PWTyler

Tag: Keepers of the Feather

  • Dramatis Personae: Stefania Martikova

    Stefania is the adult daughter of Davian and Angelika Martikov, living at the Wizard of Wines winery with most of her family and the “inner circle” of wereravens. Stefania and her husband have four children also detailed in chapter twelve of Curse of Strahd.

    Like the rest of her family, Stefania is a wereraven, but she is also a (mostly) self-trained mage. She learned the fundamentals of arcane magic from an outlander wizard when she was a young girl, and continues to study the scrolls, notes, and scribblings they left behind. Stefania will do her best to hide her magic from the party until they have gained the family’s trust.

    In My Campaign

    Stefania’s teacher was a mage from the Marquet region of Exandria who found herself pulled through the mists into Barovia many years before the present day. This mage eventually gained the confidence of the Keepers of the Feather, and helped apply some of the enchantments that keep The Nest safe.

    Stefania has the stats of a wereraven, with the following adjustments:

    • She has an INT of 14 (+2)
    • She is proficient in Arcana
    • She is a 1st-level spellcaster. Her spellcasting ability is Intelligence (spell save DC 12, +4 to hit with spell attacks). She has the following wizard spells prepared:
      • Cantrips: ray of frost, firebolt, prestidigitation
      • 1st Level: burning hands, disguise self, shield

    Carefully utilizing her control over fire and cold spells, Stefania controls and cultivates the brown mold that keeps the wine cellar cool (W15). If the mold is destroyed in the course of the players’ investigation or combat with the druids, Stefania will ask the party to harvest brown mold from elsewhere in their travels (it might be found in the castle, Berez, the Amber Temple, or elsewhere in the mountains) and bring it to her to re-establish her colony.

    Stefania is eager to learn more about magic, and will attempt to befriend any wizard or artificer in the party. Given the lack of options to further her own magical education, she does not pass up the opportunity before her— she tries her best to remain respectful, but her enthusiasm can get the better of her. Her spellbook is a compilation of scraps of paper, vellum, and misprinted bottle labels bound and sewn together with colored thread and shiny bits of tinsel.

    Among the notes, scrolls, and books Stefania has, there is a partial spellbook that contains three first-level spells, two second-level spells, one third-level spell, and one fourth-level spell. Stefania has not yet learned all of the spells, but a wizard with enough time and materials could transcribe the additional spells per the Wizard class’s “Your Spellbook” sidebar. Stefania will allow a visiting wizard to study and copy the spellbook in her presence, but she will not let it leave The Nest.

    In My Campaign

    The outlander who left these materials to Stefania was a Dunamancer (See chapter four of Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount), and the spellbook included spells usually limited to that world.

    Stefania knows of a number of locations where magical secrets may be found, including:

    • A ruined tower on the shores of Lake Baratok was supposedly build by a great wizard
    • The Abbey of St. Markovia contains an extensive library, that likely includes arcane texts (I based this library on the Teodorus Archives described in Hearing Secret Harmonies)
    • More than twenty years ago, the outlander that had taught her magic left to investigate rumors of “a great library deep in the southern mountains”
    • Strahd von Zarovich knows powerful magic, and there is little doubt the library of Castle Ravenloft is full of magical secrets if it can be reached.

  • Circling Back on my Corvid Friends

    When I ran my D&D campaign of Curse of Strahd (CoS) that ended last year, I spent a decent amount pouring through past editions’ sourcebooks and adventures, lifting aspects of Ravenloft and Barovian lore to incorporate into Curse of Strahd’s Baroiva. One of the pieces that stuck with me the most as I dug through the archives was the idea that the leader of the Keepers of the Black Feather was the last cleric of Andral, the god of a pre-Strahd Barovia.

    The immediate product of these deep-dives was two blog posts on a blog I maintain with friends:

    The Church of the Morninglord: St Andral
    The Cult of the Morninglord (or History of the Church, Part One)

    I quickly went to work incorporating much of that into the Martikov family of CoS, expanding roles and identities withing the family, as well as establishing a thread that explains the way the history pieced together between the lore of 2E & 3.5E Ravenloft, with the Church of Andral and the Cult of the Morninglord, vs the Church of the Morninglord that is the only faith (past and present) of 5E’s Barovia.

    As the campaign continued, much of this came together in scribbled notes, incomplete documents, and of course, making decisions on the fly as the campaign took new directions and players asked unexpected questions. I always intended to collect these threads, but as the campaign moved on, and then ultimately finished, I lost steam and the project was set aside. You might even note I say “multi-post deep-dive” up there in May 2020, and then never followed up. I hope to break up what I often spent too much time on into smaller posts I can knock out a little faster (although still likely with little regularity), all focused on the Martikov family and their ties to the history of religion in Barovia. I’ll continue to index posts related to the subject together, and ideally when this little project is complete (if ever complete), I’ll have something that could be collected into a supplement for others to bring my Martikovs into their Barovian campaigns.