Council of the Damned

The Council of Death is the governing body of the Wakened Dead.

Raz - A ghoul who is said to have eaten 10,000 brains; his memory bank is enormous and his intellect is unmatched among mortals. Raz has an affinity for the light surprisingly enough and he respects the living. Raz has a habit of disguising himself and participating in chess tournaments with the people of the capital and regularly makes fools of grandmasters. Raz spends most of his time creating abominations and is deeply concerned with principle of what it means to create new life. “What is life? I am animated and yet I am not alive. I can feel joy and pain yet I am not counted among the living. Is it that I can not have children? I can tinker and make other animated beings, but they are all even less alive than I am. None of them can reproduce and I have yet to make one wise enough to create false life to be my grandchildren…”

Azif Alhazred - A necromancer turned lich who is thought to be among the forces responsible for starting the Undeathening. He has a penchant for dark magic and despises the living and loves death, though he is still capable of listening to reason. Raz has convinced him attacking the surface is counterproductive because while it will cause more deaths in the short term, allowing the living to be prosperous and multiply will result in more deaths in the future and because members of the Council are beyond death, they can wait for the inevitable. With no life, there can be no deaths.

General Kazou - A Death Knight who once fought against the tides of undead before finally succumbing to it. His sacrifice guarded their retreat and let them escape the encounter with their lives. Unfortunately, they were never ordered to retreat. Kazou’s troops fled in terror as he stood his ground and was overwhelmed by the hoard of zombies approaching his position. Kazou’s rage over being abandoned caused him to be raised as a Death Knight. He used his power to command the dead to lay siege to the soldiers’ fort and made sure to slaughter all those who betrayed him. General Kazou has retained the fire affinity he once had life.

Baker - Baker was as his name suggests a baker in life but in death is a wraith with an affinity for air. He has since forgotten much of his past but still clearly remembers and ruminates upon the circumstances of his death. He had locked himself away in his bakery with a rather generous supply of food. One day he heard climbing up his barricaded walls and in through his second floor window came three armed men. They demanded he give them all of his bread and killed him when begged to keep a week’s worth for himself. Baker is a Murdered Ghost, but has no desire to find the identity of those who killed him. Instead he is content to live in misery and desires nothing more to make the living suffer. It is rumored that he would go to the surface and cause mayhem if not for the fact that Raz, through his vast collection of devoured minds, knows his original identity and the identity of those who slew him, thus giving Raz the ability to put him to rest at any time.

Black Bones - Black Bone is the first of the black boned skeletons to be discovered. He arose from his grave not knowing what he was and wandered about the ruined capital. He found plenty of mindless zombies but those did not react to him. He continued until he found humans. The humans tried to smash him and but his bones were too thick. He did not understand what was going on so he smashed them in return. The humans were reduced to fleshy mounds before him and no longer reacted to him so he once again set out on his search for anything. Black Bones came to learn through the screaming that smashing was unpleasant. He remembered that humans tried smashing him the first time he saw them and grew angry with them. He made it his mission to smash all humans he saw. Black Bones has since mellowed out as he continued to learn. He now realizes that they only attacked him because they had been attacked by every other skeleton they saw and he has forgiven and mourned those he slew. Black Bones has come to have an affinity for earth and while he still remains slow of wit, he is intelligent for the other members of the Council to value his opinion.

Ingrid the Cripple - Ingrid the Cripple is one of the original 21 vampires. She has an affinity for water magic, yet in a twisted way. Water is commonly associated with healing but Ingred uses her magic for poisoning and crippling. Ingrid hates the living and is thought to be the source of many plagues and ailments though her vampiric descendents are just as likely to cause them

Jacob Wolf - Originally Jacob Wolfe, after being turned into a werewolf spawn he dropped the “e” to make his name more fitting. Jacob was not an original member of the council but was allowed on as the seventh member as a tiebreaker and to give some representation to the small number of werebeast spawns that found their way into the sewers. Jacob has no magical affinity but does have plenty of raw physical strength, especially on the night of the new moon. The other members of the Council do not take him as seriously because he is still the new guy even after hundreds of years. Jacob also underperforms as his role as a tiebreaker because his personality changes greatly on nights of the full moon when he returns to his human form. Often his vote as a human and as a wolfman will be counted as separate votes when doing so will lead back into a stalemate making progress at times impossible.

It should be noted that the Council has no representation for zombies, abominations, or mummies. Zombies are excluded because even the most intelligent ones are idiots and the vast majority are mindless in the first place. Abominations are excluded because they are mostly just extensions of their creator’s will. The Council did at one point attempt to enlist a mummy, specifically the mummy of the First King whose tomb was in the heart of the city. He was raised during the Undeathening and led his undead servants on a rampage before being driven back into his tomb and sealed away. The Council reopened his tomb and enlisted him. When they got him back to the Necropolis, he demanded he be made their king and they serve him on his quest to conquer the empire in his name. The Council refused at which point he used his power to dominate all of their minions, and Black Bones, and used them to wage war against the surface in a crisis that would be named the Second Scourge. In the end, a joint effort between the Council and the Slayers freed Black Bones and sealed away the First King much more thoroughly than before. Nine crests are needed to once again open the tomb doors, six of which are held by the Council and three of which are held by the Slayers.

The Second Scourge made the Emperor aware of the existence of the Necropolis and he began a campaign to remove them despite the fact that the Slayers refused to pledge full support on the grounds that the Council assisted with cleaning up their mess, the First King, and had the potential to be valuable allies. The Necropolis is protected by a powerful necromantic aura that sucked the life of the Emperor’s knights and raised them against their own brothers in arms. While the undead were thoroughly contained in a siege, breaching the Necropolis proved impossible. A secret treaty was created between the Empire and the Council in which the Council agreed to aid the Slayers and never attack the surface and in return the Empire would never bother them again.