Dragna's Blog: Kasimir's Quest

Last time, we discussed the problem with Patrina Velikovna's RAW storyline. To briefly recap: In RAW, Kasimir’s storyline centers around resurrecting an evil sister whom he correctly killed for the wrong reasons. Now, Kasimir wants the players’ help to resurrect her from a misguided and inaccurate belief in her redemption. This resurrection storyline has no clear role or place in the campaign, and ends by leaving the players worse-off than when they began.

So what do we do with this?

I generally try to hew to a core concept of fairness when discussing the consequences of the players’ actions: If the players suffer consequences for their actions, those consequences must have been fairly foreshadowed in advance, such that the players had a reasonable chance to avoid them. The greater the risk of consequence, the greater the warning the players are owed.

Now, “Help your friend resurrect an evil archmage who will immediately betray him (and you), then try to become a vampire” ranks pretty high on the “consequence” list, and the risk is all but certain; if the players help Kasimir, this Bad Thing will occur. That means we need to give the players sufficient warning of the Bad Thing so that they have a reasonable chance to prevent it.

But wait. Resurrecting Patrina is the whole point of Kasimir’s quest. If we give the players a fair chance to avoid it, then we’re basically trashing the entire questline.

That lead to my first conclusion: Patrina’s resurrection must go. Even if this storyline began with a focus on Patrina’s resurrection, it couldn’t end there—not unless we were willing to actually let the players redeem (or recruit) Patrina. (Given that Patrina is a bonkers-powerful archmage, and also has few-to-no redeeming qualities, I felt it probably best to leave her as an antagonist.) That meant that the ultimate stakes of Kasimir’s stakes could not be about resurrecting his sister.

But what should they be instead? My first thought was an internal arc: Kasimir wants to bring Patrina back, but needs to forgive himself for his guilt. That meant that the players’ ultimate role would be to convince Kasimir to release his guilt and shame, and . . .

. . . forgive himself for committing unprovoked fratricide for Patrina’s crime of “being pursued by an abusive man”? (Patrina arguably deserved death for separate reasons, but Kasimir didn’t know that, and it’s still oof.)

Okay; maybe not. But where did that leave us?

Well, as I’d pondered the idea of Kasimir’s internal arc, I realized that, if this were to provide real gameplay, there needed to be a loss condition—which meant some kind of adversarial gameplay. (For example, maybe Patrina’s spirit would be urging Kasimir to surrender to his guilt, acting as the “devil on Kasimir’s shoulder” to the players’ angel.) If Patrina won, Kasimir would resurrect her and the players got a boss battle; if the players won, they might still get a boss battle, but Patrina’s spirit would be significantly weaker than her resurrected self, and the players would have Kasimir on their side this time.

That could have worked, in theory (at least, independently of the arc’s problematic nature), but raised a new problem: If Patrina was the “final boss” of Kasimir’s quest, that meant that its climax had to take place in Castle Ravenloft, where Patrina’s body and banshee were located. That meant either (a) the climax of Kasimir’s storyline had to happen during the Ravenloft heist, before the players ever visited the Amber Temple; or (b) it had to happen immediately before the final fight with Strahd. 

Neither of these options worked (for obvious reasons). That meant that, if I wanted Patrina to be the “final boss” of Kasimir’s quest (and it was looking increasingly clear that, as a natural antagonist, that had to be the role she was to play), I had to relocate her spirit. The Amber Temple, as the RAW endpoint of Kasimir’s quest, was the most obvious candidate. 

But why would Patrina’s spirit be there? Wasn’t she busy being a banshee in Castle Ravenloft? And wasn’t her literal corpse entombed there? (I knew I had Markovia’s spirit show up in Krezk notwithstanding her burial in the Ravenloft catacombs, but surely that only worked because she had a deep spiritual tie to the Abbey and blessed pool?)

I reviewed Patrina’s bio and the Amber Temple chapter of the RAW module, at which point I realized two things:

• The dark gift of Tenebrous, the secret of lichdom, is only available to wizards who can cast 9th-level spells.

• Patrina is an archmage capable of casting 9th-level spells.

Suddenly, everything clicked into place.

Patrina hadn’t been trying to become a vampire at all. She’d been trying to become a lich—and that was why Kasimir had killed her. 

I returned again to Tenebrous’s dark gift, and noticed that the secret of lichdom imposed two tasks: (1) craft a phylactery and imbue it with the power to contain the beneficiary’s soul; and (2) concoct a potion of transformation that turns the beneficiary into a lich. Notably, the two items can’t be crafted concurrently.

What if Patrina had made the phylactery first, then stored it in the Amber Temple? 

What if the potion of transformation required the sacrifice of innocent souls, and Kasimir caught her preparing it—and killed her before she could drink it? 

What if Patrina’s soul, due to the botched transformation, had rebounded—not to her catacomb in Castle Ravenloft, but to her waiting phylactery in the Amber Temple?

What if Patrina’s phylactery was the Sunsword itself? What if Kasimir sought not to redeem her, but to recover the only weapon capable of defeating Strahd? What if Patrina lied to Kasimir by omission, pretending that she had hidden the Brightblade’s broken hilt in the Amber Temple centuries ago—but secretly knowing that, should Kasimir retrieve it, her soul would be free to achieve its original plan of lichdom? 

And then I knew I’d found the answer.

But where would I put the Sunsword? What were the implications for Patrina’s history, and the lore of the Amber Temple? We’ll answer all of these questions in the third installation of the Designing the Amber Temple blog series, so stay tuned!