Douglas McMourning

Dr. Douglas McMourning is one of the primary characters appearing in Wyrd Games' Malifaux universe.

Description
A tall, thin man in his middle years, Dr. McMourning sports a shock of red hair and is normally found elbows deep in the many bodies which are sent to him as Head Coroner of the Guild in Malifaux, and is commonly attended to by his loyal servants Sebastian and the Zombie Chihuahua.

History
Coming to Malifaux in the first days of the reopening of the Breach which connects that world and ours, Dr. McMourning quickly rose through the ranks of the medical staff to become the head of the Guild Coroner's department due to his exceptional talent in the field of medicine. Becoming more and more obsessed with the mechanisms of death, he began to delve into the forbidden knowledge left behind by the city’s former inhabitants, and by this means slowly mastered the art of necromancy.

More recently, however, the number of corpses which have been disappearing from the City Morgue has begun to raise eyebrows, and no matter how hard he has tried to falsify paper trails or lay the blame on others, suspicion has fallen firmly upon McMourning’s shoulders. This has led him to utilise the sewers of Malifaux, which can be accessed directly from the subterranean Morgue, to reach Malifaux’s Quarantined Zone, that area of the city forbidden to humans by the Guild. There, he has established an expansive fortress-laboratory where he is free to experiment at will with whatever unliving matter his undead minions bring to him. This laboratory has all of the trappings of a traditional mad scientist’s lair, complete with towering electrical capacitors and bank after bank of vacuum tubes, the purpose of which is unknowable to any save McMourning.

However, this experimenting with dark magic has not come at a cost, and where once the doctor was a benevolent man, interested only in the furtherance of medical knowledge, he has has slowly transformed into a creature of evil, caring not one bit what repercussions his actions may have on others. Indeed, one of his favourite tricks is to frame those who are close to finding out the truth about him. He first puts in an anonymous letter to the Guild Guard, stating that his pursuer is in fact a practicing Resurrectionist, then sends one of his undead servants to the poor unfortunate's house, with instructions to obey that person's whim. When the Guard inevitably come knocking in the middle of the night, they find a man served by a zombie (or less savoury construct) and promptly execute him for the crime of necromancy.