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Gaynor

Page history last edited by Hal! 13 years, 7 months ago

Soulslayer the Dreaded

 

(formerly Prinz Gaynor Teufel das Verdammte)

Daemon Prince of Chaos Undivided

Former Master of the Order of the Fiery Heart

 

Soulslayer 2 

First Appearance: Siege on Bachendorf Keep

Status: Active.

If there is one primary antagonist in the Legacy of the Gods campaign, it is Soulslayer. His plans have been in opposition to the Heroes since the formative early period of the campaign.

 

Pictures

 

Tropes

The following tropes are associated with Gaynor:

 

Big Bad - He's been the top baddie in numerous plot arcs, and has been in some way connected to the conspiracies of several others' main villains. There are certainly bigger bads in the Warhammer universe than this guy, but he's very probably the archvillain of this particular campaign short of the four Ruinous powers themselves.

Captain Ersatz - He began (obviously) as a slightly tweaked version of Michael Moorcock's recurring multiversal antagonist but has diverged widely from the source material over the years. With the sheer amount of stuff that Warhammer stole from Moorcock, it's not like one more theft would draw any attention...

The Chessmaster - Yeah.

Cursed With Awesome - He was cursed with immortality and compelled to walk the earth, but not just the sort of immortality that means not getting older. No, he was unable to die at all. Who wants to live forever? He did, but not as a puny human. See, his "curse" also prevented him from ascending to daemonhood or deteriorating into chaos spawn. Poor guy.

Hero Killer - He has killed several player characters over the course of the campaign, as well as killed or incapacitated a number of major setting figures or NPCs. There's a reason that he's also known as the Bane of Kings. He's probably the one major villain that the heroes would rather not face in a straight fight.

Hidden Agenda Villain - The heroes initially had no idea what his real objective was. They knew that he was a Champion of Undivided Chaos and that he had engineered at least one major Chaos Incursion, but he also didn't seem especially bothered when they whacked the leader of that very incursion, but rather simply complimented them on defeating Gunderit and retreated. He also acted in ways that seemed inexplicable to the players, and seemed to beinvolved in secondary ways in a number of other villains' plots. When they DID realize what he was really after, things got worse.

Locked Out of the Fight - Gaynor did this to the rest of the heroes via force fields to facilitate a "duel" with Cassandra.

Man Behind the Man - He was this a lot - a number of plots involved him hijacking another villain's plot. However, initially Gaynor was an inversion of this trope: Gaynor was presented as the Dragon to Octavius Mors Gunderit, but was pulling the Warlord of Khorne's strings the whole time.

McGuffin Delivery Service - The Crystal of Water. This was the only one of the four Crystals of Power that the PCs even had a shot at getting before him, and he let them bust past its defenses then waltzed in and snatched it. Bastard.

Moral Event Horizon - He was a major villain long before this event, but operated almost entirely through proxies (several of which established themselves quickly as Complete Monsters) and his own evil deeds mostly consisted of gloating and offstage villainy. He didn't cross this in play until he engineered the McGuffin Delivery Service situation mentioned above such that he could separate the pregnant Cassandra from the rest of the party for a solo duel (the first time any PC actually got to cross swords with him directly). During the duel, he made a point of not carving her up with his magic sword but drew a mace with his off-hand and beat her brutally with it, ending up bashing her in the stomach and using his telescoping arm to propel her into a wall, causing her to have a miscarriage and subsequent Heroic BSOD. While forcing the rest of the heroes to watch in impotent fury, and her husband to pound on the force barrier in incoherent fury. He got away scot-free.

Rubber Man - this is restricted to his arms, but he can stretch them to remarkable distances... and his armor stretches with him!

Scary Impractical Armor - Totally.

Xanatos Gambit - He's pulled several of these off, both of the sort where he really did want the final outcome and some where the final outcome wasn't precisely what he wanted, but was still beneficial to him. Some of his schemes have definitely at least bordered on Xanatos Roulette.

  • Manipulating Imrian Shadow-weaver into summoning him into the material world to supposedly bind Soulslayer into giving him counsel and material assistance to defeat the Heroes of the Hammer before Imrian's first encounter with them. He persuaded Imrian to target Cedric as possibly the most dangerous single hero, then had him teleport Cedric, Cassandra and Richelle into the underworks of Athgorond so that Imrian, Imrian's minions and Gaynor himself could play a vicious game of cat-and-mouse with them. The purpose of this manipulation? To get Imrian to use the mage-bane venom on Cedric and force him to choose between death (which would have removed Cedric from the equation permanently and left both Cassandra and Richelle in Imrian's clutches with the other heroes none the wiser) and lichedom (which would make informing his compatriots of the ladies' plight and effecting a rescue a possibility, but would leave him an undead shell riddled with corruption). Either way, Gaynor was sure to get something that he wanted. The final result of the heroes curbstomping Imrian and taking his flying castle was an entirely acceptible outcome, and helped set up Uhlrik to use that castle to show up at the Blighted Isle some time later...
  • Another example came about in the Bretonnian Gambit storyline, where he lured the Heroes into pursuing him into Bretonnia and storming the castle of King Charles. He planned all along to allow Uhlrik to "overpower" him and perform the act needed to remove his curse of being eternally trapped in earthly immortality after he had absorbed the power of Arianka, which would allow him to ascend to a higher plane of existence and join the ranks of the gods as their equal. The heroes' arrival before he could complete the sacrifice that would allow him to devour the Law Goddess was irksome but not insurmountable, as his retinue was keeping them rather handily at bay. King Charles screwed this up by charging at the heroes, thus spoiling the Bretonnian Standoff and spurring a battle royal in the middle of Gaynor's as-yet incomplete ritual. Naturally, Gaynor killed him on the spot. In a battle that killed or incapacitated all but two of the heroes (and gravely wounded those two), Gaynor's curse was stripped from him, thus theoretically making him mortal enough to kill but leaving both Uhlrik and Cassandra too weak to actually do the deed and thus setting him up to kill them and then finish the ritual as planned. The Dark Gods, however, were not amused (or were they?) at his hubris, and now that he was mortal again they decided to finally grant him the reward he had earned with his centuries of havoc and manipulation by sucking him kicking and screaming into Hell then turning him into a daemon prince, which conveniently prevented him from absorbing Arianka's power and thus becoming their peer. So even though he failed to get what he really wanted, he did get the wildest dream of all Chaos Champions with egos smaller than his own (read: all of them). Not a bad consolation prize, all things considered.

You Have Failed Me - He turned his right hand man into Chaos spawn after years of faithful and mostly successful service for failing to take Ludwig and Cassandra down. He also rather casually killed his catspaw King Charles de la tete d'or III, King of Bretonnia for charging thoughtlessly at the heroes, thus messing up the rather careful balance of the Mexican Standoff that Gaynor was using to buy time for his gamebreaking ritual.

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