The world on which Stalker was born is flat, with edges from which seas cascade off. While this causes a bevy of physical and logical issues, the environment seems to be generally Earth-like in terms of gravity, atmosphere, etc. It has two visible moons.

This world has thousands of gods, most of which are powered by the belief of their worshippers. These gods can generally manifest physically, and may in fact be entirely physical beings wielding superhuman power, like the Asgardians in the Marvel Universe. The most prominent god is Dgrth - deity of evil, war and warriors - whom Stalker has likened to the Devil of Earth’s monotheistic religions.

Space travel seems to play a major role in the history of Stalker’s world. The humans of this world are established to be descended from space-faring colonists with vac suits and lasers who regressed to a swords-and-sandals technology level. This technological decline might be linked with the arrival of a second wave of space travellers - aliens who came to rule the lives of men. Men rose against these ’gods’ and eventually locked them away in what seems to be a system of prison dimensions.

It is implied that the gods of Stalker’s world are the banished alien invaders, who can draw upon belief to create magic and manifestations in Stalker’s world. Why men resumed worshipping those creatures whilst they still tell tales of the human rebellion against the aliens is not clear. Presumably it was the result of a thirst for power the aliens could grant to those renegades who worshipped them, and the worship slowly became acceptable as the memories of the oppression of the aliens faded.

Since the aliens’ magic appears to violate the laws of physics, it is possible that it is their coming that altered the nature of the world, turning it from a world operating along scientific laws and technologies to an irrational law of magic. If so, this may be the reason why the technology of the human colonists was lost.

Stalker’s world is uniformly dour and grim. As Wonder Woman put it, “Stalker’s world reminds me of Apokolips. Hopeless and forlorn and lacking anything that resembles beauty.”

Here’s the only known map of part of Stalker’s world :

Powers and Abilities

Stalker has been granted infernally-inspired strength, stamina and martial abilities. As Dgrth put it - “I give you the art of combat — with all its skills ! No form of fighting man-to-man is beyond you any longer ! I bestow the eye of a marksman - with any weapon ! And I grant the gift of the hunter — to follow any trail, undiscovered and unhampered. From that I give you the name, Stalker.”

Stalker’s skills are not superhuman, but in a mundane environment not used to high-cinematic or super-heroic fighters they may appear so. He can still be defeated by ordinary opponents - for instance an entire group of determined men-at-arms - but very few people on his world can fight like he does. Stalker is without fear, highly determined and extremely fast and strong, making him a real badass in his milieu.

Stalker does not seem to really feel cold weather, and can operate without appropriate clothing in the middle of winter without hindrance. This may be because he grew up in the Cold Wastes.

Among the unusual fighting skills that Stalker demonstrated is picking up improvised weapons (large bones, torches and the like) and fighting just as efficiently as he would with real weapons — and an uncanny ability to fight opponents on his flank or even in his back without even looking at them. Stalker excels at using his environment as a weapon, and will often come up with unorthodox tactics.

Another sign of his martial superiority is his ability to use weapons that are normally two-handed (such as a quarterstaff) with but one hand. Though he was never seen dual-wielding two-handed weapons, broadsword and quarterstaff is a perfectly fine dual-wielding combination as far as Stalker is concerned.

Stalker no longer has a soul, and is thus beyond feelings, morals or emotions. From his biography he also appears to be unageing, and it is hinted that he cannot die. It is unclear whether he feels pain.

Based on the narration, the DC Heroes stats assume that if Stalker were to operate in a more cinematic or super-heroic environment than his bleak world, he would scale up so he retains a high spot in the martial pecking order.

Stalker also knows some sort of technique or Ritual to cannibalise the puissance of mystics, demons and the like whom he defeats, making himself more powerful in the process. Thanks to this ability, in 1945, Stalker had grown powerful enough to withstand the combined assaults of the Justice Society (including Green Lantern (Alan Scott), the Flash (Jay Garrick) or Johnny Thunder’s Thunderbolt) — but that taxed his HPs reserve through extensive LDD, and he had to retreat to recuperate. The 1945 version of Stalker chiefly used his Sorcery for Energy Blasts projected from his hands and for Animate Dead spells, but also used his puissance to teleport and insta-build fortified manors in the style of his homeworld.

The Black Horizon

Direct contact with Stalker’s psyche produces an effect that Wonder Woman called the “black horizon”. It induces a numbing, devastating feeling of existential cold, a deep spiritual shock, and begins a mental warping of the person — dredging up a desire for cold, unfeeling violence and expediency. In 1945, this effect was strong enough to turn the mystic members and allies of the JSA into ranting, traumatised ghosts - an effect even Doctor Fate wearing his helmet could not resist. In 2008, contact with Stalker’s psyche (when he held the Lasso of Truth) plunged Diana into shock, and infected even her with a desire to kill and be devoid of emotion or empathy.

Even being present as a spirit (say, a ghost) in Stalker’s vicinity is being subjected to a slowly warping influence. This is much weaker, though - the effect was only mentioned at Stalker’s 1945 level of power, and heroic levels of willpower could resist the effect.

Stalker not having a soul is consistently treated as something far more terrible and horrifying than for other soul-deprived characters in the DCU, such as the magician Faust. For most such characters the lack of a soul is almost a technicality ; in the case of Stalker it horrifies even powerful mystical beings.

If a PC comes in contact with Stalker’s soulless psyche, treat it as a role-playing experience rather than with dice rolls - the effect is powerful enough to threaten major players such as Doctor Fate, Wonder Woman or the Spectre as he was in 1945, and such an AV/OV would blow most PCs out of the water nigh-instantly. The effect seems far more dependent on what the values of the person being warped by the void that is Stalker’s soul are. Those who truly believe in compassion, altruism and empathy can resist, those who accept expediency, remorselessness and brutality will presumably soon succumb to the black horizon — and lose all sight of whether the end justifies the means.

The Rock of Eternity

In his 2008 appearance, Stalker wears a pendant with a stone that is reportedly the core of the Rock of Eternity. It was given to him by the Oracle to round up the three swordbearers needed to destroy Dgrth.

Stalker used this stone for interdimensional (and possibly chronal) travel, the creation of setting-appropriate garb and what seems to have been teleportation. It also likely helped everyone understand each other. If this stone is what it was purported to be, it is presumably immensely powerful in the right hands.

History

As a young boy, the future Stalker was thrown out of his home by the man he called his father - though the man denied being his father, and was probably right. The kid was left to fend for himself in the town of Geranth, near the desert called the Cold Wastes. As yet another street urchin in a brutal, impoverished world, he had to fight for every morsel during his entire childhood, and to steal anything that he wanted for himself. For a while he criss-crossed the Cold Wastes, following merchant caravans and living off their refuses.

Often dreaming that he was a great knight and an heroic fighter, the famished urchin kept looking for a way out. Eventually, he did the unthinkable and threw himself in front of the cruel baroness ruling the city of Loranth, making his case and asking to be taken in to train as a soldier, a man-at-arm and eventually a champion. Amused and always interested in getting slaves, the baroness agreed, then promptly made the boy an expendable and underfed menial servant. After a year, the angry boy confronted the baroness, only to be beaten up by her guards. However, he managed a daring escape and eventually made his way back to the Cold Wastes and Geranth.

There, the nameless scapegrace drifted in the religious quarter, watching the numerous temples — and visited the temple of evil and war, where men worshipped the terrible Dgrth. Amazingly, the god appeared to the youth who yearned to become a great warrior, and offered peerless martial and hunting skills in exchange for the young man’s soul. The unnamed rascal eagerly accepted the Faustian deal, and Dgrth called him Stalker.

(Dgrth apparently bestowed similar ’gifts’ to other supplicants, who were collectively called his Chosen. Little is known about them, though the Oracle of Stalker’s world was apparently also a Chosen of Dgrth.)

Beware the man with the stolen soul !

One of his first deeds as Stalker was to ride back to Loranth, sneak into the castle of the baroness, kill off some guards he knew as they tried to stop him, then deliver a death threat to the baroness via a note tied to a large throwing dagger. The note announced Stalker would be back to kill her a year hence, so she would live in dread of the return of the unstoppable killer.

However, something was wrong - doing so did not procure any satisfaction. Stalker realised that Dgrth had already taken his soul, whereas Stalker had mistakenly assumed that the infernal god would wait for his death to collect his due.

Stalker rode back to the temple in Geranth, killing the high priest when he realised that the man could not reach Dgrth for him. Claiming that the evil god had tricked him, Stalker decided that his new goal was to find Dgrth and reclaim his soul and his ability to feel emotions.

Stalker’s quest eventually taught him that there was but one man who knew of a way to reach Dgrth. This senior priest was called Prior F’lan and officiated in a temple right at the edge of the world — where the sea falls away into eternity. Stalker simply went there and demanded to see Dgrth, but was captured. Annoyed, F’lan denounced Stalker as an envoy from a rival death god, to be sacrificed to Dgrth.

However, a slave girl sympathetic to Stalker’s plight discreetly gave him his dagger back. The soulless man decided to wait for the sacrifice anyway, hoping that Dgrth would be summoned in by F’lan - and then to use his dagger to force the god of war and evil to give him back his soul.

Darkling death at World’s End Sea !

As it turned out, the ceremony did not include a summoning. Improvising, Stalker appeared to jump to his death from the edge of the world, but it was a ruse and he hid, using information provided by the slave girl. The slave girl was caught and F’lan was about to torture her - but Stalker had doubled back. He freed the girl, forced F’lan to tell him where the gateway to Hell was, then threw the priest into his own torture contraption. Sending the wench on her way, Stalker sailed to the Burning Isle to find the gateway.

The indomitable Stalker did reach his goal - a small isle of ice and tundra dominated by an active volcano and littered with ancient ruins. After several clashes with the guardian god of the isle, Stalker realised that he was in the legendary place from whence the human uprising had banished the gods/aliens centuries ago. Obtaining passage through a transdimensional door, he descended into Dgrth’s Hell.

There, Stalker overcame a number of opponents and ritualised tests to prove his worthiness. However, once he gained audience, he just turned back - to go face the hordes of great warriors that had been consigned to Dgrth’s hell throughout the centuries. As the only living man in hell, Stalker was acclaimed as their champion by the damned warriors, and they offered to follow his lead. Soon Stalker, riding a hell-horse, led the vengeful warrior ghosts against the demons of the god of war and evil.

Leading from the front lines, Stalker broke into Dgrth’s stronghold, denouncing their deal and demanding his soul back. Dgrth’s explained that his very nature as an object of worship made that impossible - Stalker’s soul was now irretrievably a part of Dgrth and would remain so as long as the devil lived. Furthermore, Dgrth’s nature meant that he would endure as long as evil and war did — the belief of mortals in an entity governing those essentially making him eternal.

Undaunted, the crimson-eyed fighter left Dgrth’s hell, and swore that he would destroy Dgrth by tackling an impossible task - expunging evil and war from the world, thus killing Dgrth.

His further adventures are generally unchronicled, but Stalker said that he left an interminable trail of death and destruction wherever he want, and that his passage always brought anguish and regret. To his soulless eyes, all means apparently matched his end.

Destroyer of worlds !

From what was later divined, Stalker spent three centuries on his impossible quest to eliminate war and evil, then cracked and decided to reach his goal by exterminating all life. During his adventures he had found a way to absorb magical puissance, and he started killing mystics and gods so he would become powerful enough to kill everyone. This demented crusade was successful after untold carnage, but Stalker came to realise that there were other worlds that Dgrth could reach for worship, and that he had to kill everyone on those too.

How long this went on is unknown, but Stalker stated that he had brought ’peace‘ “a thousand times, in a thousand worlds” and Doctor Fate stated that untold millions had fallen to Stalker’s quest. Stalker became such a multiversal menace that the toughest realities started preparing for his coming ; on New Earth this took the form of Hourman, an android from the far future, travelling to the early XXth century to give a special hourglass to the boy Rex Tyler, who would grow up to become Hourman. The hourglass was a sort of chronal weapon specifically intended to neutralise Stalker.

Years later, in 1945, Stalker did come to New Earth as the men from the future knew he would. A NAzi occultist and cult leader in the US, Richard Jensen, was trying to summon a powerful demon named Koth to fight for the Reich. This was only possible through enormous expenditure of magical energy, and Jensen somehow set up a trap for Allied magicians, to use their energy for the summoning.

Jensen’s trap worked fine and felled no less than the Spectre, Doctor Fate, Sargon the Sorcerer, Zatara, Merlin the Magician, Tor the Magic Master and their ally Hourman. However, it was the summoning ritual Jensen and his cultists then used that was the actual trap - for rather than summoning a demon, it allowed Stalker to come to Earth to bring ’peace‘. The genocidal invader started by killing the cultists.

The godlike Stalker drained further power from the magicians felled by Jensen’s trap, then clashed with the rest of the Justice Society in Washington, D.C.. Though he was too powerful for them to vanquish, they forced him to retreat. Resting in Antarctica, Stalker resurrected the cultists to serve him, conjured up a fortified manor to use as a base, and started building what was apparently his standard means to destroy worlds - a structure that could gather the energy of the Earth and shoot it into the Sun to have it go nova.

The Justice Society assembled !

The JSA rallied, summoned its reservists and again attempted to take out Stalker. During the assault, Mr. Terrific identified the device that Stalker was assembling to destroy the solar system and started sabotaging it. Doctor Occult then projected his own soul within Stalker’s psyche ; having a soul in there deprived Stalker of his insanity and broke the spell holding the mystics who had fallen prey to Jensen’s trap. Freed, Doctor Fate divined the importance of the emblematic hourglass Hourman wore on his costume, and instructed him to use it against Stalker.

Doctor Occult never quite recovered his soul from having projected it into the void that was Stalker’s own ; this forced his sister Rose Psychic to merge with him, sacrificing her independent existence and turning them into an unique merger of two people. As to Stalker, it would seem that the hourglass from the far future sent him back in time to the moment before he would lose his soul to Dgrth in Geranth.

Presumably, Stalker was now caught into a time loop, though each iteration of his life may have been slightly different. His next appearance in the DC universe may have occurred during a subsequent “rerun” of his life, taking place early during the three centuries during which he uselessly quested to destroy the god of war and evil.

Or perhaps that, from Stalker’s point of view, it took place centuries if not millennia before the clash with the Justice Society on 1945, during the first iteration of his life.

Swords against devilry !

When he appeared again, Stalker had contacted a woman said to be the most gifted oracle on his world. She turned out to also be a Chosen of Dgrth, having sacrificed her legs and her sanity for magical knowledge. The Oracle told Stalker that Dgrth had lied to him, and that it was possible to kill the god of war and evil. However, this required a unique stone altar at the world’s end, and three very specific swordbearers. Since the insane Oracle shared Stalker’s goal of revenge, she gave him a small piece of the Rock of Eternity that would allow him to reach other dimensions to find the three.

The keystone of the plan to destroy the lying god of evil was the quasi-avatar of truth and compassion — Wonder Woman. Once the company would be assembled, spells would imbue Wonder Woman with the characteristics of the three other swordbearers - the infernal Stalker, the savage Claw the Unconquered and the noble Beowulf the Dragon-Slayer. This gestalt could kill Dgrth.

Stalker thus came to New Earth in 2008, and ’recruited‘ Wonder Woman - when she used her lasso to verify whether Stalker was sincere, as he knew she would, the Amazon was exposed to Stalker’s absence of soul and went in shock. As her own soul was gradually eaten by the black horizon within Stalker, the increasingly ruthless Wonder Woman ventured to the world of Beowulf, fighting at his side and convincing him to help. Stalker rejoined her, and the three fighters went on to recruit Claw the Unconquered on his own world, before returning to Stalker’s world and the Oracle there. As they travelled, Wonder Woman gradually mimicked the attributes of the three warriors of legends accompanying her, with her eyes going red just like Stalker’s.

On the last leg of the journey toward the Oracle, Wonder Woman used her royal prerogative to assign a name to Stalker — “Elpis”, meaning “hope” — shocking even the soulless killer, as he never had one.

Swords against treason !

Stalker, desperate to regain his soul, had lied all along - his actual plan was to bring the three swordbearers who could kill Dgrth to the god of war and evil, betraying and killing them in exchange for his soul. Stalker suddenly threw his sword through Beowulf’s chest and attacked Wonder Woman, but the Amazon feinted and took the Rock of Eternity fragment away from him. Diana grabbed Dgrth, pulled him and herself back to Earth where her superhuman powers were restored, and shook off the effect of the Black Horizon to reclaim her sense of compassion. Having regained her kindness, she was able to use the lasso of Truth to vanquish Dgrth. Meanwhile, back on Stalker’s world, Beowulf and the Oracle apparently convinced Stalker to renounce his plan.

Diana explained to Stalker that he had been the one who had been deceived. His soul was indeed irretrievably a part of Dgrth, and the lying god of war and evil had convinced Stalker that he could give him back his soul by using the soul of Wonder Woman when it was displaced by the Black Horizon. Wonder Woman had to reclaim her soul, leaving Stalker with nothing.

Crushed, Stalker was agreed to go through the killing ritual as originally planned. With Dgrth slain, the still soulless Stalker left with the Oracle of his world, the two Chosen still hoping to somehow undo the results of their pact with the god of evil and war.

Description

Stalker was bigger and more powerfully-built in 1945, likely as a side effect from all the absorbed energy.

Personality

A cold, emotionless hardarse and swords-and-sorcery adventurer. He’s dual-classed as a fighter and a rogue, as it were (Fighter 12/Rogue 6 or some such), and in his adventures will use both his superior martial skills and his gift for stealth, tracking and infiltration.

Stalker is genuinely fearless and extremely confident in his skills. He has been known to employ approaches that would be unreasonable for a lesser man, such as demanding cooperation from a roomful of bloodthirsty and armed worshippers of death. His approach will usually be blunt and straightforward, and he has a distinct tendency to treat most opponents as being more annoying than dangerous.

As his inability to feel emotions diminishes his empathy, Stalker acts in a somewhat solipsistic way. His original adventures after his soul was stolen were generally heroic, and he will rescue people and the like — but on some level he’s just going through the motions and doesn’t really care about the innocents. Having been the underdog victimised by evil and powerful folks, and having always dreamt to be a shining knight, he does what he’s always wanted to do, but there’s no satisfaction in it. His attitude after he rides to the rescue is closer to “okay, problem solved, now go away, thanks, bye”. If he ever fails or is forced to abandon those he was helping, he does not feel remorse or regret.

As the years, then the decades go by, Stalker’s soulless nature and all-consuming determination to recover his soul burn away these remains of a moral sense. He knows of no love, no joy, forever and ever until he becomes unable to relate to human beings, which eventually will lead him to genocidal detachment.

Thus, in 1945 Stalker was obsessed with bringing annihilation to the entirety of creation - even if he had to do it one person at a time. He did not consider that a good thing, but felt compelled to perform his grisly task as it was the only way for him to ever know peace from his eternal torment.