The Headless Horseman

Overview

The darklord of the Winding Road. He seeks his lost head (see: Headless Horseman's Head). The Headless Horseman is a legendary figure throughout the Core and beyond, with an endless number of possible local variant origin stories.

The Headless Horseman carries a wicked sickle that can cleave a person's head off with any clean blow. He is not inhibited by most spells that impede movement, and he is unaffected by turning. The Horseman's fearsome activities have not gone unnoticed, as he is a subject of fear spoken of in ghost stories in at least the domain of Borca.

The First and the Last to Follow

Just because the Headless Horseman has passed does not mean the danger is over. The First to Follow, a mob of reanimated heads of the Horseman's past victims, usually swarm the survivors of the Horseman's attacks en masse. The truly unfortunate survivors of this second wave have to face a third wave of attacks from The Last to Follow. The Last to Follow is a group of flying reanimated heads but instead of normal humanoid heads, they are the heads of medusae and maedar.

Activities During the Grand Conjunction

The Headless Horseman played a strange and anomalous role in the Grand Conjunction. Apparently serving the interests of Azalin, the Horseman began riding around causing havoc in order to lure out a group of heroes who would ultimately be used by Azalin to manipulate Hyskosa's Hexad. The heroes were directed to fight the Horseman by Soldani, where they were ultimately defeated and decapitated, and their heads delivered to Azalin through unknown means.

As out of character as it is for the bogeyman-like Headless Horseman to seemingly work for another darklord's benefit, this was not the only anomaly. Instead of the usual Last to Follow, the final wave of the Horseman's barrage was a group of bounding beholders that finished off the last of the survivors of the Horseman's attack.

In Tales of Ravenoft

The Headless Horseman appears in the Tales of Ravenloft short story The Freak, where the Horseman doggedly pursues the disfigured hermit known as Anatole the Freak while at the same time acting as the poor soul's guardian.

Data from the Ravenloft Catalogue

		Darklords
		From the Shadows - p58 Download Now! Darklords - p6
		From the Shadows - p7 Download Now! Darklords - pp44-47
		Tales of Ravenloft:The Freak - pp222-250 From the Shadows - pp5-8 Download Now! Darklords - pp44-47
		Headless Horseman, The Headless Horseman