Meredoth

Canon Information

As originally presented in Ship of Horror, Meredoth was the darklord of an Island of Terror domain called Nebligtode. This domain was actually a large body of water with several islands within it. The most notable of these islands were Todstein and Graben Island. Meredoth festered like this in Ravenloft for over a century before the Grand Conjunction happened. The Dark Powers have diminished his aging to to but a snail's pace, but the years are still creeping up on him.

As of the then current timeline presented in Domains of Dread, Meredoth became the Darklord of the Nocturnal Sea, the eastern sea of the Core. The Nocturnal Sea contains several new islands in addition to the landmasses that once belonged to Neblingtode, but these new islands (and the water immediately surrounding them) have their own darklords.

Domains of Dread also retconned Meredoth as originating from the world of Mystara. On that world, he was a baron of Norwold, a province of the Alphatian Empire. As a baron, Meredoth could never find as much time alone for his magical research as he wanted. After he poisoned the starving colonialists who merely begged for his aid, a storm rolled in and drew him into Ravenloft.

Meredoth is responsible for poisoning the Graben Family and reanimating them as lebendtod, initially merely to have someone to keep the flow of body parts coming. However, since their initial reanimation, the Graben family and their spawn have become some of his primary minions.

Meredoth has also created a number of snow golems and even developed several magic spells that deal specifically with snow. He used the spell Transmute Snow to Stone to manipulate the rock and permafrost that forms the bedrock of his home on Todestein.

Noncanon Information

The Nocturnal Sea Gazetteer proposed that Meredoth is the darklord of only Nebligtode, the area of the sea immediately surrounding and including the Todstein and Graben islands. The sea itself was was reimagined as a separate domain known as The Drowning Deep.

Meredoth was born to a pair of talented and wealthy wizards in the Alphatian Empire in the outlander world of Mystara. Unfortunately, he received precious little nurturing from either of them. His father was an obsessive constructcrafter with no time to spend upon his child, which he instead entrusted to the care of golems and their like. His mother was a self-absorbed enchanter who found it least bothersome to discipline her irksome child through the use of enchantments.

The Alphatain Empire was a magocracy, and Meredoth met his parents' expectations by demonstrating an aptitude for magic which would ensure his eventual membership in its nobility. The child was drawn in particular to necromancy, which was held to be as valid an avenue of research as any other in the free-thinking realm. In his early teens, Meredoth watched his mother addict herself to the drug tsongha and wither away within a span of a few months. The conclusions that he drew from his childhood were that the flesh was weak and was to be disdained, that arcane craftsmanship could improve upon nature and so was to be valued, and that entities capable of perfect obedience were alone worthy of trust.

The young necromancer's time in school only reinforced these conclusions. His brilliance was recognized and gave his peers reason to overlook his oddities and instead court his goodwill. Soon enough a false friend stole his ground-breaking research into a variant skeletal golem. Meredoth retaliated by addicting him to tsongha. It was a ploy that he would use repeatedly, with the difference that it was now he who stole the work of others, confident that they plotted to do no less to him. In addition to necromancy, Meredoth honed a talent for destructive evocations which served him very well in spell-duels with those who dared question his "honour". Picking his fights carefully, he at at the same time slaked a violent nature that his father had derided as plebeian, and claimed as rightful spoils the spellbooks of his peers.

Meredoth soon graduated to experiments on animals and commoners in pursuit of a predictable and reliable intelligence stripped of the influence of both drives and emotions. He had no ability, however, to wield spells of enchantment which would have been most applicable to this line of inquiry. Ultimately abandoning a direct approach as futile, he instead set to crafting unique constructs and undead with ever greater capacities for rational and intelligent self-direction. These efforts met with far greater success, although the results still fell well short of the mark. The constructs wanted for the potentiality of the living, and the undead retained the perversity and appetites of the living.

The onset of arthritis forced the aging wizard to confront betrayal by his own flesh. He was predisposed to neither the path of lichdom, deeming it beneath his abilities, nor the path of ascension, deeming its demands on his time too great. Instead he opted for the alchemical exilirs that kept the Alphatian elite youthful. Disdainful of the cult of youth that his his mother had worshiped, Meredoth was content to dial back the clock no further than his late sixties.

Politically, the question arose as to what to do with the psychopathic wizard. He would soon be confirmed as a supreme master, but there was no appetite in society to bring him to court (not that Meredoth was very enthusiastic about the prospect of having to so waste his time himself). So upon being confirmed in 633 BC, a barony in the distant wilderness of Norwold was foisted upon him. Although this came as a surprise, Meredoth was pleased enough with the arrangement, believing it would give him all the independence and privacy he desired. In addition, he anticipated the opportunity to plunder a nearby, nascent realm of wizards to add to his stores of arcane lore.

The colonialists sent with Meredoth were left to take care of themselves on the mainland, while the necromancer installed himself on an island that he named Todstein. His research fared well, his vassals faired poorly. They beseeched him for aid. His response of animating their dead and putting them to work in the service of the needs of the living was ill-received. By spring, the colonialists were dead to their last. The obedient dead, however, had not slacked in their efforts and so there was some grounds for hope that a second batch of colonialist might survive the winter. The soil, however, proved to be no more fertile. Death by slow starvation awaited them, as it had their predecessors. On the first day of 635 BC, Meredoth answered the colonists' pleas for aid in person. Food aplenty was distributed to all, and Meredoth promised his subjects would never want again. Unfortunately he meant this literally, as the food was laced with a deadly poison. Meredoth then proceeded to animate the entire community as obedient dead. Snow began to fall, and a blizzard rapidly came into being. The necromancer retreated to Todstein. The island and its master were seized by the Mists. Todstein became one of the two principal islands of the domain of Nebligtode, and Meredoth became the Darklord of this new island of terror.

Meredoth remains locked in his research on Todstein to this day. His abduction from Mystara and his imprisonment within Nebligtode troubles him but little. He plunders the human resources afforded him on Graben Island and ships in the immediate vicinity of Todstein as he sees fit. He is unaware of the curse that has crippled his creativity and effectively reduced him to a tinker. He is all too aware of the inexplicable and loathsome change that has overtaken his spellcasting and partially remade him as a spontaneous spellcaster. He has demonstrated little interest in making sense of his kidnapping and imprisonment beyond a curiosity into the the macabre effects that often attach themselves to his necromantic spells. Still, his knowledge of the Land of Mists has grown with the passing decades. More than ever he takes pleasure in the seizure of the spellbooks of fellow wizards, although the thefts are now mostly effected by his agents. He has populated his island with golems of various sorts, and with corporeal undead, principally lebendtod. Lebendtod are his principal agents on Graben Island, across the Nocturnal Sea, and on the mainland. They are used far less to shape events than to inform him of the rare event that is truly worthy of his attention.

The necromancer assures his survival though the practice of cloning. As a dread possibility, a clone of Meredoth's was brought to independent existence after its entry into the Land of Mists. It fled Nebligtode, personally indulges in the the spell-thieving that Meredoth must effect through his agents, and plots his destruction. Meredoth was himself killed in 737 BC by the same adventurers who laid waste to the Graben family. Meredoth exists today as a clone of himself. His destruction, however temporary, has forced him to bend his attention to a wholesale improvement of the security of his island, of his lairs, of his boltholes and of his person. He will not be so easily embarrassed as second time.

The sole entity that Meredoth treats as being more than a tool is his sentient rod, which he made from a white-fang that he has named Hoarfrost and that he has bonded with in lieu of a familiar. His most useful agent abroad is Colin Graben.

Statistics

Second Edition: male human necromancer 20, Chaotic Evil

3rd Edition:Necromancer 15 / Archmage 5, Chaotic Evil

TSR Collector Card

Meredoth's TSR 1991 Collector Card number is 381.

Data from the Ravenloft Catalogue

		Domains of Dread Ship of Horror Download Now!
		Domains of Dread - pp79 Ship of Horror - front cover, p1 Download Now!
		Domains of Dread - pp79-80 Ship of Horror - p62 Download Now!
		Secrets of the Dread Realms - p7 Domains of Dread - pp79-80 Ship of Horror - pp62-63 Download Now!