Make them more interesting: Arvia

Arvia is one of the Raven’s Peak NPCs who appears to have been put in to make up the numbers: “we need a dwarf, and we really need another woman; wait a minute!” While she can clue the PCs into the existence of the Arrow of the Fire Wyrm plot against Krasylla, the rest of her secret plans (break up someone else’s relationship? hope to do something to ancient elven rubies when she has no Stone-singing?) are fairly inconsequential and easily-ignored.

My proposed fix: embrace Arvia’s religious fanaticism, beef up her power, and turn her into an NPC who is ostensibly on the PCs’ side, but whose bizarre priorities and dogmatic decision-making make her a dangerous ally to trust.

Why make Arvia a religious fanatic?

Because there’s nothing else for her to do otherwise. She organised a bunch of commandos to make their way to Vond and try to kill Krasylla, but there’s no way as written to interact with that, and they’re destined to fail – mostly because it’s cool to let the PCs be the ones who fire the arrow at Krasylla instead, which is perfectly fair, but doesn’t leave Arvia with much agency. As it happens, I think you can make that whole plot more interesting by having there be a whole bunch of people looking for the arrow, including the PCs, but that doesn’t help Arvia, because she’s still only the one who set the plan in motion and is now waiting for it to succeed or fail.

Her description otherwise says that she’s not above the “the betrayal and the sacrifice of her friends”, and “Arvia is reluctantly, and secretly, in love with Peyraman, and is jealous and wants to see Viseria dead. Her jealousy has awakened an aversion to humans in general and an unreasonable hatred of love across the borders of kin, including contempt for all half-elves.” (Raven’s Peak, p. 44.) In the list of stuff that can happen in the final showdown, right after Krasylla being shot by an arrow of the Fire Wyrm and just before Soria marching an orc army at Vond, is “Arvia Hugedottir has the Galdane rider Viseria killed out of jealousy. The Galdane riders become aware of the murder of Viseria and turn on Arvia and the dwarves.” (ibid., p. 213).

That’s it? The only dwarf key player in the campaign is reduced to setting some plot in motion before the campaign even starts, and then has a lover’s tiff in the middle of demon-spewing gates between worlds being open or closed, which will at most annoy some other minor NPCs if they’re not already busy with the more important plot happening all around them?

If Arvia is going to pop up regularly, as the campaign suggests, it should be for something more interesting than “Arvia sits down and starts singing about Huge”.

Arvia, as written, is not actually a religious fanatic

“Princess Arvia of the Crombe dwarf clan is very proud and ambitious, but stands outside the royal lineage since her mother promised the child to the god Huge if it survived, since she had suffered hemorrhaging during the pregnancy.” (Raven’s Purge, p. 43)

This is a great start, because it gives you an NPC who lives in at least two worlds. On the one hand she’s a member of a royal family, and has intimate knowledge, through her father and siblings, of what ruling a dwarven kingdom involves. With that come connections and reputation enough to open doors in most dwarven cities, and potentially other significant settlements elsewhere.

On the other hand, the lack of any actual ruling obligations means she has the freedom to travel the dwarven cities spreading the word of Huge, attracting like-minded dwarves to her banner. She may not have an army as such, but she’ll have followers from all walks of dwarven life, and this isn’t like the modern day where someone in the army can legally own a handgun but has to leave their military-grade stuff in the barracks: with the possible exception of siege weaponry support, any full-time soldiers in her retinue are as effective fighting for her as they would be as part of a legitimate army. As are any of her other supporters, who are hard to spot because they just are everyday people most of the time.

The problem is that the main focus of her plan that we’re told about is to shoot Krasylla with an arrow of the Fire Wyrm.

That’s not the plan of a religious fanatic! It’s a perfectly workable plan, and something that any of the main players other than Krasylla and Zytera would consider doing if they happened to have the arrow; and the people carrying out the plan don’t have to be religious fanatics, just a bit brave. Maybe you could argue that the Galdanes who fled Aslene with the arrow were fanatics, and the arrow has been kept ever since by a succession of similar fanatics sworn to see Krasylla killed, but that’s really not clear: the route from Aslene to Margelda was one that hundreds if not thousands of Galdane Aslenes undertook (GM’s Guide, p. 31), and arguably the first carriers of the arrow were doing so to preserve it from marauding demons, relying on the safety of numbers to protect them.

What does Arvia actually want?

Why Arvia wants Krasylla dead is clear: she wants Vond, and Krasylla is currently camped out inside Vond and won’t move (actually can’t move, because of what turning into Sarmog involves, although it’s not clear that Arvia knows that).

What the rest of her plans are, the book doesn’t say, but based on her background and her personality description, it’s safe to say that she’s a firebrand conservative dwarf who wishes that things could go back to how they were in the good old days. And I think that involves rolling back, or trying to pretend really hard that they didn’t happen, many of the events in the Ravenlands since at least the First Alder War, and ideally since the Shift.

For starters that means her ruling Vond, or at least being acknowledged as the one who brought Vond back into dwarven control and revered as a holy leader throughout the dwarf lands. It will require killing or subjugating a great very many humans and orcs, if the dwarves aren’t going to be vulnerable to popular uprisings; and elvenspring aren’t going to be in much favour either. (She can live with elves, and she probably doesn’t think of halflings, goblins or wolfkin much; they live far away, in places where dwarves historically didn’t bother with.)

Note what it doesn’t necessarily involve: closing the rift, or treating demons differently from any other Ravenland faction who might oppose her. Hell, given how well the dwarves did compared to other Kin when the blood mist was about, she wouldn’t weep if it came back.

What can Arvia do?

It’s not clear how old Arvia is, but let’s say that she’s been active for at least 20 years. For much of that she’s been travelling across the land, through the dwarf tunnels that criss-cross the mountains but also occasionally venture into the lowlands, recruiting followers and gathering information. Arvia is clearly a fighter, but she’ll have a healthy mixture of skill sets among her followers. Notably, anyone planning on travelling mostly by long-forgotten tunnels will have a sizeable retinue of stone-singers to hand, and Arvia was educated by priests. If in your campaign stone-singers are mostly Belderannians, Arvia will have had to go to Belderand and recruit some, but the pitch “follow the word of the prophetess of Huge, and also restore tunnels built by ancient dwarves in places you haven’t been before” is a sound one and will have succeeded.

As well as the cadre of close supporters travelling with her, she has a sizeable number of followers in all significant dwarf cities that she can call upon if she’s near, or mobilise for a massed assault on Vond.

Your players’ initial opinion of Arvia may well be positive. She’s respected or feared by her followers, she’s clearly a skilful warrior and commander of troops, and she wears her title of Princess lightly, especially when trying to make a good first impression. If someone has tipped them off that she’s a dangerous mad fanatic, she is charismatic enough to dismiss such concerns, often through appeal to scripture. Perceptive players may notice that she has no sense of humour, though.

She has certainly travelled to the mountains near the now-ruined city of Wailer’s Hold: someone looking to recruit dwarves who wish a return to the good old days will find plenty of listeners among dwarves who have lost their ancestral city. If any Meromannians wanted to hold her clan against her, she could retort that she is now clanless, serving a higher power as Arvia of Huge. This will have been how she heard of the arrow of the Fire Wyrm that could kill Krasylla.

Not far from there, after all, during the long frustrating nights when the blood mist keeps people indoors or huddled around their camp fire, Galdane Aslenes have been lamenting for years that they couldn’t get to the tyrant Krasylla in his fortress of Vond and avenge their ancestors. Arvia speaks the language of frustration, resentment and defiant hope very well, and will have found it easy to elicit their friendship and collaboration. Look at a map, she can say: while the Groveland Woods do indeed stand in the way of brave horsemen only comfortable on the plains, and after that the plains of Harga are infested with Rust Brothers, there is a mountain chain heading south, then joining up with another heading east to Begrand; and there are surely ancient tunnels heading past Harga into Vond itself. Clearly it is the will of Horn that you join with the daughter of Huge!

Weirder Arvia plans

“Arvia of Crombe also wants the stones of Stanengist to secretly use them as raw material for experiments in stone magic, but she knows that the elves would go to war if they found out.” (Raven’s Purge, p. 44.) This is a wonderfully bonkers plan that has the potential to cause all sorts of mayhem, and I think you should absolutely lean into this sort of thing as much as you can.

Because Arvia is a religious fanatic: given four new pieces of information, she will ignore two of them as irrelevant, dismiss one of them as lies and heresy, and seize upon one of them as a justification for what she’s already doing, or, even better, a reason to do something even weirder that will just make things worse. If your players discover some really interesting information about Stanengist or the world, and they’ve spoken to Arvia a few times, they should be nervously worrying whether there are any dwarf tunnels nearby that Arvia could come out of any moment now and come to exactly the wrong conclusion.

You know how a normal Christian thinks “thou shalt not kill” and “love thy neighbour”, and is therefore worried about war in the Middle-East and global climate change? Arvia is the equivalent of the weird End Times evangelist who is actively rooting for all of that because it will cause Armageddon, and you know what happens when Armageddon happens? The Rapture! All of the right people will be swept away to paradise, and anybody unlucky enough to be left behind clearly didn’t deserve to have a good life anyway. Look, it says it right here in Scripture.

Rust Brothers have orders to kill elves and Maiden Druids and seize the rubies for Zytera’s experiments; and so Arvia has given orders to ambush said Rust Brothers and take the proceeds for her stone-singers’ own experiments. (Rubies are stone, and therefore part of Huge’s realm, and therefore fair game. Arguably the elves have been blaspheming by building elven flesh around a sacred jewel that doesn’t belong to them, but Arvia will gracefully not pursue this line of argument for the time being, at least not while Vond still belongs to the enemy and her position isn’t strong enough.)

Stanengist can be used to seal the rift, and (in my headcanon) was used to enslave the orcs originally? If Arvia hears this theory, she’ll be very interested, because part of her vision of the world As It Should Be involves the orcs being slaves of the dwarves again, and ideally the humans as well. It involves a ritual pronouncing yourself supreme ruler of the Ravenlands? Well, that was always her intention; tell her about this ritual! The ritual will open the rift wide open to a flood of demons? This is when she stops listening to you, or blithely pronounces that the dwarves will be safe in their mountain cities, and if the flood of demons wipes out those troublesome humans and orcs, well, isn’t this a sign from Huge that their stay in the Ravenlands was only ever supposed to be temporary? Maybe she can throw the crown through the rift once those interlopers are safely dead.

Stanengist comes with ancient elven rubies? That is a sign from Huge that her plans to experiment with stone magic on elven rubies were correct, and a reward for her initiative. There are just enough rubies in the crown to power it, but the PCs are looking for a couple of extra for safety, and e.g. because they don’t want to kill Gemelda if they can switch her out for Viridia? This means the crown is useful enough, and the Maligarn sword should be located so Viridia can be experimented on. You said yourselves that she’s insane and evil and not to be trusted; surely she’s forfeited her right to existence by her previous crimes?

Zygofer wants her hand in marriage (also my headcanon, but the original explanation makes no sense)? Fine, she accepts. She is sworn to Huge’s service so such a ceremony will have no effect on her soul, but it will get her into Vond, which is what she most wants. And as Zygofer wouldn’t refuse his future Queen a bridal party, that means she can place a number of people she trusts right by her at the heart of the ceremony. How fortuitous that the PCs happened to be here: she can accept for all of them in one go, and avoid the poor messenger having to make two trips!

Who’s thwarting Arvia?

Once the PCs have met Arvia enough, they should be right on top of this list, if only because they want to say “Aarrgghh! Arvia! No!” to her face rather than silently mouthing it whenever she reaches a catastrophically unwise decision that, because of the size of her following, they’re going to have to go along with and subtly sabotage rather than outright oppose.

If the rest of the dwarves have any serious plans to regain their old strongholds in the mountains of the Arina Forest, and from there reclaim Wailer’s Hold, they will be annoyed by Arvia’s insistence that they skip all of those obvious staging posts and go straight to Vond. (Her insistence that the orcs were rightfully enslaved and really should be slaves again will not help any parallel negotiations with the orcs to let the dwarves and orcs coexist peacefully in the Arina Forest, on the basis that the orcs don’t even want the mountains.) Likewise, if there are any efforts to settle the mountains west and south of Harmsmoor, and dwarves attempt to negotiate with the ogres, they will not be impressed if their entreaties of “you’re not using those mountains, and we are Kin” are sabotaged by Arvia’s followers chanting “unclean, impure, blasphemous Kin!” from the sidelines.

Arvia’s attempts to do stone-singing experiments on elf rubies will bring her into conflict with Zytera and Kartorda, to some degree, as well as Kalman Rodenfell if she’s too blatant. Kalman Rodenfell will not want to sabotaging the anti-Zytera coalition by infighting, though, and Zytera will console himself that once he weds Arvia he’ll be the rightful ruler of the Ravenlands and he can deal with her insolence at that point. Both Arvia and Merigall might be interested in experimenting on Mard the Freak (Raven’s Purge, pp. 210-211), but it’s unlikely that Arvia could ever get there. Maybe you could move Mard to Haggler’s House instead, so they could become rivals?

The rest of the key players, if they’ve any sense, will be trying to avoid getting involved with Arvia. Let her be somebody else’s problem.