A few points about the story as I was writing it:
* ~ * ~ * S P O I L E R S * ~ * ~ *
Azalin's viewpoint:
It's pretty obvious whose viewpoint this story is told from. I loved the "I, Strahd" books because they let you into Strahd's head, and you got to see his thinking and even his wry sense of ironic wit.
In this story, I'm trying to do something similar with Azalin, showing the lich's rationality and his largely amoral outlook. He values several things that a human can sympathize with. But for other things, his own viewpoint is clearly a self-serving rationalization... rather like Strahd, in fact.
The two novels that directly relate to him only tell his story from a third person perspective, and in my opinion I believe Gene DeWeese's storytelling is better on facts than it is on characterization.
Azalin has a few departures from the usual campaign norms. He seems a little less bitter about losing his spellcasting ability - at least in terms of this story, he is focusing his attentions on escape, so perhaps he'll get depressed again later when the experiment is over. He also doesn't remember what happened in Mordent beyond a few dream snatches, and that does annoy him a lot - arguably moreso than the lack of new spells.
However, he does have the stiff fingers that the books since Red Box have noted. He gets around this by using a Ring of Mage Hand, which he finds somewhat ironic.
I have limited his spell list to exactly what is noted in GazII. He uses Wish spells to get around that limitation, but it irks him deeply to do so.
The Voice is his ability to use "Sending" at will (it's one of the spells he has Arcane Mastery). The Reach is his ability to perceive any undead in Darkon, and the Seizure is his ability to control such undead (although he prefers to have them obey him and contribute according to their own abilities, as with Scherbinung's free will). The Withering is the negative-energy touch attack that all liches possess - like any lich, Azalin can use this to heal damage. (Negative energy heals damage for undead.) The Sight is his divination magic, which he uses either through casting spells, or through using his Scrying Orb.
Azalin has a large number of spells that he never uses or discusses in this story. There are surprisingly few spells that he knows related to planar travel, and I pretty much mention all of them in this story.
Quantarius is, of course, Azalin's tutor back in his time on Greyhawk. Azalin appears to have trusted and respected him in general, and that shows in my portrayal of him in Ravenloft.
Vassaliches:
I'm taking a slight creative liberty here with his first servant vassalich, an undead wizard named Scherbinung. "Scherbinung" does not mean anything in German, to my knowledge. It's a rough transliteration of the Mandarin Chinese characters:
which is pronounced "Shi1 Bin4 Hong1" in the Pinyin system. The letters themselves are not commonly found together in that phraseology, but I thought it was just about feasible, given that liches and vassaliches often conjure up outlandish pseudonyms for themselves. This would be one of the few Chinese characters in Ravenloft, perhaps tying in with the "Asianloft"
world (if it ever comes out). The three characters mean "corpse", "wake", and "funeral procession for a prince", respectively.
Azalin gets through the vassalich help pretty quickly. In canon, we know he has Balipur helping him at the Grand Conjunction, then Werner Ruschieder in
Chilling Tales, then Yako Vormoff in the Requiem, and Foedus in GazII. I felt it wasn't too much of a stretch to imagine what his first vassalich might have been like.
Also, you never see Chinese characters in Ravenloft. This vassalich might be the first.
Kargat and servitors:
The Kargat agents Lixantri and Thelandrus Dach are non-canon, though given their extremely limited role in this story I don't think anybody will mind.
Much of the descriptions of Avernus is taken from the
From the Shadows adventure, and likewise with the sentient servitors in the castle. I made Aquinus the vampire have a slightly larger role, and Axrock is normally found in the smithy hammering out new Doom Guards for his master.
Avernus:
Azalin makes use of two Rooms of Wizardy in this story. (The castle has a room for each school of magic, as well as for elemental magic and wild magic, which increases the caster level of any matching spell cast there.)
The crows who serve the storyteller are mentioned in GazII, as the Corvis Regus. They were retconned to have been there since the ruler entered the domain, and I like the idea of him having non-human, non-Kargat servants too.
The room where they carry out his experiment is high in the towers of Avernus. Eventually, it is the room that becomes Ebb's lair. (It has the circular window 20' in diameter already installed.)
Elrod's canon:
I love Elrod's work. But, I was particularly annoyed and unconvinced by the "Strahd wins all" ending of
I, Strahd: The War Against Azalin, where Strahd's scrappy band of assassins lures the Kargat leadership out of hiding and kills them all.
Instead, I tried to portray that less as a resounding victory for Strahd, and more as the first step in the retaliation process between the two darklords. (A bit like the struggle in the Middle East between Hamas and Mossad, perhaps.) Strahd may have killed Vychen and all Azalin's main Kargat heads in the past, but Azalin's Kargat avenge the deaths by hunting down and striking at most of those responsible. A fairly neat balance of power, I thought.
The names of the Barovian soldiers and the undercover agents are all drawn directly from IS:TWAA, and they almost all come to a bad end in this story.
Nanje's torture is emblematic of one of the many issues with vampires in this game. Their template is very overpowered as far as abilities and ability scores go (arguably even moreso than liches!), but they have a long list of vulnerabilities that liches do not have. Azalin made her into a vampire to punish her for eternity. Note that she drinks troll blood, a neat solution to the question of how to feed a vampire prisoner if you intend to keep them captive forever. Troll hearts presumably could regenerate.
A more serious continuity clash is in Elrod's work where she says Azalin never knew any teleportation spells. Yet the GazII shows Azalin clearly has
Teleport Without Error in his repertoire! The only explanation I could give for this was that Azalin may have always
known teleportation spells, but he never intentionally
used any while working for Strahd, to lull him into a false sense of security.
I hesitate to rewrite Elrod's excellent work, but that would be the only recourse unless we can hold that Azalin, for some reason, merely chose not to show off all his power in front of Strahd - a feasible enough proposition.
Ebb and the outworld:
Basically, this story suggests that Ebb's arrival in Darkon was not a chance occurrence. She was drawn there by Azalin's first escape attempt. The cold outworld that she comes from is detailed briefly in GazII, where it seems like it owes more to science fiction than to fantasy. The humanoids on that cold world are never described in full. I tried to describe them in greater detail here. I think of them as being Grimlocks (Monster Manual I).
The dragons in the outworld are Shadow Dragons (incidentally, they were first premiered in the Greyhawk setting!) and the grimlocks use a clever little technique to defeat them - they pump the caverns full of positive-energy-infused gas. The dragons presumably have some organ inside them that generates negative energy, and this tactics causes a bad reaction to occur, choking them to death.
The outworld itself I portrayed as a rocky asteroid type of world with a central core generating negative planar energy (and which the Shadow Dragons feed off) and with the surface bathed in positive planar energy, sustaining the Grimlocks. The surface rocks appear to have radioactive isotopes, to judge from the effects on living creatures.
The positive-energy-infused gas that comes out also causes burns to Azalin and his vassalich, maintaining the continuity.
Other darklords and domains:
Duke Gundar also has not had much detail to his name. He is presented briefly in
Knight of the Black Rose, as is his son, Medraut. I stuck to the scanty canon as much as possible for them.
Strahd's ring of nondetection is in the sourcebook. His headaches after scrying are well documented in Elrod's work. I tried to maintain continuity with Elrod where possible.
The "dark Olvers" that cross over into Darkon are, of course, Arak elves. The Greyhawk term for an elf is Olve or Olver. At this point it's not clear if they would be drow or not.
Writing notes:
My initial draft of this story had focussed more on the actual meeting between Azalin and Ebb (and specifically the brilliant combinations of combat spells Azalin might use to contain Ebb) but then I realized the experiment was fairly interesting too. Before I knew it, I was nudging up to the word limit and didn't have enough left for a second half of the story. Maybe another time.
As a final observation, I notice that I have unintentionally done a few things very similarly between this fanfic, and my previous one, "The Islanders". Both feature a character known as "The Creature" (although here I call Strahd by his real name too - the term "The Creature" is a carryover from
House on Gryphon Hill). Also, both have a non-combatant meeting a dragon in first contact.