Jander Sunstar

Jander Sunstar is an elf afflicted with the nosferatu strain of vampirism, a Dungeons & Dragons character who starred in his own novel: "Vampire of the Mists". He has also appeared in two short stories featured in D&D anthologies: "Realms of Infamy" and "Realms of Magic", both of which take place before the events of his debut novel.

Born in Evermeet in the Forgotten Realms, Jander adventured for a time as a member of an adventurer band called the Silver Six. Their final and most notable feat would be to slay a Red Dragon that was terrorizing the Dales; as they celebrated their victory in the Swan Song Inn in Merrydale, the village was attacked by nosferatu. Although the Silver Six fought back as best they could, two of their members were slain and a third vanished into the darkness. Afterwards, the ungrateful villagers drove the surviving members of the Silver Six away and banned them from the village.

The survivors scattered, but Jander was approached by their "missing" friend - now a nosferatu, who proceed to turn Jander into one of the undead. He spent ten decades enslaved by his creator, but was finally able to escape his master's control and destroy him. After an attempt to find a cure for his vampirism failed, Jander spent years trying to cope with his undead existence; feeding exclusively on animals or on shallow meals of humanoid blood, to preserve his sanity. Ultimately, he came to settle near Waterdeep, where he began to take occasional meals from the inmates at an insane asylum.

Here, he met a madwoman called Anna, who came from a place he had never heard of - Barovia. He fell deeply in love with Anna, and when she spontaneously sickened and died, claiming that this was the work of an enemy of hers in Barovia, Jander exploded in a fit of vampiric fury. Butchering the other inmates in his rage, he vowed to destroy the man who had hurt Anna so, and was promptly swept away by the Mists of Ravenloft. They deposited him in Barovia, where he was ultimately taken in by Strahd von Zarovich. In exchange for the count's shelter, the older nosferatu began tutoring Strahd in the deeper applications of his vampiric powers.

Jander's adaptation to the Demiplane of Dread was not easy; like a "true" Ravenloftian elven vampire, Jander developed the cursed Black Thumb, the ability to kill a plant with the slightest touch at the cost of deep spiritual. Worse, in this dark realm, Jander could no longer feed on animals, and so he was forced to feed on humans, an act that his "host" eagerly encouraged. One of his early "hunts" with Strahd saw them fall upon a party of Faerunian outlanders, recently trapped in Barovia - during the slaughter, Jander regained his senses and forced Strahd to spare a boy, Martyn Pelkar, whose fevered recollections of the slaughter would see him found the church of the Morninglord.

As he lived with Strahd, Jander grew more and more disgusted with the human vampire's embracing of his dark side. And then, finally, he learned the truth: his beloved Anna had been an incarnation of Tatyana, meaning Strahd was the foe he sought to slay. Seeking aid from some of the more strong-willed and rebellious denizens of Barovia, Jander enlisted the help of Alexi "Sasha" Petrovich - one of the first priests of the Morninglord, and a Half-Vistani whose parents had been saved by Jander shortly after the elf's arrival in Barovia, "Little Fox" Leisl, a local female cutpurse with a crush on Alexi, and a female wizard named Katrina, all of whom had secretly been slaying Strahd's vampiric spawn for some time. Together, they plunged into the crypts below Castle Ravenloft, where they laid Sergei's ghost to rest and retrieved the Icon of Ravenkind, with which they attempted to destroy Strahd.

But it went disastrously wrong. Katrina had been Strahd's werewolf agent all along, and she turned on the party, heavily wounding Leisl and presumably infecting her with lycanthropy - some fans have speculated that this is why the Morninglord's church calls for the destruction of vampires, but mercy for werebeasts. Despite this, the party managed to drive Katrina away, destroy Strahd's spawn, and injure the count himself before he escaped with a spell. Alexi and Leisl fled Barovia for safety, whilst Jander, consumed with grief over this pyrrhic victory, realized he had been nothing more than a puppet of the same Dark Powers that tormented Strahd, and attempted to commit suicide by embracing the rising sun.

...Which shouldn't have worked because Nosferatu in D&D aren't killed by sunlight. As such, whilst the novel ends on this grim note, subsequent splatbooks revealed that Jander survived, and was in fact swept up by the Mists once again, ultimately ending up regaining consciousnesses in Forlorn. Since then, he has roamed the Demiplane of Dread, battling evil (especially other vampires) and trying to cling to his soul.

Jander has stats in two separate splats for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Children of the Night: Vampires, a Ravenloft splat, and the Villain's Lorebook, a Forgotten Realms splat. He made his last appearance to date in the splatbook Champions of Darkness for Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition.

5th Edition

What bad retcons do to characters.

...And then, out of fucking nowhere, he came back for Descent Into Avernus, of all god damn places, where, it turns out, he became an integral piece of Zariel's retconned backstory. Turns out that he actually did escape the Demiplane of Dread somehow, and joined an army of good-aligned characters in Elturel, and rode into Hell with Zariel back when she was still just a badass Solar and not the fiendish combination of devil and woodchipper she became. The problem is that dear Jander was quite wrong when he thought that surviving Ravenloft was as bad as surviving literal Hell, and he panicked real bad. He ran for the Prime again and left Zariel to get captured by Asmodeus when he did. Needless to say, that chipped away at his sanity, and he eventually killed himself after begging Lathander for forgiveness.

Which, obviously, he didn't get. After pissing off Eldath, Torm, and Lathander in just one career, nobody listened to his bitch-ass prayer, and he woke up in Avernus with a huge chunk of metal lodged through his chest, staked out on a hill made of iron tree sculptures for Stirges to inject the blood of fellow traitors into him forever, which is metal as fuck. Players can rescue his soul from the tree, which at least lets him die for keeps, though doing so prompts a boss fight with the one of Zariel's former paladin underlings who feels no remorse about becoming a narzugon.

Classic example of a clueless lack of understanding of what fans actually want turning what was probably intended as a neat little nod into anti-fanservice; people who knew about Jander generally liked him, and people who didn't know about Jander wouldn't care either way if he'd just been some other random NPC. Instead, it combines character assassination with a confusing and fucked retcon that makes a hash of his story and the story of the plane as a whole. The author of Vampires of the Mist herself, Christie Golden, vocalized her disdain over Jander's treatment on Twitter, pointing out that it made little sense.

And Then

Jander returns in Van Richtein's Guide to Ravenloft in yet another form. Now there are at least three Janders (yes, we know it's stupid): one in Morden, one in Avernus, and one other somewhere else. Now everybody gets what they want, right?

No, because now his original self's daughter/ward/adoptee/dhampir is out to murder him (kind of) and he and Strahd are at war again, and Jander duplicated himself with a machine in Morden trying to cure vampirism, which explains nothing. Oh well, at least now people can have their favorite emo vampire however they want him.

Etc

Overall, Jander's treatment in the books (both hardback adventures and the paperback novels that spawned him) has been quite emblematic of how the IP-juggling of Ravenloft in general has occurred. Part of that stems from the wildly different tone in which all Ravenloft materials are presented nowadays that Wizards et al. are more aware of how dangerous the portrayals of the poor, foreigners, minorities, the crippled, and other 'outsiders' to society are in horror, and Jander's history of interactions with Anna are quite hard to read in a modern context. The awkward timing of Zariel and Jander's history retcon makes this even stranger, given how much the timeline has to jigger to allow Jander to have been present as both a founding Hellrider in the 8th century and a companion of Zariel in the 14th century. Still, that's WotC's horror writing in a nutshell: retcons everywhere, with all the awkwardness that entails.

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