What does the Order of Maidens do?

We know where the Order of Maidens is: its grand temple is on the island of Maidenholm (GM’s Guide p. 41), which is on hexes Ak12 and Al11. Only elves and Elvenspring are generally allowed to visit.

We know who founded it: the Shardmaiden and her mortal lover Morander.

What do they do? That’s harder to answer.

So you’ve joined the Order of Maidens

The GM’s Guide (p. 51) says: “The Order of Maidens is a group of druids sworn to fight the demonic evils of the Forbidden Lands. They carry an emerald shard from the Shardmaiden fused into their foreheads, which helps them focus power from their Mother. The Maidens tend to use more offensive spells than other druids, and are even more suspicious of Alderlanders.” Slightly earlier (p. 50) it says “Many druids have taken it upon themselves to fight Zytera and the Rust Brothers in the name of the Shardmaiden.”

(Yes, it says “emerald” rather than “ruby”, and that’s almost certainly just a mistake, but if you want to say that the shard changes colour from time to time, knock yourself out.)

Raven’s Purge agrees, saying (p. 21): “The Elvenspring who carry a shard of the Shardmaiden fixed to their frontal bone are known as the Order of Maidens and possess extraordinary magical powers.”

So, OK, you’ve got to be an Elvenspring to join, because they typically won’t let you land at Maidenholm otherwise; and you’re going to be doing something more proactive than going from village to village being nice to people, like the Raven Sisters do. Maybe not just fighting demons, but elves and demons don’t get on so that’s a reasonable default target. After all, you certainly can’t do the Raven Sister thing of pretending to just be an ordinary person, just helping out with the harvest and the occasional bit of healing, because you’ve got a pretty obvious shard of a jewel permanently attached to your forehead.

What magical powers, though? The stats given for a typical Maiden Druid are lower than those for a starting character, and don’t include anything startling. “Use more offensive spells than other druids” implies that they don’t bother with the Path of Healing, which most druids take; but fighting demons pretty much requires the Path of Healing and its level 2 spell Banish Demon (Player’s Handbook, p. 123), so we’re back to square one.

Perhaps it’s best to ask: what powers should you get if you have a fragment of the Shardmaiden’s shattered heart permanently attached to your flesh?

What can the shard tell you?

Most obviously, it feels like you should be able to tap into the knowledge, wisdom and memories of the Shardmaiden. This is going to be hit and miss: a newly-ordained member of the order won’t be as comfortable with their newly-acquired shard as someone who’s worn it for years; the Shardmaiden doesn’t know everything and hasn’t been everywhere; and there’s no guarantee that the information you’re looking for is in your shard.

But if you’re a Maiden druid and you find Stanengist, there should be a stirring of some kind of awareness somewhere in the back of your mind; and if you take the crown in your hands, or especially put it on, you should suddenly be overwhelmed by the Shardmaiden saying “This is my brother Nebulos’s circlet! But what have they done to it‽”

What does it feel like?

When the shard tells you something, it should be sudden, striking, absolutely trustworthy, and fleeting.

Say a scholar is showing you an ancient text, and its meaning is unclear: maybe it’s written in Maha signs, or there’s a word that has been translated from another now-lost language and whose exact meaning is debated. You get a sudden vision of what the meaning actually is; this probably sends you staggering if you weren’t expecting something like this; and grope after it as much as you like, there’s nothing further forthcoming. But you are absolutely sure that you know what the word means, and if the scholar can ask you intelligent questions in the seconds that follow, they may be able to get some invaluable understanding of the context of the original writing.

Or you enter a clearing, and you recall a memory from hundreds of years ago, when the Shardmaiden stood where you’re now standing: it was summer rather than autumn so the meadow was in full flower, the trees were smaller, the ruined building over there was still intact, and her lover had arranged a most acceptable picnic, with promise of further entertainment later.

Or, when facing a gryphon, you could suddenly get a brief glimpse of a fight with another gryphon, ages ago, and you now know that they tend to fight in a particular way, and you have some ideas on how you could use that to your advantage.

Or maybe it doesn’t

I’m a huge fan of Susan Cooper’s Dark Is Rising books, and that’s the mysterious fantasy vibe I’m going for in my campaign. I also don’t expect my player who has a Shardmaiden shard to have to spend points on a talent to get the most out of it; on the contrary, I view it as a way of delivering interesting additional plot stuff, without having to worry about whether I’ve given them “enough” Shardmaiden info-dump fodder this session. I don’t want the first question that player asks me to always be “I fire up the Shardmaiden scanner; what does it tell me?”

But maybe your game is different! Your players might have a far more transactional approach to magic items; you might have noticed that the Red Wanderer looks awfully like an artificial satellite, and elven hearts look a lot like memory crystals, so maybe the shard of the Shardmaiden’s heart is basically a small computer? In which case you should absolutely decide that there’s an “ask the shard” talent that your player can take. Let’s say that for every rank they get a gear die that they can add to a certain category of rolls, which means that they can roll e.g. Wits+Insight+Shard to know stuff, and of course they can push the roll, and I wonder what it means if you take damage to your shard?

Personally, I would advise that while you as a GM might think that everything can be explained by modern-day science stuff, it’s probably a mistake to expose that to the players. The reason is that as soon as you say e.g. “oh hey, I know you thought you were all superheroes, but in fact you’re just ordinary people filled with nanotechnology”, that suddenly changes the entire vibe of the game. And I think people play fantasy games because they want the more innocent, widescreen fantasy vibe.

What can many shards tell you?

The Shardmaiden had many children. There are many druids in the Order of Maidens. Chances are slim that all of the shards of her heart would be identical; I wouldn’t put it past her, but that seems pretty boring. It seems like the Shardmaiden would be particularly interested in what her children could do together, which means starting by embracing their differences, and then seeing how they collaborate.

I think you can overstate this. You can start to say “maybe the shards can communicate with each other”, add to that “the shard is always listening to its bearer because the Shardmaiden ultimately wants to learn from her children”, and before you know it, the GM from “Or maybe it doesn’t” is nodding sagely, saying things like “this is basically the Internet”, wondering how the shards communicate with each other, and therefore how the bad guys could listen in to those communications, or even intercept or corrupt them, and suddenly your druid is a netrunner rather than a redrunner and you’ve lost control. (Although if Maiden Druids can communicate in real time, imagine what a commando of 4 or 5 Maidens attacking a Rust Brother camp looks like. They know where each of their comrades is in real time, and exactly what they can see. The demons don’t stand a chance.)

But it feels like a player should be able to say “I’m lost and I don’t know what to do; can any of my brothers or sisters help?” And a hook like “you were minding your own business / in the middle of something, and then a Maiden Druid asked you to help and that’s now disrupted all your plans” is catnip to most GMs I know.

The GM’s Guide (p. 44) says “The eastern villages usually have a crystal from the Shardmaiden’s temple as a talisman against evil”, and that looks a lot like the memory crystals that elves use. It seems reasonable that a Maiden Druid could show up, meditate in a way they’d been told, that would trigger something in the crystal, and from time to time the crystal would produce and detach a number of smaller crystals, maybe of a different colour. (Elves are big on colour.)

The local priest would then have to organise someone to send these small crystals to the standard places they always send them, and get similar crystals from. Maybe they can send them by pigeon if you can trust the pigeons not to be eaten by hawks or gryphons (although remember that every so often you need to have someone send you a bunch of pigeons back); maybe it’s something that should only be entrusted to your most competent servants. Hey, the PCs are going that way anyway; maybe they can help?

So there’s a regular exchange of smaller crystals between Maiden Druid bases. When a delivery comes, you take a small crystal, you somehow smush it into the big central crystal, and that’s a bunch of memories and messages now transferred. If someone meditates on the big crystal again, maybe they’ve got answers to their questions; maybe someone else wants their help; maybe they’re good enough that they can leaf through the new memories that just arrived, get some idea of what others are up to.

Get good enough at this and you’ll be wanted back at Maidenholm, to manage all of the adventuring druids.