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Rakshasa rajas (Read 23 times)
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Rakshasa rajas
10/10/05 at 20:52:22
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I was going to stat him out, but I've moved to another project right now, and the Ghul Lord PrC needs a lot of work before it's remotely balanced.
 
Ak-Yama, male undead-grafted ak-chazar rakshasa
Ghul Lord 10/Pale Master 10
Chaotic Evil

 
Before you is a tall, albino rakshasa swathed in silken robes, mantles, and scarves the color of night. From its broad, lumpy shoulders four heads grow; a bare human skull with long, dripping fangs and a serpentine neck; an emanciated hyena of incredible size, with a slavering jaw, patchy fur, and mottled skin shining with a nauseating yellow light; a cadaverous white tiger with an intelligent-looking brow; a monstrous, predatory humanoid with thick, tangled hair, bone-white pock-marked skin stretched tight against its bones, and powerful jaws that look like they could snap a bull's femurs in half with ease. From its strangely malformed shoulders sprout also four arms; one is desiccated and leathery; one is pale and rubbery, gaunt but filled wtih obvious strength; one is entirely bare of flesh; one is waxy and gray and massively muscled. Cold, cruel light glows in most of its eye sockets, although one of the tiger's eyes is dry and unmoving, while the other, alone in the creature, seems alive. On each of its heads it wears a golden crown decorated with a single black gem. Four scimitars hang at his side, each gilded hilt tipped with a similar ebon stone. He chants the eldritch words of a spell, and for a  moment his heads seem to gain back their lost life and vitality while the air seems to thin, replaced with the taste of ash, salt, and dust.
 
Ak-Yama was an ak-chazar rakshasa, a master of undeath. Now he is a raja, a prince of his kind, and he has progressed so far from his original caste without reincarnation, something unthinkable by most of his race. Ak-Yama belongs to a heretical sect of rakshasas who believe that advancement from one caste to another is possible within a single lifetime, something that doesn't endear him to his fellows, but what did he care? He was an ak-chazar anyway, a speaker to the dead. Despite their power, they are considered untouchable by other rakshasas anyway - something to use, but not something to associate with. What did he have to lose?
 
Ak-Yama owes his puissance to his four wives, each of the Great Ghul race. The great ghuls were once of a minor race of geniekind - either the jann or some now-extinct offshoot - before they were all corrupted by the curse of the hungry dead, becoming in their devious, fallen ways personifications of necromancy. It was to these corrupt creatures that the ak-chazar rakshasa descended. In exchange for feeding each of his brides one of his limbs - the two arms and two legs he had at the time - they taught him secrets of necromantic power that even he, an adept of a caste that has specialized in the study of the magic of death since the beginning of time, had not known existed.
 
Ak-Yama is now festooned with undead grafts, which have more than replaced his missing limbs. He has also grafted on several new heads, including the head of a great ghul, a dark naga, and a shoosuva - a sort of undead hyena - stolen from the Abyssal lord Yeenoghu. Ak-Yama is the master of his new heads, although they have intelligence of their own, and secrets they keep from him.
 
Ak-Yama must occasionally spar with demons sent by Yeenoghu to harry him, but Yeenoghu's own feud with Baphomet takes precedence in the demon lord's eyes.
 
Many ak-chazar have come to serve Ak-Yama, reveling in the idea that he was once of their kind, though the ghuls have not chosen another to teach since then and Ak-Yama holds his secrets close. He also has many rakshasa sorcerers, naztharune, and warriors in his armies, though by far the bulk of his troops are undead.
 
Although his tutilage among the Great Ghuls caused his alignment to shift to Chaos, Ak-Chazar still rules from Acheron, on a cube filled with plague-wasted jungle foliage. The other faces of his cube are ruled by other rajas, with whom he has reached a tenuous peace. Still he is strongly considering a move to the negative inner planes, where he hopes he can continue his rise to greater power unfettered by the ambitions of his fellow rajas.
 
Grafts: Bonemail, Enervating Arm, Mummified Eye, Paralyzing Arm, Weakening Arm, deathbringer arm, matched pair of legs from an Abyssal ghoul.
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Gods will be dragged
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Re: Rakshasa rajas
Reply #1 - 10/10/05 at 20:54:03
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Minakshi, Maharani of Light and Illusion
 
In Acheron, in a certain group of cubes, there dwelled a race of evil spirit-creatures who had been waging a different kind of war, their battleground the mortal world, their primary foe the race called Man. Called the rakshasas, they were said to have been born from the primal rage of the multiverse against those mortals hubristic enough to think they controlled it, but most now lived disciplined existences under their great rajas.  
 
Pan closer, now, back to that particular island-sized cube, one face seemingly covered in lush jungle foliage and rain forest like the others in its cluster. Masked by centuries of growth are the ruins of a city. Once it must have been a great factory of pain, a place of vile learning and study; now it is shattered rubble and ash. Perhaps the magics of its natives failed, and the city was struck directly by another cube.
 
This is an illusion.
 
In reality the city is as thriving as ever, cleaned daily of all refuse by diligent slaves. The ministries of agony still function; stolen souls still wait in long lines to be devoured.
 
And there are illusions within illusions: few of the city's inhabitants know of how they appear to outsiders. Fewer still know who truly leads them. The rakshasas remember Khara the mighty, brother of Ravana himself, with his twin ass heads and seven tiger heads. Khara's supplicants believe they bow to him and offer him daily tribute. They are wrong.
 
Two-and-a-third centuries ago, a rakshasa princess named Minakshi, daughter of Kuvera who ruled the rakshasas before Ravana, conquered the city and burned it to the cube, leaving only rubble and ash. At least, that's the perception she allows the outside worlds. Within, the coup was bloodless and completely unnoticed. Minakshi, with her inner circle, rules in utter secrecy, for of all rakshasa rajas her mastery of illusions and deception is supreme.
 
Yet she has allowed knowledge to leak out that somewhere, among the battle-plains of Acheron, a rakshasa Court of Light and Illusion exists. The mystery that surrounds it has made it even more feared throughout the planes. The few rakshasa raiders that come out of it are not connected with the Court itself; they themselves have no idea of their link to that fabled city. Neither are they connected with the city most of the planes believe destroyed; illusions mask the name the raiders use so that responsibility goes to one of a dozen others.  
 
The rakshasas of the hidden city know only of the great prosperity their lord has brought them, and the amazing success they have in their wars against the inhabitants of the Material Plane. And this, too, is mostly an illusion. Minakshi conserves her troops, giving them the sensation of victory when normally they fight only phantasms of her creation, in illusory worlds she has prepared. She wants to have as large a force as possible when the time comes.  
 
It is true, of course, that occasionally a rakshasa will be seen to fall. Sometimes this means that Minakshi has seen fit to execute this wretch for having learned too much. Sometimes it means she has decided to let the troublemaker into her inner circle, revealing just enough knowledge to make him useful in controlling others. With the city believing a rakshasa dead, the special operative moves in secret in a thousand different shapes.
 
One city on one cube, of course, is never enough to satisfy Minakshi's ambitions. Ultimately she wants them all; the whole plane must fall to her lies, and then who knows?  
 
This is the dream that Khara himself lives. Far from being killed by Minakshi, she uses him to fulfill her fantasies by proxy, at least within her illusions. Daily the triumphs of Khara grow more extravagant; beyond his sight Minakshi watches the illusion only they share, and imagines that it her puppet is herself.
 
So it is that for the first time the mystery surrounding the Court of Light and Illusion has broken, a tiny bit, and an ambassador is allowed to come to the City of Brass. A treaty with one of the most fabled of the rakshasa courts; surely the Sultan would be interested? The Maharani has such sights to show him...
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Re: Rakshasa rajas
Reply #2 - 10/10/05 at 20:54:32
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Kumbhakara is a brother of Ravana, like him a son of the rakshasi Nikasha and the sage Visravas. Kumbhakara is maharajah of sleep, dreams, and posession. One day every six months, Kumbhakara wakes up, and his powers are weakened. His court exists physically on the same cube as Ak-Yama's, but it extends through a psychic dreamscape within the minds of all who enter.
 
On Kumbhakara's face of the cube is a field of poppies; in the center of that field is a golden palace. The palace contains Kumbhakara and his sleeping court; all who venture near the cube face sleep as well, such is Kumbhakara's power.  
 
In the dreamscape the palace appears a hundred times bigger, and its boundaries shift and change. There the raja's court is aware and ferocious, and Kumbhakara has ultimate control over the dreaming reality.
 
Kumbhakara is a fiend of posession and a powerful psion, and all of his servants are as well. Regularly he dispatches minions to the Material Plane in astral form, there to enter the bodies of sleeping mortals and force them to obey his commands.  
 
Kumbhakara twists the dreams of mortals, stealing from them the refuge of sleep and filling their minds with his own thoughts and warriors, creating an army of sleepers not permitted to wake with which the rakshasa lord hopes to conquer the realms of men, recreating the rakshasa empire that died with Ravana.
 
Kumbhakara's only weakness is that every six months he must spend one day awake, and on that day his whole court wakes as well. All his posessing minions must return to their own bodies and Kumbhakara must begin again, finding new mortal bodies to use as pawns if his pawns are compromised during the day of cursed wakefulness, shifting his pieces into a new configuration, moving toward his goal from new angles. Some periods he moves closer; occasionally he must sacrifice his pawns and move a step back, but he believes he is moving inexorably toward his goal of ultimate conquest.
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Re: Rakshasa rajas
Reply #3 - 10/10/05 at 20:55:25
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Indrajit, originally called Megha-nada, was the general of Ravana's armies, and Ravana's eldest son. That was the time of Ravana's greatest power. With Indrajit at the lead, rakshasa legions invaded Swarga itself, the great palace in Limbo where the gods Indra, Vayu, and Agni dwelled, and conquered it, making the gods themselves into their servants.  
 
When Ravana went against Indra’s forces in Swarga, his son Megha-nada accompanied him, and fought most valiantly. Indra himself was obliged to interfere, when Megha-nada, availing himself of the magical power of becoming invisible, which he had obtained from Siva, bound Indra and carried him off to Lanka, the rakshasa capital in Acheron. The gods, headed by Brahma, went thither to obtain the release of Indra, and Brahma gave to Megha-nada the name Indra-jit, conqueror of Indra.’
 
With Indra made into a mere vassal, Ravana was able to make the maruts do his will, killing only those false immortals who displeased him or threatened  his schemes. With maruts threatening even the elder cobras who ruled the serpent races, Indrajit was able to convince all snakes to submit to him.
 
Indrajit was finally slain by the hero Lakshmana on the same day that Ravana ended his incarnation at the hands of Lakshmana's brother Rama. These twin losses were grave for the rakshasa race. The gods freed themselves, the maruts ignored the rakshasas' fiendish commands, and the rakshasa holdings shrank to Lanka and a few lesser cubes surrounding it.
 
Surviving Indrajit is Garudajit, his son with a naga princess. Garudajit has inherited powers over snakes from both his parents. From his realm in Minauros, he rules many rakshasas, nagas, ophidians, and yuan-ti.
 
Garudajit is a large (18' tall) rakshasa with a serpent's lower body and three heads: two human heads (one with bestial features, the other with the subtle scales of a yuan-ti pureblood), and one serpentine. He owes fealty to Mammon.
 
Ravana was the king of the rakshasas, having seized this title from his half-brother Kuvera. He could take almost any form, but typically he is remembered as a gargantuan rakshasa with ten heads, twenty arms, coppery eyes and long, sharp teeth.
 
For a long time it seemed that Ravana was unstoppable: his domains included many cubes in Acheron, the realm of Swarga in Limbo, and sizable holdings in the Material Plane.  
 
Then Rama came, and with him his army of vanara monkey people. They killed both Ravana and Indrajit, his son. Ravana’s treacherous brother Vibhishana took over Ravana’s capital Lanka, and the rakshasa dreams of empire were ended.
 
Still the rakshasas hope that one day their greatest leader will be reborn. Already a number of rakshasa maharajas claim to be Ravana reincarnate, but they all lie. In truth, Ravana has already been reborn: as Sisupala, a somewhat spoiled but ordinary human prince on the Material Plane. Sisupala has no idea of his previous incarnation, and none but the gods know what has become of Ravana's spirit. If the rakshasas were to find out, they could take steps to transfer the prince's soul into a body more appropriate to rule them.
 
Sisupala, however, does not want to rule the rakshasas. Though the ferocious spirit of Ravana rages within him, he would much rather settle down with Rukmini, his fiancée.  As long as Rukmini lives, he will do everything in his power to avoid the fate the rakshasas desire for him.
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Re: Rakshasa rajas
Reply #4 - 10/10/05 at 20:56:02
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Kuvera is Ravana's half-brother, once maharajah of all rakshasas, now the self-proclaimed Rajah of Wealth.
 
Since the creation of the rakshasa race they had ruled themselves from the Waters of Creation in Acheron, wealthy and powerful beyond dreams, unassailable in their fortress-city of Lanka, a city created by the god Tvashtri himself at their commission . It was Visravas, a powerful and cunning Brahmin sage - Visravas son of Pulastya son, it was said, of Brahma himself - who hatched a plan to steal Lanka from the rakshasas, and steal the rakshasas as well from the caste that had ruled them for so many eons.
 
The mere rumor of Vishnu's coming was enough to disturb the rakshasas; they feared the great Preserver who had been the enemy of their plots and schemes since the dawn of time, and the dawn, noon, and dusk before that. The rakshasa warriors were soon at alert, but more was needed - Visravas needed to provide them with evidence. This he soon did: one day the rakshasas discovered a mace near the city gates, a mace recognizable as Vishnu's. The following day a rakshasi woman found a conch shell within the city itself, sending waves of terror throughout the populace. The day after that, a stylized wheel was discovered, carved to resemble the rays of the sun. The day after that, a lotus, and after that a jewel that shone like the sun itself. At that point the rakshasas evacuated Lanka en masse, and Visravas and his wife Idavida strove into the city unhindered. Visravas installed himself at the throne of the rakshasa maharaja and melded it to the considerable spiritual powers he posessed as a Brahmin sage descended from Brahma himself. When the rakshasas began to creep back, Visravas was unstoppable; the power of Lanka had become his own power, the soul of the rakshasa race and guardianship over the Waters of Creation had become one with his own soul, and the fiends were forced to bow to his will.
 
Visrava was mainly concerned with introducing the order, rituals, and discipline of the Vedas to the benighted heathens the rakshasas had become. He taught them the proper sacrifices and rites to honor the Vedic gods and divided their society into castes, the better that each rakshasa should know his or her place. He restructured their military and created the ministries which would rule over various aspects of rakshasa life from then on, and he taught them of reincarnation and the quest for transcendence beyond the wheel of karma.
 
Eventually, after ruling the rakshasas for millennia, Visrava stepped down from his throne, beginning a life of ascetic contemplation to prepare for his next life. His son Kuvera inherited the throne of Lanka.
 
Kuvera was a very different sort of ruler than his father had been. He had lived in Lanka among the rakshasas his entire life, and the power of the city had warped and changed him, made him both more and less than human. Where Visrava was primarily concerned with order, Kuvera was more interested in the wealth the rakshasas could provide. He sent his legions to the mortal world, where his father had not permitted them to go in centuries, to steal and raid and conquer the nations of humanity. He insisted all the wealth of the multiverse was his by right as lord of the rakshasas; sometimes he rode at the head of his armies in a flying chariot forged by Tvashtri, and beleagered mortals learned to think of Kuvera as the lord of all evil.  
 
Meanwhile, the older rakshasa lords had not given up the hope of reclaiming their power. When Visrava ruled he had seemed incorruptable, but when he stepped down this seemed to them to be an act of weakness, a sign that even the seemingly immortal sage had at last grown old. They met in secret and discussed how they might exploit this.
 
A princess of their kind, a daughter of one of the ancient noble rakshasa families named Nikasha, was introduced to Visrava. Their meetings, at first, seemed coincidental and casual, and Visrava thought nothing of it. As time went by, Visrava began to see Nikasha more and more, and the exquisite spells and glamour she wrapped around herself began to affect even the puissant sage, who had forgotten the pleasures of a young woman long ago. When thoughts of Nikasha began to make it impossible for him to meditate, Visrava decided he must have her, if only to banish her from his mind. The two met in secret, and although Visrava did not at the time know it, many children were conceived.
 
This, of course, was the purpose the rakshasas had intended that Nikasha accomplish. It was necessary, they decided, to join the blood of Visrava, which the old sage had bonded irrevocably to Lanka itself, with their own blood, so that they could rule through the resulting half-breed offspring. The children of Visrava and Nikasha - Kumbhakara, Ravana, Vibhishana, Shurpanaka, Bibhishan, and Khara - six children, a whole litter of potential claimants to the throne, were raised by the rakshasas in secret, and when they had grown to adulthood the strongest of them, Ravana, led the rakshasas in a revolt against his half-brother the king, and Kuvera, Visrava, their supporters and confidantes, even the queen mother Idavida were driven from the city. Ravana was left the unquestioned master of the rakshasa race, and his own epic conquests had just begun.
 
Although Kuvera could not withstand the onslaughts of his half-brother, he was far from powerless without his throne. Blinded by greed and hubris as he was, he was the son of Visrava, clever and determined with divine power running through his veins, and he soon had a new kingdom, Alaka, among the highest mountains of the Gray Waste.
 
In Alaka, Kuvera attracted exiled rakshasas and other spirits and fiends, using slaves to mine the buried wealth of the Glooms and other planes too. Alaka soon became almost as wealthy as Lanka had been, if not more so. He is now king of the merchant rakshasas, and a lord of the Planar Trade Consortium. Besides the tremendous amount of precious minerals at his disposal, he buys and sells souls, and has many horse-headed oni servants who play sweet music in imitation of the minstrels of Swarga, where Indra rules. Many yugoloths are at his court at all times, particularly arcanaloths seeking to make deals with him on behalf of their tanar’ri and baatezu clients, though he will at times deal with both tanar’ri and baatezu directly. His palace contains that rarest of luxuries in the lower planes, a beautiful garden known as Chaitraratha that manages to remain green and lush in the middle of the Gray Waste. Kuvera is dwarfish in appearance - some associate him with the dwarven god Abbathor, even claiming they are the same entity (which is possible, though dwarves deny it). He is also represented as a pitch-black rakshasa covered in jewelry and sitting cross-legged on his throne or on a white lion.  
 
Kuvera has many wives: Yakshi, Charvi, an asura woman of the danava tribe exiled to the Elemental Plane of Water, and Rambha, who Kuvera sent to seduce and spy on his half-brother Ravana in attempt to copy the trick the rakshasas had used to depose him. He has three sons; his daughter is Minakshi, who used illusions to cover her deformed appearance and eventually went to Acheron to found a kingdom of her own. Kuvera is also said to have five hundred children with the rakshasa lady Hariti, maharaji of plague; these children form the ruling caste of Alaka, ranking below his other children and his Prime Minister but above all other citizens. Kuvera’s prime minister is named Manibhadra, a grim old rakshasa sorcerer who made too many enemies among the rakshasas of Lanka to ever go back to them. He has two fearsome rakshasa bodyguards, a male and female who accompany him at all times.
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