Café de Nuit

This character might be of interest to GMs wanting a change from the usual demonic succubus. I've written it up more as an interdimensional specimen collector - an alien researcher obtaining samples of the local fauna's genetic material. There's also a philosophical element to it, too - pondering a maddening riddle on the human condition.

Alkrystrelanax, the soul-blender (a.k.a. "the Pleasure Demon")

Alkrystrelanax ("Alkris" for short) was an otherworldly entity brought into this world by a sect of caballists several centuries ago. The sect's members had a specific purpose in mind: to breed the strongest race of humans possible. Their goals were utilitarian, and Alkris agreed to a covenant whereby it would faithfully serve their purposes until dismissed by them all - or until all of them had died.

One of their early acts, hurriedly hushed up, was allegedly to feed Alkris human sacrifices, including at least one newborn child, and one fully grown woman. That done, Alkris assumed a female form and posed as a courtesan or concubine, intentionally impregnating itself from those high-ranking humans deemed to be "racially superior" and bringing their children to term. At one point, Alkris was even a consort in the king's court, bearing illegitimate twin children of royal blood. Key to Alkris' farflung carousing was its ability to change its physical appearance and properties - numerous portraits exist of concubines who looked nothing alike, but all were Alkris under some pseudonym.

Immediately upon birthing a child, the sect would take it away and study it, amazed by Alkris' ability to bestow immunities and other hereditary traits on children. Alkris would immediately fall pregnant with another man's child, the better to fulfill its covenant and also to collect more genetic material for its own study.

Alkris eventually grew bored with children and began bearing newborn humans that looked like teenagers, and then eventually birthing full-grown adults. The sect was astounded by this feat of biology, and studied its offspring carefully. Although mentally they were "tabula rasae", physically they were in excellent condition and thoroughly resistant to plague and disease.

More unsettling, Alkris appeared to be able to "blend" together offspring from several people at once. Alkris very early on perplexed the sect by birthing several children with material taken only from female humans in its vicinity - the sect pored over portraits of male nobles for weeks until they realized they were looking at a child "born" of two serving maids in their stronghold. Alkris eventually learned how to blend children from only male human materials too, although the process was more taxing on it because of lost genetic material.

The kingdom collapses:

After many decades, the project had progressed to the point where Alkris' direct descendants had grown up in the society around them and spawned many new generations of their own. The nation they served had weathered several plagues and a famine better than expected, thanks to their more resilient hereditary traits.

But genes are subtle and they work in the long run. They are powerless, for example, to help with the quick survival skills needed in times of revolution or war.

The proud nation that Alkris served suddenly collapsed with the death of its king. The sect that had contracted with Alkris also scattered to the winds, many of its initial leaders already dead from old age. Alkris fled as the companion and prized slave of the last sect member, called "The Youth" by all the others. His name too has been lost to time, for reasons that will be made clear later.

Hiding together, The Youth refused to accept that the kingdom was truly gone, and that all they had worked and conspired towards had vanished to the winds. The Youth, by then, was already in his middle age, and he sought a way to prolong his life indefinitely. Alkris was able to sort through his physiology and find a way to remove the mortal imperative - but it would be an excruciating process requiring vast changes to his body. He would be rendered completely sterile at the very least. The pain might drive him insane.

Alkris told him this, and The Youth accepted this, but before he underwent the changing, he lay with Alkris and ordered it to bear him a daughter. That done, Alkris made him promise to release it from his employ. The Youth, knowing he was the last of the sect remaining, and that he would be immortal, agreed to revise the terms of Alkris' covenant. He wrote down his final orders to it, and then underwent the changing to become immortal.

Alkris' riddle:

By the time Alkris carried the daughter to term, The Youth had long disappeared into the wildlands of the kingdom, an immortal with a far-reaching dream of vengeance. Alkris remained with the child, now searching for the answer to its final research question from The Youth:



Alkris spent many years at a port city, trying to research this question. It adopted a variety of personalities and faces and followed humanity's bustling scrum. It saw scenes of mortal depravity, and of transcendent forgiveness. In the post-kingdom troika of squabbling principalities, it saw children reunited with long-lost parents, brothers betraying sisters. It sat with greybeards at the docks and heard them recount the old days with weariness - how everything changes, yet everything stays the same.

Decades into its masquerade as a human female, Alkris itself knew an unexpected stab of grief and despair when strange men suddenly descended on its quarters in the port city, and snatched away its daughter, then a blossoming maiden. They left only a message from The Youth, now the ruthless vizier of the border principality, sending Alkris his regards and merely taking back what he had given it, years before.

Alkris began collecting experiences the way it used to collect genetic samples. It befriended people, moving through society's many circles and outliving every generation of its shortlived human friends. Alkris' greatest claim to fame eventually developed out of one of its regular haunts, a brothel operation catering to the port city's rich and famous. As a courtesan, its talents were much in demand - though few of its clients could have guessed that they lay with an alien intelligence with a brooding racial memory many orders of magnitude older than they. After the loss of its child, Alkris would never bear another offspring while on this world.

Outside of the escort business, Alkris explored the whole spectrum of human emotion - looking down from mountaintops to glory in the sight of the dawn, or lolling helplessly in the fume-heavy cellars of opium dens. Knowing there was no way out of this world until it found the answer to the riddle, Alkris led a curiously meticulous life of vacillating between the scientific and the debauched.

Alkris occasionally despairs of ever finding the answer, but it knows there is no other feasible way out. The only other way of discharging its covenant is for every last member of the sect to die - and The Youth lives on in despotic immortality, as the vizier of the neighboring province, intent on restoring the old kingdom, in his name.

With the PCs

Alkris is useful as an adviser to the party. Its sexual relations with humans is merely its most-publicized role. As an alien intelligence that does not require sleep, Alkris is far more active in its information gathering than any human could be. Though hampered somewhat by its inherent otherworldliness, Alkris has amassed a significant compendium of information, meticulously indexed. This has its downsides too: what may be noteworthy to an alien may not be noteworthy to a human. PCs who gain access to Alkris' personal notes will probably find high-level state secrets sharing page space with recipes for healing poultices and other trivia.

Alkris is not a combat-oriented character. Its primary function is a biological one, and it may have retained some ability to heal PCs by touch (handwaved away as "rearranging their physiological disposition" or some such mumbo-jumbo). As a spy, Alkris could be very useful, as it can change its face and even its outward build and shape to some degree.

In Ravenloft, Alkris may be one of the only creatures able to undo the Darkonian memory drain effect, or other incurable afflictions like lycanthropy.

One adventure idea that worked well for me was to have the PCs hear of Alkris as a much-sought-after courtesan of singular wit and beauty - with the hint that she knew secrets that could give them access to a plot goal. Arriving at the brothel, they found a scrum of aged peasants and beggars lining the streets, waiting for alms from the clients and the courtesans themselves. One radiantly beautiful courtesan came out with gifts of food to them, and gave the whole platter to a crotchety old crone to distribute.

Inside, the courtesans heard the PCs' plight and then unhelpfully all claimed to be the "most beautiful and witty" of the lot, so a puzzle element came up for the PCs to guess which one was Alkris. They would have to meet with a courtesan and talk with her long enough to ascertain her identity - and given that they charged for their time, the costs racked up quickly. Each courtesan had a completely different riddle to ask them. None of them knew the answer to the riddle about the "keenest pleasure known to the sentient mind", but several volunteer their own (inaccurate) guesses.

Eventually the PCs gave up and went outside. Talking with the beggars, they eventually found out that the old crone was actually Alkris itself, as it had adopted a form that would "make all the troublesome gentlemen leave it alone for once". Alkris also asked the PCs the riddle, explaining that it needed to know the answer in order to leave this world. Failing that, it needs to kill The Youth - hardly a simple task.

The PCs can either give it the answer (see below) or attempt to kill The Youth. Killing The Youth is very difficult as he is the pseudonymous leader of a police state, and would be roughly akin to assassinating Josef Stalin. Technically, Alkris itself might have been able to attempt this, except for the fact that The Youth had taken her daughter hostage. The PCs can also attempt to find the daughter, who by now would be a very old woman in her 80s or so. By freeing her and restoring her to Alkris, they can then bargain with The Youth's men for Alkris' release from its covenant.

Finally, the PCs can solve the riddle for Alkris. The answer can be changed to whatever the GM needs it to be for their campaign. In my original design, the answer was an intentional meta-reference.

Question: What is the keenest pleasure known to the sentient mind?

Answer: The moment you find an answer to a question that's been plaguing you.

I have no d20 stats for Alkris, but here are the broad brushstrokes of its GURPS stats:

• Can change its outward appearance to whatever it wants. For humanoid changes, this can be done in minutes.
• Can change its structural composition to whatever it wants, with the only restriction being a conservation of mass. (It's essentially a "biological" shapeshift.) This could take hours or days, depending on how profound a change Alkris wants to make.
• High scores in social interaction skills, learned from its study of human behavior in courts and the sect.
• No combat ability. Alkris has a very high regeneration rate and prefers to flee combat whenever it can.
• Immunity to disease, illness, and most poisons. (Things like acid will cause damage if ingested just as they would if splashed on Alkris.)
• No "level drain" effect. Instead, Alkris is able to cause sensations of intense pain or ecstatic pleasure just by touching something and willing it. This is fastest for humans and mammals because Alkris spent the most time in those forms, but given enough study, it could replicate the same effects in most creatures. Alkris usually does not cause pain unless it has no other way out - it has learned that humans tend to be much more useful if they enjoy your company.
• Complete control over its own genetic properties, and that of its offspring. Alkris can completely understand the genetic makeup of anything by simply absorbing it. (These were the "sacrifices" it devoured, of a child and a grown woman, early on in its stay on this world.)
• Alkris can have various physical properties if needed, but cannot have them all on at once. It might take a few seconds to cycle through some properties, including slippery skin (to escape grapples), chameleon skin, dark vision, acute taste and smell, stretching limbs, and peripheral vision. These are actual physical changes it makes to its own organs, so it's not illusion magic.
• Magic (or other means) that reveal Alkris' true form cause human viewers to become violently nauseated for a number of minutes. Genetically, it's an extreme version of a chimera but depending on the method used, it might appear simply as a lolloping, seething mass of organic matter.
• Immediately after intaking some organic material, Alkris becomes briefly comatose as it studies the material. Once or twice this has led its sexual clients to panic, believing it was dead. This causes social problems during meals, too, so Alkris usually eats by itself.

Sounds good... I like that it seems to leave options available to the party for interaction and yet it does not revel in the alien nature of the villain as to drown other aspects. Alkris is very much a doppleganger but with a far different motive and is not purely evil in desires. In fact while I tend to assume such I did not see any such supremely evil acts mentioned as done by Alkris though I assume she has done some in her quest!!! "She" also seems not to be completely without feelings which is something that can be played with as well.

The only thing that seems off is the idea of the Youth. I think it needs a tad bit more fleshing out to truly fit. I like the idea that they have the covenant but as Alkris is keen to escape, it would perhaps be better to have the Youth force such changes in the end as his hold on the original agreement was tenuous at best. Show that the Youth had cunning and such by using this beings binding of word but also outsmarting it's manipulations, or some unforeseen ace in the hole against this almost perfect deceiver. Perhaps the Youth caused the destruction in its manipulations and seeing this mistake would want immortality to ensure against time. Now that the covenant is changed Alkris cannot openly murder the Youth but perhaps the Youth is more than willing to destroy "her" as he worries that once "she" finds the answer to the question "What is the keenest pleasure known to the sentient mind? " "She" will come to kill him before departing fearing "her" motives. Not to mention that he stole "her" daughter back... Also now that he has a kingdom to lose he could be fearful of having to start over once more as it is destroyed again.

Just some observations. Good work!!!

Thanks for the feedback, A G Thing! I can definitely elaborate on some of those points. This character was actually used for a non-Ravenloft setting, so I'll need to sit down and think through its backstory more thoroughly to tailor it for Ravenloft.

Off the top of my head, I can imagine that it has "eaten" many many sentient beings, as part of its quest. Initially, when it was relatively new to the world, it might have been able to get away with this without much of a moral question ("You can't blame me, I'm new here") but as time went by it must have slowly become aware that its actions caused terrible suffering and despair to the individuals it consumed this way - especially as every one it ate would give it greater and greater understanding of the human condition.

If you fancy a dark twist to it, the open-ended nature of its riddle means it could have done some really perverse things, all in the quest for pleasure. These I leave up to the GM's imagination, but a quick search of your local court's sex offenses docket could probably give you enough material to last you for a long time.

As for Alkris' own condition, you could give Alkris a "gift" from the Dark Powers, whereby its offspring turn out Twisted or otherwise unwhole. This could be a good way of giving Alkris some combat ability, too - if it's leading an unholy cabinet of vile creatures, all dedicated to protecting their "Mother".

The story theme of The Youth (a distant despot with a secret vulnerability through a compromised child) is actually a repeat of my Yuri Mitrovic storyline for Falkovnia. (Link is here.) It may need some tailoring to fit into Ravenloft, but then again there are several noblemen in fairly advanced domains who have lots of extramarital affairs...