Johann Glück is a man like any other. Each day he wakes up at the crack of dawn, bathes, has breakfast, goes to work, comes home, eats dinner, and finally goes to sleep. Some men are farmers, tending the land; some merchants, beholden to the almighty gold piece; Johann is the grim reaper, and he plies his trade in souls.

Life, you see, is an interesting thing. Left unchecked, it would thrive and grow and reproduce until it choked itself on its own waste and smothered itself with its own mass. Without a grim reaper, carefully watching and pruning, the world would not be able to support such explosive growth, and like a raging bonfire with too little fuel life would snuff itself out.

Johann’s possesses a divine implement, a scythe, which allows him to perform his duties. It allows him to travel to any corner of the globe, to command vermin to spread a plague, to call hurricanes and blizzards and earthquakes, even to affect the fertility of an entire region. It’s not all bad, though, for the grim reaper’s job is not wanton destruction, but balance. Just as he can decimate a city, he can make it grow and prosper. He can make make the women bear more children more readily or the land bear more fruits.

The grim reaper is a mantle which is passed down through the ages. Each grim reaper is intimately aware of death, and in particular his own death. When the time draws near, they cease their duties in order to find the next reaper. It is almost an instinctual feeling, like a bird returning each year to the same nest in a city a half a continent away. The reaper knows who is destined to follow him and seeks out that person.

It is not an easy sell. The next person is invariably incredulous and hostile to the entire idea. The great power held by the reaper would be a terrible thing in the wrong hands, and so it is only entrusted into the most selfless, empathic person of an entire generation. The idea, to such a person, of wreaking death on such a wide scale for the rest of their lives is utterly anathema… but it is the final task of a reaper to convince his successor that the job must be done, and must be done by them.

Encounters with The Reaper

Johann is dying and decides that it is time to pass the mantle. The new grim reaper is to be the sister of one of the PCs. When she will not hear of it, Johann seeks out the PCs to help them convince her that she must accept her fate.

Someone has stolen Johann’s scythe and is using it to terrible ends. The PCs must recover it.

A dying noble has learned of Johann and the power he wields. He hires the PCs to bring Johann to him, so that he may convince Johann to grant him immortality.