The D&D team showed off some of the Darklords appearing in the Ravenloft book. One, Viktra Mordenheim, is a mad scientist, driven by love.
Earlier this week, we got a glimpse of some of the Darklords that will be in the upcoming Ravenloft: The Horrors Within. There were five in all. Including some familiar faces. But you might not know the tale of Viktra Mordenheim, a mad scientist who is driven by love and heartache.
As the Darklord of Lamordia, Viktra Mordenheim represents both heartbreak and hubris. Once, she created something so perfect that it saved the woman she loved. But now she is driven to find it, not to be reunited, but for pride. Pride and her own triumph over death itself. Of course, this is what keeps her trapped in Ravenloft.
Viktra Mordenheim – From Child Prodigy To Mad Scientist
Even in her earliest days, Viktra Mordenheim was fascinated by the complexities of the humanoid body. Born a child prodigy to a minor noble household, Mordenheim grew up with the best education money could buy. And unlike some, who don’t appreciate what they have, Viktra excelled. She quickly grew beyond the tutors and scholars her family could provide.
When she was but a teenager, she became first a doctoral candidate, then a preeminent researcher at a local university. Her understanding of the inner workings of life was almost unnatural, they said. Naturally, her talent and her pursuit of knowledge at the expense of all else earned her few friends. So her reputation for meddling with forces best left alone was an easy one to earn.
And so it might have stayed, if she hadn’t been experimenting unethically. In her quest to conquer death, Mordenheim employed corpse-snatchers to round up fresh subjects. One of her less scrupulous contacts was a woman named Elise.
Elise was reckless and dangerous. But she was free-spirited and spontaneous, too. Everything that Mordenheim wasn’t. And, it goes without saying, she was the most beautiful woman that Viktra had ever met. For a time, love bloomed in Mordenheim’s life.
Tragedy was never all that far away, however. And soon Elise began to show signs of a wasting disease. Dr. Mordenheim’s drive to conquer death became an obsession. Rather than spend what time she had with Elise, she fell even further into her work, experimenting on the living and the dead. Her subjects were often killed and resurrected and killed again as Dr. Mordenheim sought to understand the powers of life and death, of the gods themselves.
Elise fell into an unnatural slumber towards the very end. But Viktra Mordenheim met with success – she had created an artifact known as the Unbreakable Heart. Placing it in Elise’s body, Dr. Mordenheim saw life return to her lover. Only too briefly, as the local constables burst into her lab and tried to capture Mordenheim for her heinous crimes against the living and the dead. Sparks flew. Flames erupted. And in the aftermath, Dr. Mordenheim woke up in Ravenloft with Elise nowhere to be found.
The Darklord of Lamordia
Now, unbeknownst to Dr. Mordenheim, she has become the Darklord of Lamordia. Lamordia is a place of learning and science in Ravenloft. If Dr. Mordenheim could relinquish her obsession, she would be hailed as a hero by the local folk, who revere her knowledge.
But Dr. Mordenheim has no time for the people of Lamordia. The Dark Powers set upon her, twisting her obsession and drive even further. Now she seeks to find Elise. Not to be reunited with her lost love. But to understand the Unbreakable Heart. Her creation. Her triumph over death itself.
Despite all her attempts, she will never repeat it. That feat of scientific immortality will not be recreated. And it is this that drives her in a vicious cycle of experimenting and turning to darker and darker methods to try and snatch success from out of the Mists.
A feat that no one has ever managed. The best one can hope for is to escape the Mists.
But perhaps Dr. Viktra Mordenheim will triumph in the end, and then she’ll teach those fools who dared laugh at her!
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Source: Bell of Lost Souls
