Zurvan
Description
When incognito by merit of his inherent powers, Zurvan appears to be a young and handsome human, about 30 years old. He appears well-built and while not overly muscled, every motion is deliberate and charged with a puissant essence. He stands at 5'11" and weighs close to 170 pounds and prefers to wear only the finest attire. Zurvan would be found in rich silk tunics, polished black leather boots, and bedecked with a number of jewels and attractive and exotic accouterments. His black hair is trimmed cut short and swept back, save for a long and winding mustache above his quipped and amused smile. His eyes dance with merriment and constant motion, sweeping to and fro. On his back is hitched a fine leather satchel, no doubt filled with traveling gear. At his side is sheathed a broad, curved knife of fine quality, the hilt bejeweled. Slid through his pack is a recurved short bow of heartwood yew and etched with mystical sigils. A quiver of arrows is attached to the backpack for easy reach back. In hand, Zurvan clutches a fine walking staff made of hickory. It, too, is writ with magical runes, and it is capped by a fat ruby.
But all of this is a façade, masking Zurvan's true and more hideous appearance. The handsome sorcerer is actually a nefarious gray slaad, here in this plane on some dark business. His body type does not change much at all, but his unblemished skin becomes hard, gray scales dappled with black spots. All hair disappears and his facial structure contorts and flattens to effect a toad-like visage. His hands and feet end in sharp claws. And while his voice is still rich and his tongue still glib, the slaad's mouth is filled with small but sharp teeth. Zurvan's black eyes, rounder and more amphibian, glitter with magical confidence and the unstoppable power of constant, roiling entropy. Hopefully, this creature's ambitions will take him far away before the nearby environment (and the people in it) are permanently traumatized!
History
Exactly 1,742 years ago, Zurvan burrowed his way out of the heart of a githyanki wizard who was captured and forced to die by a red slaad's horrifying infection. Zurvan was just a green slaad back then, and took his time to acquaint Limbo. The red and blue slaadi that oversaw his birth were ordered to capture and "breed" more of his kind. He spent his first year maturing and evolving at a frightening celerity into an adult green slaad. Zurvan already hungered and lusted for the power the wizard that hosted his tiny eggs once had. At his makers' behest, of course, he put what little power he had to their ongoing wars throughout the planes of Limbo and Pandemonium. Zurvan honed his abilities on just about everything that dared to explore those maddening realms. He enjoyed it, to be quite frank, and looked up to his disorganized but deadly army's commanders, the death slaadi. Zurvan wanted to become one of those demonic ass-kickers. He wanted to be one of the slaadi that everyone in the universe feared.
So he asked his generals what it took to become one of them. They just laughed and turned their backs on the pathetic little green slaad. Deep inside, Zurvan knew it was because he wasn't ready to know. But the treatment still burned his arrogant sense of gratification. He abandoned that army -- he served it well for centuries anyway -- and sought out the means to evolve as he knew he must, as he could feel deep inside he must. His powers stagnated. There had to be more! That was when he quite literally stumbled into the Brackish Cocoon of Ynroth, hidden deep in his chaotic homeworld of Limbo. The change was forced upon him (although he was looking for it all along), trapping him in a pool of mystical muck. He underwent agonizing throes that shriveled his body and turned it inside out.
For gods know how long, years perhaps, he tried to escape the sensation of drowning and torturous change, clawing his way towards the surface. He might as well have been trying to swim in quicksand. But he did finally make it out of that place, and found himself changed just the way he imagined -- now a gray slaad! Zurvan began to research throughout Limbo, battering aside anyone who got in his way with his latent and greater magical powers. He avoided the death slaadi still, but his hunger clashed with a few other gray slaadi now and again. But that was alright -- he won the duels with such rivals and pried the secrets they already gained from their claws. Unfortunately, nothing they knew pointed in the right direction to further his evolution. They sought more temporal powers. That wasn't enough for the ambitious Zurvan. So he dared the wrath of the death slaadi again, asking how to become one of their own. He was once more met with mockery, but this time they at least dropped a clue -- he had to conduct more research not in Limbo, but in the material plane, in Cael. So Zurvan took his happy slaadi self straight to the world of mortals. The town of Smyth in Verdentia seemed to be a hotspot for the epic wannabe's, so it seemed like a good a place as any to further his research…
Personality
Zurvan is conniving and cruel, but only so far as it takes for him to learn more about sorcery and magic. He is not needlessly sadistic or vicious, and often doesn't slay the victims of his curiosity unless leaving them alive would endanger his goals. The transformation from green to gray slaad shed some of his misbegotten arrogance, but Zurvan still comes off as full of himself and hoighty-toity. It practically begs for him to be brought down a notch. The poor fool who tries, however, is in for a surprise! Zurvan tries to behave in a civil fashion as expected for mortals. He learned quickly what was taboo and what wasn't, although there are still a few things he doesn't know about human life, and may whimsically do something that can be very offensive.
Goals
Zurvan will master the sorcerer class (20th level) before taking up a Prestige Class like archmage -- unless he transforms into a death slaad first. In that case, he'd probably multi-class as a fighter or even assassin instead.
Character Sheet