Café de Nuit

I'm preparing to run a Ravenloftesque solo for a dear friend of mine online, and I'm working on building the land, using materials scavenged from a number of places. Regards deities, I always use Forgotten Realms ones as a default. In this instance, I Have a Darklord who has been cursed by both Lathander and Chauntea. Now, Lathander has cursed him to become a vampire, and he is even more vulnerable to sunlight than the typical specimen, especially the rays of dawn, which even momentary exposure to will incinerate him. With the coming of dawn, no matter how dark his lair, or how far underground he goes, he always feels like he is burning in agony for the first few hours of it. What I need is a curse from Chauntea, that will make his existance even more of an unliving hell, but won't easily be something that can be used to destroy him. (Ideally, it should be even worse than what Lathander did to him...)

(He sacrificed her chosen, and her unborn child to powers of darkness in exchange for power. Note "powers of darkness" should not be confused with "Dark Powers.")

Perhaps you could go for a ying yang approach?
Since the dawn burns him, perhaps the night freezes him?
By day he is scorched and burned - by night he is hounded by freezing winds that chill his undead flesh. Each moment of his unlife thus is plauged by pain.
Durring the night, he is surrounded by an aura of extreme cold. Frost forms whereever he walks, even light snows follow him when he ventures outside.
By day, however, he radiates extreme heat, burning away the frost and ice in his lair. As a result, his tomb is shrouded in mist formed by steam by day and condencing moisture at night.

Well, since she is the goddess of the world and nature (I think.) You could say that as he harmed nature, nature will harm him.

Give him a specter's unnatural aura, but instead animals in the radious attack him.

Give him the black thumb of an elven vampire.

Finally, have the trees themselves reach out to hinder him, forcing him to use his black thumb.

The black thumb of the Elven vampire is a good idea, except this is a corrupt noble, who isn't likely to care. The animals attacking him might also be good, but Chauntea deals more with plants, and growing things. Good ideas, though!

"By the dawns dim light you shall burn
By the moon you shall stalk the land
All born of the earth shall turn from you
And return to earth in your hand."

All things made of earth based material (stone, wood, glass) will age at a vastly exagetated pace at the vampires touch. Ex: A glass chalace will become britle and tarnished after only a few moments of contact. A wooden chair will rot away into a pile of mulch. Silver and gold will tarnish in mere seconds.

He cannot stay long in any home or castle as the very fundation cracks and rots away leaving the lair in ruins.

That can work! I imagine his castle will have either have constant gangs of workmen about it, or only kept standing due to some unholy power. Thanks!

You can add that into the evil of his domain.

Because his castle needs contant work he uses conscripted slaves to toil constantly in his vast mines and large monster filled forests only to have the goods recovered rot away in less then a months time. Any who break his strict laws are taken into the work gangs while the few nobles make thier wealth off staging "gathering" raids on neighboring domains and selling the workers to the Darklord.

Between the vamparic feedings, crumbling ruins of the castle and exhaustion few of the workers ever see old age.

Hmm, since he sacrificed one of her chosen and her unborn child and since Lathandar is a god of birth, some sort of morbid birth-related curse might be appropriate. Perhaps once per whatever, he is forced to give birth to a Death's Head and filled with wracking pains, reflecting his dark nature. Most of the heads are destroyed in eating their way free of him, but a few escape. During this time, he is too much in pain to strike down his spawn, allowing the head to escape and eventually grow into Death's Head Trees. Perhaps some of the locals have "domesticated" the trees and use them as a source of food as well as to ward off the vampire lord. The vampire darklord might have an unnatural fear or aversion to them that normal vamps have to garlic.

Another curse might be for the vampire lord to have a twisted parternal streak, wanting to spawn as many minions as possible. However, his spawn almost always meet a short death after becoming undead. Perhaps they can only sleep in soil from wild, uncultivated lands and must enscew the protective coffins that are stereotypical of vamps. Perhaps any plants cultivated by humans turn on any of his spawn, temporily transforming into any number of dread plants. Or an order of Chauntea's druids could always locate and destroy the vampire lord's spawn.
A simpler alternative might be to make the vampire lord "barren" by denying him the ability to create spawn.

Van Owen wrote:The black thumb of the Elven vampire is a good idea, except this is a corrupt noble, who isn't likely to care. The animals attacking him might also be good, but Chauntea deals more with plants, and growing things. Good ideas, though!

Actually, while the black thumb does kill plants, it also forces the vampire to feel the plants agony as it dies, so he would care.

As he stands at this moment, I have him having everything made of bone, as that is one of the few materials that will tolerate his touch. In a way, it works to his advantage, as it allows him to get the most out of each corpse--food and raw material. It also gives me an interesting NPC to create, the craftsman who makes all the bone items.

Your point about being barren is good--Lathander hates undead--transformation is intended as punishement, not free reign to create more of his ilk.

I want his castle to crumble much more slowly than other things, but it does decay at an alarming rate, and is helped along by nature. Creepers assail the walls, providing natural ropes, moss covers the crumbling floors, while mold takes hold wherever it can, including in his coffin of bone and leather. These provide him with constant reminders of Chauntea's contempt.

You might have him come across a large deposit of fossilized dinosaur bones thereby giving him some large materials from which to build larger things like buildings.