The necessity of Viridia

We’re not told much about the ancient elves of the Heart of the Sky, but some things are clear and straightforward. The Shardmaiden sang the humans to the Ravenlands and shattered her heart soon afterwards; Neyd mapped and maybe even created all the rivers and lakes; Gemelda was their leader and pretty all-round awesome; Nebulos created the Stillmist and a bunch of magic items; Algared had a go at ruling a Kingdom; Viridia was corrupted by evil and isn’t that a shame.

One glance at the description of the Maligarn sword and its drawbacks is enough, I suspect, to make most people nope out and decide to have nothing to do with the sword of evil.

On re-reading what we’re told, though, and in particular how we’re told it, I’m no longer convinced that Viridia is as much of a card-carrying villain as we’re lead to believe.

The case for Viridia being a flat-out wrong-‘un

The events are, on the face of it, damning.

Viridia goes looking for the bloodthirsty giant Scrome, and finds out that when his yellow eye is awake he’s kind and loving, but when his green eye gets its turn he goes on a rampage of destruction. Good Scrome says “I don’t deserve to live”, but she decides to wait until Evil Scrame wakes. (Raven’s Purge, pp. 19-20.)

Time passes, Scrome wakes up, sees elf blood and a lack of Viridia, and fears the worst. Gemelda and friends track him down and find that Viridia’s ruby is lodged inside his evil green eye. Trying to pry it out instead kicks off a years-long Marble Madness rampage, and by the end of that Viridia’s ruby is now an emerald. Her siblings give her a replacement body, but she storms off, saying she’s now a killer (ibid., p. 20).

Eventually Gemelda decides she has to do something about Viridia going around killing people, and summons her to the Stillmist a second time, where ambushers (Kalman Rodenfell maybe? Gemelda et al are in Stanengist by this point) rip her emerald from her flesh. Merigall manages to grab the emerald and Stanengist somehow, and flees, temporarily putting Viridia’s emerald in her sword before casting a last-gasp spell that teleports Maligarn and Stanengist to somewhere unknown (ibid., pp. 22-23). Angry elves dissolve him in Lake Harga but he gets better.

The personality of Viridia is “rage, cruelty, impatience, greed” (ibid., p. 23); wielding Maligarn gives you penalties to cautious fighting and makes you likely to go berserk (ibid., p. 24).

To this day, Merigall’s highest-priority goal, behind only not dying, is to find Viridia (ibid., p. 36). Given how evil Merigall is, that doesn’t speak well for Viridia.

Reasons for doubting the received wisdom

The Forbidden Lands campaigns glorify in unreliable narrators, and there are plenty of holes to poke in the official narrative. Even if you as a GM don’t subscribe to all or even any of them, there will be Viridia-friendly NPCs who do.

Did Scrame actually kill and eat Viridia?

Scrome woke up, saw elf blood, and panicked. When the elves tracked him down he said “I’m pretty sure I didn’t eat a ruby”.

The official narrative says “The stories don’t tell of how she died, but one thing is certain: he devoured her before the yellow eye next awoke” (ibid., p. 20), but that can’t be true: if the only witnesses to this were Scrame and Viridia, neither of which are talking about this, then we can’t be certain.

In fact, judging by how Scrome frantically went through his bowel movements looking for a ruby, we can extrapolate and suspect that every time Scrome wakes up, he’s full of remorse, and forces himself to throw up, to see what he might have eaten when he was evil. You’d have thought he’d have at least found some elf hair, and/or that Scrame wouldn’t have eaten all of Viridia’s bones. Or, of course, her clothes and armour.

Why would Scrame put Viridia’s ruby in his eye?

OK, OK, so maybe the official records gloss over random elf body parts because that’s gross. Why does Scrame eat Viridia almost head to toe, but when he finds her ruby, he changes tack and decides that he now needs to be all subtle-like and stick it into his eye?

This is especially puzzling because whichever eye is currently-active determines a 180 degree personality shift. It feels like “let me do something that might cause me to permanently lose control of my body” should be something that either Scrome or Scrame would only consider as a matter of last resort.

Also, where in his eye? Assuming giant eyes work the same way as human and octopus eyes, you wouldn’t want to put a ruby in front of the lens because either you’d end up blind (if it’s opaque) or you’d stop seeing green and blue (if it’s translucent). Putting it most places away from the lens would maybe let the ruby see stuff occasionally, but only in a frustrated “Scrame has to be looking at something at exactly the right angle” sort of way.

No, the only way that makes sense is if Viridia’s ruby was exactly where it would need to be to tap into everything that Scrame sees.

Possibly Scrame said something like “if only you could see things from my point of view you’d realise I’m not that bad”, and Viridia, being both a warrior with a typically unsubtle thought process, but also an immortal elf with an unexpectedly casual attitude towards flesh and its permanence, took him literally. She shed most of her flesh, keeping enough residual mobility and senses to guide Scrame’s hand, to position her ruby at the base of his eye, tapping into his optic nerves or what have you, and then shedding the rest of her flesh.

Her thinking at this point is presumably something like “OK, let’s try living inside someone else for a while, it’ll be fun, I’ll get a new body eventually”. The experience ends up proving more traumatic than she expected, but she wasn’t to know that.

Were Viridia’s siblings as helpful as they claim they were being?

Let’s have a look at the official account.

“The siblings carried Viridia’s green stone back to the Stillmist where they once again dressed it in flesh, but Viridia was changed. No longer loving and dutiful, but angry and quarrelsome. The siblings suggested that she shed the flesh forever, and come to rest in the crown of Stanengist where they would eventually join her.” (ibid. p. 20)

What’s missing: any trace of empathy or understanding.

The first massive red flag is how previously Viridia was “dutiful”, but she’s now “quarrelsome”. This is a hugely authoritarian and patriarchal take! Gemelda and her followers, this suggests, previously only valued Viridia as a capable warrior who took orders and didn’t think for herself. Once she dared talk back, she was no longer worthy of respect, and was denied agency.

(You may wonder “how can a group of mostly-female elves, whose leader is a woman, ascribe to patriarchal ideals?”, but remember that not every woman is a militant feminist. The Suffragettes had opponents who insisted that, as traditional dutiful women, they didn’t need and didn’t want the vote.)

The second red flag is the absence of any significant pause between “we gave her a body again and she’s upset” to “Viridia clearly shouldn’t have a body any more”, without any significant reflection on why she was upset. Viridia has, after all, just spent a few years at the back of an angry giant eye, powerless to do anything about it. Wouldn’t you want to give her time to settle down? Maybe having any flesh is weird to her at the moment, and she needs time to settle back into the daily rhythm of being an elf. (She hasn’t had to do simple things like breathe, eat, drink, sit in the sun, practice-spar with other shieldmaidens etc. for years, after all.) If she has something like PTSD, you shouldn’t expect her to be able to switch that off immediately as if nothing had happened.

And if she’s now a different person, not just chronically, due to mental anguish that should fade with time, but inherently, because she’s had formative experiences and decided to change her outlook or priorities, then does she really want her old body back? Because that’s presumably what Gemelda et al created for her: something that looks as closely as possible like the old Viridia, like they remember. And she looks down at her body and it’s exactly like it was, as if nothing had changed. She wants to scream “this isn’t my body; this isn’t what my body should look or feel like”, and they say “but it is: it’s your body like it always was, like it should be”.

If your players are interested in exploring trans themes, this sounds awfully like body dysphoria to me.

Is there room for death and destruction, as well as life and nurturing?

Regarding Scrame, we’re told that “When the green eye was awake, the giant ravaged the land and destroyed what he himself and others had built” (Raven’s Purge, p. 19). That sounds pretty bad: it is, after all, much easier to destroy than to create, and the presence of rampaging monsters at large isn’t exactly the sort of thing that leads to harmonious peaceful societies.

So if Viridia announced that she was going to rampage around like Scrame, and did, she probably had to be stopped. The question is, did she?

It says here “Viridia pushed her siblings aside, grabbed her sword and stated that creation not only demanded nurture of that which grows but also the culling of the old and that henceforth that task would be her charge. She left her siblings, but a trail of truncated limbs and rotting corpses revealed her path. The green stone in her heart is called Gall-Eye.” (ibid. p. 20)

Why the insistence that the corpses were rotting? Shouldn’t they? Isn’t that what happens to dead bodies? Wouldn’t it be weird if they didn’t? Maybe they were rotting quicker than you’d expect, but isn’t this just a sign that they were enabling other life quicker than they would have normally? Even the name “gall-eye”, presumably intended to provoke disgust, is telling: far more life is made possible through plant galls, and other icky types of developmental life stage, than if evolution or elf-driven terraforming had stopped at more traditional life cycles. Consider such wonderfully charismatic creatures as butterflies: the Large Blue spends its larval stage beating up ants for their lunch money, for instance, while the Purple Emperor likes nothing more than rotting meat.

And more generally: while the elves had done a good job of setting up the initial stages of life, there’s a case to be made that after a while you need to apply a certain amount of creative destruction. A row of seedlings needs to be thinned out after the initial phase of germination so the healthiest have room to thrive; the forest needs to burn occasionally so new growth can replace the old; capstone species like beavers damming rivers, or bison stripping bark from trees, create mosaics of habitats where life can flourish even more.

Even humanoid societies are in danger of stagnation. There generally aren’t enough people in the Ravenlands now, but maybe in centuries past there were enough people that a warlord could luck into power and influence, use that to gain more power, and before you know it there are dukes and kings, and starving peasants. Maybe Gemelda at best wrings her hands and says there’s nothing she can do, or at worst is happy with inequalities like this (maybe she gets a cut?). But you can be pretty sure that Viridia, with her unsubtle warrior’s mind and appetite for destruction, might see someone saying “The King is dead; long live the King” and decide to put that theory to the test: how many Kings can you kill before there is not, in fact, still a King?

What could Viridia be like instead?

If you summarise Gemelda’s position as “we shouldn’t go around killing people left, right and centre”, a charitable statement of Viridia’s counter-argument may well be “maybe not all of us, maybe not all the time, but someone has to, and I don’t see any of you doing the dirty work”.

If you wield the Maligarn sword with Viridia / Gall-Eye set in the pommel, you’re going to kill a lot of people. The blade is exceptional, Viridia makes you really powerful against many people in close quarters, and Gall-Eye makes it increasingly likely that once you start killing, you aren’t going to stop. Maybe this concerns you.

I suspect Viridia’s response would be “you shouldn’t have picked up an elf sword of mass-killing, then”.

An adventurer worth their salt knows when to negotiate, when to flatter, when to cajole and when to threaten. If violence is needed, there is a time for sneak attacks, ranged attacks, carefully-timed parries and ripostes. If you’ve picked up Maligarn, you must have decided that you absolutely, positively got to kill every motherfucker in the room.

(Besides, when Viridia wields her sword, she’s an ancient immortal elf of formidable skill. She bypasses niceties like posturing, parrying and so forth and goes straight for the kill, and if she’s wounded she’ll get better. It’s not her fault that you’re not good enough to fight five demons in a small room.)

Similarly, it says her personality is “rage, cruelty, impatience, greed”, and that’s not attractive, but consider for a moment that ever since her original ruby ended up in the back of Scrame’s eye, nobody has given her a moment’s peace. She was a helpless bystander to bloody mayhem, until she was dumped back in a fleshy body, lectured to by her sister, ran away in a panic, spent a while trying to get used to the new her (while constantly looking out for elves sent by her sister), before being betrayed and stuck without a body again.

Regardless of where she ended up after Merigall’s last-ditch spell teleported her somewhere – and it’s safe to say that being on the receiving end of a desperate use of chaotic magic isn’t particularly enjoyable – she’s been stuck in a sword waiting for someone to find her, and possibly had a succession of owners who all got themselves killed by being mortal and listening to her. That’s not fun even if you’re immortal and, because you’re just a sentient gem in a sword, can switch off for weeks, months or years on end.

So her listed personality of “rage, cruelty, impatience, greed” could just be a combination of relief and what she expects people to hear from her: “oh, finally! When do we get to pillage and rampage?” Regardless of her ultimate ambitions (e.g. self-actualisation, getting a body, shagging Merigall, triumphing over her sister), she’s an emerald set in a sword, and her immediate aim is to persuade whoever stole her that they need to keep hold of her and take her interesting places, because if they e.g. take her home and put her on a display cabinet above the mantlepiece, or toss her into a swamp, that’s another 50-100 years of waiting around for the next owner. So you’re not hearing the real Viridia: you’re hearing the elevator pitch, which she thinks is likely to work on people who come across a shiny sword probably very shortly after its previous owner died.

(That covers rage, cruelty and impatience; what about greed? What use has an immortal elf in a sword for material goods? That’s the backup elevator pitch. “OK, so you have no use for a sword like me. Who do you know who does, and is stupid enough to get himself killed as a result? [Sell]({{ relref “fixing-things/coins-are-boring/” >}}) me to him, then make sure you’re there to rescue me when he dies.”)

Eventually, things will settle down. She’ll talk to the PCs, either explicitly, if they’ve got some kind of ritual or they put her in Stanengist, or unexpectedly in their dreams, because how can you pass up an opportunity to have a PC jolt awake in a cold sweat and say “the evil sword spoke to me, and she’s an ancient elf woman”? She’ll challenge them on their tactics, debate them on ethics, get to know them. Maybe they won’t get on regardless, because she’s uncompromising and determined, and I suspect both her fighting and debating styles take no prisoners. But I think if you give the players time, you can strike up an interesting relationship, maybe come to an agreement, an understanding that Viridia might make you uncomfortable, but she’s still needed in this world.

So when they chuck Stanengist through the rift, Gemelda and at least three others are in the crown but she isn’t. Ha! Take that, sister!