Editing Forlorn Hopes and Immortal Evils Lords (section)

==Duke N'mautan==

The eccentric Duke has not left his fortified demi-spire for a full century. He directs his Kabal's raids and schemes from afar, with his cryptic orders interpreted and (sometimes lethally) debated by a circle of underlings. The Duke, to the exclusion of almost everything else, spends his time perfecting and testing a cruel and strange hobby.

Sixty years ago, some small village on some backwater feudal world caught the Duke's eye. In a single night he spirited it and all its inhabitants, down to the last blade of grass and grain of sand, into the depths of his spire. He constructed an artificial sun to mimic their own; an artificial sky and artificial fields and artificial weather.

For the past sixty years, the human inhabitants of the village have lived the same day over and over. The Duke invents increasingly complex and horrific scenarios. He has studied every inhabitant in excruciating (and often visceral) detail; he knows how to manipulate small events to provoke heresy, violence, cannibalism, insanity, or wanton cruelty. Some say that the Duke uses the village to model his political ambitions. Others say that he enjoys killing the inhabitants every night and replacing them with memory-wiped clones in the morning. The cloning process is not perfect, and strange maladies and deformities are slowly entering the village. Whether or not the Duke knows or cares is debatable.

In any case, Duke N'mautan is both petty and thoughtful; cruel and kind, changeable and inflexible in his beliefs. Not even his closest retainers can predict how he will act from one moment to the next.