How did they Fall?

[Hell_Born]

As I mentioned in my other topic, List of Darklord Curses, my collection of Ravenloft sourcebooks is rather... scattered. Also, I find that explaining what darklords are (in generic terms; they are cursed, how they are cursed, why were they cursed) is something I often need to do to when discussing Ravenloft. So, I make this list topic: can you please detail for me the key act, or key acts, that resulted in the various darklords of Ravenloft going from mere villains to darklordship?

For example, Strahd's key acts would be: turned self into a vampire out of jealousy over brother's wife-to-be, slaughtered brother & entire wedding reception, then went after brother's wife to turn her into his vampire bride, prompting her to leap to her death from the castle's walls.

[hidajiremi]

Borca
*Camille Dilisnya poisoned her husband to death, resulting in her exile from her family, whereupon she "found" the ancestral Dilisnya homeland of Borca.
*Ivana Boritsi stole darklordship from her mother by plotting the older woman's murder and turning her best friend into an alchemical weapon of destruction to achieve it.
*Ivan Dilisnya harbored a disturbed love for his older sister, and when she married and had a child, it drove him mad with jealousy. He poisoned his sister and her husband, and the child survived only because the midwife spirited it away.

Darkon
*Azalin had his only son executed for treason, and when his kingdom crumbled in revolution, he found himself in Ravenloft. After that, it was just a matter of will and being sick of Strahd's bullcrap.

Dementlieu
*Dominic d'Honaire was a manipulator almost from birth, enjoying turning children and friends against one another for fun. At the age of seven, he convinced his nanny to kill herself, and then "suggested" moving to a new land to his father.

Falkovnia
*Vlad Drakov was a mercenary captain who craved respect and a crown, but knew only violence and terror. He was drawn into Ravenloft after having an entire village of innocent people tortured to death by impalement.

Forlorn
*Tristen apBlanc was the half-vampire son of a local noble house, and his parents were killed when he was a baby. He was raised by a druid, who sought a method to purge the vampiric taint from him, but in his suspicion of his adopted mother, he killed her before she had the chance. Her blood burned him to death, and now he exists in a half-living, half-dead state. For years afterward, Forlorn hovered on the edge of being drawn into Ravenloft, but it was not fully absorbed until Tristen murdered his two sons, drove his wife to suicide, and imprisoned his daughter in the bowels of the castle.

Hazlan
*Hazlik, a Red Wizard of Thay, showed a moment of weakness by falling in love. His lover's master, a rival wizard, found them together, and his lover claimed to have been raped by Hazlik. He was cast out of Thay, but took his revenge when he found his rival and former lover together in the wilderness and butchered them both.

Invidia
*Bakholis the warlord raped a young girl, who cursed him to become a beast in form as well as in deed. During the next full moon, he slaughtered his whole family, transformed into a werewolf.
*Gabrielle Aderre had longed to know her father's identity her entire life, and to have a husband and child, but her mother's second sight foretold only disaster down that path. While they were under assault from a werewolf, Gabrielle abandoned her mother to die, then proceeded to the citadel of Bakholis, were she killed him with little effort and led a popular rebellion against his remaining lieutenants.

Kartakass
*Harkon Lukas was a wolfwere who wanted his kind to become more organized. For this unthinkable behavior, he was cast out of his own society, and when he began to kill his own kind and normal wolves alike, the Mists took him.

Lamordia
*Adam, the flesh golem creation of Dr. Victor Mordenheim, savagely beat Mordenheim's wife to the brink of death after the woman's fearful intervention caused Adam's only friend, the Mordenheims' adopted daughter, to fall from his grasp and to her death.

Mordent
*In a fit of rage, Sir Wilfred Godefroy, master of Gryphon Hill, beat his wife and daughter to death, then covered up his crime by making it look as though they had been trampled to death by a horse. That night, they rose from their graves to haunt him, and within a month he had committed suicide, only to join them as a restless spirit.

Nova Vaasa
*Romir Hiregaard was a good man, but jealous. When he found his wife dancing with another man, he killed them both, but she survived long enough to tell him of his mistake and curse him. Rather than face life with the magnitude of his crime, he hanged himself.
*His oldest son, Tristen, inherited the curse through no fault of his own, becoming literally two people in one body - one, the good lord Tristen; the other, the depraved killer Malken, legacy of his father's curse.

Richemulot
*Claude Renier was a clever and brutal wererat who led his clan to great success even as he abused and tormented them. He directed them to hundreds of killings, finally leading them on an exodus from their homeland when things became too difficult there.
*Jacqueline Renier was Claude's most beloved granddaughter. That's why he never saw it coming when she poisoned him, then threw him into the dog kennels to be torn apart.

Sithicus
*Lord Soth was once a paladin, but when he fell in love with a woman who was not his wife, the gods cursed his child to be born deformed. Thinking his wife had been unfaithful, he slew her and installed his new mistress in her place. The truth came out and Soth was stripped of his rank. He prayed for forgiveness, and the gods offered him a chance: he would go on a quest to save his world, but almost certainly die in the attempt. Just before his quest was complete, his mind was poisoned with lies about his new wife; he abandoned his quest to confront her, only to spurn both her and his new son moments before their deaths. She cursed him to suffer a lifetime for every life that had been lost from his foolish pride.
*Inza Magdova Kulchevich, a gypsy and daughter of two great heroes, betrayed her mother, causing her mother's weapon to shatter during a duel. When the woman died, she betrayed the rest of her tribe to enter the good graces of Soth, Knight of the Black Rose, then usurped his position after his disappearance by betraying Soth's seneschal, the dwarven werebadger Azrael Dak.

Tepest
*The three Mindefisk sisters were left on their mother's doorstep as a gift from the fey. Their desire to leave behind their drab life motivated them to murder travelers for their money, then cook their remains and feed them to their family. When all three of them fell in love with a wanderer, who used them and threw them aside, their hatred for one another was matched only by their hatred of him. They murdered their lover, and in so doing became hags, hideous mockeries of their former beauty.

Valachan
*Urik von Kharkov started life as a panther, transformed into a man by sorcery as part of an intricate plot of revenge. He fell deeply in love with a woman, then murdered her when his creator turned him back into a panther while they were alone together. Urik fled his master when he changed back into a man, and eventually became a vampire while serving the Kargat.

Verbrek
*Alfred Timothy was the weakling son of the darklord of Arkandale, Captain Nathan Timothy. To escape his human weakness, he began to worship a false god of wolves; frustrated by his failure to gain divine powers, he went on a rampage and was captured while sleeping it off. He was bought by a gypsy woman, who offered to free him for the price of a promise - one that Alfred broke as soon as he was free, devouring the woman.


And that's pretty much the Core. The problem with defining a "single moment" in which a darklord fell is that a lot of darklords didn't see themselves as bad people until they were finally damned. Some of them still don't. In many cases, it wasn't one primal act that condemned them, but a slow accumulation of evils, until one finally tipped them over the edge. Not all of them had as... dramatic... of falls as Strahd.


Jeremy Puckett

[Scarycount]

Hazlan
*Hazlik, a Red Wizard of Thay, showed a moment of weakness by falling in love. His lover's master, a rival wizard, found them together, and his lover claimed to have been raped by Hazlik. He was cast out of Thay, but took his revenge when he found his rival and former lover together in the wilderness and butchered them both.

Actually, according to Gaz 1, his lover seduced him knowing that they would be discovered as an attempt to disgrace hazlik.

[cure]

For Gaby one should add that the mother was abandonned during the attack when she refused to cough up the name of the father.

[Scarycount]

actually, she agreed to give the father's identity, though not his name, but gabby couldn't stand the truth and abandoned her anyway

[Rotipher of the FoS]

Forlorn
*Tristen apBlanc was the half-vampire son of a local noble house, and his parents were killed when he was a baby.

Actually, Tristen was born a (latent) vampyre, not a dhampir. His father fed upon his already-pregnant wife after becoming a vampire, having sired their child before being attacked by one of the undead. IIRC, Tristen didn't succumb to the taint and start drinking blood until he was a teenager.