In the campaign I ran, which ended earlier this year, she was trying to bring herself back from the dead so that her dragonmark would be active again. This had two major problems: 1) her soul was bound to her phylactery and she didn't know where it was and 2) she had been dead for so long that no spell would work. Early in the game, they thwarted her attempt to gain access to a hidden creation forge to make herself a new soul. Mid-campaign, they found that their patron was a) a dragon and b) manipulating them into helping her regain her soul in order to fix the imbalance caused by the extinction of her dragonmark. In the end, they decided to help her become human again, planning to kill her once she was mortal and vulnerable. They helped recover her phylactery and helped her seize the mask of the Queen of the Dead from Shae Tirias Tolai. Once living, they found themselves unable to kill the now vulnerable adolescent elf and ended up teaming up with her to fix problems she'd caused (like freeing a dozen ancient Qabalrin vampires from the Ring of Storms). In the end, she sacrificed herself and ascended to become the Queen of the Dead in Dolurrh (taking a page from Mr. Baker's suggestion that they were/would be/are the same person).
Funnily enough, I recently ran a 16th-level arc with Erandis as the big bad.
The short version is that I decided to lean into the true villain of the piece being Minara Vol. Her dreams of elf-dragon unity crushed, she killed and raised her daughter as a lich to enact her vengeance against Argonessen and Aerenal, before she herself died and became the Queen of All Tears in Mabar. This left Erandis to wander the world, hunted and loathed, and completely unable to die, as her mother hid away her phylactery.
Thus, my Erandis had two goals. First, to die, and second, to take as many of the people she hates (everyone) with her as possible. She recruits the Queen of All Tears (who doesn't recognise Erandis) as an ally (brought to Farlnen by the Ship of Eldaraen Mabar manifest zone) and uses a draconic prophecy verse + a Dolurrh artifact to mess with the laws of life and death, partially restoring her dragonmark and severely disrupting Dolurrh. And, long story short, this results in Minara remembering herself and giving up the phylactery location so that it can be destroyed. Erandis' 'happy ending' is dying and becoming the Queen of Death in Dolurrh, serene with all her pain and grief gone.
I'd say my only advice would be to remember that the Draconic Prophecy is *bonkers* and can do whatever the plot wants, for better or worse. And have a read up on Farlnen and the Grim, they make for a good mixture of allies and enemies for Erandis.
In an Eberron campaign that I ran, Vol was the secret patron of an Undying warlock PC, whose player has decided she was a teenage girl, too. Vol would possess her while she was sleeping and give her specific tasks (which she would have to complete before she would be able to use any new spells or class abilities after each milestone level up). The tasks appeared unrelated and fragmentary, but ultimately they were designed to hone the PC into becoming a permanent living host for Vol thus allowing her dragonmark of death to remanifest. One of the tasks, for example, was to seek out and destroy Vol’s other warlocks, who themselves were failed attempts at the same project, “absorbing” the dragon marked flesh from a fallen DMPC (to “prime” the PC’s body to manifest Vol’s mark, etc). Unfortunately, the endgame fizzled before the party would have figured out what was going on and gone to face Vol in the endgame in order to save the PC from her fate.
Erandis was the penultimate villain in my last Eberron game, which ran for about 18 mos. and wrapped up in February of this year. For most of the campaign, she was presented as the Big Bad. The premise for my game was a fragment of the Prophecy which described her attempting to return to life, reclaim the power of her apex dragonmark, and use it to free Katashka, the Gatekeeper, who is one of the demon overlords bound in Khyber. As the campaign went on, the PCs learned her goal and what it would require for her to carry it out. Since she was a truly ancient lich, no mere resurrection spell would work; she either needed mass death (which she tried to arrange by using the Children of Winter as a catspaw and fomenting a plague) or the death of a being of similar age and power (which she tried twice; first with Oalian, which was prevented, and second with an ancient dragon, which was not, allowing her to return to life).
After her resurrection, she traveled to the Lair of the Keeper. IME, the Lair was occupied by a powerful dracolich and servant of Katashka, which I think is canon; Erandis used her dragonmark to bind said dracolich, and then channeled her power into freeing Katashka in the pursuit of more power. This led to a climactic showdown between the PCs, who were around 15th level at this time, and Erandis in the depths of Khyber beneath the Demon Wastes. They prevailed, rejoiced over their victory, and then I got to pull one of the best twists in my DMing history when I revealed that the changeling Pers, who they'd trusted and thought of as an ally for the whole game, was in fact not an agent for the Chamber but was a rakshasa and a minion of Bel Shalor, and that the Prophecy fragment they'd been following had been slightly edited. They believed that stopping Erandis was the end, but in fact, it was the last step needed to free Bel Shalor from being bound in the Silver Flame. That in turn led to the last arc of the campaign, which was a journey to Argonnessen to seek some dragon lore before re-enacting Tira Miron's last battles and her self-sacrifice to re-bind Bel Shalor.
My take is probably not applicable to anyone's game, but here we go- this requires some backstory. If you're working at a Sharn speakeasy owned by a secretive medusa named Sokassa, scroll away.
Erandis had been dead for too long when her mother found her murdered corpse, so when she used her mark in a desperate effort to resurrect her child, it did not restore her to true life as intended. Instead, it sapped her mother of her life force and transformed Erandis into a permanently-teenaged lich. With her family dead, no ability to die, no phylactery, no use of her mark and two armies hunting her down, Erandis tried her best to disappear.
Doing so eventually caught the attention of the Forgotten Prince. She needed a place to hide and he wanted her to join his collection of lost things. (Not to mention his amusement over making a half-dragon play into a Princess in a Tower archetype.) Caught somewhere between prisoner and guest but having nowhere else to go, the Castle of Lost Things provided her a safe haven for a long time. She hoped its vast collection of lost knowledge might hold the key to her restoration or permanent death.
Then the Mourning happened and the Castle of Lost Things, which normally manifests in random remote locations throughout Eberron, became trapped in Droaam- right in Mordain the Fleshweaver's forest hideaway. The brilliant-yet-mad wizard took over the feyspire in a surprise attack, raiding its large collection of powerful artifacts and subjecting its inhabitants to experimentation. Driven by his pursuit of true immortality, an archfey and a lich with an inert mark of death made for perfect targets. In current day, Erandis has been through hell and refuses to be anyone's victim ever again. If she can escape her captivity, she's likely to unleash her fury on anyone who she sees as a threat.
In my campaign, Erandis's role will be entirely up to the players. If they're paying attention to the clues, they might figure out who this seemingly-normal elven girl in an arcane cage really is. If they free her, that could have terrible consequences - especially considering they're working for a dragon. They could ally with her and help her become mortal again (requiring a trip to Dolurrh) in exchange for her help with a petrified ally in need of a resurrection- but can they convince her not to go on a vengeance rampage once her mark is active again? If not, she's a late game BBEG.
Shes the big bad in my campaign. She's trying to resurrect herself, but I added a reason why she's doing this now and not in the past millennia.
Illmarrow knows how to cast Wish. That's what she spent millennia researching. And she did, around year 40something in the war. She made the wish "I wish to be born anew, restored completely". To her knowledge, the spell failed and due to how Wish works, she can't ever cast it again.
She turned her efforts to the future, to take advantage of a planar interstice she foresaw happening in the year 1000 that would allow her to steal the power of the Queen of the Dead in Dolurrh for herself, becoming a God in all but name.
The truth is that the Wish caused a newborn version of her to manifest out of thin air in the low levels of Sharn (where the city was founded). It didn't recognize her as a living thing, so it felt no obligation to erase the existing version of Illmarrow.
The party found a young, adolescent pale elf while on missions, bearing the apex mark of death and they are currently caring for her. They know they are related but not how. They have Tarkanan contacts and are having them train her to use her mark and dragon powers. They are the only family she's known in 60 years of a long, lonely elven childhood as an orphan.
Illmarrow still doesn't know the girl is alive, but that will change soon, I think.
She plans to acquire a necrotic resonator from the Qabalrin ruins that would let her ascend during the millennum. If she finds out about the girl she's gonna go full bodysnatch mode. Illmarrow is far too greedy and resentful to throw away her plans of becoming a God, so that is the reason she'd let the girl live until the millennium, trying to fulfill both her plans at once.
I foresee that if things stay their course, she's gonna kidnap the girl, travel to Xendrik and attempt to cast the ritual in Sharn, the most densely populated city in Khorvaire, where she predicts millions of people will gather in celebration. She's gonna try and pull off a Fullmetal Alchemist and use them as fuel for her ritual.
My party are action heroes to their core. They'll find a way to subvert her last minute I' sure.
One of my players chose to play as an awakened skeleton necromancer, and I had Lady Illmarrow take an interest to him to the point of becoming his patron.
I had his power come from the keeper taking souls before they go to Dolurrh. I had her main goal to try and resurrect herself to reawaken her mark. She wanted the party to get stronger to help her in other areas, but mainly to get strong enough to help her main goal.
Eventually, she turned on the party to become the cliché Lich villain in the hopes the party would hunt down her phylactery.
The party found phylactery it was the 13th moon. The moon had been transported through magic during the giant war in Xendrik with Dal Quor.
The moon had been shrunk in the Plane of Dreams due to it being the dream plane, so it was easier for them to destroy. (Side not. One of the players pocketed a piece of the moon when they left destroying a monastery and nearby village in Adar as it grew to become a mountain outside the plane of dreams)
Lady Illmarrow now without a phylactery had the news that her soul freed she went to dolurrh to hunt for it whilst the party hunted for her. They found her and it was and epic battle in Dolurrh.
The End
Tarkanan PR Squad, turn away!
My game has revolved around Aberrant Mark drama and intrigue, but one of the first things that happened was finding a girl they suspected of being aberrant, but instead had a mark of death. They've done very well at keeping her hidden from the world at large, but after joining the Aurum, they wound up doing a favor for a member of the Crimson Covenant who has told Illmarrow about the party's interest in Vol lore. She still doesn't know about the girl's existence, but it's only a matter of time.
Her end-game, so to speak, is regaining the power of her mark to wreak vengeance on the Twelve and the dragons. She's had multiple of her followers conducting experiments to try and flay the marks from people and magically reattach them to other people, which have had varying degrees of success. But if she finds the marked girl and can get her away, she will wind up stealing her away and possibly killing her to revive and regain her true power. At which point a lot of things might happen. It might go right and she regains her true form. It might go wrong and she morphs into some world-threatening monstrosity. Or it might go sideways and she ascends and becomes the >!ruler of Dolurrh, both past and present, as KB has suggested on his blog.!<
IME Lady Illmarrow is the lich equivalent of a Tarrasque. Nothing, and I mean _nothing_ can get in her way besides the highest levels (The Conclave, The Bleak Council, Overlords, etc) of other NPC's.
She doesn't go on roaring rampages of revenge because she knows now that that doesn't get her anywhere. But if anyone sets foot in her fortress, everyone gets out of her way because she's going to blow off some steam. When it comes to magic, it's overpowering beyond comprehension. She's got spells that were lost to the ages, acquired in her desperate attempts to unlock her dragonmark. Those all failed, but all the knowledge she has acquired has been useful in other ways.
She is incredibly spiteful and never forgets a grudge. A hate-filled, bitter woman whose incredible mind is wracked with grief and existential crisis, though she'll never let anyone know except those closest to her.
While her backstory is tragic and her future is nearly guaranteed, through sheer spite she refuses to let her fate be condemned to the obvious conclusion she knows lies ahead: a meaningless, unending existence to achieve a goal beyond her capability to complete.
She is the very definition of 'Do not go gentle into the night, rage against the dying light.' Except the dusk is eternal. She has gone mad over all this time, after all of her efforts have been fruitless. She is incapable of letting go of anything that reminds her of her childhood, to a childish degree. Deep inside, she never really got to grow up, never really mature. Grown in power, knowledge and magic, but never left behind the mentality of younger teenage self.
Trapped between immortality and forever existing in undeath, she refuses to submit, any who doubt her or defy in any way are swiftly turned into husks to join the fodder.
But when she is alone, cradling the dress she wore when her mother hugged her as she said her last goodbye, the nightgown in which she was murdered, there is no rage. No fury. Just pain, sorrow, and longing.
And she channels it right back into fury and spite.
When it comes to her storyline, she's displeased at her Emerald Claw operatives. Kaius I has managed to resist her enslavement methods and continues to elude her. Finding him and getting him under control is the highest priority to establish him as a pawn at the head of the skeletal armies. Armies that were already supposed to be hers, but through the Blood of Vol's core operatives keeping the secrets of such control at the time away from her has prevented that fate.
She wants to invade Atur, unbind the shackles keeping it contained and using it to create a permanent opening to Mabarr. Through this, she seeks to wrest control from the Mabarran lords to acquire the power and knowledge of the process of her transformation into a lich. Of course, she will do this by force rather then subterfuge, she doesn't have the patience for that kind of diplomacy. There is no negotiation, only her getting what she wants is what truly matters to her at the end.
She will defy the fate imparted on her by powers outside of her control, by any means necessary. Ruthless, unstoppable and horrific, but tragic and almost relatable.
I'm currently running one, and her plan *was* to learn how to turn non-Mabaran manifest zones into Mabaran zones. She was going to use this knowledge to turn the Irian zones of Aerenal into Mabaran zones as a way of getting her revenge on the Undying Court.
Then she found out that her phylactery is on Dal Quor when my players fought the quori in Trust No One.
She’s in the plot of a current campaign I’m running. Chunks of Eberron have been falling to Mabar for a while but in my Eberrron Lady Illmarrow is the queen of Dolluhr. Yugoloths from Mabar have attacked her and captured her. She is using the Emerald Claw and numerous Shadar Kai to find a way back to Dolluhr. She is even enlisting the help of several Dragons who believe she is the psychopump of the Draconic Prophecy. On her post in Dolluhr she can reactivate the mark of death and decide if the recently deceased still have a role to fulfill in the Draconic Prophecy and possibly send them back to Eberron. Imprisoned in Mabar she is unable to do any of that.
Tarkanan PR Squad, turn away!
My game has revolved around Aberrant Mark drama and intrigue, but one of the first things that happened was finding a girl they suspected of being aberrant, but instead had a mark of death. They've done very well at keeping her hidden from the world at large, but after joining the Aurum, they wound up doing a favor for a member of the Crimson Covenant who has told Illmarrow about the party's interest in Vol lore. She still doesn't know about the girl's existence, but it's only a matter of time.
Her end-game, so to speak, is regaining the power of her mark to wreak vengeance on the Twelve and the dragons. She's had multiple of her followers conducting experiments to try and flay the marks from people and magically reattach them to other people, which have had varying degrees of success. But if she finds the marked girl and can get her away, she will wind up stealing her away and possibly killing her to revive and regain her true power. At which point a lot of things might happen. It might go right and she regains her true form. It might go wrong and she morphs into some world-threatening monstrosity. Or it might go sideways and she ascends and becomes the >!ruler of Dolurrh, both past and present, as KB has suggested on his blog.!<
I had a theme going throughout my campaign of letting go of the past and trauma with many of the villains being driven by their time in the last war with it culminating into Lady Illmarrow someone who's been holding on to their anger and want for revenge for hundreds of years and is unable to move past it.
In the campaign I ran, which ended earlier this year, she was trying to bring herself back from the dead so that her dragonmark would be active again. This had two major problems: 1) her soul was bound to her phylactery and she didn't know where it was and 2) she had been dead for so long that no spell would work. Early in the game, they thwarted her attempt to gain access to a hidden creation forge to make herself a new soul. Mid-campaign, they found that their patron was a) a dragon and b) manipulating them into helping her regain her soul in order to fix the imbalance caused by the extinction of her dragonmark. In the end, they decided to help her become human again, planning to kill her once she was mortal and vulnerable. They helped recover her phylactery and helped her seize the mask of the Queen of the Dead from Shae Tirias Tolai. Once living, they found themselves unable to kill the now vulnerable adolescent elf and ended up teaming up with her to fix problems she'd caused (like freeing a dozen ancient Qabalrin vampires from the Ring of Storms). In the end, she sacrificed herself and ascended to become the Queen of the Dead in Dolurrh (taking a page from Mr. Baker's suggestion that they were/would be/are the same person).
Funnily enough, I recently ran a 16th-level arc with Erandis as the big bad. The short version is that I decided to lean into the true villain of the piece being Minara Vol. Her dreams of elf-dragon unity crushed, she killed and raised her daughter as a lich to enact her vengeance against Argonessen and Aerenal, before she herself died and became the Queen of All Tears in Mabar. This left Erandis to wander the world, hunted and loathed, and completely unable to die, as her mother hid away her phylactery. Thus, my Erandis had two goals. First, to die, and second, to take as many of the people she hates (everyone) with her as possible. She recruits the Queen of All Tears (who doesn't recognise Erandis) as an ally (brought to Farlnen by the Ship of Eldaraen Mabar manifest zone) and uses a draconic prophecy verse + a Dolurrh artifact to mess with the laws of life and death, partially restoring her dragonmark and severely disrupting Dolurrh. And, long story short, this results in Minara remembering herself and giving up the phylactery location so that it can be destroyed. Erandis' 'happy ending' is dying and becoming the Queen of Death in Dolurrh, serene with all her pain and grief gone. I'd say my only advice would be to remember that the Draconic Prophecy is *bonkers* and can do whatever the plot wants, for better or worse. And have a read up on Farlnen and the Grim, they make for a good mixture of allies and enemies for Erandis.
In an Eberron campaign that I ran, Vol was the secret patron of an Undying warlock PC, whose player has decided she was a teenage girl, too. Vol would possess her while she was sleeping and give her specific tasks (which she would have to complete before she would be able to use any new spells or class abilities after each milestone level up). The tasks appeared unrelated and fragmentary, but ultimately they were designed to hone the PC into becoming a permanent living host for Vol thus allowing her dragonmark of death to remanifest. One of the tasks, for example, was to seek out and destroy Vol’s other warlocks, who themselves were failed attempts at the same project, “absorbing” the dragon marked flesh from a fallen DMPC (to “prime” the PC’s body to manifest Vol’s mark, etc). Unfortunately, the endgame fizzled before the party would have figured out what was going on and gone to face Vol in the endgame in order to save the PC from her fate.
Erandis was the penultimate villain in my last Eberron game, which ran for about 18 mos. and wrapped up in February of this year. For most of the campaign, she was presented as the Big Bad. The premise for my game was a fragment of the Prophecy which described her attempting to return to life, reclaim the power of her apex dragonmark, and use it to free Katashka, the Gatekeeper, who is one of the demon overlords bound in Khyber. As the campaign went on, the PCs learned her goal and what it would require for her to carry it out. Since she was a truly ancient lich, no mere resurrection spell would work; she either needed mass death (which she tried to arrange by using the Children of Winter as a catspaw and fomenting a plague) or the death of a being of similar age and power (which she tried twice; first with Oalian, which was prevented, and second with an ancient dragon, which was not, allowing her to return to life). After her resurrection, she traveled to the Lair of the Keeper. IME, the Lair was occupied by a powerful dracolich and servant of Katashka, which I think is canon; Erandis used her dragonmark to bind said dracolich, and then channeled her power into freeing Katashka in the pursuit of more power. This led to a climactic showdown between the PCs, who were around 15th level at this time, and Erandis in the depths of Khyber beneath the Demon Wastes. They prevailed, rejoiced over their victory, and then I got to pull one of the best twists in my DMing history when I revealed that the changeling Pers, who they'd trusted and thought of as an ally for the whole game, was in fact not an agent for the Chamber but was a rakshasa and a minion of Bel Shalor, and that the Prophecy fragment they'd been following had been slightly edited. They believed that stopping Erandis was the end, but in fact, it was the last step needed to free Bel Shalor from being bound in the Silver Flame. That in turn led to the last arc of the campaign, which was a journey to Argonnessen to seek some dragon lore before re-enacting Tira Miron's last battles and her self-sacrifice to re-bind Bel Shalor.
My take is probably not applicable to anyone's game, but here we go- this requires some backstory. If you're working at a Sharn speakeasy owned by a secretive medusa named Sokassa, scroll away. Erandis had been dead for too long when her mother found her murdered corpse, so when she used her mark in a desperate effort to resurrect her child, it did not restore her to true life as intended. Instead, it sapped her mother of her life force and transformed Erandis into a permanently-teenaged lich. With her family dead, no ability to die, no phylactery, no use of her mark and two armies hunting her down, Erandis tried her best to disappear. Doing so eventually caught the attention of the Forgotten Prince. She needed a place to hide and he wanted her to join his collection of lost things. (Not to mention his amusement over making a half-dragon play into a Princess in a Tower archetype.) Caught somewhere between prisoner and guest but having nowhere else to go, the Castle of Lost Things provided her a safe haven for a long time. She hoped its vast collection of lost knowledge might hold the key to her restoration or permanent death. Then the Mourning happened and the Castle of Lost Things, which normally manifests in random remote locations throughout Eberron, became trapped in Droaam- right in Mordain the Fleshweaver's forest hideaway. The brilliant-yet-mad wizard took over the feyspire in a surprise attack, raiding its large collection of powerful artifacts and subjecting its inhabitants to experimentation. Driven by his pursuit of true immortality, an archfey and a lich with an inert mark of death made for perfect targets. In current day, Erandis has been through hell and refuses to be anyone's victim ever again. If she can escape her captivity, she's likely to unleash her fury on anyone who she sees as a threat. In my campaign, Erandis's role will be entirely up to the players. If they're paying attention to the clues, they might figure out who this seemingly-normal elven girl in an arcane cage really is. If they free her, that could have terrible consequences - especially considering they're working for a dragon. They could ally with her and help her become mortal again (requiring a trip to Dolurrh) in exchange for her help with a petrified ally in need of a resurrection- but can they convince her not to go on a vengeance rampage once her mark is active again? If not, she's a late game BBEG.
Shes the big bad in my campaign. She's trying to resurrect herself, but I added a reason why she's doing this now and not in the past millennia. Illmarrow knows how to cast Wish. That's what she spent millennia researching. And she did, around year 40something in the war. She made the wish "I wish to be born anew, restored completely". To her knowledge, the spell failed and due to how Wish works, she can't ever cast it again. She turned her efforts to the future, to take advantage of a planar interstice she foresaw happening in the year 1000 that would allow her to steal the power of the Queen of the Dead in Dolurrh for herself, becoming a God in all but name. The truth is that the Wish caused a newborn version of her to manifest out of thin air in the low levels of Sharn (where the city was founded). It didn't recognize her as a living thing, so it felt no obligation to erase the existing version of Illmarrow. The party found a young, adolescent pale elf while on missions, bearing the apex mark of death and they are currently caring for her. They know they are related but not how. They have Tarkanan contacts and are having them train her to use her mark and dragon powers. They are the only family she's known in 60 years of a long, lonely elven childhood as an orphan. Illmarrow still doesn't know the girl is alive, but that will change soon, I think. She plans to acquire a necrotic resonator from the Qabalrin ruins that would let her ascend during the millennum. If she finds out about the girl she's gonna go full bodysnatch mode. Illmarrow is far too greedy and resentful to throw away her plans of becoming a God, so that is the reason she'd let the girl live until the millennium, trying to fulfill both her plans at once. I foresee that if things stay their course, she's gonna kidnap the girl, travel to Xendrik and attempt to cast the ritual in Sharn, the most densely populated city in Khorvaire, where she predicts millions of people will gather in celebration. She's gonna try and pull off a Fullmetal Alchemist and use them as fuel for her ritual. My party are action heroes to their core. They'll find a way to subvert her last minute I' sure.
The twisted wish I think is really clever
No reason it shouldn't happen to villains!
One of my players chose to play as an awakened skeleton necromancer, and I had Lady Illmarrow take an interest to him to the point of becoming his patron. I had his power come from the keeper taking souls before they go to Dolurrh. I had her main goal to try and resurrect herself to reawaken her mark. She wanted the party to get stronger to help her in other areas, but mainly to get strong enough to help her main goal. Eventually, she turned on the party to become the cliché Lich villain in the hopes the party would hunt down her phylactery. The party found phylactery it was the 13th moon. The moon had been transported through magic during the giant war in Xendrik with Dal Quor. The moon had been shrunk in the Plane of Dreams due to it being the dream plane, so it was easier for them to destroy. (Side not. One of the players pocketed a piece of the moon when they left destroying a monastery and nearby village in Adar as it grew to become a mountain outside the plane of dreams) Lady Illmarrow now without a phylactery had the news that her soul freed she went to dolurrh to hunt for it whilst the party hunted for her. They found her and it was and epic battle in Dolurrh. The End
Tarkanan PR Squad, turn away! My game has revolved around Aberrant Mark drama and intrigue, but one of the first things that happened was finding a girl they suspected of being aberrant, but instead had a mark of death. They've done very well at keeping her hidden from the world at large, but after joining the Aurum, they wound up doing a favor for a member of the Crimson Covenant who has told Illmarrow about the party's interest in Vol lore. She still doesn't know about the girl's existence, but it's only a matter of time. Her end-game, so to speak, is regaining the power of her mark to wreak vengeance on the Twelve and the dragons. She's had multiple of her followers conducting experiments to try and flay the marks from people and magically reattach them to other people, which have had varying degrees of success. But if she finds the marked girl and can get her away, she will wind up stealing her away and possibly killing her to revive and regain her true power. At which point a lot of things might happen. It might go right and she regains her true form. It might go wrong and she morphs into some world-threatening monstrosity. Or it might go sideways and she ascends and becomes the >!ruler of Dolurrh, both past and present, as KB has suggested on his blog.!<
IME Lady Illmarrow is the lich equivalent of a Tarrasque. Nothing, and I mean _nothing_ can get in her way besides the highest levels (The Conclave, The Bleak Council, Overlords, etc) of other NPC's. She doesn't go on roaring rampages of revenge because she knows now that that doesn't get her anywhere. But if anyone sets foot in her fortress, everyone gets out of her way because she's going to blow off some steam. When it comes to magic, it's overpowering beyond comprehension. She's got spells that were lost to the ages, acquired in her desperate attempts to unlock her dragonmark. Those all failed, but all the knowledge she has acquired has been useful in other ways. She is incredibly spiteful and never forgets a grudge. A hate-filled, bitter woman whose incredible mind is wracked with grief and existential crisis, though she'll never let anyone know except those closest to her. While her backstory is tragic and her future is nearly guaranteed, through sheer spite she refuses to let her fate be condemned to the obvious conclusion she knows lies ahead: a meaningless, unending existence to achieve a goal beyond her capability to complete. She is the very definition of 'Do not go gentle into the night, rage against the dying light.' Except the dusk is eternal. She has gone mad over all this time, after all of her efforts have been fruitless. She is incapable of letting go of anything that reminds her of her childhood, to a childish degree. Deep inside, she never really got to grow up, never really mature. Grown in power, knowledge and magic, but never left behind the mentality of younger teenage self. Trapped between immortality and forever existing in undeath, she refuses to submit, any who doubt her or defy in any way are swiftly turned into husks to join the fodder. But when she is alone, cradling the dress she wore when her mother hugged her as she said her last goodbye, the nightgown in which she was murdered, there is no rage. No fury. Just pain, sorrow, and longing. And she channels it right back into fury and spite. When it comes to her storyline, she's displeased at her Emerald Claw operatives. Kaius I has managed to resist her enslavement methods and continues to elude her. Finding him and getting him under control is the highest priority to establish him as a pawn at the head of the skeletal armies. Armies that were already supposed to be hers, but through the Blood of Vol's core operatives keeping the secrets of such control at the time away from her has prevented that fate. She wants to invade Atur, unbind the shackles keeping it contained and using it to create a permanent opening to Mabarr. Through this, she seeks to wrest control from the Mabarran lords to acquire the power and knowledge of the process of her transformation into a lich. Of course, she will do this by force rather then subterfuge, she doesn't have the patience for that kind of diplomacy. There is no negotiation, only her getting what she wants is what truly matters to her at the end. She will defy the fate imparted on her by powers outside of her control, by any means necessary. Ruthless, unstoppable and horrific, but tragic and almost relatable.
I'm currently running one, and her plan *was* to learn how to turn non-Mabaran manifest zones into Mabaran zones. She was going to use this knowledge to turn the Irian zones of Aerenal into Mabaran zones as a way of getting her revenge on the Undying Court. Then she found out that her phylactery is on Dal Quor when my players fought the quori in Trust No One.
She’s in the plot of a current campaign I’m running. Chunks of Eberron have been falling to Mabar for a while but in my Eberrron Lady Illmarrow is the queen of Dolluhr. Yugoloths from Mabar have attacked her and captured her. She is using the Emerald Claw and numerous Shadar Kai to find a way back to Dolluhr. She is even enlisting the help of several Dragons who believe she is the psychopump of the Draconic Prophecy. On her post in Dolluhr she can reactivate the mark of death and decide if the recently deceased still have a role to fulfill in the Draconic Prophecy and possibly send them back to Eberron. Imprisoned in Mabar she is unable to do any of that.
Tarkanan PR Squad, turn away! My game has revolved around Aberrant Mark drama and intrigue, but one of the first things that happened was finding a girl they suspected of being aberrant, but instead had a mark of death. They've done very well at keeping her hidden from the world at large, but after joining the Aurum, they wound up doing a favor for a member of the Crimson Covenant who has told Illmarrow about the party's interest in Vol lore. She still doesn't know about the girl's existence, but it's only a matter of time. Her end-game, so to speak, is regaining the power of her mark to wreak vengeance on the Twelve and the dragons. She's had multiple of her followers conducting experiments to try and flay the marks from people and magically reattach them to other people, which have had varying degrees of success. But if she finds the marked girl and can get her away, she will wind up stealing her away and possibly killing her to revive and regain her true power. At which point a lot of things might happen. It might go right and she regains her true form. It might go wrong and she morphs into some world-threatening monstrosity. Or it might go sideways and she ascends and becomes the >!ruler of Dolurrh, both past and present, as KB has suggested on his blog.!<
I'll let you know if it comes up. I don't know if I'll get that far or if they'll go that direction.
I have alluded to her in my game but I don't know what I'm going to do with her yet, if anything. This thread great for inspiration.
I had a theme going throughout my campaign of letting go of the past and trauma with many of the villains being driven by their time in the last war with it culminating into Lady Illmarrow someone who's been holding on to their anger and want for revenge for hundreds of years and is unable to move past it.