Name: Captain Argus Fellborn, the Red Tide
Gender: Male
Appearance: Look sharp, lads, there's blood ahead!Abilities:Having spent decades engaging in piracy across the seas, Captain Fellborn is a highly skilled sailor and fighter, particularly with swords, firearms, and polearms. His blood magic allows him to turn blood into an explosive substance much like gunpowder, allowing him to fire flintlocks and cannons, fill grenades, and breach doors. However, this technique can injure its wielder and thus must be used very carefully.
Captain Fellborn also has an affinity for necromancy, particularly the raising and control of corporeal undead. At the height of his power, he and his thralls were able to command a ship's crew worth of undead and make them perform the often complicated tasks of running a ship. His greatest necromantic feat was infusing undeath into the dead wood that composed his ship, the
Silent Swordbill, giving it a very simple, impulsive un-life enabling it to move its own sails and rudder, open and close doors and hatches, and sometimes just creak unnaturally. His powers have diminished during his sleep, however, and now he finds himself struggling to control more than a few undead at a time.
The perpetual scarcity of talent that pirate crews face has also demanded that over the years, Captain Fellborn has picked up on a few additional skills important to a ship's crew such as carpentry, nautical navigation, and cadaver surgery. Unfortunately, despite being fully aware of how effective steam propulsion is, the intricacies of steam technology elude him.
Personality:Captain Fellborn is a firm believer in the power of fear. He cultivated the image of a vicious reaper of souls whose jolly roger signaled a fate worse than death for those who resisted. In truth, he was not cruel but rather ruthlessly pragmatic. A foe too cowed to resist meant more blood and no losses, and when he did take losses, it was prudent that he conscript some replacements, via necromancy or enthrallment, to keep his crew at full strength. In person, he believed in fellowship among sailors and treated his thralls like brothers and sisters and in turn commanded them to always speak their mind. It wasn't like he had to worry about mutiny or treachery, after all.
On the matter of humans, Captain Fellborn believes that they should be treated as a resource to not be over-harvested, like fish or whales. They must be kept in fear of vampires, but also afforded the understanding that it is in their best interest to not resist. They must neither gain the nerve to fight back nor despair so much that they decide they have nothing to lose by resisting.
As one might expect from a pirate, Captain Fellborn is very fond of gold, silver, and copper. He does not hoard it in chests, however, but rather he melts precious metals down and uses them to cast and plate weapons, from sword blades to cannon barrels. Since gaining immortality, he has become very conscious about how easily iron perishes to rust, and likes for his weapons to be able to withstand the toll of time.
Bio:Captain Fellborn was once a sailor serving aboard the
Silver Swordbill, a merchant ship that moonlighted as a smuggling vessel. His background was nothing special- his father and grandfather were both sailors, and he followed in their footsteps. During one trip, he noticed an inconsistency in the ship's cargo- an unknown crate not recorded or logged- something that was abnormal even for a smuggling job. Concerned that one of the crew might be skimming or pulling a job on the side without sharing the profits with the crew, he peeked into the crate to see what the contents were. The crate contained a vampire, tightly restrained by silver shackles. The vampire offered the man a deal, swearing by Ichor and the Violet Witch to grant him vampirism in exchange for releasing him. The sailor, hesitant to take this deal, went to the captain to report this terrifying discovery.
The captain, evidently wanting to bury the evidence, ordered the sailor to be killed, falsely accusing him of theft. In desperation, the sailor fought his way below deck and broke the vampire's shackles. The vampire slew the entire crew aside from the sailor that freed him. True to his word, he enacted the ritual to turn the sailor into a vampire, giving him a new name- Argus Fellborn.
Over the next ten years, Argus was brought into vampire society, learned to master his new form, and eventually parted ways with his sire. On the anniversary of the
Silver Swordbill's disappearance, the ship returned, refitted as a ghastly pirate ship with an undead crew and a new name- the
Silent Swordbill. Over the years, the ship gained a reputation as a dreaded ghost ship, which would appear only at night or during heavy fog, demanding blood and treasure from its victims. In addition to plundering merchant ships, he also attacked naval vessels, but to these ships he made no demands, accepted no parlays, and gave no quarter. Occasionally, he'd find someone who was willing to sign the pirate articles and submit to enthrallment, and with every thrall, his crew became stronger.
Even the dreaded Red Tide, however, was compelled to serve the queen and Ichor, and it so happened that he was called upon to deliver a sealed package across the sea, and to not allow anything to stop him from getting it to the recipient. Unfortunately, it was during this smuggling operation that the Hundred Paladins finally caught up to the elusive pirate. During a storm, a powerful steam frigate intercepted the
Silent Swordbill, and the ghost ship's sails could not match the swiftness of its foe's steam propulsion. Captain Fellborn managed to escape after a hard-fought battle that left the frigate's steam engine heavily damaged, but he had to sacrifice most of his crew, including every last one of his thralls To make matters worse, one of the enemy marines had managed to steal one of his most valued possessions- an enchanted compass that always pointed in the direction of the
Silent Swordbill.
After making the delivery, Captain Fellborn concluded that it was only a matter of time before the Paladins tracked him down, and there wasn't going to be enough time to rebuild his crew. There was another matter that weighed on him- while he may have hidden it well, sacrificing his faithful thralls to ensure the mission's success was the most agonizing thing he had ever done. He had no choice in the matter- the queen and Ichor must be served, at any cost- but it didn't make the loss any less painful. With the Paladins having gained the ability to track his ship, it was only a matter of time before he joined them in death.
Instead of getting ready for a final stand, or attempting to flee, he sailed up and down the coast, burying caches of cannons, armaments, and gunpowder, each with a plank of wood from the ship. If the planks were able to fool the compass, it'd slow them down long enough for him to give them the slip. If not, then his buried treasure would secure a legacy more immortal than vampirism. While burying the final cache, however, the paladins finally caught up to him. The pirate captain chose to face them alone, ordering his skeleton crew to return to the ship and raise anchor. It was a good way for a pirate to met his end, he thought as his foes finally overwhelmed him...
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