So, since I’m at loose ends for the next week or two, and I’ve never been really satisfied with the Van Richten’s Guide to the Shadow Fey, I figured I’d take the chance to write up some of my Faerie that won’t be getting an appearance in the Eye of Anubis, and also expound on the fairy-tale logic I use. And hey, maybe I can pick up some good ideas from the feedback here, or someone else has a few Fey to post.
First, to wet the thirst a bit, here’s a pleasant chap who stalks the Core and Nidalia from time to time.
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Red Jack
- Seven for day and seven for night
Seven young girls who’ll die of fright
Seven young men who’ll feel my bite
Fourteen souls to please Hell’s sight
Then perhaps I’ll rest a mite.
--Old children's rhyme in Mordent
For seven days, one young man is brutally mauled each day at noon, as though by a great bear, or wolf, or something else. Each day, at midnight, a young maiden dies of some unimaginable shock. And then the killings stop.
These are the manifestations of Red Jack.
Appearance: This old Murder-Fey possesses two forms, and shifts between them at will, though always he kills at night in the form of a man, and during the day in the form of a beast. In either case, however, those who look upon Red Jack know that they have seen something nature most emphatically did not intend.
At night, Red Jack takes the shape of an old man wrapped in a funeral shroud. Tall and straight as a ramrod despite his wrinkled skin, Jack can almost be taken for a human man until one sees his face. You see, in the form of a man, Red Jack has no mouth. Merely an unbroken expanse of wrinkled skin from nose to chin. But even worse are his eyes.
Red Jack's eyes are almost normal, calm and cool and matte black in color, if a little too large for his face, but for each soul he takes, the old Murder-Fey gets a new eye. Each young man he kills he gains a new right eye, each young lady a new left eye. These are the victim's eyes, arranged helter-skelter around the Faerie's own ominous orbs. Filled with pain, sometimes crying, these eyes give Red Jack the appearance of a spider later in the week, and at the end to something altogether unholy.
During the day, Red Jack takes the form of a great beast, a nightmarish conglomaration of wolf and bear and insect. Imagine, if you will, a creature the size of a grizzly bear, but with the muzzle of a wolf, and covered in plates of chitin instead of fur. But this creature, you see, is blind, for it has no eyes. Not that this keeps it from using scent and sound to hunt.
As far as its mouth goes... around this wolfish muzzle, which opens further than any normal lupine's, more the jaws of a shark or a snake than a wolf's, are arranged the mouths of its victims. In expanding lines, men above and women below, the mouths scream and wail and moan their faith, never making intelligible sounds. By week's end, the beast form is surrounded by a veritable cacophany of anguished sound.
Nature: Some things are known, to those that study such things. Red Jack always appears in an urban area, and always on a Monday. He manifests rarely, and takes long periods of rest between these manifestations, usually a decade, though manifestations as little as two years apart and as much as twenty-seven years have been recorded. He never troubles the same Domain more than once a century.
Always, his modus operandi is the same. At noon on Monday, Jack finds a young man, past puberty but not yet married, who is alone. The Murder-Fey then takes the form of the Beast, and rips them to shreds. He doesn't need much time, merely for the victim to be alone for a scant few minutes.
That night, at midnight, he appears in the bedroom of some young women, against past maturity but unmarried. And somehow, he frightens her to death, though some believe that mental magic is involved.
Then on Tuesday, he repeats the process, taking a life at noon and at midnight. And so on, until seven young men and seven young women are killed. Then at midnight of Sunday, with the last death, he disappears for the next hundred years or so.
The victims are never found again. Divinations spells are futile, resurrection impossible. They cannot become ghosts or any other form of undead. They simply cease to exist.
The Truth: What is less well-known is that Red Jack is not a free agent. In order for the Murder-Fey to manifest, he must be summoned by a little ritual, summoned by a mortal of the same age as the intended victims, summoned to wreak bloody havoc upon others.
It always works out the same way. The summoner is a youth who is depressed or unhappy, perhaps spurned in love, perhaps simply angry. And this unhappy youth finds the ritual. The details vary. Some find an old pamphlet or bestiary in the library, others find the ritual scrawled on a slip of parchment in the street. Others find it carved into the floorboards of a piece of furniture, others still find it penciled into the margins of a penny dreadful. In every case, the ritual is written upon something physical, and found in a way that makes sense to the summoner, though the seller or previous owner of the object with the ritual will swear up and down that he has never seen it before.
The actual ritual is fairly simple. One takes a wax candle upon which the wick is soaked in a few drops of blood. One also needs a clay bowl with three gold coins (though really, a coin with any gold content will do). Lastly, the ritual must take place beneath a tree where someone has died, most commonly through being hung. A graveyard tree will also suffice in a pinch. Red Jack isn't too picky, provided the intent is there. Then one merely recites the rhyme and summons Red Jack.
- Red Jack! Dead Jack! Hear my plea!
Bloody candle lights the way,
Three gold coins in bowls of clay
Brave Jack! Grave Jack! Come to me!
Hangman’s tree my meeting ground,
Hear my summons, lifeless hound.
--summoning rhyme for Red Jack
Of course, what the ritual fails to tell the summoner is that Red Jack's victims on the last day are always the summoner and whomever he or she loves most.
Defeating Red Jack: The Murder-Fey is not an easy entity to stop once he has tasted blood. Before the summoning, there is no compulsion laid upon the summoner. After finding the ritual, even after summoning Red Jack the first time but before giving the order, the summoner can back off at any moment. Probably a dozen rituals are found and two or three are performed for every time Red Jack manifests fully.
After the manifestation, however, things become a bit trickier. In beast form, Red Jack is strong, swift, and hard to hurt. In man form, he becomes a sorcerer of no mean might. Furthermore, he only manifests when the victim is alone, or when the summoner calls him. And even if slain, Red Jack merely disappears until the next time the summoner calls him, or the proper victim is alone.
To actually stop a manifestation requires one of two methods. One is simple. One must kill the summoner before the last day. The other is to order Red Jack to attack a true Innocent. The Murder-Fey will try, but the touch of an innocent is toxic to him, their presence painful, and their words torture to him. If Red Jack is defeated by an Innocent victim (though the victim could have some help), then the Murder-Fey will not return.
As for permanently destroying Red Jack? Well, that would require stopping the rituals from being spread. But whatever entity distributes them, be it Red Jack or some Faerie Lord, does so as a twisted moral test. Stopping it would not be simple...
DM Notes: Red Jack is designed as a kind of moral quandary on legs. What makes him so insidious is that he takes a single mistake (summoning Red Jack), and then forces the summoner to degenerate further, since either they order Red Jack to murder people, or else he murders those close to them. And they can't stop the deaths.
The key to a Red Jack adventure is likely a mystery or investigation, trying to find out that there even is a summoner, a common thread in the deaths, and then finding the summoner. Of course, then they have to figure out what to do...
Now, if the DM just wants a good murder investigation and nothing more profound than that, that's perfectly alright. Just make the summoner an evil git who the PCs won't mind slicing open. He's probably racked up a few Powers Checks by now ordering Jack around, so there might be a good fight there.
But what if the summoner is a person in over their head? Perhaps there's nothing really wrong with them that having a few friends won't cure. But Red Jack is still out there, and he's still killing... Stopping the deaths might require the death of the summoner, unless the PCs know of the alternative method and happen to have a handy Innocent they're willing to risk.
Thoughts?