Ezren Vulk [Ghast]

In life Vulk was tall and lean, with thin black hair and dark, searching eyes. Gracious on the surface and rotten beneath, he was perhaps the most magnetic man in his starving, fanatical domain.

Death ruined that charm. His skin is now dry, gray-green, and drawn tight over his bones. His nails have lengthened into black claws, his tongue into a long rasp for scraping marrow, and his teeth into black, razor-sharp points. In darkness his eyes glow like live coals.

He has forgotten every language and commands his ghouls with snarls. Magic might allow conversation, but no one has tried it and survived.

His great intellect is mostly gone, but a vicious cunning remains. He fights in a frenzy of claws and teeth: each of two claws deals 1d4 points of damage and his bite 1d8. Any human or demihuman he wounds, elves included, must save vs. paralysis or be frozen for 1d4+6 rounds, unless a priest frees them with remove paralysis.

Like any ghast, he stinks of decay. Approaching within 10 feet calls for a save vs. poison; failure brings nausea and -2 on every attack roll until the fight ends.

Sleep and charm never affect him, nor do poison and disease, and the dark powers have made him immune to holy water as well. Still, any weapon can hurt him, magical or not, and cold iron deals double damage. Clerics of 3rd level or higher can turn him, and protection from evil holds him off if powdered iron is used in the casting.

He is rarely seen without 1d4 common ghouls. Any human or demihuman he kills rises as a ghoul unless the body is blessed. Raise dead or resurrection without that blessing only brings the victim back instantly as a ghoul. A destroyed or devoured body cannot turn.

Vulk was the first person the domain's future lord met on arriving from a neighboring land. Largely through that lord's magical charm, they became friends and together founded the cult of a false god, traveling the new domain for months to gather converts. Vulk became chief inquisitor, hunting doubters and "blasphemers"; many visitors who escaped the altars ended up in his "question chambers".

He also led secret rites for the false god that often ended in sacrifice and cannibalism, and more than half the domain's wild mongrelmen are said to have died by his hand.

His end came while hunting a family accused of blasphemy, destined to be turned into mongrelmen. He caught them fleeing north toward a mist-shrouded realm and carted them off in chains, but halfway home mongrelmen raided the wagon for food and gear. Delighted to find who they had caught, they slaughtered his acolytes and freed the prisoners, who reportedly reached safety and lived out their lives. The mongrelmen carried Vulk into the wilderness and tortured him slowly to death, then lashed his body to a raft and set it adrift toward the capital.

The raft arrived empty but bloodstained, and the furious lord massacred the mongrelmen living below the capital. Weeks later, the dead acolytes' corpses began turning up gnawed in their tombs. Investigating personally, the lord found his old friend, now undead, feeding on them. Unable to destroy him, he drove the ghast into nearby human lands.

His curse may stem from his taste for human flesh or his victims' dying oaths. Now he roams those lands with ghouls of his own making, hunting the newly dead. They avoid daylight though it does not harm them. They lair in places of death, linger a few weeks, and move on, often leaving a ghoul or two behind that must be hunted down to erase all trace of them.