When Vorgath hits a creature with an attack, he can attempt to drag it through the Lower Planes: the target takes 10d10 psychic damage and vanishes until the end of Vorgath's next turn (Wisdom save negates the vanish, not the damage).
Within the Rusted Citadel, Vorgath is CR-equivalent to a CR 17 threat: he may summon 1d4 Bearded Devils or 1 Horned Devil as an action (once per day), and while in his citadel his Eldritch Blast damage ignores resistance to fire.
Vorgath's pact with Kaelthar Vane is broken but not void. If the Pact Contract is read aloud in his presence, he can be summoned as a witness and gains advantage on all rolls made against Vane for 24 hours.
When Vorgath reduces a creature to 0 hit points, or when a creature within 10 feet of him ends its turn, he gains temporary hit points equal to his Charisma modifier plus his Warlock level (minimum 1).
Vorgath is a devil: immune to fire and poison damage and the poisoned condition; resistant to cold damage; darkvision 120 feet; speaks, reads, and writes Common, Infernal, and Abyssal.
Vorgath has advantage on Charisma (Intimidation) checks made against mortals and devils of lower station, and can communicate telepathically with any devil within 60 feet.
After finishing a Short or Long Rest, choose a damage type; Vorgath gains resistance to that damage type until his next rest.
Add 1d10 to an ability check or saving throw after seeing the result; can't use again until a Short or Long Rest.
Pact of the Blade: Vorgath can summon his Infernal Bargain Blade (+1 longsword, 2d6 extra fire by taking 1d6 fire himself) as a bonus action. Invocations: Agonizing Blast, Devil's Sight (120 ft. magical darkvision), Thirsting Blade, Lifedrinker (+ Cha to blade damage).
Three beams, 1d10 force each (Agonizing Blast +4 per beam). 3d10+12 total.
Ranged spell attack, 4d10 fire damage.
Minor magical effects; Vorgath favors the smell of sulfur and the sound of distant chains.
Creates a sound or an image within range.
Cast at 5th level: 8d10 fire damage on failed Dex save, half on success.
Cast at 5th level: targets 5 creatures, Wis save or obey a one-word command.
Interrupts a creature casting a spell of 5th level or lower; higher levels require an ability check (DC 10 + spell level).
Cast at 5th level: 10d6 fire damage, Dex save DC 19 for half.
Next weapon hit deals +5d10 force damage; 10+ damage can banish (Cha save) to a harmless demiplane.
Wis save or paralyzed for up to 1 minute; repeat save each turn.
60-foot sphere; Con save or 8d6 necrotic damage, half on success.
Vorgath carries a forked infernal iron rod tuned to Avernus; can banish a foe to Avernus on a failed Cha save, or travel with allies.
Wis save or charmed and dominated for up to 8 hours; telepathic command link.
Behind the character
Duke Vorgath is a towering horned devil-warlord of Avernus, a Duke of the Brazen Wastes whose crimson skin is cracked with glowing seams like cooling lava and whose eyes burn as twin coins of molten bronze. He wears scorched brass plate—the Infernal Regalia of his station—and broken chains drape one shoulder like a mantle, trophies of the greater duke he unmade through contract law two centuries ago. He carries the Infernal Bargain Blade, a black longsword whose edge weeps embers, and his voice has the cadence of a magistrate: measured, precise, and patient in the way of someone who has never once needed to raise it.
Vorgath is cunning, cruel, and scrupulously honest about his intentions—a rarity among devils, and his most dangerous quality, because mortals keep expecting the trap and miss the terms. He does not lie; he drafts. Every conversation with Vorgath is a negotiation whether the other party knows it or not, and he treats precise language as both weapon and art form. His cruelty is architectural rather than temperamental: he does not torment for pleasure, but he will let a thousand souls burn if the ledger says they are owed.
Beneath the magistrate's calm is a furnace of forty-three years of betrayed patience. Vane's broken tithe is not merely a slight—it is a wound to Vorgath's entire understanding of the cosmos, which holds that contracts are the only true law in any plane. He wants Vane destroyed, yes, but more precisely he wants Vane judged, and he will trade a portal key fragment, his intelligence network, and even his own summoning to mortals who can put the Emperor's soul in front of an infernal court. He respects boldness, rewards precision, and never forgets a promise—or its exact wording.
Before the adventure
Vorgath's story begins, though he will never admit it, as a mortal soul—a damned man coin-stacked into the legions of Avernus some two thousand years ago. He has no memory of his mortal life beyond a name locked in a soul coin worn against his sternum, and he has decided that the name matters less than what he made of the damnation. As a bearded devil he fought in the Blood War's front lines, where he learned the lesson that defined him: chains break, blades dull, but a contract, precisely worded and witnessed, binds forever.
He taught himself infernal contract law in the trenches, between engagements, reading discarded writs scavenged from battlefields. His ascent was slow and surgical. He served a greater duke of the Brazen Wastes for a century, mapping every flaw in his master's holdings, and then brought a tithe dispute before the infernal courts so precisely argued that the courts awarded him the entire territory. The old duke's armor was melted and reforged into the rusted plates of the Rusted Citadel, which Vorgath raised on the ruins as both fortress and statement: the law had changed in the Brazen Wastes.
Two marshals of the old regime escaped the purge and remain at large in the badlands—a loose end Vorgath has hunted for two centuries. His ambition next turned outward, toward the Material Plane, but infernal incursion requires mortal partners. Kaelthar Vane came to him forty-three years ago: a mortal king drowning in losing wars, kneeling in the ash with an offer of his kingdom's soul tithe. Vorgath drafted the pact personally—banishment trap, soul engine, unending rule in exchange for a thousand souls a season—and believed he had found the ideal client: ruthless, literate in power, and desperate enough to accept hard terms.
For seven years the tithe flowed and Vorgath's influence in the Material Plane grew through embedded agents. Then Vane, having studied the soul engine his patron had gifted him, realized it could run on souls harvested directly, cutting Hell out of the transaction entirely. He stopped paying, sealed the rift with the engine's own power, and stranded Vorgath's agents as soul coins in the wastes. The betrayal did not enrage Vorgath—it refined him.
He spent the following decades doing what he does best: documenting. Every withheld soul is itemized. Every sealed rift is catalogued as breach of covenant. His court's bound pit fiend magistrate, Zhal'kereth, validated the claim, and the debt now stands at forty-three thousand souls plus compounded interest, enforceable the moment mortal hands can place the original contract before an infernal court. This is why the banished party matters. When Vane's banishment trap hurled the heroes into Avernus, Vorgath's spies watched them land in the Brazen Wastes and recognized the opportunity immediately: mortals the Emperor believes dead, carrying the Emperor's hatred, capable of reaching the Emperor's Vault where infernal claws cannot.
He has prepared for their arrival with the patience of two thousand years—key fragments readied, intelligence compiled, the second coin polished and waiting on a table beside a map of a kingdom pinned to the wall with a dagger. He is honest with them from the first audience: he wants Vane judged, he will pay for the privilege, and the wording of any promise they make him will matter forever.
What he does not tell them—what he may never tell them—is that the contract's final page transfers the tithe debt to the mortals who deliver Vane's soul, and that his long game stretches past the campaign's ending, into a gate he means to own, and toward a memory in the Styx that he has spent centuries trying to buy back.
Threads to follow
Beneath the surface
What haunts them
What drives them
Personal quest · 1
Vorgath's pact with Kaelthar Vane has been broken for forty-three years: the soul tithe stopped flowing, yet Vane still lives off stolen power. Vorgath demands the party recover the original pact contract from the Emperor's Vault beneath the Obsidian Throne. The contract is more than parchment—it is the legal spine of Vorgath's claim. With it, he can petition the infernal courts of Avernus to declare Vane's soul forfeit, strip the dead man's switch of its infernal authority, and summon himself as a witness against the Emperor.
The quest tests the party's commitment: Vorgath will not hand over his second portal key fragment until he sees proof they can reach the vault at all. He is honest about the cost—once they have the contract, they will understand the dead man's switch, and they will carry the burden of knowing what happens if Vane dies wrong.
Vorgath briefs the party in his throne room, showing them a scorched copy of the pact's front page and explaining the tithe's structure.
Act 1, The Rusted Citadel: Vorgath has offered the party the second portal key fragment in exchange for a binding promise to destroy Emperor Vane. He will accept nothing vague—the promise must be sworn, and devils treat sworn words as currency.
A full oath binds the party infernally: breaking it later imposes disadvantage on all Charisma checks with any devil and marks them as oathbreakers in Avernus. A narrow oath gives Vorgath room to interpret—and exploit—their words. Refusal costs them his alliance and forces harder paths to the key fragments, but keeps their souls unencumbered. This decision echoes into Act 3: the wording of the promise determines whether Vorgath arrives at the final battle as ally, creditor, or judge.
Act 1, Ferry of Lost Names: Vorgath's stolen soul coin contains the memory of a mortal who knew Vane's original name—the name that anchors the pact. The Pale Oarsman will trade the coin for a memory of equal value.
Paying a true memory permanently removes it (recoverable only from the soul engine in Act 3), but earns Vorgath's fragment and the Oarsman's grudging neutrality. Tricking him works for one crossing but makes the Oarsman an enemy who may withhold the third fragment's location later. Fighting him is deadly and summons an infernal patrol. If the party recovers Vorgath's coin, the duke grants them the Infernal Bargain Blade as a bonus reward—tying this decision to their arsenal in Acts 2 and 3.
Act 3, The Emperor's Vault: The party holds the pact contract. Vorgath, summoned as witness, can invoke it to drag Vane's soul to Avernus for judgment—but doing so requires the soul engine to be destroyed first, and the ritual will consume the contract forever.
Using it in the ritual permanently disables the dead man's switch and summons Vorgath to the final battle at full power—but the contract is consumed, and Vorgath's claim on Vane's soul is satisfied, meaning he owes the party nothing after. Keeping the contract preserves the disadvantage-on-save weapon for the throne room but leaves the switch active. Destroying it frees the party from any oath sworn in Act 1 but forfeits Vorgath's aid and his fragment-based knowledge of the vault. Each path reshapes the final battle's difficulty and the campaign's epilogue.
Witnessing Vorgath's infernal court proceeding in Avernus.
Each character gains permanent insight into infernal law: advantage on Intelligence (Arcana) checks involving contracts, pacts, and bindings, and the ability to detect magical coercion once per long rest.
Advantage on Arcana checks related to contracts and bindings (permanent).
Ally
Vorgath has watched Mara Voss her entire life through his spies in the Material Plane. When the party was banished forty-three years ago, Vorgath's agents observed Vane's soul collectors harvesting the fallen heroes and noted that a child in Emberfall—the daughter of one of the banished—escaped the nets. That child was Mara. Vorgath's agents have quietly diverted patrols away from her resistance cells for decades, not from mercy, but because Vorgath calculated that a living resistance would keep Vane's legions divided and give him a lever when the banished party returned.
When the party crosses through the Gate of Ash, Vorgath sends word ahead through the same infernal channels: 'The ghosts of Emberfall come. Decide whether you are worth their price.' Mara, who has spent her life hearing whispers about devils who watch from the fire, must decide whether Vorgath's decades of quiet protection were strategy or something stranger—and whether an alliance with a Duke of Hell can serve the Free Peoples Alliance. Vorgath, for his part, finds her refusal to be frightened genuinely novel, and has begun treating her as a piece worth protecting rather than merely using.
Enemy
Vorgath and Vane's history is the campaign's oldest wound. Forty-three years ago, Kaelthar Vane was a mortal king drowning in wars he could not win. He crossed into Avernus through a rift and knelt before Vorgath in the Brazen Wastes, offering his kingdom's soul tithe in exchange for a banishment trap, a soul engine, and the promise of unending rule. Vorgath, then an ambitious duke seeking to expand his influence beyond Avernus, agreed—the contract was signed in infernal wax, witnessed by a pit fiend magistrate, and sealed with Vane's true name.
For seven years the tithe flowed: a thousand souls a season, delivered through the rift. Then Vane learned the soul engine could run on harvested mortal souls directly, cutting out the middleman. He stopped paying. Worse, he used the engine's power to bind the rift shut, sealing Vorgath out of the Material Plane and stranding the duke's agents there as soul coins. Vorgath does not merely want Vane dead—he wants him judged.
A dead debtor is a loss; a soul dragged before the infernal courts in chains, stripped of his stolen crown before the assembled hierarchy of Hell, is a precedent that will elevate Vorgath's station for ten thousand years. This is why he needs the party: mortals can reach the vault where his agents cannot, and mortal hands can read the contract aloud in ways infernal claws cannot.
Faction
Vorgath is the Infernal Court of Vorgath—its duke, its lawgiver, and its ambition made flesh. The faction exists because of his rise: two centuries ago, Vorgath was a bearded devil in the legions of a greater duke whose name is now scrubbed from Avernus's records. Vorgath served in the Blood War's front lines for a century, learned that contracts bind tighter than chains, and engineered his master's downfall through a precisely worded tithe dispute brought before the infernal courts.
The courts awarded him the master's territory in the Brazen Wastes, and the Rusted Citadel was raised from the wreckage of the old duke's fortress—its rusted plates are the old duke's armor, melted and reforged. Now his court includes horned devil marshals, contract-devil advocates, the infernal scavengers who comb the wastes in his name, and a bound pit fiend magistrate who owes Vorgath three favors from the tithe case. The court's goals are his goals: destroy Vane, reclaim the unpaid tithe of forty-three years (a debt Vorgath estimates at forty-three thousand souls plus compounded interest), and use the precedent to expand infernal influence into the Material Plane.
Every member of the court watches how Vorgath treats the party, because his treatment of mortal agents sets the precedent for whether devils of his court may bargain with mortals as partners rather than prey.
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