Make them more interesting: Kalman Rodenfell

As written, Kalman Rodenfell is an ancient elf who doesn’t know about either the protonexus or Stanengist, but once he hears about them he’ll spring into action. Weirdly, he can decide to commit suicide and explode – doing exactly the same damage as a giant’s sweeping blow, which honestly isn’t that impressive – and if he ever meets Merigall he’ll fall head-over-heels in love with them.

I propose that you ditch all of this apart from “Kalman Rodenfell” and “ancient elf”, and ask yourself: what role should an ancient elf key player serve in a campaign like Raven’s Purge?

There needs to be an elf who remembers

The campaign is focused on Zytera, the Big Bad who waged war against the elves, dwarves and orcs, opened the rift wide and then shut it again, has two very different powerful and subtle demons by their side and also a military sidekick, and now mostly cackles from the back of a giant spider and plots against themselves.

On the other side: Zytera’s son trying to play both sides against the middle, a guerrilla druid with the zeal of the convert, a dwarven religious fanatic, an orc matriarch battling for her species’ freedom, and an elf.

If the PCs are going to have any chance of defeating Zytera, they need to at least match one of his advantages, which is that Zytera remembers. Zertorme is a politician and caught up in his family soap opera, Virelda is mostly concerned with the Rust Church, Arvia is obsessed with all sorts of crazy stuff, and Soria only really cares about orcs. The players are going to need to find out about ancient stuff somehow, and given that one of the typical answers to anything in Forbidden Lands is “an elf did it” or “ask an elf”, Kalman Rodenfell may as well be that elf.

And if Kalman Rodenfell remembers things that the elves in the crown don’t, that makes him even more interesting, because suddenly Zytera’s advantage is not just neutralised, but actively countered.

Kalman Rodenfell is the way to show off elf villages

The campaign proposes that you visit a starter human village passively-aggressively fought over by the mayor and the brewmaster, a castle filled with undead, a valley of the dead tended by a gentle giant, a village fought over by thieves and slavers, a village where ogres play drunken Gladiators, a castle with a mysterious fire demon secret, an orc castle, a village of crazy and/or racist druids, the mysterious depths below a dwarven city, further demon-infested depths beneath an ancient dwarven mine, the home of the bad demon-guys’ garrison, and finally the bad guys’ castle filled with more demons.

It would be nice for there to be somewhere nice to go occasionally?

If the campaign is about “there were these ancient elves and they were awesome, but now they’re in a crown and they need to die for the good of everyone”, as well as “the future is what we make of it, and the elves are the past”, then you may as well nick some other good bits of Lord of the Rings, being the bits where everyone can breathe and relax because they’re no longer in horrible danger: Rivendell and Lothlórien.

Thematically, going to a perfect elf village and meeting Kalman Rodenfell should be an almost literal breath of fresh air, compared to all of the mud, blood, treachery and violence the PCs have battled through previously. This is a moment where they can relax, wash away the dirt of the road and forget their troubles, be clothed in the finest fabrics, eat of the finest fruits, and delight in an elf village that has been designed for pleasure and comfort for hundreds of years.

So when Kalman Rodenfell affirms their greatest fears and tells them that there is indeed a grave task ahead of them, they’ll maybe not protest, but sagely nod their heads, and commit themselves to the task that they perhaps always knew they would have to face one day.

(And then a few days after, when it’s raining and they need to make camp and someone has buggered up folding the tent so it takes far longer than it should do to do the basic task of setting up the place where they sleep, how long have we been doing this now anyway, why does someone always get something wrong?, they’ll maybe think “hang on, what did we commit ourselves to?” and “you know, we don’t have to do all that heroic stuff”.)

As a GM you don’t have to do much more than describe a village of unearthly beauty for about 5-10 minutes, which the PCs won’t interact with much because the whole point of it being amazing is that there’s no conflict, and conflict is what we talk about when we roleplay. You can cut to Kalman Rodenfell giving them plot, maybe do about half an hour of the players interacting with elves, and then you’re done. But that half-hour will be memorable, and it’s a useful breathing spot between all the nastiness.

What does Kalman Rodenfell remember?

To my mind, the easiest and best answer is: everything.

The greatest of the stones that fell from the Red Wanderer, back in the day, was the Heart of the Sky, from which emerged the Shardmaiden, Gemelda, Neyd, Nebulos, Iridne and Viridia (Raven’s Purge, pp. 17-18). Algared fell close by and was was accepted as a future husband, taking the Shardmaiden’s place in the original circlet. Kalman Rodenfell’s name means “he who fell from the red one” (Raven’s Purge p. 47), and the simplest explanation for why he has this cognomen is that he was also part of the initial elves who fell from the sky, rather than an elf who came later somehow. He’s a contemporary of the elves from the Heart of the Sky, and while he might not have been their precise equal – you don’t call someone “The Aurochs” or say “he sleeps standing in the blood of his enemies so as to draw nourishment and knowledge from them” if you expect them to write a Constitution or paint a work of art – if you want someone with memories he’s the best you’re going to get.

So while in the early days he was maybe just an elf, he was there. He remembers Neyd’s stories of exploring the Ravenlands and naming all of the creeks, lakes and rivers, and he was one of the first elves to experience Nebulos’s stillmist. He was there when the humans arrived, drawn by the Shardmaiden’s song, and when she told Algared to go and make some Frailers, he wondered whether he should go too. When Viridia failed to return from fighting Scrome and Gemelda created the Redrunners to find her (ibid., p. 20), Kalman Rodenfell was in their vanguard.

But I think this is when Kalman Rodenfell starts to take a leadership position, as Gemelda is still preoccupied with the now-rampaging Viridia. Shortly after the First Alder War in 825 AS, as he realises that the elves and dwarves together are going to be no match for the human armies of Alderland, and having still been in contact somewhat with the dwarven artificers who helped Nebulos create the first circlet, or their heirs, he decides that now is the time to turn it into a proper artifact of war, forging Stanengist. (Maybe Kalman Rodenfell even wears the crown at this point? Who else could have been the commander of the combined armies?) One of the first things the united elven and dwarven command does is summon the orc leaders and enact the ritual of subjugation, enslaving the orcs as a whole. This is enough to reinforce the dwarven armies with orcs for the Second Alder War (GM’s Guide, p. 25), and while Iridne demands to be given flesh again and leaves the crown, the elves also have their orc slaves by that time, and contribute them to the Third Alder War (ibid., p. 27).

I suspect that this is the point where Rodenfell decides that the crown has fulfilled its purpose, and sends it back to the Stillmist, perhaps in penance, regretting his decision. At some point between 852 AS and 869 AS, Merigall and Viridia go to the Stillmist, and unsuccessfully parlay with Gemelda, Neyd and Nebulos. Viridia is ambushed by elves (almost certainly Rodenfell’s elite troops, unless Gemelda insisted on her people being there), Merigall grabs Viridia’s gem and Stanengist and flees, and then once he’s cornered at Lake Harga (Rodenfell is definitely here at this point), casts the “if I can’t have it, nobody can” spell that spirits Stanengist and the Maligarn sword away (Raven’s Purge, p. 23).

(This is one reason why “if Kalman Rodenfell and Merigall ever meet, they’ll fall in love” is such a rubbish weakness: they almost certainly have met already, centuries ago.)

Soon afterwards, Zygofer finds Merigall in the Blaudwater, and it’s not long before the rift is flung open. Between 874 AS and 900 AS, Kalman Rodenfell has plenty of time to talk with sorcerers and rift theoreticians, and then has another 260 years during the blood mist to think about his actions in the Alder Wars. He must at least be aware of the possibility that forging Stanengist was what brought the demons.

Remembering does not mean recalling

Richard Nixon set a precedent for dissembling politicians when he said “I do not recall” rather than “I don’t remember”, because recalling is a voluntary act, so for humans means “I choose not to recall” (“…because it suits my current purposes not to do so”). But for elves there really is a distinction: elves live in the constant Now, with excess memories they do not currently need carefully stored away in special crystals.

Kalman Rodenfell has lived long enough that his memories must take up a vast array of crystals, and maybe he can be seen pondering them from time to time, fingers hovering uneasily over a collection of crystals arrayed in a honeycomb pattern like Jean-Michel Jarre’s accordion keyboard, memories flashing up in coloured lights all around him.

So maybe the first time the PCs meet Rodenfell, he’ll only remember events of Stanengist vaguely, because he’s had other things to do in the subsequent years, or he prefers not to torture himself with old memories. The very next day, though. he might remember more details, having delved into his past and literally refreshed his memory. But it’s unlikely he’ll tell them everything, because Rodenfell is no longer the sort of elf to face his memories face-on.

This is Kalman Rodenfell’s weakness: he might remember everything, but he deeply wishes he didn’t. He regrets a lot of his past actions, and is indecisive about which course to take. The book says (ibid., p. 47) “Kalman Rodenfell wants to claim Stanengist to save the old elfstones to the Stillmist. If necessary, the crown must be sacrificed to protect the land and seal the Protonexus in Vond. This latter goal is disliked by the Redrunners, who’d rather see the crown worn by the commander of the elves to reinstate their kin as a power-broker in the Forbidden Lands and to drive away the humans.” I think it’s far more interesting if Rodenfell wants both of these things, and he can’t decide.

Optional: crazy schemes that Kalman Rodenfell has considered

If you want to make Kalman Rodenfell more comedic and/or more disturbing, consider that as well as flitting between worrying about what to do, and deciding to ignore the problem entirely, he might have occasionally decided to try what the layman would call “crazy schemes that could never work”. He’s just a fighter, and knows nothing about rifts and demons, but there are elves who do know about this stuff, and he might have dragooned them into trying to implement his ideas. (You should probably play Rodenfell as bipolar, ADHD or similar.)

For instance: if the problem with the rift is that demons could come through it, how about we build a really big wall right next to it? This will have involved finding elves, or maybe elvenspring, who are really good symbolists and can open portals, so to be able to experiment at attacking a wall from the other side of a portal; and so it’s possible that the portals no longer exist, and all that’s left is a number of weird standalone walls in the clearing of a forest, significantly damaged in parts. Possibly, as per Frank Lloyd Wright’s instruction to architects, the elves have grown vines up them.

Or: what happens if you open another rift right next to another one, so anything popping out of the rift immediately goes into a new one? This will have left fewer obvious signs, but maybe there’s now a very small weird microclimate or ecosystem between where the rifts were?

Or: what if we breed a very large, very cute animal that likes rifts, and wants to be next to them, so you can’t get through the rift because the big cute animal is in the way, and you can’t bring yourself to move it? This is obviously a terrible idea, but maybe Kalman Rodenfell talked to a biologist geek who wanted to breed new animals anyway, and so there’s an elf who’s been spending much of their time, for the last few hundred years, breeding huge hulking furry things that like portals?

And if you want to go down the disturbing route, consider this: what if we solved the problem of “when Zytera dies, the rift will be flung wide open and hordes of demons will come through” by “let’s grant Zytera his wish and have him never die”? The implementation of which ends up something like “let’s build Zytera his own personal stillmist, so he can carry on doing demonic experiments”?

Even before you consider why Zytera would agree to this, the fundamental problem with this approach is that the Stillmist is only possible because elves have rubies that contain their personality and life essence, which the stillmist is constructed for, and other kin don’t; not even demon-warped elvenspring stuck to the back of giant spiders. Still, maybe if we experiment with breeding hybrids enough, a solution will present itself?

One possibility is to breed elf/elvenspring hybrids, and that doesn’t sound bad at first. The theory goes as follows: if you breed two radically different dogs together, like a mastiff and lapdog, you’ll end up with something that’s merely medium-sized; but if you then breed the resulting dogs back with mastiffs, for generations after generations, eventually you’ll end up with something very much like a mastiff. So maybe, if you breed elvenspring with elves over and over again, eventually you’ll end up with a baby that has a fragment of a ruby inside, which will then grow in the normal way; and once we understand how that happens, we can reverse-engineer the process, and implant a ruby inside a standard elvenspring; and once we understand how to do that properly, we can make a deal with Zytera.

The problem there, apart from the fact that elvenspring were designed by the Shardmaiden as very much a Kin of their own, and not a body type that elves could build for themselves, is that elvensprings’ lives are long, their sexuality is deliberately voluntary, and a breeding programme that needs many generations in short notice works against both of these things. So maybe instead researchers look for natural experiments: see if there have been any elvenspring that tried to have children with elves, if that ever succeeded, whether any of those children in turn tried to have children with elves, and maybe offer incentives for further breeding. Chances are the answer was “no, elves whose bodies have been adapted for breeding can breed only with humans”, or “the result is just other elvenspring”. At worst, some ancient elvenspring may have been respectfully autopsied, looking for any trace of a ruby; when none was found, the project will have abandoned as a failure.

If you want to get really dark, though (and ask your players beforehand if they’re comfortably exploring this sort of stuff!), you can have a more active experiment, where the subjects are forced to give birth young, repeatedly, and their progeny treated as useful only inasmuch as they display physical characteristics that would enrol them into the next phase of the breeding programme, with all “failures” being discarded as unsuitable. You can expect there to be a Dr-Mengele-type character centrally involved, who was probably also some hideous sexual predator as well if you consider where the other half of the breeding came from, and I’d hope their name would be anathema to all elves who ever knew about it, and this would be a cautionary tale of when science goes too far.

The other way you could try to get hybrids would be to experiment on elf/demon hybrids, where you take a demon body, stick an elf ruby inside it, and see what happens. You’re now in full-on mad scientist territory, competing with Zytera and possibly Merigall for incomplete elf rubies, and that alone should be enough to tell you to stop. But if you ever wondered why there could be an elf laboratory – complete with wooden art deco curlicues and other elven stylings – in a mountain valley where for some reason lightning crashes all the time, well, here’s your answer. Igoriel will see you to your room. Walk this way.