Lord Ember

Lord Ember is the Master of Apprentices of the Artificer Guild, he is also a Renegade who seeks to overthrow the Hierarchy.

Overview

Head of the Eldest Guild, Ember is a cross between the Fat Man from The Maltese Falcon and Darth Vader. Passionately devoted to restoring his beloved Guild to a place of prominence in Stygia, can be alternately kind and genocidal, subverting all other considerations to his grand goal. He is willing to manipulate, plot, assault or destroy, as the case may be, in order to achieve his goal, as more than one unruly Guildmaster has learned.

Ember ascended to his current position after the suppression of the Revolt of the Guilds in 1598; some whisper that he engineered the coup’s failure so that his superiors in the Guild would be destroyed as traitors and leave him at the top of the pyramid.

Incredibly powerful in the arts of Inhabit and Flux, Ember can do almost anything imaginable with a computer or inanimate device. Possession of mechanical equipment is the least of it; no data would be safe if Ember set his mind to destroying it. Centuries in the forge have charred Ember black, but have given him astonishing strength; he bears a smith’s hammer wherever he goes and he knows how to use it.

History

The Master of Apprentices, Lord Ember has gone by his nom de forge for so long that even he has forgotten his real name. He claims to have been Apprenticed to Nhudri himself and has held his current title in the Guild since before it was banished by Charon. Indeed, he used the breaking of the Guilds as a convenient way of ridding himself of certain political opponents; since then he has enjoyed a sort of protected status in Stygia. He has played the role of a model citizen, volunteering his services to the various Legions numerous times.

Ember's mansion in Stygia is positively Ghormengastly in scope, with hundreds of chambers, dozens of towers and scores of cellars carved into the bowels of the Isle of Sorrows. Here many of the Guild's new Apprentices are hidden; here rest the Guild's stockpiles of arms imbued with Arcanoi, here squat the forges that hum and belch black smoke as they are worked day and night. Through a cunning arrangement of flues and ducts, the smoke of the forges escapes into the sky over Stygia at a hundred different points, none located anywhere near Ember's mansion. There are literally dozens of doors at strategic points around the isle, and the house is such a maze that Lord Ember can be entertaining a Deathlord in the parlor while an Apprentice is instructed ten feet away; neither aware of the other's presence.

Ember's primary obsession, cloaked in rationality, is to return the Guilds to prominence in Stygia. This radical notion, combined with his high visibility outside of the Guild, makes his existence precarious in the extreme. Most politically inclined Artificers fully expect him to be unmasked soon and are already jockeying for position with an eye toward replacing him.

  • Signature Character art by Andrew Ritchie from the White Wolf Website.
    Signature Character art by Andrew Ritchie from the White Wolf Website.

References

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