Samuel
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Joined: 18 Apr 2010
Posts: 103
Tue May 11, 2010 3:33 am |
 Post subject: Vanguars |
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Vanguars
[Imagined By: raynor.foxhound/ Samuel]
Name: Vanguars
Classification: Death/Dark
Rarity: They are a very rare race and are mainly known through the telling of stories that detail the destruction they typically bring to the land.
Lifespan: They can potentially live forever by stealing the life force of others, having no limit to their own life span.
Appearance: Vanguars are, surprisingly, very human-like in appearance with hardly any kind of distinguishing features that set them apart from typical humans. However, Vanguars seem to emit an aura of dread around them, making people sensitive to such emissions fear and avoid them, even causing some to grow sicker the closer they are to them. If anything, Vanguars typically have a fascination with imagery that represents death, such as skulls and black roses, but this is more preference then anything else.
There are some Vanguars, however, that have become so old and powerful that they have become the very image of death itself, their own powers of death which they draw from a source known as 'Hegalia' can corrupt their bodies beyond redemption. It is these Vanguars that are usually talked about and feared, becoming the epitome of evil itself in most people’s minds.
Strengths: Powerful Vangtheology, Formidable Warriors, and Ability to Steal the Life Force of Others.
Weaknesses: Universally Despised and Feared, Vangtheology can kill them if they are reckless, weak to symbols and liturgies that represent life.
Skills/Abilities: Vanguars use the death magic known as Vangtheology, powerful spells meant to strip the life from all living things. So long as they are willing to pay Tribute in the form of their own life force, they can access Hegalia to use powerful spells that can eradicate life on a massive scale. Due to the nature of their spells, Vanguars strive to steal the life force of others so they can maintain safe access to Hegalia. While this usually means that young Vanguars are somewhat vulnerable and easily overcome, the older and more experienced Vanguars usually have a massive store of stolen life force to use as many spells as they want.
To be more specific, they are able to steal the life force of other creatures. This results of the victim's body seeming to get smaller, the skin and body getting wrinkled, shriveling up as their energy is sucked away. The blood within the victim's body dries up completely inside. Extremely powerful spells from the most experience of Vanguars can bring an epidemic in a village with a few words or steal a whole cities life force within a moment. But this can only be done by the most powerful of their kind.
The most common spells are to cause weakness in a person's body by touch by stealing their energy. Another common spell is their 'Hathos', which is their shadow that they can send out to devour people. It becomes a physical creature made of black shadows that eat people's life source. With it's large mouth filled with drooling fangs and large claws, they can't be described anything less than terrifying. It returns with its belly filled and gives half of the energy to their master.
General Personalities: Vanguars, when explained by others, are the classic villains; the evil, powerful necromancer that causes untold destruction who is eventually defeated by a cadre of adventurers, turning them into heroes. However, Vanguars tend to be more complex then that and are typically the ones to emerge victorious over the adventurers who attempt to kill them.
Vanguars are typically sardonic, vain people, very selfish and, at times, very evil. Their magic makes them thirst for life force in a very similar way that those inflicted with vampirism crave blood, driving them to perpetuate all types of evil to satisfy their dark hunger. Knowing the fearsome power that lies at their fingertips, they are usually cool, confident, and calm, always maintaining a threatening appearance to intimidate the ‘lesser’ individuals around them. When pressured, they usually resort to incredible defiance, stubbornly refusing to admit defeat and using everything at their disposal to destroy the threat before them.
For all their worshiping of death and the power it brings, Vanguars are genuinely afraid of dying themselves; in their belief, those of their kind that die are destined to fade into nothingness, never to return. The fear of death and non-existence is usually enough to make a weakened Vanguars admit defeat and escape, preferring the stigma as a coward as opposed to absolute oblivion.
History: Interestingly enough, the first Vanguars were, in fact, clerics that served an obscure god of healing and redemption whose name has been lost to the ages. The clerics, however, soon became corrupt with their power and lost sight of what their path was, resulting in a loss of faith which effectively ‘killed’ their god as a result. With the loss of their deity and the divine powers that were granted by him, the clerics began to panic and sought new ways to regain their power, since no other god would take in such an unfaithful lot.
Then, by some random chance, their search produced a being known as the Necrotheos (The Dead God), a dark and weak being whose world, the Hegalia, had long since been overwhelmed by the power of death. With no life to be found and consumed by him, the once phenomenally powerful deity was left in an incredibly pathetic state, unable to ‘die’ and consigned to suffer forever due to his lack of foresight.
Seeing a mutually beneficial opportunity between the two, the Necrotheos offered the fallen clerics access to the powers that had destroyed his world in exchange for their own life force as tribute. Accepting the terms of the Necrotheos, the fallen clerics were unbound from their preset lifespans and infused with the powers of death, granting them the power they craved for.
Thus, the Vanguars were born.
Interesting Facts: Like most religions, Vanguars have their very own Armageddon that predicts the end of their kind. In their belief, the god of healing and redemption they abandoned and ‘killed’ would return in the form of an ordinary Vanguars himself, though he would fight against them and their evil ways every chance he could. Eventually, he would redeem the entire race by severing their connection to the Hegalia, pacifying them and freeing them from the threat of oblivion, resulting in all the Vanguars being eliminated from the world.
However, it should be noted that this is a ‘prediction’ as opposed to a ‘prophecy.’ As such, the events are not set in stone and Vanguars, preferring their dark power over the redemption their former god seeks to provide them, are very careful to find such traits in any of their kind. Such people who display those traits are immediately killed, just in case.
It should also be noted that even though Vanguars have very close ties with the concept of death, they are far from being as such; Vanguars are very much alive and, surprisingly, have a certain hatred for the Undead since they do not possess any life force for them to take. Their hatred even extends into the auras they emit, weakening lesser Undead around them and even destroying the most basic of them. Superior Undead, however, are typically unaffected by this effect, more of an annoyance to them then anything else.
Aging: Vanguars do not age. |
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