The Witch Queen of the Black Numenoreans

Campaign: Adventures in Middle-Earth

Characters:

• Heva the Small, Woodman Slayer -- a harrowed woman haunted by visions of the growing Shadow
• Odo Hayfoot, Shire Hobbit Treasure Hunter -- a reluctant adventurer with a greed for gold
• Thuradiel, Mirkwood Elf Wanderer -- a world-weary traveler who tires of life in Middle-earth
• Nar Goldhorn, Dwarf Warden -- a seeker after a lost ancestral harp
• Lillian, Bree-lander Scholar -- a student of the healing arts who feels the pull of the road

Objectives: Seek Beruthiel in her dark fortress.

Events:

• The company is bolstered by the addition of two adventurers who have felt the cold hand of the Shadow upon the land and are moved to act against its reach. Nar Goldhorn, a Dwarf who wishes to locate his family's famed harp, and Lillian, an overfed scholar who dreams of adventure, join in fellowship with Odo, Thuradiel, and Heva.
• Travel northward results in no incidents of note. The fortress now occupied by the mysterious Beruthiel had long fallen into disrepair, but even so it seems cursed with a forlorn and moribund atmosphere beyond the rot and ruin brought by time and neglect.
• A lone watchtower lurks at the perimeter of the fortress's broken wall. Sensing that something watches them from the watchtower, a portion of the company decides to stay in view of the tower as a distraction while Thuradiel, Odo, and Lillian sneak inside.
• Inside the tower, Thuradiel, Odo, and Lillian surprise a small contingent of Orcs acting as sentries. Thuradiel and Odo engage the Orcs in combat while Lillian throws errant bits of broken masonry to distract the Goblins. Luckily, the Orcs were unable to light their warning beacon before being felled in the melee.
• Surprisingly, there are no sentries posted at the gate of the fortress. The gate is open, which feels like an uneasy welcome.
• Inside, the fortress teems with cats. They flow like a living carpet across the filthy flagstones of the keep. All the cats are black. As the company enters the fortress, the cats swarm them as a roiling mass of fur and fangs. The company manages to fight their way to the stairs; the feline tide recedes. 
• The keep is explored. Several statues in the style of the craftsmanship of Gondor are discovered, but each statue has been defaced in some way.
• In a long and ancient hallway the company is rushed by a number of Orcs and their allied panthers. The fight is vicious, but sudden and short. Despite his small size, Odo delivers the finishing blow to the majority of the black panthers. Nar vows to write a bardic tale telling of the day a Hobbit stood as a champion against the great cats.
• After further exploration, the company finds themselves in the presence of Beruthiel, a woman enshrined in dark robes whose face is veiled by shadowy cloth. The floor swarms with mewling black cats, but a white cat sits upon her lap. She is enthroned, and flanked by slavering Goblins. Addressing the company, she congratulates them on their bravery for seeking Queen Beruthiel of the Ages Past--Beruthiel the Returned, Witch of the Black Numenoreans, she who is the Claw of the Shadow!
• The Orcs surge forth and are met with blade and arrow. Beruthiel rises from her dark throne and commands the shadows cast by the torchlight in the room to mercilessly slash at the company. 
• Lillian attempts to put out the torches and thus rob Beruthiel of her shadows, but eventually realizes that this would leave the company in utter darkness against their foes. Heva is knocked to the ground by an Orc; despite her battle rage, she remains unconscious. The day, however, is carried. Thuradiel sends an arrow through the Witch Queen, who shatters into a thousand shards of potent darkness.
• And yet...the keep proves empty of the Orcish horde the company expected to find. Where is Beruthiel's warband? Is it already on the march somewhere in Middle-earth?

First Female Doctor in Britain, the Rise of Science Fiction, Remembering Octavia Butler

The First Female Doctor in Britain Spent 56 Years Disguised as a Man (Lauren Young for Atlas Obscura)

The Rise of Science Fiction from Pulp Mags to Cyberpunk (Jeff VanderMeer for Electric Lit)

Remembering Octavia Butler (Scott Timber for Salon)

Junjo Ito Cosmic Horror Game, Ugly Desires, Country Noir

A Cosmic Horror Game Inspired by the Work of Manga Artist Junjo Ito (Chris Priestman for Kill Screen) 

Ugly Desires in a Beautiful World: A Bloodborne Photo Essay (Gareth Dutton for Waypoint)

New Genres: Country Noir (Court Merrigan for Electric Lit)

Alraune

New podcast episode is up!

Hanns Heinz Ewers' 1911 novel Alraune is part horror, part science fiction, part decadent prose, and absolutely of the most extreme femme fatale stories ever written. Kate and Jack tackle Ewers' complicated personal and political history and why this German author's weird tales deserve to be read alongside the work of other horror luminaries.

Kate and Jack selfishly take on the role of readers this month, highlighting the author's luridly beautiful writing.

Explore sexy funtimes dekadentenstil with bloodletting, gender bending, and attempts to scientifically identify the sluttiest woman in Berlin. What on earth is a German fencing fraternity? Why should we bring back dueling for satisfaction? How can reading out loud be an effective pathway to getting laid? Find out all this and more in this month's episode of Bad Books for Bad People.

As our way of showing how much we love you, we reveal details of our first give-away, which is open until February 1, 2017, at midnight ET.

Intro/Outro Music: "Dekadente Nächte" by Porta Nigra.

Find us at BadBooksBadPeople.com, on Twitter @badbooksbadppl, Instagram @badbooksbadpeople and on Facebook. You can discover where to get all the books featured on Bad Books for Bad People on our reading list.

Listen here, listen now, listen forever!

The Two Things I Want Cover Art to Do

Should the covers of RPG core books be designed to serve a purpose? As a thought experiment, I propose that core book cover art should be designed to answer two questions: who are the characters and what do they do?

(I also want the art to be good, but that goes without saying.)

Let's see how a bunch of RPG covers stack up according to my rubric:

Moldvay Basic D&D 
The gold standard of D&D covers. The game is called Dungeons & Dragons, the art shows that the player characters are fantasy adventurers who go into dungeons and encounter monsters--like dragons, for instance. Easy win.

3.5 Dungeons & Dragons 
Absolute failure. What is this game about? Also: ugly and so very brown. If anything, the only vibe it gives off is about what the player, not the character, will have to do in this game: it might be a warning saying "This is a textbook, get ready to study."

Pathfinder
Cover art is a place where Pathfinder smokes 3.5 D&D. Borrowing a page from Moldvay, we get fantasy adventurers versus fantasy beasts in fantasy dungeons. It does what it says on the tin.

4e Dungeons & Dragons
We get a sense of who the player characters are on this cover, but not of what they do. You could argue that it looks like they're exploring subterranean depths, but it looks way too cautious for the big set-piece battle style that 4e supports.

5e Dungeons & Dragons
A return to form for D&D cover art: adventurers fighting monsters in fantasy locales. The slightly over-the-top heroics of the cover compared to Moldvay Basic give a fairly good indication that D&D isn't a necessarily a meat grinder anymore.

1e Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay
The characters depicted on the cover look like they were rolled off of random tables, stuck together in a party, and are now facing a tough battle that will leave some of them dead and others hideously wounded. I'd say that's a good encapsulation of the WRFP experience, actually.

7e Call of Cthulhu
It is usually the case that earlier editions of Call of Cthulhu have moody, evocative covers that show Cthulhu being generally menacing and whatnot, which really doesn't give an indication of what the game is about. The newest edition does a better job of this by splitting the game into two books, and thus has two covers. The cover of player's guide shows investigators getting way over their heads by discovering a cult idol--a pretty good indication of how the game is likely to play out.

Deadlands
I love the Brom painting on the cover of this book, but...you're probably not going to get to play a harrowed gunslinger so it feels a bit like false advertising. 

1e Shadowrun
The cover reads as "fantasy Flock of Seagulls steal data and do violent stuff in a cyberpunk dystopia," so it nails the premise fairly well. It may also hint at the idea of the party's hacker going on their own Matrix adventure while everybody else does other stuff.

RIFTS
So, we play the alien-chicks version of Charlie's Angels trapped in that one Rick Springfield video? No? Oh...in that case, this cover doesn't work for me; it really doesn't tell me anything about the player characters or what they get up to. Also, I know this is a beloved piece of RPG art, but I've always found it really static and a bit ugly.

Savage Worlds RIFTS
Okay, the amount of trade dress on the cover is excessive, but this gives me the impression of playing a post-apocalyptic punk with crazy weapons who fights robot Nazis, which is actually much closer in spirit to what RIFTS is about than the original cover.

Burning Wheel
Yeah, I would have no idea what this is about if I saw it on a shelf. Ridiculously uninformative. The cover is actually really attractive, especially when you see it in person, but it doesn't get me excited about the premise of the game itself.

Swords & Wizardry Complete
I'm not going to go to hard on this one since it's already been a lightning rod for grognard ire, but it suffers from the same problems as the Burning Wheel cover above. While I really like the image, it doesn't really indicate that the game is an OD&D clone.

Traveller
Seriously, go fuck yourself.

Romasanta: The Werewolf Hunt

Romasanta was far better than I expected it to be. The acting was good, the women beautiful, and I really liked the weird anachronism of the setting (it’s set in 1851, but looks like it’s set in the early modern period...and then someone mentions genes, which is a solidly twentieth-century understanding of biology). 

That said, the poster art is massively misleading. Anyone expecting a low-budget riff on the same territory covered by Brotherhood of the Wolf is bound to be disappointed; despite the garb showcased in the above image (which doesn’t even feature prominently in the film–if at all), Romasanta doesn’t have any of the swashbuckling kung-fu of that film.

Werewolf film buffs in general are liable to be disappointed as well. By the end of the film it’s not clear that there even is a werewolf at work here. Romasanta is based on the life of a nineteenth-century Spanish serial killer Manuel Blanco Romasanta, who claimed that he murdered because he was under a curse which caused him to turn into a bloodthirsty wolf. His trial is noteworthy because it featured phrenology (my favorite pseudo-science) and because Romasanta’s sentence was commuted by Queen Isabella II. Interestingly, the sentence was commuted at the request of a mysterious Dr. Phillips (possibly the exiled hypnotist Joseph-Pierre Durand de Gros) so the doctor could study this case of "psychological lycanthropy."

So, between the real-world case and the film, what’s gameable here?

• The tension in the question of whether a series of murders are the work of a madman or a werewolf is worthy of mining.
• Romasanta was collecting the fat from his human victims. Why? Was the fat used in a ritual to bring on his lycanthropic transformation or to keep it at bay?
• Furthermore, Romasanta inspired the legend of Sacaúntos, sinister men who killed children for their fat. What if these bogeymen were a particularly malicious sort of fey sent to frighten a human community away from an ancient faerie site?
• Who was this Dr. Phillips and why was he so interested in studying this werewolf? Perhaps the crown commuted the sentence in hopes of harnessing the occult secrets of lycanthropy as a weapon against an enemy nation.

Days Gone Bye

This is a read-through of The Walking Dead, from the beginning: headshots only.

The first issue of The Walking Dead is all about establishing what the audience is supposed to know about Rick Grimes, the primary protagonist of the series. We are introduced to Rick in the middle of a gunfight in which he, as a police officer, is shot down by an escapee from a nearby prison. We next see Rick awaken in a hospital, the zombie apocalypse having happened in the interim. The juxtaposition of Rick being wounded and regaining consciousness amid a world gone to hell underlines an important trait that will define who Rick is: he is a survivor. 

Rick's ability to survive whatever human and inhuman obstacles the story places in his way marks him as a protagonist; metaphorically, the ability to survive might be his "superpower." As the series unfolds, the narrative development is in how he survives and especially in what he finds difficult to survive or cope with.

However, the association between Rick and survival isn't meant to be taken as a solitary orientation; The Walking Dead is not the story of a lone wolf's struggle in a zombie-infested world. Instead, The Walking Dead is a story about community in the face of crisis. As such, Rick's survival skills have a communal, outward-facing focus. When Rick encounters Morgan and Duane, for example, he uses his abilities and access as a (former) policeman to give them guns and a better vehicle to help enable their survival in this tough new world. At this point in the story, this is Rick's default position: he is a survivor who feels a duty to help others survive.

Rick's default position proves to be troubled or strained by another trait of his that we're introduced to early on: his sensitivity and sentimentality. Even though he's been told by Morgan that wasting a bullet on a zombie that can't get at you squanders an important and limited resource, he takes the time to finish off a crippled and "suffering" zombie he had encountered earlier. Interestingly, Rick knows that his sentimentality is a potential liability; when he attempts to cheer himself up by relating the story of his son's birth--a story he tells to a horse, of all things--he remarks that "thinking about the good times makes all this seem so much worse." 

Of course, forming communal bonds is itself a survival instinct for the protection of the herd, but forging those ties is rendered problematic by moments of profound upheaval and instability. There are dangers here: there is already fear about cultural backsliding in this new apocalyptic age (Donna's fear that the equality of the sexes will fall by the wayside), there is the possibility of old resentments tearing apart a new community now that the old boundaries of social propriety are no longer in play (Shane's feelings for Lori), there are conflicts of ideology (the religious Donna doesn't approve of Andrea and Amy sleeping with Dale in his trailer), there is tension over who is going to be the leader and who has the best plan for the group's future (Rick and Shane butt heads to establish alpha male status).

None of this is easy, and the group is essentially living during wartime as they are besieged by enemies from without and from within. The fault lines already apparent threaten to erupt into irreparable rifts; disagreement over responsibility for the deaths of Amy and Jim lead Shane and Rick into a deadly confrontation in the woods--a confrontation that only ends when Carl shoots and kills Shane before Shane has a chance to pull the trigger on his father. This is how The Walking Dead registers the fallout of the group's strain: it asks, how does this effect the youngest and most vulnerable members of the group? How are they changed by the experience? And can the adults manage and handle that change in the children?

The problems of survival and community collude to make Carl learn the hard way that killing a living, breathing man is not at all like killing a dead, shambling thing. It's a lesson he wouldn't have had to learn otherwise, but the world he now lives doesn't leave him with that luxury.

From the hip:

• I love that Rick's survivor skills are exemplified by how easily he adapts to using different modes of transportation; all within the first few issues he walks, rides a bike, drives a car, and rides a horse. That Rick can do anything!
• Rick and Lori's disagreement over whether Carl should have a gun to protect himself parallels the ongoing debates about access to firearms in the US. Here zombies stand in for "terrorists" and "criminals"; clearly an armed populace can better protect itself, right? Right?
• Note that many of the characters were plagued by debt before the zombie apocalypse, perhaps hinting that the alternative was a slow moving and persistent economic Armageddon. 
• The issue where Carl kills Shane is the first issue that doesn't feature zombies. The violence between the living is allowed the space to stand on its own.

The Shadow Falls on Duryn

Campaign: Adventures in Middle-Earth

Characters:

• Heva the Small, Woodman Slayer -- a harrowed woman haunted by visions of the growing Shadow
• Odo Hayfoot, Shire Hobbit Treasure Hunter -- a reluctant adventurer with a greed for gold
• Thuradiel, Mirkwood Elf Wanderer -- a world-weary traveler who tires of life in Middle-earth

Objectives: To discover who or what is behind the Orc-host that is currently terrorizing the land.

Events:

• Duryn is not as the characters left it prior to their journey to Falastur. Although the people of Duryn had previously expressed desires to aid and shelter their neighbors from Falastur, the refugees are greeted with thinly-veiled hostility. Strangely, the town seems to now be home to a proliferation of black cats who roam the streets.
• The characters spoke to a number of prominent citizens in Duryn (Astrid, the baker; Ragnarr, the archer; Ormund the Grey-beard) but each gives a different and conflicting reason for the change of heart toward the people of Falastur. Astrid believes that the Falasturians engineered the downfall of their town for nefarious ends; Ragnarr believes that outsiders simply cannot be trusted; Ormund fears the drain on Duryn's resources that taking in the refugees will cause.
• Walking the streets for reasons he kept to himself, Odo overhears guttural voices coming from inside a granary that indicate that someone named Beruthiel wishes to sow discord among the Men of Middle-earth. Odo rouses his companions, who rush back to the granary--discovering Orcs (accompanied by their great black cats) busy poisoning the stores of flour. The fray is joined valiantly, and the Orcs are put to the sword. 
• Examining the ragtag armor worn by the Orcs reveals markings that seem to indicate that pieces of it were pillaged from a long-abandoned keep to the north. It is resolved that the party will seek that desolate fort to delve deeper into the mystery of the Orcish horde and their master Beruthiel.

Gathered Dust and Others

The stories in Gathered Dust and Others straddle the line between inventive weird fiction and Lovecraftian fanfic. There are excesses here that veer into the unpardonable: mauve! coils of hair! spooky flutes! Description sometimes strays into territory too purple (or perhaps mauve) for even my forgiving tastes, dialog becomes tin-eared, Lovecraft's cod-antiquarian vernacular gets tried on the way a boy tries on his father's shoes, and there are moments of self-consciousness that devolve into preciousness. 

Nevertheless, the great moments in these stories are truly great. At its sharpest, Pugmire's fiction adds a unique and fitting sensuality to the usual Yog-Sothery. There is a shade of desire inherent to the mythos that is rarely explored beyond hentai gymnastics, but here we feel the erotic charge of attraction that makes otherworldly belief, cult, and obsession possible. The same charge is explored within the context of Pugmire's literary influences as well; where Harold Bloom found the heart of the anxiety of influence to be primarily Oedipal, Pugmire's fictions treat it as a libidinally-charged undeniable attraction--Lovecraft, Poe, Wilde, Baudelaire, et al, become lovers, co-conspirators, and the vampire from which these stories feed.

Best Thrifting Finds of 2016

This will inevitably just take up space, but...there was no way I was leaving the market without it. $7.50! Seems complete, save for the vampire fangs--which I am totally okay with being missing because they likely would have been in a stranger's mouth at some point.

* * *

This book gets mentioned in Alan Moore's Promethea, which I had just read two days before going to the flea market. I had assumed that the author and the book were both fictitious inventions by Moore, but then I found this 1896 edition waiting for me. As I was looking at it, the seller scurried up next to me and offered to sell it to me for half price. $5 later, it is now mine. Oh, and it was previously the property of the Lawn Tennis Club of Yonkers, according to the seal.

* * *

I'm under-read in supermarket Gothic romances, but I'm sure this omnibus collection from Reader's Digest will help get me caught up. Bought purely on the enticement of the cover alone.

* * *

I picked this up because; 1) it's the one Dead Can Dance album I don't have and 2) the packaging has a weird nostalgia to it. Remember back when Tower Records existed and could charge $15.99 for a cd? Remember those silver holographic tabs they put on the edges to prevent theft? It was like 1995 all over again when I opened this.

* * *

The dust jacket is beat to hell, but come on...Lon Chaney wrote the foreword! This is like my dream Monster Manual right here.

* * *

I picked up a book by Arch Merrill purely on a whim; I saw that it was a book about upstate New York history, which you don't see that often, and the price was right. After reading it, I had to track down a couple more. Although the historical stories related in his books require a little modern fact-checking, they relate amazing pieces of forgotten history full of oddballs and oddities. These are the bits and pieces of strange local history that we lose as the world marches on, so it was truly thrilling to find such an able account of things I otherwise wouldn't know about the place I grew up in.

* * *

Not a thrifty find, but rather a suggestion for refreshment after a long day of crawling the flea markets: the Jungle Bird.

1 1/2 oz Kraken rum
1/2 oz Campari
1 1/2 oz pineapple juice
1/2 oz lime juice
1/2 oz simple syrup

The Poisoning of Falastur

Campaign: Adventures in Middle-Earth

Characters:

• Heva the Small, Woodman Slayer -- a harrowed woman haunted by visions of the growing Shadow
• Odo Hayfoot, Shire Hobbit Treasure Hunter -- a reluctant adventurer with a greed for gold
• Thuradiel, Mirkwood Elf Wanderer -- a world-weary traveler who tires of life in Middle-earth

Objectives: Escort the beleaguered people of Falastur to safety in Duryn.

Events: 

• On the way to Falastur the party is ambushed by Orcs, who are dispatched with some difficulty.
• Also discovered: a ransacked warden's tower; the wardens lay slain inside, but are given hasty burials as time seems to be of the essence. It's clear that the wardens were killed by brutish blades, but some also bear the marks of beastly fangs. A dark army is on the march.
• Arrival in Falastur unveils that the town has been repeatedly raided by a horde of Orcs riding gigantic black cats. The people of Falastur are not just terrorized; they have become distrustful of each other and quick to anger--the Shadow is upon them!
• An audience with the town's elders reveals that the Orcs seem to be searching for something or someone. It is also discovered that the town's granaries have been pillaged and the town's well has been defiled with poison. Words of debased Black Speech have been left to on both to mark their desecration.
• Before an orderly exit from Falastur can be organized, the horde attacks again in numbers scarcely believable. The party holds off the horde as best they can as a train of wagons is put into motion so that the folk may seek shelter in Duryn. The cat-riders harry the train, but ultimately are dissuaded from giving pursuit.
• Falastur is set aflame behind them as they flee, but its people are safely escorted to the walls of Duryn. An unforeseen Shadow lengthens across the land--whose impure strength guides this horde of Orcs and dire panthers to march upon Middle-earth?

Weird Panics, Cemetery Symbolism, Upper West Side Cult

An Illustrated Guide of the World's Weirdest Panics, From A to Z (by Michelle Enemark and Cara Giaimo for Atlas Obscura)

A Graphic Guide to Cemetery Symbolism (Atlas Obscura)

Inside the Rise & Fall Of A 1970s Upper West Side Cult (by Jake Offenhartz for Gothamist)

The Best Books I Read in 2016

Nothing more arbitrary than a top-ten list and nothing more empty of meaning than the "listicle," but these are the books I enjoyed most in 2016 and so here we are. I could tell you why I loved these books, but I'm going to let them sell themselves on their own merits with an excerpt.

Robert Aickman, Cold Hand in Mine

Daily life is entirely a matter of the pattern men and women impose upon it: of style, as the artist calls it. And the character of that pattern is very important, as day follows day. None, the less, reality lies far behind, and is unchangeable: is ritual, in fact.

Lisa Rodensky (editor), Decadent Poetry

IN twilight while I walk alone
A strange voice calls me, clear and low;
A shadowy hand that seeks my own,
Cold as the wind and soft as snow,
Still leads me, leads me as I pass
Across the grey December grass.

The village windows beckon still
With glow of amber and of gold;
But my way lies along the hill,
My road must cross the frosty wold;
And still I feel and still I see
The darkness round me deep and free.
— Rosamund Marriott Watson, “Ex Umbra”

Jeff VanderMeer, City of Saints and Madmen

Then she would sing, and he would imagine the thrull of her against him, and marvel at the power of her voice, the depths and hollows of it, the way it matched the flow and melody of the orchestra only to diverge, coursing like a secret and perilous undertow, the vibration growing and growing until there was no longer any music at all, just the voice devouring the music.

Jeffrey Ford, The Physiognomy

I now wondered what it would take to subdue his idiocy. For a moment, I pictured cutting it out of him, a large laughing black mass, like a comedic tumor on the brain.

Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

Optimism has always been an undeclared policy of human culture–one that grew out of our animal instincts to survive and reproduce–rather than an articulated body of thought. … This would explain why at any given time there are more cannibals than philosophical pessimists.

China Mieville, The City & the City

Maps made clear to walkers where they might go. It was here in the crosshatch that the students might stand, scandalously, touching distance from a foreign power, a pornography of separation. 

Ray Russell, The Case Against Satan

Gregory had always disliked snow. Its beauty was transitory, for after the first smooth white quilting, it became a thing of depressing ugliness; lumpy, rigid, veined with dirt and offal, a thing to offend the eye.

Alistair Rennie, BleakWarrior

Its artificial quaintness had become the sum of its everyday life, which meant that people were nice to each other in ways that people of the past never had been. They were also abnormally law-abiding and socially calibrated to the highest standards of common decency and a mutual respect for one another’s private affairs. The inhabitants of the City of Antiquities were among the most morally coherent of the entire continent, which also made them among the most nauseating.

Lord Dunsany, The King of Elfland's Daughter

And little he knew of the things that ink may do, how it can mark a dead man’s thought for the wonder of later years, and tell of happenings that are gone clean away, and be a voice for us out of the dark of time, and save many a fragile thing from the pounding of heavy ages; or carry to us, over the rolling centuries, even a song from lips long dead on forgotten hills.

Tanith Lee, A Different City

From our youth our own ghosts already live in us. Oblivious though we may be, sometimes they speak. Why else the mirror, the canvas, the photograph?

The Sins of the Father

Campaign: Krevborna, 5e D&D

Dramatis Personae:

• Cassie Mabcrowe, teenage warlock with the blood of a fallen angel running through her veins
• Father Encanto, a cleric belonging to an obscure cult of black-feathered zealots
• Hideo, a monastic traveler from far and foreign lands who is troubled by the primitive customs of Krevborna
• Margritte Fenrova, a wildling raider hailing from a tribe of wolf-blooded savages

Events:
The characters were brought together at a blazing bonfire that seems to have been waiting for them in the woods outside Piskaro. They are strangers to each other, but each had been guided here by prophetic dreams of a wedding that turns horrific. In the morning they ventured into the salt-blasted city of Piskaro and located the out-of-the-way chapel that each of them had dreamed of previously. 

Taking seats upon the pews at the back, they observed the ceremony--which proved to be a dull and monotonous affair typical of a wedding performed by the Church of the Saintly Blood. The bride was a lovely young woman, fair of skin and brown of hair. Her husband-to-be looked studious and ever so slightly dashing. Also present, at the side of the bride, was a white-haired man with beard and spectacles.

The prosaic wedding was interrupted precisely at the moment where the bride and groom were about to exchange blood and seal their union when all of the windows of the chapel shattered simultaneously, creating jagged entries into the chapel for a number of hound-faced fey and their hunting ravens. Each character was revisited by imagery from the dreams that had brought them to this place--brief snippets of bloody violence--and lo, a melee ensued within the hallowed chapel. 

Although the characters fought well with sword, axe, crossbow, and spell against the fey creatures invading the chapel, there were more of them than they could handle. The prospective husband died protecting his bride; she was captured and delivered into the hands of a tall "man" with antlers who stood watching at the door of the chapel. He retreated with his prize, and his hound-faced minions fled with him.

This led to a chase in which the characters pursued the antlered man and the captive bride across the canals of Piskaro. Each character ended up falling into the stinking waters of the canals at one point or another in the chase, slowing their progress considerably. Eventually, their quarry managed to elude them, exiting the city amid overturned apple carts and a small army of angry merchants plying their now-spoiled wares at one of the gates leading out of the city.

Returning to the chapel led them back to Lucius Korokov, the father of the bride. When pressed about who had interrupted the wedding of his daughter Elena and why she had been taken, he replied that in his youth he had made a pact with they fey: in return for magical power, he had promised his daughter to a captain of the Wild Hunt. It appeared that the captain had come to claim his prize, but Hideo could also tell that there was something that Korokov was hiding.

Even so, the characters agreed that Elena must be rescued. Encanto decided that the fact that Elena had been taken by members of the Wild Hunt was information worth pursuing. A little research in the folklore archives of Volomaas Library dredged up a number of tales about the Wild Hunt emerging from a particular grove within the woods outside Piskaro. 

The next morning the party set off for the woods. Margritte's tracking prowess caught the trail and they found themselves near the spot that had converged upon when they first met each other. Venturing further into the woods, they discovered a hill within a grove of trees; despite the otherwise sunny day, a thick fog hung in the air around the hill. After scouting the perimeter around the hill the group discovered an ancient stone door (obscured by thick moss) that was built into the hill. The inside of the hill proved to be stone passages that betrayed that the interior of the hill was much larger than the exterior hinted at. 

The party crept stealthily through the passages, silencing guards when they could not sneak past them, until they discovered the lair of the Wild Hunt and a bound Elena with them. Surprise was on the side of the characters this time, but despite their initial advantage of momentum their foes fought back viciously. Encanto was felled by warrior of the Hunt, but Cassie's training as a doctor (of sorts) helped her to staunch his bleeding in the middle of the melee, saving the cleric's life so that he could then save the downed Hideo's life with his curative magic. 

In the end, Encanto's crossbow bolts and Hideo's sword conspired to bring down the horned captain of the Wild Hunt. (Cassie and Margritte, for their part, had been busy bringing down the captain's fey host and their flesh-hungry ravens with a combination of hexes and savage axe cuts.) As he lay dying, the captain revealed that he had struck his deal with Lucius years ago because he knew that Elena was destined to be no normal woman; she was fated to be the Mater Monstrum--the captain desired to take her captive so that she could not fulfill her purpose of ushering in a new age of darkness in Krevborna.

A conundrum: do the characters return Elena to her father, even though he is clearly hiding something? Should they now safeguard Elena from her dark fate of birthing a horde of monstrosities? Is Elena's life worth saving if it is ultimately a threat to the lives of all within the land?