Darklords

Think of darklords of Ravenloft. Terrible but cunning monsters that rule over human villages and creatures of the night.

WHat are cool examples of ones beside the obvious: Death knight, a lich, vampire lord and king of the werewolves.

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vimeo.com/102372269
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bit different from deathknights, but a hellknight is always nice.

Dragons (the classic)
Beholders (one effectively rules Waterdeep in Forgotten Realms)
Rockefellers (you get the idea)

Gods.

vimeo.com/102372269

My go-to is an almost exact !Not!Ghengis Orc warlord, right down to the incremental shift from chieftain to emperor, the mass-rape, and progressive social reforms.

Banshee queen.

Death Slaad.

Sentient Not Frankstein's monster loaded with concealed world war 2 weapons.

A death knight that has been displaced from his original setting because the dark powers just really wanted to fuck with him after he's done everything wrong.

False friend of the protagonist revolutionary who usurps the feudal system and establishes them-self as the megalomaniac leader of a corrupt oligarchy.

>hellknight
paladins of law. Fuck they sound interesting.
Can be fused with . to emanate an aura of Law.

Obsessed monster slayer killing even benevolent non-humans

Changeling who kills and replaces the local ruler

Goblin King who lives in the center of a labyrinth

A Knight of Hell, escaped from said Hell to rule over some local village, could be really interesting. I could even see it being a very safe and profitable town, just with a crushing atmosphere and one of endless military drill and total populace participation in methods to help them combat demons and keep pure. You could end up with an entire town of grayish Hell Knight people with a super hostile outlook on anyone who doesn't tow the line and fuck off from their careful paradise. Could make for a flavorful locale or hidden town with valuable goods and info.

I dare you to make an interesting darklord of something with a pumpkin head.

Easy. He's an amalgam horror of all the souls of dead children, stuck inside the lantern head like a black hole. The head is likely a demon artifact, or even a former demon's head. It's not a fiendish being now, but just a crazed one, as child after child fuses into it and adds to its confused form and thoughts. The souls of so many children through a demonic focus means massive power, so it reigns as a pretty capricious being, maybe even defended and cared for by its populace victims who are mad but understand enough to want to show mercy.

Some form of the headless horseman

Batman but he just went full insane instead of kinda.

How many timelines did this happen in as compared to him just barely hanging on is the real question

Aboleth and Illithid are similar in themes but very different in appearance for a darklord. Human sacrifice/experimentation, mind control, insidious eldritch influences etc.

A lot.
Like a lot a lot.

Hi Delita.

A very skilled orc.

I always like the idea of
1d4chan.org/wiki/Count_Joe_Kürbisgärtner

A thematic army behind a redneck farmer.

Do you know of other neat/funny WHFB army ideas? Stuff like Goblin circus.

Stalin, he played Ravenloft Darklord 'This shit is real' edition in Russia for a few decades. Vlad Drakov of the Falkovnia domain is somewhat inspired by him.

At least post a picture from the actual book cover.
Yes it is an actual book about Stalin isekai and conquering the other world.

Is this translated?

ya know, I'm pretty sure thats just what Soth is going through

Lord Soth isn't a Darklord. He was briefly, but the Dark Powers realized they'd made a mistake and so ditched him back to Krynn, where literally everyone pretends that it never happened (and thanks to rampant time travel, it legitimately might not have).

See, to be a Darklord, you have to be more than an evil bastard who did something unspeakable. You have to be an evil bastard who did something unspeakable and DON'T THINK IT WAS WRONG TO HAVE DONE SO, and are in fact fundamentally incapable of ever admitting that you might have been wrong. You need hubris in frankly legendary quantities.

Lord Soth is an evil bastard, yes, but he punishes himself already, on a nightly basis, over what he did and fully admits that he was wrong. So the Dark Powers drew him into the Land of Mists, but then only kept him for a few years at most because all he did was sit in his castle and mope, not doing anything interesting, and outright admitted that he'd fucked up and shouldn't have done what he did. So the Dark Powers sent him back.

Then the time travel.

>tfw slav
>tfw mom is a fantasy book illustrator
>has to deal with shitty isekai and other bottom of the barrel generic fantasy all the time
>often can hear exhausted moans like "oh god, another elfaniel" from the other room

Hag Queen
Genies or Rakshasa
An evil Empyrean who walked into town and declared himself king.
A Ghast and his band of Ghouls
A Grimlock Cannibal Priest
A Kraken whose cult controls the local port
A Lamia hoarding all the wealth and art in a trade city.

Similar to a lich but a worm-that-walks. Bonus points for going full Oogie Boogie and giving him a gambling problem.

I hear exhausted moans from your mom in her room pretty often too.

Nothing.

There is a strange landmass that echoes like a roaring beast at the whim of the weather, everyone fears the natural feature and fight tooth and nail to keep it appeased - sacrifices, curfews, militant law enforcement, false prophets, whatever.

Players find out the truth and try and explain it only to be attacked as charletans and the people they are working to save fall victim to the backfire effect in an absurd way.

At one point Earth-51 was a utopian universe with no more super crime because Batman snapped after Jason Todd died, then went on a murder spree against Super Villains. The other Heroes couldn't stop him, and eventually all the remaining Super Villains turned themselves in to avoid getting put in the ground. Then Batman just went underground and waited for super crime to pop up again. It was probably retconned out of existence though.

>Hag Queen
controlling convenant of lesser hags.

Or a Banshee queen.
Controlling banshee and ghosts.


A headless knight controlling an army of floating heads?

No mummies?

FUCKING MUMMYLORDS BRAH.

Don't forget that the core of the Darklords is not that they are rulers, it's that they are prisoners. Each one of them was tested and found wanting and, most of all, can't admit they did wrong.

What does her domain look like?

Nazi Elf Dictator

I'm impressed so many people here know who the Dark Lords are.

But do you know what the Dark Powers are?

Brain in a Jar.

Grease, sugar and salt.

Bruh do you even whistle on a blade of grass?

>everyone else see's this as a Delita call out
>my first thought was "...Napoleon wasn't corrupt though"

A husk of a thing that used to be a man, a puppet and new toy of the Dark Powers. Constantly hunting and harvesting souls, with the help of it's hellhound minions and the
souless undead bodies of those it has slain.

Previously unknowable horrors from beyond the veil who seek to punish mortals for terrible crimes.

As of CoS, they're PROBABLY the vestiges of dead gods imprisoned in the Amber Temple, and more actively try to tempt people into doing wrong.