Make them more interesting: Zytera

The problem with Zytera is that they’ve already won.

All the other key players are unhappy with their situation and wish to change it, and killing Zytera is typically a major part of their plan, however unrealistic. (Merigall is an exception inasmuch as he doesn’t want Zytera dead yet.) Zytera, in contrast, is happy with how things are. Zytera is the boss, Zytera is the target, Zytera reacts, and that’s inherently less interesting.

I think what you need to do is remind everyone of how scarily-competent Zytera can be, and absolutely refuse to let them go down without a fight.

What hath Zytera wrought?

At the start of Raven’s Purge, Zytera reigns uneasily. The army they can bring to bear in Vond and the nearby area is on the order of a thousand troops, and seriously outweighs e.g. Zertorme’s garrison in Amber’s Peak. But now that the blood mist has gone, the Rust Brother protection racket is now under threat from within (villagers comparing notes and banding together), and the realm as a whole faces new threats from without (orcs and maybe Zertorme skirmishing to test the army’s defences).

Beyond that, Zytera is perhaps most aware, of all key players, of the potential threat from Alderland. Sure, it’s been hundreds of years since the fourth Alder War, when the Alderlanders sent an army north to wipe out Zytera and his scourge of demons (GM’s Guide, p. 30), and whoever rules in Alderland might be content to let Ravenland do whatever it wants behind the Iron Lock. But if Alderland ever wanted to invade, it could probably crush a conventional army with little difficulty.

The plan was that during the blissful almost three hundred years after that final Alder War, Zygofer would have mastered mog and become immortal. For whichever reason that hasn’t happened, and the campaign doesn’t think it’s going to happen any time soon. Maybye it was always going to be really hard; maybe a demonified immortal Zytera doesn’t have the same genius that Zygofer had; maybye now that Zygofer effectively is the rift he’s now stuck in a mental paradigm and can’t think himself out of it.

Still, that’s no reason to count Zytera out.

Zygofer and Therania, separately and together, are scarily competent

Therania has an “ethereal body [which], in the form of a barely distinguishable female shape, can appear at different locations in the Forbidden Lands. It can’t act, but it can sense what is happening and also talk.” (Raven’s Purge, p. 31.) I think it’s safe to say that Therania has set up and maintained a superb spy network, easily as good as Krasylla’s, and she herself could be observing potentially anything, anywhere.

Zygofer, meanwhile, may have some sort of sway over potentially all sorcerers of Blood and/or Death, judging by the Dark Secret mentioned in the Player’s Guide (p. 30) “Zygofer the Spellbinder haunts you in your dreams and makes you obey him”. Maybe his pre-eminence in Ravenlands dark magic has allowed him to inveigle himself into the soul of anyone who practices those arts, unless they know a way of keeping their mind safe from him?

Even if you decide that Zytera’s court is now a rats’ nest of frantic plotting, with e.g. Katorda plotting on finding one of Merigall’s children and feeding them to Krasylla, so Merigall then goes on a roaring rampage of revenge and takes out Krasylla, this is all happening in Zytera’s court. Zygofer, Therania, and/or any of their spies and servants have better chances of finding out what’s going on than if all of this were happening in e.g. Amber’s Peak.

And they’re both highly-competent sorcerers, smart and different enough to spot holes in each other’s plans. They may bicker and scheme against each other, but when backs are against the wall, you’d probably still want to be Zytera.

Underestimate Zygofer at your peril

Zygofer might be physically old and decrepit at the moment, but his mind is still as sharp as it ever was; and by “ever” I mean, for instance, the period between 869 and 877.

Raven’s Purge says (p. 23) “When the Redrunners finally tracked down Merigall, it defiantly spirited away both Maligarn and Stanengist to places unknown even to itself. As punishment, the Redrunners dissolved the demon’s body in acid and poured the acid into Lake Harga, which turned red in color and was henceforth known as Blaudwater. When Zygofer much later made his seat in Alderstone, he sensed the demonic being in the lake and was able to reshape Merigall through sorcery.” There’s a gap between 852 and 869 when this is most likely to have happened; Zygofer is said to be in Alderstone along with Merigall in 869 (GM’s Guide, p. 29), and knowing him, he immediately turned to doing demon stuff once he had Merigall back.

Having unwisely started the Fourth Alder War, against Alderland this time, Zygofer proceeds to wipe the floor with the human army by opening the rift wide, has Merigall send the resulting flood of demons into Aslene to buy some time, and in only a couple of years works out how to completely thwart them (ibid., p. 31).

So over the course of less than a decade, Zygofer decisively wins the final war, becomes supreme ruler of the Ravenlands, and binds two powerful demons to his service. I’ve mentioned elsewhere that Krasylla’s contract should be tattooed on Zygofer’s body, not in an easily-nickable parchment; and Merigall’s life essence is almost certainly hidden away by a cult next to the sea rather than in a known place they can try to steal it from. They are, like it or not, strongly bound to Zytera’s service.

It’s actually even better than that, because the nexus is tied to his life somehow, as a third surety. Regardless of all the ways to kill him (cut him free of his giant spider with Asina, shoot him with the arrow of the Fire Wyrm with his name on, for some reason chuck a lock of his hair through the nexus like the demons from Churmog don’t know who’s on the other side already), if anyone wants to take him out, he can reasonably say “you know this means another demon flood, right?” and make them think twice.

The only problem with that argument is Stanengist.

Why doesn’t Zytera know about Stanengist?

At first glance, it seems weird that either Zygofer or Therania should want Stanengist, when (1) wearing it will drive them mad, and (2) Zygofer’s threat of “maybe I’ll open the rift wide open and demons will flood through” can be completely nullified by throwing the crown through the rift. They should be trying to destroy or hide Stanengist, or, failing that, to find enough rubies of the elves of the Heart of the Sky that nobody can ever fully-stock Stanengist to drive them mad or seal the rift. Merigall is actively seeking Viridia, Therania can probably guess that the undead Algarod in Weatherstone has Algared, and it’s common knowledge that Soria has Iridne. That should be enough.

The thing is, Stanengist has never mattered to either of them until now. Even if you accept that it was used to enslave the orcs, and at some point someone stood at the back of a large army saying “this army only exists because of Stanengist”, Zygofer won that war anyway. Maybe Merigall mentioned that he was dissolved by angry Redrunners because he nicked their crown; but maybe he focused on Maligarn and Viridia, maybe he said nothing, and of course Zygofer is driven by his own research and could have easily ignored any such talk at the time, or forgotten it since. He would have been thinking about opening the rift more, as a potential backup plan at the time, so any talk of closing it will have been dismissed as not important or counter-productive.

Also, all talk about “wear the crown and rule the land” isn’t amazingly seductive if you already rule more of it than anyone else does or can. Sure, it would be nice to rule all of Ravenland, but Zytera doesn’t have enough troops for that. Eventually he will, once he’s mastered mog, become immortal, and summoned/created shedloads of more demons; but at that point Zygofer won’t need to bother with such petty things as rifts and crowns.

And by the time Therania became part of Zygofer, the war was over, so she never had a reason to care either.

So, unusually, Zytera is acting from a position of weakness and desperation when they decide to get involved with Stanengist. They need a quick fix which might calm things down, but they don’t know what they’re dealing with. And nobody’s going to tell them.

Zytera’s plans for Stanengist are better than you think

The whole idea about a ritual that can crack the rift wide open (but needs to involve a ruler of Ravenland, and coincidentally all of the candidates are female even though arguably Kalman Rodenfell would also qualify) is just daft. If Zygofer has what amounts to a dead man’s switch linked to the protonexus, so if he dies, it stops being throttled, then he wants to be able to use that threat at will, without anybody being able to prevent him, or it’s not that good a threat.

No, I think the reason why Zygofer and Therania are interested in Arvia, Soria and Virelda is one of these convenient coincidences that tends to happen when two people with disparate goals share a body. I think this happens a fair bit: not only have Zygofer and Therania shared a body for hundreds of years, but they’re family, and knew each other very well even before they were joined together. If one of them wants to get involved with something, it’s easy for the other to decide that they’re also interested; if nothing else, to find out why the first one was interested in the first place.

So, Zygofer thinks that if he’s going to rule via Stanengist, it would help his claim if he had a Queen who genuinely had a claim to a sizeable chunk of the Ravenlands; especially if she places the crown on his head, in a reversal of Napoleon and Joséphine. This should be a stunningly legitimising move, adding to his existing claim by dint of being descended from elves (“Since these Frailer sorcerers were descended from the elves of Ravenland, they believed they were entitled to the land beyond the mountains.”, GM’s Guide, p. 24). It’s not going to work, because him being suffused with demon stuff will trump anything else, but it’s a really good plan, and there’s no shame in being wrong about something like that.

Therania, meanwhile, is tired of being back to back with her father (who stinks, and for some reason has a child’s head stuck on his hip – Raven’s Purge, p. 32). As a second-generation aristocrat she won’t be happy with any replacement body other than one belonging to a Queen, and that’s why she has been seeking them out.

This is good, because it gives Zytera a reason to get out of Vond.

Let Zytera be mobile

The end of the Blood mist lets people move about, and the same should be true of the villain of the campaign. As written, Zytera will be at Haggler’s House (Raven’s Purge, p. 172), but otherwise the only other time to interact with them will be at Vond, which the campaign thinks will be during a final grand confrontation where every key player takes turn posturing, delivering their lines and backstabbing.

If Zytera travels, this gives the PCs the opportunity to hear about the trip in advance, talk to people about what they think it means, potentially be there when it happens, and/or talk to people afterwards about how they thought it went. As well as Zytera, probably Merigall, and maybe Kartorda if it turns out to be a big ceremonial diplomatic processional, this gives the PCs an opportunity to interact with whichever other key player Zytera is visiting, which can be useful if e.g. you really wanted them to meet Arvia but they’d decided to go nowhere near dwarf territory for some reason.

Or, if they want to sneak into Vond, they can do so when they know Zytera isn’t going to be there. (Unless it was all a feint, e.g. to flush out plotters, and Zytera’s in Vond after all, waiting to see what happens.)

What is Zytera doing? It could be as simple as actual diplomacy (with a sideline in scoping out potential brides or replacement bodies). Zytera can reasonably promise that, with population numbers having crashed everywhere during the blood mist, a fifth Alder War isn’t on the cards, for the good reason that there’s just too much empty space between where everybody lives. There just isn’t the competition over territory there was back in the day. They can also reasonably say to Soria that it wasn’t the humans who enslaved the orcs, and they have no quarrel.

If Zygofer is frustrated with his lack of progress in mastering mog, he may decide that the problem stems from the fact that he’s been using basically the same human test subjects for the last 300 years. Maybe he just needs more data? So some trips will be about capturing interesting live subjects, like orcs (don’t tell Soria), wolfkin (Zytera is pretty sure they’re not actually demonic, so what happens if you do add demons to them?), halflings or goblins (if you want to understand the glue that sticks demons together, experimenting with an already-divided akin might be a good approach), or weirder things like individualist bloodlings.

What about the family soap opera?

Back before Zygofer was decrepit and had to be welded to the back of his youngest daughter and a giant spider so he didn’t die, his wife Martea snuck out of Alderstone, taking with her Zertorme and his sister Marga (GM’s Guide, p. 28). The campaign (Raven’s Purge, p. 35) says this was Merigall’s doing, but I don’t think there’s any reason to blame him for the plan’s many failures. She only took the two of her children she had to hand (Therania was with her husband so had to be left behind), and things went wrong as quickly as you’d have expected them to if she was doing this with no help from anyybody other than her own wits. They got waylaid by unfriendly troops, desperately fled to a dungeon, Marga turned into a hideous demonic mass and that was it.

Seventeen years later (GM’s Guide, p. 29), Zertorme turned up in Vivend and started organising a resistance against his father, which frankly is what you expect from your son if you’re an evil sorcerer. The fact that Zertorme is still around and must have used demonic magics to survive this long, despite swearing blind that demons are bad and his father the demon-summoner even worse, means that as a GM you get to say “two sides of the same coin”, “the apple never falls far from the tree” and all sorts of good stuff like that.

Marga is a wonderfully-creepy demon, and a salutary tale about the evils of experimenting with demons. And I suppose it makes sense to have Martea nearby, for extra madness. The whole thing made Zertorme depressed and mopey, and is why he’s determined that his father is bad and wrong and must be stopped: fine.

But do you expect me to believe that Zytera doesn’t know about them? He sent an army to the Lumra Mines at the time, scouts found demonic activity, Merigall confirmed it was Marga demonified (a furious Zygofer will have sent him with the army so you can be sure he reported this back). Between Therania’s ethereal form abilities and Zygofer’s knowledge of demons, they’ll have found Marga and Martea soon enough.

And on reflection, Zygofer won’t have been too unhappy about this. This is what happens when people disobey him: they blunder into turning themselves into demons. Better to stay under his protection and become a better, more appropriate, more controlled demon hybrid form instead. Let that be a lesson to anyone who doubts his wisdom.

Incidentally, this is a reason why the Maligarn sword cannot be with Marga and Martea. Even if Zytera have decided that the rest of the family should be left to their fate and don’t visit, Zertorme can definitely check up on them without being torn limb from limb, and so can the shape-changing Merigall. No way have neither Marga nor Martea volunteered at some point “oh hey, some adventurer we ate the other day had this nifty-looking sword with an emerald in the pommel”.

Who isn’t thwarting Zytera?

(Normally this section is called “who’s thwarting Key Player name?” but we established earlier that everybody hates Zytera.)

Of all the key players, I think Merigall is the likeliest to be fine with Zytera surviving. They want their life essence back, obviously, but if they get that, they’ll probably be happy to still work with Zytera occasionally from time to time. Merigall doesn’t really do hard feelings, and the look on everybody else’s face when they didn’t seek a roaring rampage of revenge would be so worth it.

Weirdly enough, Kalman Rodenfell is the other key player whose plans don’t inherently involve Zytera’s death. Yes, Zytera’s reign must be stopped, and the flow of demons through the rift is bad, but in truth there isn’t a huge flow of demons right now. As long as Vond is under elven or elf-allied control, the demon flood can be kept under control, and there will be no need to sacrifice Stanengist and, more importantly, the elves of the Heart of the Sky along with it. All you need to do is invent some way of suspended animation system that could work on Elvenspring-demon-hybrid organisms. (The word “all” is doing a heroic amount of heavy lifting in the previous sentence.) And Zygofer would get to live forever, which is what he always wanted. Now, Kalman Rodenfell is an ancient elf warrior rather than a specialist in demonic organisms, so he’s probably not thinking about this particularly seriously. But he’s one of the few key players not out for Zytera’s blood.