Delecti The Necromancer

Delecti is... really interesting, and I'm quite looking forward to seeing how he is handled in the Guide, because there are quite a few questions about him that have only been answered tentatively before. He is a relic of the Second Age who managed to con both God Learners (who he started out with, and learned many of his tricks from) and the EWF for their mystic knowledge and magical resources and then survive the end of an Age. He had abandoned his original body a long, long time ago, learning to inhabit well-preserved corpses and making himself effectively unkillable so long as he had a supply of such corpses in hand.

And his mark is left on the land itself. When he was a Wyrmfriend, he worked closely with a sect called the Remakers to create something called the Stitched Zoo. There he would make frankenstein monsters and bring them to life, in an effort to restore long-extinct prehistoric species back to life: and that is where the modern Beastmen of Dragon Pass come from, though back then they were tortured, pained beings who had to go to great lengths to heal and reconcile themselves with their new nature. During the Dragonkill, he made the Upland Marsh itself by using God Learner know-how to enslave and twist a local river goddess and turn her into a goddess of dead and stagnant water obedient to him - thus hiding from the human armies that came to fight the dragons. And when the dragons were killing all the living humans in Dragon Pass, Delecti simply stopped pretending to be alive and killed all of his servants and followers too, turning them into the undead (a secret he may have learned from spying on troll myths), hiding himself under the cover of the dead and so slipping off the dragons' radar.

Since then he has been focused on ensuring his eternal existence, slowly but surely expanding the Upland Marsh and luring in fresh corpses to reanimate. While those Orlanthi whippersnappers that showed up are annoying, they are also a welcome new source of bodies, especially when they are so eager to explore the Upland Marsh looking for treasures or wishing to slay some undead. And when some of them stay there forever, their friends and relatives may come after them as well - or their goods. This makes the Upland Marsh a perfect adventurer trap that keeps Delecti well-stocked in material. And the most well-fit and powerful of those adventurers could be added to his personal wardrobe of bodies to wear. He has not stopped stitching things together, by the way - while some of his zombies are relatively mundane zombie humans, zombie trolls, zombie elves, zombie birds and zombie animals, sometimes he likes to mix things up by stitching the various corpses at his disposal into gigantic monstrosities. He also has some really odd items in his collection, such a goddamn undead whale he somehow managed to drag into his swamp.

And it is important to remember that the Upland Marsh is ever growing, pushed forward by Delecti's undead brides and priestesses - the Dancers of Darkness, who also help him pick new bodies. Delecti has been known to drop in on nearby Orlanthi settlements to make deals with their leaders - they would let him expand in peace and provide him with bodies, and he would grant them immortality and power, turning them into his vampire lieutenants. The zombies he makes from the people in those clans are often allowed to exist in a state of twisted mimicry of life, going through the motions and mumbling to themselves about the weather and the barley even as they rot. Perhaps it's because Delecti is a creature of Stasis that has himself long since succumbed to his routine. Or perhaps it's his idea of a joke.

It is said that when Delecti was creating his zombie kingdom, he enchanted his minions to find and destroy the creatures of all five elements that came within his realm - Water, Darkness, Earth, Sky and Storm. He forgot about the Durulz. It is unclear whether they themselves were his creation (they'd certainly fervently denied it) or if he had simply experimented on them to try and restore their power of flight before giving up on them as a lost cause. The ducks had been shunned by all the elements - even Orlanth only accepted them halfheartedly and at a distance; the world itself was against them ever since the Great Compromise. But this very fact had made them an exception from Delecti's spell. His zombies could not see them, though his more powerful and intelligent undead lieutenants could; and his vampires proved to be at a unique disadvantage when fighting the Durulz, due to their annoying propensity to lure them into the sporadic areas of running water. Realising their sudden advantage, the ducks flocked to live near the Upland Marsh - because they were at an advantage when facing the undead, while everyone else wasn't, making it the safest place for them to be. Or so it is said.