Make them more interesting: Virelda

That’s Virelda on the cover of Raven’s Purge, rather than the more obvious choices of Zytera or Merigall. If your players are human, and therefore your campaign will at least start somewhere near Harga, they’re likely to be aware of her fairly early on. And she’s an easier Key Player to bring in, e.g. swooping in to rescue the players from a Rust Brother attack; certainly compared to Kartorda and Arvia who you might not care about, or Zytera and Krasylla, both of whom are arguably too powerful and too busy with their own business in Vond (which is supposed to be the location of the finale of the campaign, and therefore somewhere you should probably avoid at first / may decide to leave til last).

And yet there’s not much to her, once you get over how cool she is (if you travel by turning into a flock of ravens, you might be goth). Her role in the campaign appears to be to help you in the final battle half as much as Zertorme’s army could, if you take time out from your adventures to hunt down a random wilderness encounter (which itself is over-hyped).

This is a shame: a campaign devoted purely to the resistance against the Rust Church in Harga would be interesting in itself, even without Stanengist and other earth-shattering stuff like sealing the demon rift or flinging it wide open; and she should have a starring role within it.

How can we fix this?

What should a human resistance leader look like?

The first thing we need to do is consider what a resistance leader should look like, if we want to posit that she’s merely a hyper-competent human being rather than a borderline demigod as the book depicts her. Her story arguably becomes more interesting if it could have happened to anyone, e.g. a PC in a prequel campaign.

What does the Raven Sister resistance look like?

The last 200-odd years must have been miserable for Raven Sisters in Harga. Since Pyronax (allegedly) found a way to walk among the blood mist, the Rust Brothers have had almost total sway over Harga, ruthlessly putting down all attempts to challenge their rule. The Raven Sisters are about communitarian cooperation; tying the teachings of Raven and blessings of Clay, Flow and Wail together to benefit everyone; being nice to people. And the Rust Brothers have been very clear that this is not allowed.

What are you supposed to do during this time, when it’s clear to you that you are a Raven Sister, but you’re stuck in your village and surrounded by your mortal enemies? (Yes, travelling in animal form was safe, at least from the blood mist; but that’s a level 3 spell in the Path of Shifting Shapes, so in practice it’s reserved for the leaders of the Church, or mid-ranking Raven Sisters desperate enough to risk an automatic magic mishap.)

Obviously you can try to help people whenever you can; carefully, in whispered tones, always looking out for spies and traitors. But you have to pretend to just be a normal person, which means repressing urges to use your druidic powers, lest a passerby spot them and start asking awkward questions like “have you ever thought of serving the Sisters of Heme?”, to which the answer is either to completely recant your true nature and live, or be nailed to a tree and die painfully.

Once it becomes clear that the blood mist is gone, the natural instinct of any Raven Sister in Harga must be to leave. Not all will leave, because people have family and friends, and other bonds that tie them to the community they’re trying to protect, but the urge must be strong.

But then a leader of the resistance arises and says: you can help. You are resistance druids, supporting a motley band of freedom fighters, which means healing them when they get injured, spying on their enemies from afar, and countering the bad guys’ spy network with a furry spy network of your own.

What’s surprising is that said leader wasn’t a Raven Sister until recently, and even now that’s debatable.

What’s someone like you doing in a Church like this?

Virelda was once a Sister of Heme until she found secret documents that made her denounce her old faith as heretical: she now vows to tear the Church down (Raven’s Purge, p. 40). The first question we have to ask is: why was she a Sister of Heme in the first place?

“Sometimes confused villagers joined the Brotherhood” (GM’s guide, p. 33), back in 883 AS; but Virelda is an adult human in 1165 AS, and there’s no way that someone determined to uncover hidden secrets in libraries would have been unaware of the nature of the Church of Rust and Heme. She would have known that joining the church would involve sharing a barracks or a canteen with people who have additional body parts and pal around with demons; that she’d occasionally have to viciously nail people to a tree and carefully make sure they died slowly and painfully.

Obviously if she was intent on infiltrating the Church and finding out its secrets, and was secretly a good person, she could have decided that that was a price worth paying, and secretly hated every moment of it. But it’s far more interesting if she genuinely believed in the Church, as she understood it, and was happy to do things that her current friends in the Raven Sisters find absolutely abominable.

This places her as a traditionalist, conservative believer; almost certainly from the garrison in the middle of the Begrand where pretty much everyone is a Rust Brother or Sister of Heme, or was before they retired. You know how in our world there are people who decide to become a cop because their dad and most of their uncles were cops; or families where most people have served in the military in some kind? That’s her background.

But there has to be more than that, because Virelda isn’t the unthinking “I’m 18 now, guess I’ll join the army” type. She must have been paying avid attention to the old stories of what the Church was like back in the day, or the rumours about how the blood mist was actually conquered hundreds of years ago. So she decided that she’d join the Church, yes, but so she could find out the truth for herself.

What’s the deal with Virelda’s amazing hair?

We’re told that when Rust Brothers get random body parts grafted to them and become Misgrown (Raven’s Purge, p. 168), mechanically this manifests as basically an extra Talent. There’s no mention of Sisters of Heme – not unusual for a campaign that has no interest in women – but it feels like they should be more subtle and less obviously-demonic, especially as the Sisters of Heme seem to be the druidic counterparts to the Rust Brothers’ sorcerers.

It says (Raven’s Purge, pp. 40-11) that “Virelda is characterised by her wild, white hair which appears to have a life of its own, billowing like seaweed in the wind even though she tries to restrain it in braids”, and that fits the requirements fairly reasonably well. As for “She can’t cut her hair since it bleeds and can feel”, well, that’s par for the course: if you’re going to get demonic hair, then of course it’s living and fights back. Actions have consequences; this is something that a conservative, traditionalist member of the Church of Rust and Heme would completely understand and be happy with.

What is surprising is that she gets a +3 bonus to both Strength and Agility, given that the game is otherwise clear that nobody can ever improve their attributes. Not by XP, and not through magic items (except when some writers forget), and certainly not by this sort of amount. But the rest of her stat block is similarly implausible (the skills and talents would cost over 500 XP), as indeed are many Forbidden Lands NPCs’ stat blocks. So let’s just ignore that as a stupid idea for now and move on.

What should demonic hair that moves by itself do for you, if not boost your attributes by 42%? Well, how about some kind of uncanny kind of perception, like a danger sense or something? If her hair is in fact a demonic symbiont, it would make sense that it would be able to sense, and tell her about, people sneaking up on her, even if she had her back turned to them. How does it do that without visible eyes or ears? The nice, sensible answer is that it can do echolocation like bats; the creepy answer is that it can taste their blood on the air. Maybe it can sense other weird stuff like the presence of other demons or other demon-tainted people? Most of the time that’s an unwanted distraction, though, hence why Virelda braids it like you’d hobble a horse; so if you ever see Virelda shake her hair loose, start to worry, because she thinks serious stuff is about to happen and she needs all the warnings she can get.

Virelda doesn’t need a weakness; she needs reasons for the PCs to engage with her

There’s an entry in the description of all of the Key Players for a weakness, but in truth only some of them need one. Zytera can be significantly weakened by Asina, and there may be an Arrow of the Fire Wyrm with their name on; there is definitely an arrow of the Fire Wyrm with Krasylla’s name on; Merigall’s life essence is hidden away somewhere; Brynhelda has Zertorme’s face and a decent sorcerer could use it against him. Also, anyone demonic or demon-tainted will go mad if they try to use Stanengist. This is good old-fashioned fairy tale logic, and I love it: here are big bad people, many of whom play by the monster rules, or are otherwise unstoppable because they can bamf out of here to be by one of their childrens’ side; but if you find their one weakness you can kill them.

But arguably there’s less of a reason to talk about weaknesses for the other Key Players that the PCs might be on a par with by the end of the campaign. So, sure, in my headcanon Kalman Rodenfell has an imperfect memory and is indecisive, Soria is busy trying to rule an empire and is limited by political considerations, and Arvia is a religious nut with a tenuous grasp on reality. But rather than thinking about these as weaknesses, consider them as something about the NPC that the PCs can find out, and do something with.

So in the same way that it’s more interesting if you talk about behavioural flaws rather than dark secrets, let’s ditch talk about a Samson-style weakness, and talk instead about how we can make Virelda interesting for the PCs.

What spurred Virelda to revenge?

We’ve brought Virelda down to comparative normality, and now we can go to town on what makes her special: how she uncovered the dark secret at the heart of the Rust Church, and how it became her life’s work to bring the bastards down.

Virelda isn’t your ordinary freedom fighter

Make sure your players meet more ordinary Raven Sisters first. This is pretty easy: if they’re in Harga or nearby, they’ll be looking for friends, and the Raven Sisters want to be everybody’s friend. There’ll be an initial period of uncertainty, as the Raven Sisters wonder whether these new people are freedom fighters or murder hobos, but once the PCs prove themselves and these doubts are overcome, there’ll be an opportunity to meet the boss.

“Um”, their contact will say. “One thing you should know. She’s not a lot like us.”

Outwardly at least, Virelda has little in common with the Raven Sisters she leads, apart from an almost fanatical hatred of the Rust Pope, which frankly is the sort of thing that many Raven Sisters will find creepy and over-the-top. Sure, she wants to wipe the sanctimonious smile off both of Kartorda’s stupid faces, and if it were possible to bury an institution at a crossroads, with a stake through its heart, and then salt the earth where it was buried, she’d gleefully do that to the current Rust Church. But she’s not necessarily interested in being nice to people.

Remember, her background is in the traditionalist wing of the Church of Rust and Heme, which is an “all you need is hard work and self-belief” religion. Her objection to the current Church is that they’re preventing people living their life as they wish, not that they pal around with demons. Kartorda has to die, as the ruler of the Church that spies on everyone and executes people as traitors; and if Krasylla pulls off her plan to become sarmog she’ll make the top of Virelda’s shit list, because all dictators are bad and wrong, whether they’re human or demons. But Virelda has no quarrel with Merigall, and if Zytera just wanted to carry on experimenting with demon magic and give up day-to-day rule, like a modern-day constitutional monarch, Virelda would be happy with that.

Virelda is arguably that rarest of beings: a conservative rebel; a libertarian entryist into the Raven Church.

Except: something made her suspect something rotten in the Rust Church, and provoked her to a roaring rampage of revenge once she found out the hidden secrets. What?

What caused Virelda to freak out and swear revenge on the Rust Church, anyway?

My best guess is Virelda isn’t just a Rust originalist, but also a feminist and a scholar. (This even fits with her official stats without her magic hair: Strength 3, Agility 3, Wits 5, Empathy 4 is perfectly reasonable for a young human druid.) So her objection to the current Rust Church isn’t just that they’re an oppressive fascist regime, or even mostly that; it’s that they stole the ancient Ferrale’s achievement from her, and used it to establish a misogynist reign of terror that wasn’t based in fact.

Virelda’s feminism starts with the observation that the odds are stacked against women; but rather than saying “let’s stack the odds against men for a while until we’ve counterbalanced the historical damage”, she’s happy to just say “stop stacking the odds and we’ll be fine”. (This is easier as someone who’s already a high-achiever, of course.) And her intellectual beef with the Church is that the original church was at its best when it preached “if you live your life this way, you can do things others can’t”, epitomised by the ancient Ferrale’s breakthrough in being able to walk in the blood mist through force of will alone. When the rulers of the Church promptly hushed all of this up, denied even her very existence, and perverted her breakthrough into an instrument of oppression, well, that’s what made Virelda properly angry.

The question of course is: how did she find this out?

The simple and rather boring answer is that it was written down somewhere in a forbidden library, as the campaign suggests (Raven’s Purge, p. 40), so all she needed to do was find out the existence of this library and then break into it. The problem here is very simple: why would the Rust Brothers write down, and keep for centuries, damning documentation of the lies that their rule has been built upon? Zytera might, maybe; except that surely Zytera remembers? (And Zytera has no interest in keeping information that might be useful to their successor.)

A more interesting explanation is that the woman who first walked in the blood mist, and was subsequently experimented upon by Zytera, is still around somehow. Maybe she’s some hideous conglomeration of demons and/or undead, although again you’d have to wonder why the Rust Brothers would keep something like this around. My preferred explanation is that she’s now a powerful vengeful ghost, who cannot rest until the injustice of the Rust Church has been exposed and her true accomplishments are recognised.

Virelda has sworn holy vengeance

Actually, there’s no reason you couldn’t combine the two approaches. The ghost could be haunting the forbidden library (possibly the part of the complex where she was experimented upon relentlessly until she died), and nobody wants to go near it any more. The building is probably fairly ruined by now, and the books have almost certainly been ravaged by time and the elements to a point where they’re unreadable, if the Rust Brothers haven’t managed to send in brave volunteers armed with flints and lamp oil to torch the place in the centuries since. (It’s a one-way trip because the vengeful ghost will send you mad, but they were either fanatical enough to reckon the risk worth taking, or were unimportant patsies who were duped into an unwitting suicide mission.)

But if you go in willingly, and you open your mind to the ghost rather than rejecting her, then the world shifts, and you’re transported back in time to when the ghost died, to the library she remembers, where the books are very much intact. This is what Virelda found. She talked to the vengeful Ferrale’s ghost, swore vengeance on the people who killed her, and promised that one day her name would be known again, and her accomplishments told for all to know. This is almost certainly the only reason she was able to make her way back from there: most people end up with their minds trapped in the ghost’s memory of the past, while their physical body, neglected and unconscious, dies of thirst.

If Virelda is now the ancient Ferrale’s champion, it’s possible that she carries with her a small magical item that contains what remains of the ghost: maybe a small iron ring (which never rusts), or a lock of red hair which she braids into her own. She can use it to converse with the ghost, and it’s anybody’s guess what would happen if you were foolish enough to try and steal it.

An aside: forget about Teramalda

OK, it’s a good cover illustration, but as written Teramalda is a rubbish monster. She travels at half speed, which means you can run away easily (she’ll even let you, the first few times), and her habit of pursuing sworn enemies means you can dictate her movements by taunting her with one of you. (She doesn’t sleep and you have to, but if you have a few horses you can tag team it, by having the one she’s pursuing gallop away to a safe distance and then sleep while others taunt her; 8 hours later, you rotate people.) During this time you’re building holes and have stocks of sand and gravel nearby ready to pour into them; she follows someone taunting her, steps into a hole, you pour aggregate around her feet, she’s now immobilised, someone steps forward with gloves and pliers, job done.

Also: why should the death of Teramalda be such a blow to Rust Brother morale? Teramalda “wanders through the Forbidden Lands looking for revenge ever since the dwarves burned her alive in her armor 350 years ago” (Gamemaster’s Guide, p. 160), and she really wants to kill dwarves; this must mean that, all things being equal, she’s not in Harga (there aren’t any dwarves there any more), and hasn’t been for some time. Odds are reasonable that she either (a) wandered over to Belderand and dwarven stone-singers dropped a mountain on her and/or raised a mountain through her, or (b) she walked into a lake or the sea and has been stuck there ever since. But even if her random walk has taken her to safer places, it’s safe to say that nobody in Harga, apart from maybe Zytera and some scholars of the Rust Church, knows about Teramalda.

What’s Virelda doing now?

All that was years ago; Virelda’s job now is to run a resistance and be a major NPC for the PCs to meet. She doesn’t like it one bit.

Virelda is far too recognisable to do any actual resistance work these days

Through sheer force of will and leading by example, Virelda has taken over the Raven Sisters in Harga and made them into an activist movement of resistance. She’s determined to bring down the Rust Church, so the ancient Ferrale who triumphed over the blood mist through pure strength of will can go to her final rest. And now she can’t help at all.

All Rust Brothers and Sisters of Heme have been told to look out for someone like Virelda, and frankly it’s not hard to spot her. The very first line of Virelda’s description is “As opposed to most Raven Sisters, Virelda Bloodbeak is impatient and violent towards her enemies” (Raven’s Purge, p. 40), and the book continues along those lines as it goes along. “Virelda dresses in dark grey and red clothes and often travels in the guise of a flock of magical ravens” (ibid., p. 41); and as mentioned earlier, she’s got special demonic hair. Look at her illustration on the cover of Raven’s Purge, and note how her skin and hair are unnaturally pale: this sounds like someone rolled 46 (“Your magic permanently alters your appearance”) on the magic mishap table, which frankly sounds like the sort of thing that an impatient and violent person would do.

You know how the Rust Brothers have a standard ritual for manufacturing harpies (GM’s Guide p. 104)? (Although it feels like it should be the Sisters of Heme instead that do that sort of thing.) My guess is that these days, they tend to have white skin and white head feathers. She’s a target.

If she’s a liability for any attempts at subterfuge and stealth, her contributions to the resistance must now mostly be limited to pep talks to the troops. That, or distraction ploys where a Rust Brother guard looks suspiciously at the woman in a hooded cloak, demands that she lower her hood, she reveals herself to be the hated Virelda, a sword fight ensues with a few guards dead, then she turns into a flock of ravens and flies away just as the reinforcements turn up; meanwhile, close nearby, the actual resistance troops have taken advantage of the Rust Brothers’ focus on Virelda to do what they actually came here to do.

In truth, she spends most of her time making sure that her troops have the equipment, support and information they need: she can be found in Koracia, Farhaven and Amber’s Peak at least as often as Harga, and her travels occasionally take her to the Eye of the Rose and wherever it is that Kalman Rodenfell hangs out. From time to time she breaks into Kartorda’s quarters and leaves a taunting letter; or she kills a few of Kartorda’s outriders when he’s travelling, he follows the trail, and they end up having a brief shouted conversation, each on their own mountain ledge, before his archers arrive and she flies away as a flock of ravens. Sometimes she drops in on Merigall, either in Vond or when they’re visiting one of their children; this is safer because both of them can bamf away at a moment’s notice, but it’s also uneasy, because she’s never sure what Merigall wants, and she’s also not 100% certain that it wasn’t Merigall, or someone connected with them, that told her about the ancient library in the first place. She’s even spoken to Zytera a few times, usually when they were travelling on diplomatic missions; the conversations were outwardly civil and polite, but she still doesn’t know what to make of them.

It’s not camaraderie, because she hates the guts of many of these people, but in truth she understands these other Key Players; and these days it feels more natural to talk to them than to talk to her loyal troops, who look up to her in awe, respect and fear rather than the honest understanding she was hoping for when she started this whole rebellion thing.

That’s right. She’s become a manager. Now do you understand why she’s impatient and violent?

Who’s thwarting Virelda? Who’s courting her?

At the beginning of the campaign, Virelda will be a valiant freedom-fighter that all of the high-ups in Harga are aware of to some degree. Kartorda will have given explicit orders that she must be captured, ideally taken alive so an example can be made of her; Zytera probably considers this as an internal police matter and is happy to defer to Kartorda. Krasylla will be interested in seeing how this struggle plays out, and especially what it reveals about the strengths and weaknesses of Kartorda’s setup. Merigall probably merely appreciates the eruption of chaos where there was previously stultifying dominance.

(Where did Virelda learn Path of Shifting Shapes 3? Raven’s Purge (p. 36) implies Merigall could have been her teacher, possibly because Merigall’s a shape-shifter; but if you don’t trust Forbidden Lands NPC stat blocks, especially when they imply that Merigall is a sorcerer and a druid, rather than a dilettante demon, the answer probably lies elsewhere. The campaign says there are two other potential teachers : the elf Mergolene in the Eye of the Rose (ibid., p. 104) and a high-up Raven Sister, Tarna (p. 171). Tarna probably spends a lot of time in Koracia, and is the closest Virelda has to a mentor.)

As the campaign goes on, and it looks likely that she might be able to defeat the Rust Brothers (especially if the PCs help), more people will start to pay attention to Virelda. They’ll note that she started off as a Sister of Heme, and therefore has “tattoos, the origins of which she has tried to hide by adding to them” (Raven’s Purge, p. 40), and wonder where her loyalties truly lie. Is she tactically pretending to be something other than a turncoat, so her new-found Raven Sister followers respect her more? Does she bitterly regret her past, and is she trying to rewrite it, starting with her own body? (If your table is happy exploring this sort of issue – ask them first! – she might be bitter and be into self-harm. She might occasionally try to cut her hair, also, and end up curled up in pain in a ball for the next few days while it heals.) Or maybe she’s fine with her past as a Sister of Heme, but she seeks to become something greater?

If she’s conflicted about her past, and what she should do, then as the PCs become powerful and prestigious she’ll be more likely to confide in them, even ask them for advice. If she appears to be too conservative compared to the rest of the Raven Church, whispers might come from Koracia that maybe the PCs would be better off leading the rebellion than her; but this might also tempt the post-Kartorda faction in the Rust Church looking for a replacement figurehead to get in touch and sound her out.

Their plan had previously been to replace Kartorda with a moderate, dial down the spying, call of the jackbooted thugs to some degree, say very loudly “we’ve listened to your concerns” to the people, and hope that that worked. While Virelda may be doctrinally moderate, the populace think she’s a violent freedom fighter, and she’s a striking, female, opponent of the current regime, so she’s not the best candidate for the Gorbachev gambit. But they’re also open to a ploy where Virelda swoops in, kills Kartorda and a few other high-ups (serependipitously only people not in the post-Kartorda faction will be targeted), announces the start of a new era, and sets up a Truth and Reconciliation-style process where people on both sides of the conflict talk about the bad things they’ve done, tell grieving civilians where the bodies are buried, and we all move on. Obviously there’s no room in Virelda’s new Church for the Kartorda-era cardinals, but they get to retire, grow old and die peacefully, rather than be nailed to trees or killed by angry mobs.

She might even go along with this plan – for a while. Then a decade or two later, when she’s definitely too old to go out adventuring herself, she might scope out a group of interesting adventurers with potential, and put to them a simple proposal. Do you want to bring down the cabal of powerful Rust Brothers who never faced proper justice back in the day?