful iteration of Dippel's next phase of experiments, wherein he attempted to create a vampire instead of a revenant. However, Dippel never got to see this experiment come to its fruition. XVIII drank a and incomplete Potion of Life, which killed them. Dippel disposed of the body along with his other failed experiments, and moved on to new test subjects. Unbeknownst to Dippel, XVIII would go on to awaken years later - a result of the gradual awakening of Primordial Chaos.

### Other Notable Experiments

Experiments I through X encompassed the early stages of Dippel's experimentation, wherein he was beginning to develop and test the Potion of Life. All but one of these subjects was either killed by the experimentation, or turned into mindless and violent undead. The only survivor from amongst these experiments was IX, a human boy afflicted with the Pale Death who was turned into a ghast.

Experiments XI through XIII were Dippel's first attempts at creating a living phylactery, after he had changed the course of his experimentation to attempt to produce a living phylactery. For these experiments, Dippel attempted to utilize ancient necromantic burial rites imbued with the divine magic of the Abyss. The only survivors from amongst these experiments were XI, a khenra girl born with a fatal birth defect of the heart, who became a wraith (as in sword wraith); and XIII, a half-orc boy afflicted with the Pale Death, who became a mummy. Both proved incomaptible with the phylactery experiment.

Experiments XIV and XV were Dippel's attempts to create a revenant. The course of experimentation killed XIV, but succeeded in a limited extent with XV (formerly Keelan).

Experiments XVI and XVII were Dippel's attempts to extract soul from body in order to more readily bind his soul to the living soul of another creature. The experimentation killed XVII, but successfully created a ghost from XVI. However, the experiment still proved unsuccessful in creating a being that would be compatible as a phylactery.

Experiments XVIII through XX were Dippel's attempts to create a vampire. Dippel varied the experimentation between the three, giving them varying doses of lab-created vampire blood. XIX, formerly a human girl afflicted with the Pale Death, was given only very small doses. Ultimately, this sapped her intelligence and will, and drove her to an animalistic blood-thirst. XX, formerly a half-elf teen named Valomir Quinn, who had been wrongfully convicted of murder (actually killed by Lane Coronato and sentenced to death, was given high doses of vampire blood, and became a true vampire. This course of experimentation gave him a great deal of will and sapience, and he ultimately came to begrudge Dippel. He was the only one of Dippel's experiments ever to escape his keep, and it was he who tipped off the Weaver's Conclave about Dippel's dealings. He has since taken up residence in Dippel's former keep. XVIII was the middle ground between the two, receiving only a moderate dose of vampire blood.

Experiment number XXI (the last experiment that was adopted during the Pale Death era, and the highest one XVIII remembers) was Dippel's attempt to remove a creature's life essence from its body but leave it alive, and use the empty body itself as a vessel to become his phylactery. The attempt successfully created an undead shadow of XXI, and left her body in tact for preservation, but nonetheless incompatible as a phylactery. Formerly, XXI was a tabaxi girl that Dippel found near-dead on a roadside, having been mugged.

Since his ousting, Dippel's experiments have become more erratic and desperate, due to his increasing age and frailty, and his lack of test subjects with the Pale Death having ended. Most of his experiments now are one-offs produced from cadavers and the like, and none has successfully produced a living phylactery.

* XXIX: Formerly a human man who had been sentenced to death and executed by beheading in Hartwell. Dippel reanimated his body as a Dullahan, and also separately reanimated his mind as a brain in a jar.
* XXIV: The skull of a long-dead elf that Dippel recovered from the Golden Wastes. Now a flameskull.

## Ousting

Thirty years ago, the Weavers Conclave learned of Dippel's experiments. These experiments were considered egregiously unethical, and against the principles of the Conclave. As such, Dippel was ousted from the Conclave, and his crimes reported to the Alviren Empire - an unprecedented occurrence, as usually the Conclave maintained privilege or privacy among one another in their personal affairs.

Under threat of being arrested and executed for his crimes, Dippel disposed of his remaining failed experiments and fled his castle, taking his surviving experiments with him.

## New Plot

After leaving behind his life's work, Dippel set out to research the great mages of the Age of Arcana, and try to find a new lead on creating a living phylactery. Research and divination led Dippel to learn of a great necromancer named Tamrius Grimm, who was said to have dabbled with similar experiments to create a living phylactery, with some degree of success.

Dippel was eventually able to find the old manor of Tamrius Grimm, in the city of Saltcrest. Exploring the manor for clues, and also using divination magic, Dippel was able to learn that Grimm was imprisoned by the elves in the city of Volus during the Gods' War. Dippel set out to find Tamrius Grimm and rescue him from imprisonment in exchange for his secrets. He left XV behind at Grimm's manor, ordering him to protect it and kill anyone who came around asking questions.