Gravis

The masked "not-a-necromancer" first seen shipping a coffin through Port Quaybay
to Orathos — son of the Shadow Priest gravekeeper Fenric killed in
The Urina (who died proud, believing his boy had finally become a necromancer;
rumor credited Gravis with summoning 12 zombies). (Name unclear — Gravis/Gravis.)

Session 6

• Aboard The Expedition Ship's lowest deck, opening his coffins next to the dark
  elf's spirit cages.
• Kain relayed his father's pride and posed the binary — proud dad + necromancer,
  or ashamed dad + not. Gravis: "I have chosen... Oh no, I am."
• Hugged Kain and cried through the mask: "I love you, Dad." Kain: "I'm proud of
  you too, Gravis. You've embraced your true identity."
• Asked the party to move the spirit cages crowding his coffin-opening area (done,
  via square-footage diplomacy).

Session 24

• Reunited with the party deep in the Grey Vale Cave, where he
  has settled into the ruins of an old smuggler's den. Recognized at once by Thalia
  ("Was he from the ship? You!"); the party recalls talking him into embracing his
  late necromancer father's craft.
• Now an open, practicing necromancer: animating 57 skeletal rats (red-black
  glowing eyes) and one reanimated cat the rats shun, plus a botched animated-hands
  creature — his failed scheme to kill the cave's hand-monster with its own kind, like
  ant death-pheromones ("my first time animating anything that still has flesh… I think
  I fucked it up").
• Reclusive by design ("I am reclusive on purpose and by design"); asks the party not
  to loot his home or reorganize his bones. Came to the cave for a base, "kept his right
  hand on the right wall," and stayed.
• Lore: knows the Queen Grabbler as a symbiotic bone-supplier (she kills, leaves
  bones — never hands — he reanimates them); warns the three dead drones will aggravate
  her; and notes ruins deep beneath the cave with "other things" in them, where he was
  originally headed before settling.
• (Rendered "Gravis" this session — a new garbling of Gravis/Gravis; and a 14-ft coffin
  lies downstream in the tomb below, echoing the giant coffin he once shipped to Orathos.)

Session 25

• Referenced but not revisited: his skeletal rats register on Thalia's undead-sense, and the wood-folk's cave map labels his smuggler's-den tunnel ("Men… but it's not Men anymore").
• The Mush Mother's history of the under-cave — scaled, clawed men hauling coffin-like boxes down and never leaving — adds to the open question of whether Gravis's old giant coffin connects to the 14-ft coffin in the flooded tomb.

Session 30

• Present but idle, content making rat puppets with his skeletal rats. The party plans to let him leave the cave (to find bones outside) once the trapped father and son are extracted — "he can find more bones to necromancer-ish stuff outside."

Session 31 — death

• Killed in the Queen Grabbler fight. Gravis loosed a thousand skeletal rats against a single Grabbler, but "he's just a guy with some rats" — each of the drone's hundred hands crushed a rat a turn, and he ran out. Stranded 200–300 ft from the party with no one able (or much willing) to reach him, he and all his rats were wiped out — the session's only casualty.
• "Given how little anyone went to help him, it doesn't seem like anyone seems to care anyway" — the party's excuse being that he was too far off in the dark to even see. A quiet, unmourned end for the reclusive necromancer.