Stanengist, rubies, and madness

In Raven’s Purge, the players will pretty soon find Stanengist, and with it Neyd, Gemelda and Nebulos. Algared is in the Nekhaka sceptre, which can be found in Weatherstone; even if the players don’t get there first, no major faction is interested in that ruby, so it should be easy enough to nick it.

After that, there are another couple of rubies. Soria and Iridne are happy together, and you need to persuade Soria why she should stop being awesome and able to levitate. Viridia is in the Maligarn sword somewhere, and Merigall will cheerfully tell you that they have a casus belli on you if you stick Gall-Eye in the crown with the intention of closing the rift.

4 rubies are enough to close the rift (and, in my headcanon, a few other things), which is what most non-evil people want. Why should the players go looking for more rubies?

Fix the madness exploit before your players find out

It says here (Raven’s Purge, p. 28, my emphasis added): “Stanengist has a powerful negative influence on the psyche of demons and demon-tainted creatures. If such a creature dons the crown, it will immediately suffer damage to Wits. […] If the victim’s Wits drops to zero, the creature becomes permanently insane – it will lash out at everyone around it for one round before storming off into the wilderness or throwing itself to its death in the Protonexus. […] This effect is an exception to demons’ normal immunity to attacks that affect Wits.”

Stanengist was originally forged in about 825 AS, and Iridne will have left soon afterwards, well before Zytera learned of the rift’s existence from speaking to the dead in 841, investigated it with Merigall in 850, or flung it wide open in 874. So while now we understand that Stanengist is the crown that can seal the rift between the worlds, and can send demons mad, there was no reason to believe that at the time, and nor were there demons in any significant numbers to experiment on.

Besides, Stanengist was a powerful magical item holy to both the dwarves and elves, to be treated with awe and reverence, not risked on even captive demons, such as those minor drawn to the crown when it was originally forged: what if somehow they managed to spirit it away?

And once Iridne left, and it became much less powerful, it was almost certainly taken to the Stillmist for safe keeping, far from any dwarven sorcerers with ambitious of experimenting on it, only for Merigall to steal it in some time between 852 and 869.

But.

In the present day, by the time the players find Stanengist and another elven ruby to stick in it, they should have a fair idea that it’s bad news to demons. The heirs of ancient dwarven sorcerers, or people who read their notes, can postulate; smart demons can tell the players; if the crown has been put on a demon’s head beforehand, the elves inside will know; and of course an ambitious, egotistical and not-as-smart-as-it-thinks demon might steal it from them, proudly crown itself as Lord of the Ravenlands, and promptly go kablooie.

And, players being players, you know what that means. They’ll turn it into a one-turn kill weapon that they’ll try on every demon they meet.

It doesn’t matter how. Maybe they’ll be subtle and give it to the rogue, who can sneak up behind a demon and slam-dunk them with the crown (if the demon is large the rogue might have to jump on top of something first, like other parts of the demon). Maybe they’ll tie it to the end of a bendy stick and try to bop a demon on the head from distance, like a sixteenth-century lamplighter, or attach it to a rope and shoot the whole apparatus from a crossbow. Maybe they pretend to surrender, and offer up this awesome crown to their “victor” as ransom.

Attacked by harpies? Stanengist bola.

As soon as the players see a demon, knowing that it just has to have the crown touching most of its head for a round and then it’ll pretty much die, they’ll try to put the crown on the demon’s head.

I don’t care if that’s what the authors intended. That’s what they’ve written. You need to fix this.

Why should Stanengist send demons mad anyway?

There’s a dead give-away in the description: “the creature becomes permanently insane – it will lash out at everyone around it for one round before storming off into the wilderness or throwing itself to its death in the Protonexus”. The madness crown is meant to be used against Zytera, in the final confrontation at Vond: Zytera charges through the Protonexus wearing Stanengist, sealing the rift, and promptly dies on the other side of the rift just to be sure.

Failing that, it’s really funny for Zertorme to double-cross everyone, and announce that he’s going to be King of the Ravenlands, either insisting that someone crowns him with Stanengist (either his father or the prettiest woman in the room) or crowning himself. After villain exits stage left, raving, someone else picks up the crown and says “so, where were we?”

But Merigall knows it’s a bad idea to wear Stanengist, and Krasylla values it for its rift-sealing powers. You can come up with all sorts of Manipulation hijinks that will get them to put it on their head anyway, or the Heath Robinson arrangements from the previous section, or even an end-run around Bind Demon (you can’t tell them to kill themselves, but you can tell them to put this crown on their head), but that doesn’t feel appropriate for the final world-shattering confrontation. (“How did you become the ruler of the Ravenlands?” “We chucked a bunch of custard pies at the terrible demon, and while she was distracted wiping the mess off her face, we dropped a hat box on her head.”)

In my headcanon, I added a caveat that this only happens if the demon tries to activate any of Stanengist’s powers, so if Zytera says “I shall rule the Ravenlands with this crown” that’s good enough, but if you merely say “here, put this on your head” it won’t have any effect. But there’s an additional problem: how likely is it that an NPC will go mad?

The madness mechanics as written

You can put 4, 5 or 6 rubies in Stanengist. The NPCs you’d want to put the crown on have 4 (Katorda), 5 (Zytera and Zertorme) or 6 (Krasylla) Wits.

The formula is that you do d6 Wits damage for each ruby after the first three in Stanengist. If you have just enough rubies to close the rift, you do 1d6; if you fill it up, you do 3d6.

The observant will have noticed that you can roll three banes on 3d6 and fail. So if the players’ plan was “OK, Zytera, you win. Have this shiny crown, and become the ruler of us all”, and Zytera puts it on his head, but the player’s roll is absolute toilet (you absolutely should have the players roll for something like this!) so Zytera merely has a headache until they retire to their chambers for a slap-up meal that’s… a bit rubbish?

OK, but that’s not likely, is it? Maths says that the chances of driving someone mad are:

• 4 rubies in the crown: Katorda goes mad 50% of the time, Zytera and Zertorme 33% of the time, Krasylla 17% of the time
• 5 rubies: Katorda 92%, Zs 83%, Krasylla 72%
• 6 rubies: Katorda 99.5%, Zs 98%, Krasylla 95%

There’s a strong argument for sticking 5 rubies in the crown. The argument for going up to 6 is weaker, and that’s unfortunate, because this is the point where the proper moral dilemmas happen.

In praise of dilemmas

The French name for dungeon crawler is “door-monster-treasure”, and we should all be tired of that sort of simplistic thing by now. What’s interesting about role-playing is when the characters have a choice to make. But not all choices are as interesting.

If you’re going to try and break into somewhere and steal something, it’s tempting to have a planning session where you work out what obstacles could be in your way and how you’d overcome them; but in practice that ends up being really boring for the players and the GM. At best you hit on the ideal plan immediately and then play through it, only duplicating things twice; but in practice you go through far more possibilities than you ever encounter, so most of your preparations end up never being used. You should avoid planning sessions and, per Blades in the Dark, cut straight to the place you’ve broken into when something goes wrong, and let the PCs say “well obviously we planned for this”.

Similarly, in any kind of “how shall we overcome this tactical problem?” discussion, it feels to me like it’s the players talking, and as a player I struggle to stay in character.

But moral dilemmas, where there isn’t an obvious solution that’s inherently better than another, just a series of choices that need to be made? Those are solid-gold. This is the sort of thing that will have players reacting in-character, in the best kind of intra-party conflict where nobody is wrong, per se, so nobody can be accused of being the bad guy. This fleshes out characters wonderfully, and as a GM, once you’ve given the party a moral dilemma, you can sit back and do nothing for half an hour, which is amazing.

In Raven’s Purge, the moral dilemmas are when it comes to deciding whether the players should try to get a fifth or sixth ruby for the crown, because they’re going to have to make enemies if they do. But as written, there’s no reason to think there’s even a choice, because the underlying rule of “the more rubies in the crown, the more dice you roll” is completely opaque. Nobody knows about it in-world.

That’s what annoyed the most about it when I asked the other day: the GM can watch their players decide that 4 rubies in the crown is all they need, and they’ve heard that it will send demons mad, so their plan to stick it on Zytera’s head is going to be fine, and there’s nothing they can do to disabuse the players of that notion. Conversely, if they just want to use the crown to seal the rift, but have decided to take all the rubies they can find and stick them in the crown, there’s nothing that Kalman Rodenfell or Merigall can say to them to dissuade them; because, face it, it sure could look like putting all the rubies in the crown was a good idea.

There needs to be a reason why you should put more rubies in the crown, and PCs and NPCs alike should be able to find it out.

Make putting more rubies in the crown have an obvious, and known, effect

When I revamped the rules for the magic items in Raven’s Purge, I kept the “with 3 rubies you can dispel magic automatically” power, and the “with 4 rubies you can seal the rift or drive demons mad” power, and added a few additional ones so the crown would be interesting at lower levels. Notably, I added a Ritual of Legitimacy, with 2 rubies, which lets the players be recognised as the rightful owners of the crown, and attracts demons as a side-effect. (Magic items in Forbidden Lands should always have side-effects.)

In Cthulhu, spells tend to come in three levels (I’d have said “good, better, best” but casting a spell in Cthulhu is never a good idea): “Contact …”, “Summon …” and “Control …”. So maybe that’s a useful pattern: 2 rubies unwittingly makes you contact demons, and then 3 lets you scan for demons, 5 lets you summon demons, and 6 lets you control demons. That immediately gives you the players a reason not to stop at 4 rubies. (See the end for actual mechanics.)

You might also want to think what it should mean if a demon were to put Stanengist on their head and try to command it. My rule of thumb here is that it does something similar in scale to what the crown would have done to it if it had one more ruby, because if you open your mind to the Stanengist crown that feels like you’re asking for it. Maybe with 4 rubies it merely hurts a lot, but with 5 it really messes you up, and with 6 it flat-out kills you. That’s effectively what the current rules are going for: a 95%+ chance of succeeding really should be a sure-fire chance, it’s what the campaign expects, so let’s say it just is and avoid rolling dice.

And while the original circlet was forged “with room for six stones” (Raven’s Purge, p. 19), because the Shardmaiden had said she didn’t want to take part, maybe when it was reforged into Stanengist, room was made for seven stones? Either because ancient dwarven sorcerers thought seven was cooler than six, they hoped to get the Shardmaiden back, and/or they made room for Kalman Rodenfell?

In which case you have to wonder what happens if the players find all of the elven gems and they persuade Kalman Rodenfell to get in the crown. How about a crown with seven elves in it can zap demons at a distance? That would be a formidable weapon, and while not unstoppable (demons are capable of mastering the subtle arts of ranged weapons, and a gleaming gold crown makes a good target), you can make a good case of “let’s just kill all the demons with the crown rather than going to Vond and closing the rift”.

As to why the PCs know the crown can do this: the elves inside the crown will be aware that the crown can suddenly do more, now that there are more rubies in it (maybe it starts chanting “bring all demons to me and kill them!” rather than the generic “rule the world, kill the demons!”), and any surviving writings from the original dwarven sorcerers may suggest that possibility as well. If the PCs aren’t aware of ancient dwarven sorcerers immediately, the fact that the crown can do the sort of things that sorcerers can do, and stories that Nebulos had help from the dwarves in forging the circlet originally, should put them on the path of looking for old dwarven writings. And of course Kalman Rodenfell may have read these writings, although he wants to preserve as many ancient elves as possible, so maybe he won’t tell the PCs immediately.

What this means for the campaign

If the players just want to close the rift, and stop at 4 rubies, that’s fine; they can even forego the campaign’s preferred solution of amassing a huge army, sneak into Vond and throw Stanengist through the rift. That won’t deal with the problem of Krasylla turning into sarmog, or Zytera still being the political head of the Rust Church that rules Harga, but it will mean that Zytera’s threat of opening the rift wide open and there being a Demon Flood II is now neutralised. If the players then want to kill Zytera, they’ll need to find the Arrow of the Fire Wyrm with Zytera’s name written on, or Asina, and they’ll now have an enemy in Merigall because killing Zytera means a death sentence for Merigall as well. So maybe the campaign now becomes a search for Merigall’s life essence, so they get the go-ahead to take out Zytera.

This is no bad thing: you end up with a three-act campaign, with Act I being the initial exploration and discovery of the crown, Act II finding the fourth ruby, sneaking into Vond and closing the rift, and Act III ending with the final confrontation with Zytera in Vond, probably with an army this time.

Conversely, if the players decide to build up the crown as an item of power, there’s every reason for them to go looking for all other rubies: Gall-Eye (making an enemy of Merigall another way), Iridne (potentially passing up the opportunity to have an orc army with them), maybe even trying to persuade Kalman Rodenfell to shed his flesh and join as a seventh ruby to make the crown even more awesome.

(Arvia will be interested in this, because it almost certainly makes the Ritual of Subjugation more powerful, so you could make the orcs and all the humans slaves.)

The problem is that once the PCs start using Stanengist a day-by-day basis, rather than it being a McGuffin that they keep carefully stashed away until the final confrontation, that means more opportunities for a PC to be seen wearing a big shiny crown, including by Therania and/or Krasylla’s spies. Incidentally, I think the more Willpower the players put in the crown (which if they plan on using it as a weapon, they will be doing), the shinier the crown should look: not in the sense that it emits light necessarily, but it should catch your eye, draw your attention, look shinier, sparklier, more impressive, majestic, sharper. No, you can’t tell the crown to stop doing that; it wouldn’t understand. The point of a crown is to impress people.

Also, PC groups tend to be democracies, same as the player groups who run them, but the crown can only be worn by one person at a time. You may want to reinforce that by saying that if another PC dons it, they can’t access its powers unless they do the Ritual of Legitimacy again, which will attract demons’ attention; and that will also remove any Willpower put in by the previous owner. Let there be consequences of having a magic crown of leadership and domination.

This also makes it more likely that if they say to Zytera or Zertorme, during the final confrontation, “OK, you win, you get the crown of awesomeness”, they’ll say “no way am I putting that thing on my head!”

So, sure, if they can manage to put seven rubies in the crown, they should be able to one-shot Zytera. But the problem is that they’ll also be building the wearer of the crown up to be a fearsome ruler (also known as “potentially as bad as the previous guy”), which makes it less likely that Soria, Merigall or Kalman Rodenfell will help them, unless they can cast-iron promise that once they’ve used the crown for zapping, they’ll remove a few rubies; and at that point there’s going to be a lot of arguing about which rubies stay and which rubies are saved.

Also, the best way to kill Zytera is when they’re away from their fortress, e.g. on diplomatic missions; but (a) diplomatic missions might be curtailed or have their security reinforced if it’s known that there’s some kind of maniac walking around with a crown of doom on their head, and (b) once you kill Zytera and the rift is flung wide open, you now have to fight your way through Demon Flood II to close the rift.

On the plus side, this means that there really is no other choice than to assemble the largest army you possibly can, and ride at the head of it on your gleaming horse, wearing your shiny crown, before ordering your army to attack the enemy fortress, overwhelming the garrison, marching in with your army to Zytera’s inner sanctum and demanding their surrender.

Better hope that the enemy doesn’t know what the leader looks like and/or has forgotten to bring archers.

Mechanics for when there are more rubies in Stanengist

For the purpose of these rules, “rubies” means an ancient elf ruby of significant power, so one belonging to the elves of the Heart of the Sky, or Kalman Rodenfell. Gall-Eye counts as a ruby even though it’s more like an emerald now. As per my previous write-up, two rubies in the crown let you perform a Ritual of Legitimacy, which lets you transfer willpower to the crown at will.

Detect demons: Available if there are three or more rubies in the crown. The wielder can detect the rough direction and distance of the nearest demon or demon-tainted creature within the hex, as well as the rough overall number of demons or demon-tainted creatures in the hex. This is an active scan, so all such creatures should feel that something is happening, and the rough direction and distance the scan is coming from.

Harm demon wielder: Available if there are four rubies in the crown. This replaces “No demon shall wield” in the previous version! If a demon or demon-tainted creature tries to activate any of the powers of Stanengist, the crown retaliates, causing physical pain to the wielder, starting where the crown touches the wielder’s flesh and radiating outwards. The wielder takes d6 damage to Strength for each turn that the crown remains on their head; something dramatic should happen if they’re Broken.

Summon demons: Available if there are at least five rubies in the crown. All demons in the current hex are compelled to travel towards the crown, like the spell Bind Demon with a constant command of “travel in this direction”, with a Power Level equal to the number of rubies in the crown - 3. Willpower stored in the crown can be spent to increase the power level. Demons in adjacent hexes hear the call but are not compelled.

Disrupt demon wielder: Available if there are five rubies in the crown. If a demon or demon-tainted creature tries to activate any of the powers of Stanengist, the crown retaliates, disrupting all of the demon-tainted flesh of the wielder. The wielder takes 2d6 damage to Wits for each turn that the crown remains on their head, even if the monster rules would otherwise say they can’t, as shining light courses through their body, starting where the crown touches the wielder’s flesh and radiating through their nervous system or demonic equivalent. Even if the wielder isn’t Broken, any recently-acquired demonic parts should detach themselves from the rest of the body, as should demonic parts attached to a non-demonic body, so e.g. Katorda’s extra head, the giant spider body that Zygofer and Therania ride around on, any people recently consumed by Krasylla, Martea or Marga.

Compel demons: Available if there are at least six rubies in the crown. A demon of the wielder’s choice is subject to the spell Bind Demon, with a Power Level equal to the number of rubies in the crown - 3. Willpower stored in the crown can be spent to increase the power level. The spell lasts as long as the crown remains on the head of the initial wielder (so you can’t compel a demon to put the crown on and use its powers, because as soon as you take it off your head, the compel demon spell stops working).

Kill demon wielder: Available if there are six or more rubies in the crown. If a demon or demon-tainted creature tries to activate any of the powers of Stanengist, the crown retaliates, killing them instantly as brilliant-white lightning courses through their body, starting where the crown touches the wielder’s flesh and radiating outwards. If the wielder is in contact with other demonic entities, they are in turn affected as per Disrupt demon wielder, so e.g. if Zygofer crowns himself with Stanengist and there are six rubies set in the crown, they will die immediately, and the giant spider will then be disrupted and the link with Therania will be broken.

Kill demon: Available if there are seven rubies in the crown. A demon or demon-tainted creature within NEAR range takes damage to Strength as per the spell Immolate, except that it looks like the effect of “Kill demon wielder”, with a Power Level equal to the number of rubies in the crown - 3. Willpower stored in the crown can be spent to increase the power level. Alternatively, the wielder may choose to discharge all of the willpower stored in the crown and kill the target; if they do this, this power will be unavailable for a turn, and all demons or demon-tainted creatures in the hex and any surrounding hexes will become aware that this has happened, and how.