Café de Nuit

The three hags are the darkest of sisters, their present as intertwined as their past, but they pursue different kinds of evil. Lorinda prefers to seduce men and stir women to jealousy, Leticia communes with the fey and leads them to antagonize the Inquisition, while Laveeda keeps to herself and makes the sisters fight for her assistance in their plots against each other and the people of Tepest.

Of late, Laveeda has grown even more distant from her sisters as she languishes in the latest stages of hag pregancy. Knowing from experience that her sisters will consume the baby after birth, Laveeda has pondered in her hunger-maddened dreams about how she might escape from her sisters, once and for all....

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LotB states in the Boritsi section that Ivan slew a servant of Ivana's who had discovered something about Ivana's Deathstone. What did this servant learn, and how might this dead man's tale come to the light of adventurers?

Can't let a good thread die. *bump*

DeepShadow of FoS wrote:

The Giamarga wrote:What happened to that domain, and the young half vistana hero who found the bloodknife and his wolf brother? How did knowledge of the Bloodknife find it´s way into the University of Dementlieu´s Guignol Museum?

The domain of Velkaarn (might as well name it for the DL) languishes in the Mists to this day.

Note: it appears the domain would better be named Madrigar, based upon other slim references. Also, careful reading of VRA reveals the knife is NOT in the UoD's Guignol Museum, but is still lost. Had me wondering there about security in the Museum, what with foot-long dagger carved from solid ruby on display....

*electrical sizzle*

It's alive!!

Pardon me while I reanimate my old beloved thread. When last we left it, there was the question of what Ivana's servant had learned about her Deathstone, and how the information coudl come to light. Who's gonna take this one?

The Giamarga wrote:Katrina is also on card #424 of the 1992 TSR Trading cards. She´s a 4th level Diviner, alignment LN and owns a necklace of adaption.

The background on the card reads:
Katrina is Victor Mordenheim´s niece by marriage. She is a hauntingly beautiful woman who wears clothing that accents her athletic figue. She has been looking for her aunt -her mother´s twin sister - for years, hoping to find information regarding her past. She has failed to enlist the elusive Mordenheim´s aid.

The Book of Crypts also notes :

Though her family escaped Ravenloft when she was young, a few years ago Katrina was drawn in again, arriving in Valachan. [...] Katrina believes she is always right. This ferocious tenacity and independance has been with her ever since her father failed to return from war when she was a young child. Her mother alone raised Katrina and her younger brother. Katrina´s brother contracted yellow fever when he was six and died a few painful weeks later. This destroyed Katrina´s mother. She soon broke down into a catatonic state unable to eat. She died three weeks later. When her mother died Katrina was taken to an uncle´s ahouse; he took time and patience to raise his niece. This helped Katrina readjust to life without her parents. However she yearned for the company of her aunt, the twin of her deceased mother.

[...]
Katrina has found during her short lifetime that she can trust very few peopl in Ravenloft. She is wary of those she meets on the road. She rarely trusts anyone enough to tell of her life and of her travels.


In the adventure the PCs wake at night and find Mordenheim strapping Katrina to a horrible device and mind-switching Elise´s soul into Katrina´s body. (And conversely Katrina´s soul into Elise´s tortured body)

And this is the proposed ending:
If the characters save Katrina´s life, the PCs [...] have gained an ally in Ravenloft. Katrina will not join them in their tavels to escape Ravenloft. She instead chooses to return to her home, where she plans to rejoin the family she has not seen in years.


My take is that she used to be LG but some dark acts in the past drew her back into Ravenloft. Now that all her suspicions about Mordenheim have been confirmed (Mordenheim strapped her to some kind of apparatus in the adventure) she vows to take vengeance on the Doctor and to rescue her aunt. To this end she has hired adventurers in the past, carefully screening them but she always fails in this somehow. Often because she misread one of her companions as her powers of divination don´t work right in Ravenloft. Against the godless Doctor´s they always fail (Metaphysical Resistance class feature from the Scientist PrC). Her singlemindedness and distrust combined with her haughty attitude about being always right has lead her down a path of corruption where she denies any blame for the deaths of the adventurers she led to their doom. Though she symbolized much of what is contrary to the Mordenheim blood (by using magic and believing in it) she can´t escape her legacy.

Now if someone could elaborate on the dark acts that drew her here and/or tie Adam into this somehow...

Did perhaps Katrina somehow cause of her younger brother´s death? Did her mother die because she didn´t feed her? How did she come to study Divination? What happened to her uncle? What last act drew her into Ravenloft ? What did she experience in Valachan and her travels from there to Lamordia? Also in BoC the PCs meet her at the beach. Does this have any sigificance? Did being strapped to some horrible device and mindswitched with Victor´s wife shatter her sanity? Does Mordenheim perhaps hunt for her to use her agian as a receptable for his wife´s soul? Is part of her aunt´s soul perhaps still in Katrina? Where did Katrina get a necklace of adaption from? Did she alread have to use it sometime? (perhaps she travelled per ship and it sunk? Or it somehow interacted with Mordenheims strange device...)

Some ideas about that. She had nothing to do with her brother's death but still feels an irrational guilt about it. She didn't have anything to do with her mother's death but she feels guilty about that too. She feels that she could have coaxed her mother to eat somehow. She came to study divination because she wanted to foresee future events and avoid them. She thinks she might have avoided her brother's death if she could have foreseen it. She wasn't entirely rational when she was drawn into Ravenloft but not insane. She was drawn into Ravenloft to torment Victor nothing more. The mindswitch definitely effected her sanity as she now has multiple personality disorder with one personality being Elise. Victor definitely will try again if he can. For him it would look like the perfect solution. Part of her soul is in Katrina which is a big part of her personality disorder.

New hook What is going on with Sir Tristen's 4 sons? Are they more like the father or their mother? Did they inherit the curse as well? What about the youngest? How does Tristen take care of him alone? What does Malken do about the sons? Does he ignore them, try to corrupt them or try to ruin their lives?

brilliantlight wrote:New hook What is going on with Sir Tristen's 4 sons? Are they more like the father or their mother? Did they inherit the curse as well? What about the youngest? How does Tristen take care of him alone? What does Malken do about the sons? Does he ignore them, try to corrupt them or try to ruin their lives?

Okay, now we have two hooks. Brilliantlight, do you have any comment on Ivana's servant? I'd like to keep this from branching if possible.

After such close contact with the stone, the poor servant's soul can no longer rest in peace. The emotional trauma of his violent death at the hands of the enraged Ivan was a sufficient spark to light the stone's taint, forcing the man's soul to never again find rest.

Furthermore, his restless soul continues to hear the anguished cries of the spirits housed within the deathstone. These angry, vicious voices goad him into seeking vengeance by releasing them from their ebony prison.

While the spirit may roam freely through the land, the further it steps away from the wine cellars and the deathstone, the weaker and more immaterial he becomes.

Alas, coming too close to the stone is painful as the deathstone seeks to absorb the spirit into it, so he needs outsiders to release him.

At first, the spirit tried recruiting fellow servants it knew in life, hoping that a well meaning but perhaps more gullible one would achieve something. Unfortunately, few servants are allowed near the cellars, and none of them could help the dead man.

Also, not being the strongest of minds before his transformation, the spirit of the servant is highly susceptible to suggestions from the souls in the stone. And depending on which one is particularly active that day, he may be prompted to try and accomplish any number of tasks in their stead.

The strongest voice is that of a nameless scholar who had come to know of the stone's true power and therefore killed rather ignominiously. He is the most rational of the voices and maintains fairly regular conversations with the servant. However, his spirit simply wishes to be freed, henceforth the means of his escape and the consequences thereof mean little to him.

He knows of the 2000 trapped souls and once managed to arrange for the death of some workers near the cellar only to find that the servant's ghost couldn't approach the stone sufficiently for it to absorb their spirits. He also knows of the deathstone daggers, but getting someone in possession of such an item near the servant's ghost has proven difficult. Not to mention that the servant could only kill within the area surrounding the cellars, as he would gradually lose his ability to wield the blade the further away he wanders.

Other voices are insane and may cause the ghost to simply howl in pain, or weep. At other times, the ghost may become agitated and violent. Usually though, it simply converses quietly with the more rational voices and does not actively seek to be found by anyone (the scholar fears that too much attention could lead to he ghost being hunted).

There, now you can work on that other Malken hook...

brilliantlight wrote:New hook What is going on with Sir Tristen's 4 sons? Are they more like the father or their mother? Did they inherit the curse as well? What about the youngest? How does Tristen take care of him alone? What does Malken do about the sons? Does he ignore them, try to corrupt them or try to ruin their lives?

Well, much of this has been covered in canon. The Malken curse is latent in Sir Tristen's sons until he dies, after which it goes to his oldest son, and so forth (SoDR). Tristen's youngest son Myar is currently serving as the Nova Vaasan ambassador to Darkon (Gaz2).

Taking this a little further, it seems that Myar is not being "claimed by the land." This is Azalin's doing; Myar is much more valuable as an ambassador, after all. Likewise, Azalin preserves the memories of Myar's handful of servants in Tempe Falls, which has allowed Malken to penetrate Myar's inner circle. Myar's personal aide Gorchak--the secret bastard of Yorgi, taken into the family's service like so many other by blows--has developed a profound hatred of dwarves, especially dwarven women. After stalking and murdering half a dozen in secret, Gorchak been contacted by Malken, who quells his hunger for murder in favor of much greater ambitions. Gorchak is slowly corrupting Myar against the dwarves, and otherwise encouraging Myar to express his most base emotions. After Myar has failed a few powers checks, Malken hopes to have Gorchak assassinate his master, lay blame on the dwarves, and drive the two countries closer to civil war, where Malken will be able to corrupt more Hiregaard scions.

This hook uses an alternate view of Malken that I have espoused on many occasions, so as to wrap up many of the plot incongruities in the Tristen/Malken storyline:

Malken is but a fragment of Romir Hiregaard, Tristen's father. Romir is a kind of latent ancestral ghost that can only possess members of the Hiregaard family, and even then only if they have been tainted by darkness. Each time a Hiregaard fails a powers check, a latent fragment of Romir awakens in that person. Every time such a corrupted Hiregaard dies, that fragment is returned to Malken, giving him more of Romir's memories, skills, and personality. It may even be possible that Romir can reassemble himself by slowly corrupting and exterminating his own line.

So in a sense the real DL is Romir Hiregaard or at least that is one way to look at it.

Yes. That's how I see it. Romir didn't kill himself out of grief IMC, but to spite his wife's curse. After he died, his ghost possessed Tristen and acted out Romir's misogynistic fantasies. He used possession as a means of controlling his family to suit his designs, but when Tristen tried to kill himself, that was the final crime that earned Romir his DLship. Now he's an ancestral ghost fragmented across generations, tortured at the brink of consciousness by his very existence. He can make himself whole, theoretically, but only by the total corruption and extinction of the family line he was devoted to. Thus, if Romir ever succeeds in reassembling himself, he'll discover that he's destroyed the one thing he ever cared about (i.e. not the people in his family, but the familial line that he took so much pride in).

Oh, and BTW, please learn to quote more succinctly. In this case, the quote was completely unnecessary, see? *snips quote*

This definitely makes more sense to me. I always had problems with Tristen's Dark Lordship . It seems unfair as his murders were the result of a curse. I don't see the Dark Powers as the type that curses people for things totally out of their control. As I have said before I see them as LE gods of justice. They care about punishing people for actual crimes but don't care who else gets hurt in the process. In this scenario they are punishing Romir and not Tristen. Tristen getting hurt in the process is something they are completely indifferent to. Romir is being hurt this way and as far as Tristen is concerned it just sucks to be him. All they care about is Romir being punished nothing else.

New hook: Inza is the true DL of Sithicus while Azrael is a pretender to the throne. What does Inza think of this? Is she happy with him stirring up trouble (Which she enjoys) while being the target of every elf plot in Sithicus? What plans does she have concerning Azrael? If Azrael dies and she takes over how does she plan to rule? Is she planning to rule in name or being the power behind the throne? In either case she has to keep moving which makes ruling difficult.

brilliantlight wrote:I always had problems with Tristen's Dark Lordship . It seems unfair as his murders were the result of a curse. I don't see the Dark Powers as the type that curses people for things totally out of their control. As I have said before I see them as LE gods of justice. They care about punishing people for actual crimes but don't care who else gets hurt in the process. In this scenario they are punishing Romir and not Tristen. Tristen getting hurt in the process is something they are completely indifferent to. Romir is being hurt this way and as far as Tristen is concerned it just sucks to be him. All they care about is Romir being punished nothing else.

In all fairness, barring the Malken = Romir portion, this is the canon version of events: Malken is the darklord, and Tristen's suffering is just a side effect of being a component of Malken's curse (just like Tatyana's suffering in each of her reincarnations is just a component of Strahd's curse, not anything meant to punish Tatyana).

Garudos Celestar wrote:In all fairness, barring the Malken = Romir portion, this is the canon version of events: Malken is the darklord, and Tristen's suffering is just a side effect of being a component of Malken's curse (just like Tatyana's suffering in each of her reincarnations is just a component of Strahd's curse, not anything meant to punish Tatyana).

Of course, but then Malken didn't exist before the domain formed, so he's being cursed for nothing. My solution is to say that Malken DID exist before the domain formed, just not in the same form.

brilliantlight wrote: New hook: Inza is the true DL of Sithicus while Azrael is a pretender to the throne. What does Inza think of this? Is she happy with him stirring up trouble (Which she enjoys) while being the target of every elf plot in Sithicus? What plans does she have concerning Azrael? If Azrael dies and she takes over how does she plan to rule? Is she planning to rule in name or being the power behind the throne? In either case she has to keep moving which makes ruling difficult.

Inza's prime goal is corruption, to take those who are pure and good and have them debase and lower themselves, to destroy the confidence and surity of those in her dominion and to have them succumb to their baser natures. To this end Azreal has played his part, and his sitting on such a hollow, crumbling throne is sweetness itself.

The key thorns in Inza's side are The Blessed Knight - the ghostly memory of Soth's valour and goodness made manifest - and the noble hero Ganelon the Blessed. Both represent a shining mirror of what Soth 'could' have been should he have not succumbed to temptation. Inza's corruption of these two forces should be her over-arching desire - but could have unexpected consequences for the Vistani, with history repeating itself, and with the fall of one of these 'bright lights' the creation of a new Deathknight, with Inza's shattered soul becoming a new 'Blue Lady' filling Kitiara's shoes...

New Hook - Inza was born at the moment of Duke Gundar's assassination... coincidence? Or part of some larger scheme?