Malthias, creator of the Blood Stone

In the Second Age , few elves were more potent than Malthian. He was a powerful wizard both mystically and politically. He served as vizier to three successive monarchs. He served his lieges providing sage advice and solving problems as a magical trouble shooter. Malthian was a staunch foe of the undead for most of his life, but Malthian was growing very old and Mathian’s ego was such that Malthian believed the kingdom would fall without his assistance. He undergone the forbidden ritual to become a lich to preserve his life. He hid his new undead condition with illusions for many decades.   Since his own undeath helped the kingdom by keeping him alive, he figured further undeath research would help the kingdom more. He envisioned a world where undead warriors could handle all of his kingdoms fighting, so as to not to endanger the living. Some living people had to die to help his research but his efforts would ultimate save lives in the long run.   Suspicion stemming from Malthian’s unusually long lifespan led people to begin digging. They uncovered his dark experiments with creating undead soldiers and revealed Malthian’s new condition as a lich. He had to fight his way to safety killing many his own countrymen. Malthian believed his experiments were reasonable and would have been accepted if he were still alive. Malthian believed he was typecast as being evil for simply for being a lich. While it is true that every lich before him was evil, Malthian knew that he was not.   It made sense to Malthian, it takes great strength to keep ones morals intact after becoming a lich and most spell casters didn’t have Malthian’s peerless strength of character. Therefore all the other liches were clearly evil. Once in exile, he began researching the spiritual decay lesser mortals suffered after becoming liches. He also began hunting down and killing every other lich he could find. This was purely an altruistic act and those detractors that say Malthian was only interested in looting the libraries and laboratories of his vanquished foes are dirty liars.   He destroyed four liches and captured one other before other liches became threatened enough to overcome their innate distrust of each other and band together against him. The cooperative efforts were still strained by the liches’ distrust of each other, all of them were willing to throw the others to Malthian if necessary. Malthian was able to destroy three more liches even in the face of unified opposition. He defeated liches far more often than that this, but he was generally thwarted from destroying them or capturing their phylacteries. Eventually an organized effort against him succeeded, forcing Malthian to abandon (and detonate) his primary sanctum. He chose to abandon his crusade against inferior liches and laid low for about a century or two. Once Malthian was no longer a clear threat, the alliances of convenience against him splintered and the remaining liches when back to their independent ways.   Then the Second Unmaking  happened. Energy draining nihilistic demons crossed the Barrier in untold thousands and brought the civilizations of the Second Age to ruin.   Malthian realized his belief that his kingdom couldn’t survive without him was wrong, it was really the whole world that needed him. After a few skirmishes with demons, he decided his ability to smite demons with spells was insufficient to thwart demons when the demon hordes could augment their strength by turning their energy drained victims into undead slaves. He began research a means of immunizing people from energy drains. His plan was to create a living undead hybrid, immune to both negative energy and the corruption that undead conditions inflicted on people who lacked Malthian’s moral fiber.   While most of the living wizards battled demons and most of the undead liches were trying to either steal demon power or were still plotting against Malthian, Malthian was locked in his laboratories. He experimented on bound demons and periodically made expeditions to explore the Void itself. He also kidnapped elves and a few members of other races to experiment on. He made sure to use mortals that would have just been probably consumed by demons anyway, so Malthian was morally justified. He was saving lives really.   While Malthian was locked away in his labs, the last demon lord was slain and the Second Unmaking was officially over. Malthian created his desired living/undead hybrid but he was centuries too late for it to impact the Second Unmaking. Malthian made his breakthrough when humans were already well on their way to displacing the elves as the dominant race of Scarterra. That didn’t bother Malthian much. The humans would need his help even more than the elves did, and demons were still entering Scarterras in small numbers. It was only a matter of time before they came back in force.   Malthian opted to create undead warriors in lieu of spell-casters figuring that magic users were in general more prone to corruption. Malthian wanted to create self-sustaining undead warriors but eventually conceded that it was impossible to create free-willed soldiers that didn’t require some kind of sustenance. These warriors required the blood of the living. Malthian decided that was acceptable. The loss of a few humans and demihumans would be a small sacrifice compared to the thousands more the vampires would protect.   He began magically impersonating a living human wizard and began searching for highly skilled warriors of great moral character, preferably those with experience fighting demons (who were still a frequent threat in the early years of the Third Age even though the demon lords were dead). Malthian was careful to select soldiers who would do be able to do more good with their abilities than their hunger for blood would cause them to do harm (or so he believed).   Malthian created an artifact called the Blood Stone  to facilitate a mortal’s transformation into a vampire. Eventually one vampire discovered that he could pass the vampiric condition onto progeny without using the Blood Stone. Malthian destroyed both sire and childe and forbid unauthorized creation of new vampires.   His vampires didn’t get much time for do-gooding before some of Malthian’s more persistent lich enemies penetrated Malthian’s anti-scrying defenses and finally discovered what he was doing. His foe/foes also discovered that the vampires were not nearly as magically protected from spying as he was. After spying on his vampire lieutenants, a rival lich recruited a suitable vampiric turncoat.   Malthian was set up and destroyed, along with his phylactery and several of his vampiric minions. The Blood Stone was missing and presumed destroyed. Vralic, Ralark, Lorshellis, and Vladimir survived. Most of them started broods of vampires. The four original vampires are said to be immune to most of the traditional banes of vampires including sunlight.