The Midnight Market

[brilliantlight]

If you want to run with the idea of Jeremy as DL, here's my thoughts on the matter:

1) Don't make him a comatose dreamer. Just have him physically trapped, like all the other DL's.
2) I'm not a fan of insane or amnesiac lords who can't remember why they are being punished. I'd make him remember under certain circumstances; maybe if someone tries to help him find her, he remembers more and more until it all comes back, and he has to kill the person who helped him to cover it up.
3) Based on the world he created, his crimes were tied to marketeering. I'd illustrate that by having him continue to make desperate deals that keep the Market moving. To get information on Emily, he sells his hopes and fears to Grandmother Thorne, buys potions from the alchemists to jog his memory, guides people to this or that stall in exchange for coin, etc.
4) I'd tie him more directly to the Minister and the market-men. Perhaps some of his desperate gambits have side effects that give him some of the features of the Minister, and canny observers see the Minister getting weaker and weaker, until they switch places, only to play it out again the next day.

My best pitch for his backstory: Jeremy ran minor cons on a street market in Paridon, steering people toward the ones who would profit the most off of their desperation. He collaborated with drug dealers, pimps and others who enslaved people's minds and bodies, but he made himself scarce long before the truly darkest deeds were done so as to claim his conscience was clean. He was extremely good at what he did, and two of his most successful ploys were faking a broken arm to gain sympathy, and asking people for help finding his nonexistent fiancee.

As fate would have it, he did in fact get engaged. He ran into a girl from his childhood, whom fate had taken down a different path, and found himself in love. When it came to explaining what he did for a living, his con artist training kicked in, and he exaggerated his relationships with the people at the market to put himself in a better light, making himself out to be a victim of circumstances, indebted to a "monstrous" debt collector and his "wretched" henchmen. At first she was sympathetic, but as she proposed ideas for leaving, brought money to pay off nonexistent debts, etc. he was forced to spin more and more stories until his handlers seemed practically supernatural in their ability to compel him to do their bidding. Eventually she found out and confronted him, forcing him to admit that he had willingly and deliberately betrayed people into the hands of these monsters...and that they money was so good for doing so, that he didn't want to stop. The truth of her words cut so deep that he choked the life out of her to make her stop saying it. Her final words were, "Tell the truth," just as the Mists rolled in.

Now Jeremy is in a different market, where everything he had told her is the truth. There really is a monstrous Minister supernaturally enforcing everything, even compelling rulebreakers to be his lackeys, and there really are hideous wretched marketeers manipulating Jeremy's gullibility. He really is an innocent bystander, most of the time, and his arm really is inexplicably, perpetually broken. He really is searching for his fiancee, despite the fact that somewhere deep down, he knows he'll never find her alive. He now spends most of his time in the position of the people he manipulated, at the mercy of the market, desperate to change a fate that he wrote in blood two centuries ago.

I must admit that is good!

[Wolfglide of the Fraternity]

Indeed, with a backstory like that, it would be a lost opportunity to not have Jeremy be the darklord of the Midnight Market!

[Mistmaster]

And what kind of threat would Jeremy present?

[brilliantlight]

And what kind of threat would [*]Jeremy present?

IMO it depends when you meet him. When you first meet him he is a 1st level rouge, each time you meet him he gets tougher until he winds up a 12th level rouge. His personality changes too, at first he is as gullible and naive as he looks but as he gains more and more of his memories his personality reasserts and he become more and more the conman he is.

There should be clues to that. He should always doing something he not quite agreed such arriving a little late or being in a slightly different place than agreed on. He will always have an excuse with the getting more and more wild as time passes. Unless killed first he should find Emily only for the whole scene to play out again and he kills her with the cycle starting all over again.