Emmrich Volkarin
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Info
Emmrich Volkarin
Age - 68
Pronouns - He/Him
Sexuality - Dinner first, please
Species: Lich (Human)
Can be found: Nevarra, Thedas
Occupation: Lich Lord of the Mourn Watch, Necromancy Professor
Rank: Arcane Novice
World Number - TH3D5
Emmrich is a powerful entity known as a Lich, a protector tasked with detecting and eliminating any and all threats to his world and the Fade. When he sensed a malicious, powerful disturbance beyond his world, he called upon the assistance of his friends to reach this far and distant world, and he set out to eliminate this threat before it could harm his own world. This brought him in direct contact with one of the Agents of the Multiverse, and after being informed of the Corruption, Emmrich made it his personal (un)life mission to assist in whatever way he could to quell this Corruption before more worlds fell to it.
❂ Positive Traits: Charming, polite, enthusiastic, passionate, highly intelligent, compassionate
❁ Neutral Traits: Formal, bookish, tidy, hygenic, has a dry sarcastic wit, endless fascination with the unknown
❆ Negative Traits: Humorless, socially stilted, persnickety, sensitive, self-absorbed, terrified of dying (yes, the irony is not lost on him)
About
Emmrich Volkarin is a human male from Nevarra on the world Thedas and is a member of the Mourn Watch. In life, Volkarin was a highly respected scholar and a master of necromancy. For most of his adulthood, Emmrich's occupation was as a necromancy professor, teaching up and coming Mourn Watchers all they needed to know of magic, spirits, the undead, and any threats the Mourn Watch is tasked with confronting. Emmrich is an experienced mage and a powerful psychogauge, and his daily tasks included tending to the spirits of the Grand Necropolis, raising undead, performing funerary rites, quelling malicious spirits, and eliminating any and all threats to his world or the Fade. Just seven years ago, Emmrich underwent a series of necromantic rites to ascend to lichdom. As a Lich Lord, he is one of the highest ranking individuals of the Mourn Watch and his duties have expanded to oppose far more dangerous threats beyond what mere mortals are capable of facing on their own.
Emmrich is a bright, cheerful, deeply passionate person with a zest for life and an unflappable optimistic outlook. He is polite, well-mannered, and excessively formal to the point of coming off as snobbish. Despite that, Emmrich is incredibly charming and friendly, and loves to share his knowledge and expertise. Has a passion for botany and alchemy and loves plants and flowers. As a former professor, he is enthusiastic and eager to exchange knowledge and information. He has deep compassion for the people and spirits around him and will always attempt to talk a person down before resorting to violence. However, Emmrich knows where the line is drawn between someone who can be pacified and someone who is an imminent threat and needs to be neutralized. He will not hesitate to use lethal force when he has deemed it necessary. He's an experienced adventurer whose fought his fair share of evil entities and cultists and he knows how to use his arcane powers with devastating efficiency.
He knows necromancers have a bit of a stigma, so he is used to strangers being distrustful of him and his magic. He will, however, attempt to win them over by patiently explaining how the Mourn Watch is a force for good and necromancy is no more dangerous than any other discipline of magic. But constantly having to defend his deep passion can be frustrating and exhausting. He finds cremation an utterly appalling and perplexing practice.
Typical Appearance
HEIGHT - 6'8"
WEIGHT - 130 lbs
EYE COLOR - Green
HAIR COLOR - No (Grey with his glamour)
Emmrich's true appearance is that of a Lich--that is to say, he is a skeleton with glowing green eyes adorned in intricate garb and wearing a golden crown. He wears a various array of bracelets and rings, which are mementos of sentimental events or gifts from loved ones; every piece of jewelry has a story to tell. His voice has a ghostly echoing resonance to it.
Knowing his Lich appearance can be unsettling, Emmrich has crafted a powerful glamour of his mortal form. While the glamour is activated, he appears how he was in life: as an elderly gentleman with a tall, thin frame and grey hair with a sharp widow's peek and a hooked nose. He wears a cream shirt with a green vest, a crimson sash, tan pants, and tall red boots. His glamour dissipates and apparates with a flash of green flames. This glamour cannot be detected by most magic users or with most technology.
Gear & Extras
Emmrich carries little on his person when he goes out for missions. His only noteworthy item of interest is his staff, called Death's Beacon. It acts as a spell focus and arcane amplifier, and enhances Emmrich's necromantic spells against spirits and undead. He can collapse the staff into a walking cane, should he need to keep a more discreet profile. He also carries a few health potions on him for emergencies, as well as a Bag of Holding containing a variety of books and journals for his own record keeping purposes. He is a professor and he is keen to documenting everything he can of the Corruption.
Dragon Age: Veilguard
Fandom - Canon
↢ MOOD BOARD - ⚠️PLAYLIST - ⚠️PLOTTER ↣
Abilities & Weaknesses
❂ Returned Immortal for All Time
Emmrich is a Lich. As such, he is an undead immortal. He does not need to eat or sleep, and he does not age. Though his sense of smell and taste are all but nonexistent, he has gained other senses. He is extremely sensitive to spirits and the weave of the arcane, and he can see into the ethereal plane. He can see a person's life force and peer into their soul, though he cannot read intent or malice.
❂ Adventuring Mage
As a mage, he is well-versed in spell weaving and has an arsenal of basic attacks for fighting against enemies, which include simple attacking spells, shields for deflecting incoming blows, and short-ranged teleportation for dodging (think Misty Step, maximum range of 30 feet)
❂ Corpse Whispering
A gift that manifested with Emmrich's magic. Rare even among necromancers, this gift allows Emmrich to speak to the dead, as long as the corpse has an intact skull. Emmrich can commune with those who have passed on, but the dead are under no obligation to answer truthfully. The dead also only know what they knew in life, so if a murder victim were to not see the face of their murderer, they would still not be able to name their killer. Death can also disorient the soul and their answers may be cryptic and confusing. Fortunately Emmrich has enough experience to make sense of these final messages but clarity is not always guaranteed.
❂ Master Necromancer
Emmrich has a strong rapport with spirits. He can call on them for their assistance with simple tasks, like reaching objects beyond his grasp, getting into small spaces, turning on switches or opening doors, things like that. He can sense arcane energies and presences in the ethereal plane and can raise and control simple undead. Spirits that are hostile or malicious, Emmrich can banish or quell with relative ease. Emmrich also has a few specialty attacks he can use, though these require much more effort and concentration so will be used more sparingly.
❂ Entangling Spirits - Special Attack
Emmrich summons spirits to bind themselves to the target, hindering their movement and locking the target in place for a short while.
❂ The Bell Toll - Special Attack
Emmrich casts a curse on the target, dealing a high amount of necromantic damage on impact and deals prolonged, diminishing damage over time.
❂ Final Rites - Special Attack
Emmrich summons an envoy of the dead, which after a few seconds explodes and damages all enemy within the immediate vicinity.
❂ Time Slow - Special Attack
Emmrich is not a chronomancer by any stretch of the imagination, but all good mages must be well versed in various disciplines. As such, Emmrich can cast a spell that causes everyone (including allies) around him to move much more slowly. This spell lasts for only seven seconds.
❄ Immortal, Not Indestructible
Being immortal does not mean Emmrich can't ever die. Though it takes significantly more effort to kill a Lich, he can still die, usually requiring an extraordinary amount of magic or devastating damage to his physical body. If he does die, special rites must be performed on his remains, or else his soul runs the risk of not passing on. (Instructions on what to do with his body should he die are detailed in the TOP SECRET section of his personnel entry)
❄ Glass Cannon
Emmrich is only human--well, only a Lich, but that's to say, he has no significant talents beyond what his magic is capable of. He doesn't have super strength or super speed, and though he cannot tire by conventional means, his magic still draws on his personal reservoir of mana and he can exhaust himself if he gets too careless flinging around powerful magic.
❄ A Not-So-Friendly Face
Though Emmrich has fully embraced being a Lich, he knows his appearance can upset others. He will almost always default to his glamoured appearance and will only reveal his true form to his most trusted friends, even in combat. He's actually rather shy about admitting his true nature.
History
Emmrich was born in Nevarra to Rupert and Elanora Volkarin. His parents were poor, but they were good people who did what they could to give Emmrich a happy life. Tragically, both his parents perished in a collapsed building when Emmrich was a boy, and orphaned and alone, he was taken in by the Mourn Watch and raised in the Grand Necropolis. There, he took to necromancy like a fish to water and it became his deep passion. He studied extensively for years, quickly rising through the ranks until he became a full-fledged member of the Mourn Watch himself, and from there on, he became a professor. He's published numerous works and is a certified expert on necromancy and the Fade.
Then, during his tenure as a professor, he was approached by a young adventurer named Rook, who asked for his assistance in fighting two Blighted elven gods. As these gods and the Blight posed a threat to upsetting the balance of the Fade, Emmrich eagerly joined on. For months, Emmrich lent his necromantic expertise to combating the elven gods and their fanatic followers, fighting cultists, darkspawn, malicious spirits, and even blighted dragons. In this endeavor, Emmrich became close friends with Rook, and it was with Rook's encouragement that Emmrich finally underwent the final rites and ascended to lichdom. As a Lich, he became all the more powerful and all the more determined to save Thedas. The fight culminated into an epic showdown in the capital city of Minrathous, where Emmrich and the rest of his friends, the Veilguard, defeated the elven gods once and for all and banished the Blight back to the Fade.
Peace fell over the land, and Emmrich returned to Nevarra to resume his sacred duties as a Lich Lord. It was during one of his excursions into the Fade to quell a sudden disturbance that Emmrich detected something deeply sinister and far more powerful than even the Blight. Alarmed, he reported this finding to his fellow Lich Lords, who tasked him with searching for the source of this disturbance and eliminating it. This quest brought Emmrich to a world far beyond his, where he met with an Agent of the Multiverse, and became entwined in the ceaseless war to stop the Corruption for good.
Spirits, The Fade, and The Mourn Watch
Click to Expand
The Fade
The Fade is a metaphysical realm tied to Thedas, but separated by the Veil. It is an extraplanar world of dreams where mortals go when they sleep, and it is the plane where mages draw their magic from. Because the Fade is more about thought, symbols, and concepts, its physical make-up reflects its dream-like state with rocks floating in an ethereal empty space where gravity is a mere suggestion. Everything that exists in the Fade is an expression of thoughts and desires made manifest.
This is, more importantly, the realm where spirits live. Like the Fade, spirits are manifested emotions and are a reflection of the mortal world. Most spirits are benign by nature and prefer to keep to the Fade. The friendliest and most helpful of spirits are spirits of Compassion, Valor, Justice, and so forth.
Not all spirits represent a distinct virtue or vice. The weakest spirits, wisps, are shimmering orbs of light too simple and impressionable to be good or evil. In some cases they appear to be benign, aiding mages who summon them in the mortal realm. Drawing wisps across the Veil is a practice of the Mourn Watch and other necromancers. Wisp wraiths, however, are known to attack anything in sight, and wraiths are scavengers of beings feeding on scraps of thought and unable to shape the Fade.
But any spirit can be twisted and corrupted, just like any emotion in excess can become dangerous. A spirit twisted to the point of malice becomes a demon, a being of violence who has lost all sense and will lash out against any who encounter it. Typical demons include Rage, Despair, Envy, and Fear. These demons may also be innately formed from manifesting those strong negative emotions. Often destructive, they can abuse the minds of dreaming mortals, possess living or dead creatures, or even animate rubble or suits of armor.
In Thedas, ghosts are simply spirits that have retained the memory of a person who has passed; they are not the actual person's soul reduced to an ethereal form. As such, souls and spirits are two distinctly different things.
The Mourn Watch
The Mourn Watch serve as the elite guardians and keepers of the Grand Necropolis and its sacred repository of the dead. They also deal with magic that has gone awry, especially as related to Nevarran funerary rights and corpse possession. They explore the mysteries of life and death and tend to the undead of Nevarra's Grand Necropolis. The accord between undead and the Mourn Watch benefits Nevarrans since Nevarrans use necromancy to preserve history, to keep faith with their dead, and also to enlist the undead as laborers and a supplementary military force.
Another duty is stopping the misuse of dark magic and necromancy. Like any other magic, necromancy can be used for darker purposes, and it is the duty of the Mourn Watch to stop these forbidden practices and confront any malicious necromancers.
Though the Mourn Watch is highly respected in their home of Nevarra, mages elsewhere in Thedas fear them. They believe they are a death cult performing macabre rituals to seize forbidden power. As such, Nevarrans and the Mourn Watch are reclusive by nature and prefer to keep to their own land. It is very rare for a Nevarran to travel beyond their own borders, which makes Emmrich particularly exceptional.
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