Vrexhaal the Imprisoned

Vrexhaal is a towering, powerfully built humanoid covered in plates of dark red bone. His head resembles a beast's muzzled snout and bristles with dozens of horns and antlers. His narrow yellow eyes are slit with glowing red. Centuries of captivity have left him grim, bitter and starving for revenge.

Simply being near him has the effect of a fear spell, and once per turn he can turn a death gaze on a foe, who must save vs. death magic or die on the spot. Unarmed, he rakes with two massive clawed hands for 4d8 points each, and if both strike the same opponent he can then gore it on his horns for another 3d10. He is extremely hard to hurt, with 80% magic resistance and complete immunity to magical weapons below +3.

Known in legend as the Lord of the Veiled Layer, Vrexhaal holds many titles in the Abyss. His armies repeatedly won victories for the tanar'ri in the endless war between demons and devils against the baatezu, earning him vast power and the jealousy of other tanar'ri nobles. In one great struggle he slew or drove off several powerful fiends and claimed their titles and followers. After centuries of triumph he crossed to a world of the Prime Material Plane to continue his conquests.

The hill-folk of a cold eastern land say he came long ago with a horde of tanar'ri and other monsters, meaning either to lay the country waste or drag it bodily into the Abyss. A young hero whose lord-father had fallen to the fiend's legions begged the land's spirits for a weapon equal to the task and was given a spirit-forged sword. He led a band of berserkers against the demon lord and met him in single combat. Badly wounded and his servants beaten, Vrexhaal broke off and fled, and the land went free.

He resurfaced when the slaver-wizards fought for independence from a corrupt old desert kingdom. They summoned and bound him to fight its god-kings, and he helped bring them down, but the wizards learned that a summoned abyssal lord is not easily sent home. To keep him from ravaging their land, they imprisoned him beneath their capital.

A web of runes holds him, the greatest of them formed by the canals of the city itself. For years the prison held, though earthquakes and tremors betrayed its restless captive. Then an unforeseen quirk of sympathetic magic emerged: accurate maps of the city drained power from the runes, and destroying such a map weakened the prison a little. The wizards made owning an accurate map a capital crime, yet maps kept being drawn, and the runes kept fading.

Vael Morthis, the master necromancer of the slaver-wizards, recognized that the fiend would one day break free and shake the whole realm. He devised a scheme not merely to reimprison Vrexhaal but to enslave him and channel his strength into godlike power for himself. Meanwhile the demon lord has few friends left. Most tanar'ri believe him dead, and many would gladly 'honor' his memory if he returned.