DM Notes – C01.S01.09
In this “scene”, Yisi and Valea discover Joloobo is missing when he does not meet them for waking meal. They decide to assume the worst. After speaking with Dawndra, the two venture into the Vale of Soxolone to find Joloobo. Instead… they find a Rusalka.
Before that… I probably need to describe the Vale of Soxolone a bit more. I created this hidden place in the Small Teeth with the intent of making it feel like a magical place to be. I sort of rushed into the fire troll hunt and failed to really do much description.
[Writer Notes] Heroes Gate is really just a schoolhouse for me. I am taking several classes there, how to roleplay, how to DM, how to develop characters, how to write description, and several others… If you are reading any of this and saying to yourself… “well maybe he has potential, but this… this is not good writing” I am going to agree with you. I’m not writing Heroes Gate to display my writing prowess to the world… but rather, my writing progress. The project has no end except where I decide to stop. Where ever that is, I hope my writing and crafting and all-round imagination skills have visibily improved. I am writing all these notes as an effort to “make my work visible”. Perhaps no one will read them… but it is how I am “getting to better” as a writer and creative.
[End Writer Notes]
So this Rusalka introduces herself as Rrellette and claims to know what they are seeking. She essentially does a cold reading on them… on Yisi to be particular. She quotes some ancient verse and sees his eyes light up and plays it from there. To Valea and Fable, Rrellette is harmless… she sees other females of any race as friends… but males? Rrellette sees males as food. She will drag them under the waters and they will disappear. She transports them to a small pocket universe where they have no escape. She will feed upon their fear until die of it.
There appears to be some controversy around the Rusalka… are they fey water spirits or undead beings? For my own sake… why get involved in controversy… Rrellette is in fact an undead fey. It has been done before… Rrellette was once a beautiful eladrin who met her fate in the feywild at the vicious hands of her lover (or was it her own hands because of a vicous lover? Same thing?) Something happened to curse her with undeath and she raged in the feywild for some long time. Eventually, she was confronted and banished to exile within a small pocket universe. She found a way out – into another realm… at the bottom of the lake in the Vale of Soxolone. Perhaps she cannot travel too far from the gateway? Or maybe the water itself has become fused with the pocket universe and so remains her prison?
Is that too much of a rewrite? Do I really need to spell all of this out? No… not for the sake of the game at least. Perhaps only for the sake of the exercise. But there is danger in filling out the background so much that I end up feeling like I must jam it into the story rather than just let it sit in the background and color the story
Well… I took a slight turn… Fable it seems has had dealings with Rrellette. She knows the danger of the water wight, and she knows females are generally safe, seen as kin if not friends. But perhaps Rrellette is hungry, more hungry than usual, more hungry than she can bear… maybe she will not care today about the gender of her visitors… she can feed on a womans fears if need be, though she has an obvious taste for the male.
Does it make sense that in incorporal fey spirit would be hungry? Would need to “eat” the fear of a victim? I think it surely is a thing even among the living… some folk get a taste for inflicting terror upon others… it feeds something. Something unholy, something twisted, yet something that can exist.
I think I need to set up the encounter a bit more. Now that Fable actually knows about Rrellette (rather than it being a random encounter with an unknown monster) some exposition will help make the scene more meaningful.
I’ve written myself into another tight spot… is this what writers deal with on a daily basis? Or is it just my lack of experience… I decided to let the encounter begin in the perspective of Yisi who stands on the hill rise watching, rather than from the perspective of Valea who is down at the lake shore. Rrellette will attempt to charm Fable and Valea even though they are female. Both will have to save against charm… How would I play this out at table? All players are listening, but only one of them is the focus of the narration… this is perhaps one reason why they say “don’t split the party” it just leads to problems…