There have been many notorious Dungeons & Dragons villains that players have enjoyed tackling since the game premiered. Few villains, though, evoke the dread of the devious, undead wizard Acererak. Created by D&D's architect, Gary Gygax, he first premiered as the chief antagonist in the infamous Tomb of Horrors. He's recently reappeared and up to his most horrible scheme yet in the recent Fifth Edition adventure, Tomb of Annihilation.
His inception was the result of Gygax's frustration with the players in his home campaign. Tired of seeing the heroes pummel their way through every fight, he decided to create a dungeon he called "the thinking person's adventure." At the very first Origins gaming convention in 1975, he unleashed Acererak and his sadistic death traps for the first time.
It proved to be a success, and in 1978 the Tomb of Horrors was unleashed upon players. The adventure is legendary for its difficulty and has been re-adapted for every subsequent edition of Fifth Edition. In Tomb of Horror, the adventurers seek to plunder the treasure of a hidden tomb if they can survive the death traps inside.
Acererak is a lich, a wizard who refuses to die and uses necromancy to store their souls in a vessel called a phylactery. A lich cannot truly be destroyed unless their phylactery is as well. Acererak's phylactery is stored deep within this tomb along with his treasures, and the lich has rigged the entire structure to keep it safe.
Little was initially given on Acererak's background, save for the fact that in life, he was a powerful wizard who lived in a keep atop the hill that would one day house his tomb. He enslaved others to build his deadly maze and killed them all when they were finished. He then destroyed the keep and hid the entrance to his tomb. Once he knew his phylactery was safe, Acererak left to explore other worlds in the multiverse.
We finally learned what Acererak is doing on all those other worlds in the 2017 Fifth Edition adventure, Tomb of Annihilation. While serving as a spiritual successor to the Tomb of Horrors, it goes to great lengths to flesh out his horrific motivations and the despicable lengths he will go to see his plans through.
Acererak spent countless years building dungeons and tombs filled with death traps. He would purposefully fill them with valuable treasure and potent magic items to lure in the foolish and brave. He does this in part to capture the souls of those who die in his constructs. But he also does because it's fun. He gains genuine satisfaction outwitting the champions of goodness and damning them to gruesome deaths for his own amusement.
Despite being nearly all-powerful, Acererak wasn't very interested in being worshipped or dealing with the demands of followers. Why be a god when you can create one? To that end, he would come into possession of an abomination called an Atropal. The cast-off unformed beginnings of a dark god, an Atropal is essentially an evil fetus. To nurture the creature's development and ensure its birth, he needed to pull on his old trick of trapping souls. But the Atropal required many souls to nourish it well beyond Acererak's needs. He needed all of the souls he could get, as quickly as possible.
Acererak constructed a necromantic device called the Soulmonger. This machine was designed to capture the souls of the dead from an entire world, preventing them from moving on to the afterlife. These souls are then fed to the Atropal, destroying them forever and bringing Acererak one step closer to birthing a god.
All he needed was a world full of living souls and a safe place to store the Soulmonger and the Atropal it feeds. He remembered a favorite dungeon of his, one of the many across realities. This one was on the planet Toril, the world of the Forgotten Realms setting, deep in the jungles of Chult.
Long ago, the peninsula of Chult was inhabited by proud kingdoms and city-states, all worshiping their protector god, Ubtao. But Ubtao abandoned the Chultans, and some began to turn away. The people of the ancient city of Omu fell under the sway of nine trickster gods and descended into a life of wanton decadence and debauchery.
They were taken completely unawares by Acererak, who descended upon the city and slew the trickster gods. He then enslaved the Omuans and forced them to build a tomb for their false gods. Once completed, he murdered the entire population of Omu and sealed in them in the tomb he had forced them to construct. Once completed, he left for a new realm to start the process all over again.
Acererak periodically returned to the Tomb of Nine Gods to update the traps inside. He deemed this to be one of his finest constructions and an adequate place for the Atropal to hide and feed. The activation of the Soulmonger led to what the people of Toril called the Death Curse, which disrupts resurrection magic, leading all who were brought back to with and decay.
The Death Curse caught a lot of attention, and the greatest minds in Toril pinpointed Chult as its origin. Adventurers began to flock en masse to the peninsula, but Acererak was prepared for this too. He made allies with Ras Nsi, the leader of the cultish, snake-like Yaun-Ti, who had taken up residence in the lost city of Omu. He also enlisted the aid the Sewn Sisters, a coven of sadistic hags eager to see his dreams of birthing an evil god come to fruition.
Whether or not Acererak succeeds in these plans depends entirely on the luck and cunning of the heroes who face him in the Tomb of Annihilation. Evil to the core, Acererak is as old as D&D itself and will continue to terrorize adventurers for decades to come.