Dragna's Blog: Completing the Fanes (Fanes Pt. IV)

Fanes of Barovia Series
Part I: The History of the Fanes
Part II: Why Bring Back the Fanes?
Part III: Reinventing the Fanes
Part IV: Completing the Fanes

In this series so far, we've discussed the publication history of the Fanes of Barovia, our motivations for bringing the Fanes into Reloaded, and the ways I've previously attempted to do so. Today, in this last installment of the Fanes of Barovia series, we'll discuss my efforts to update the reconsecration of the Fanes for Re-Reloaded—both the discarded drafts and the eventual (and hopefully comprehensive) solution.

Let's start by reiterating our current requirements for this "reconsecration" process:

• Gameplay. The process of reconsecrating the Fanes must involve meaningful gameplay, involving, at a minimum, mechanical and, ideally, tactical gameplay.

• Connectivity. Reconsecrating a specific Fane forges a clear metaphysical link between the Fane and the particular player who did so.

• Verisimilitude. The reconsecration ritual clearly acts to remove Strahd's corruption and/or restore the Fane's own divine power.

• Uniqueness. It was impossible to reconsecrate the Fanes before the players came along.

• Elegance. The reconsecration process feels resonant, simple, and fitting.

As we've previously discussed, the old Reloaded eventually settled on a basic two-step loop for each Fane:

• Boss & Relic. The players had to defeat a local boss (the Gulthias Tree, Baba Lysaga, and the night hag coven) in order to obtain an ancient relic.

• Ritual & Disruption. One player had to use the relic to carry out an ancient ritual (vision quest, weaving the Ladies' symbol, conquering animal spirits) while the other players fended off Strahd's efforts to stop the ritual by proxy (natural disasters, zombie hordes, vermin tides).

This clearly fulfilled the gameplay requirement (since combat and skill challenges provide clear gameplay), connectivity (because each Fane had a single ritualist), verisimilitude (since the use of the rituals clearly invoked the Ladies' power), and uniqueness (killing the bosses was indirectly necessary to perform the rituals).

However, something big was missing: elegance. Put simply: these rituals didn't fit.

Why? Well, let's look at it from a top-level narrative perspective: after retrieving the Sunsword from the Amber Temple atop Mt. Ghakis, the players descend the mountain and . . . proceed to have six back-to-back big combat setpieces. The "cleanse the Fanes" subplot was a massive tumor at the end of an otherwise fairly free-flowing module, completely changing the tone and dragging out the penultimate chapter before the finale.

Beyond that? It was clear that these big setpieces were disconnected from everything around them: They advanced no character arcs or relationships, or otherwise developed anything the players had done before. With the sole potential exception of the vision quest through the Whispering Wall (which gave the players lore about the Mountain and Forest Folk), each ritual process was, to turn a phrase, content for the sake of content—nothing was gained by adding them except by giving the players something to do.

On top of that, the rituals just felt sorely out of place, providing six big, complex, puzzle-oriented combat/skill-challenge encounters smack dab at the end of a campaign that, thus far, had largely focused on roleplay and exploration. It felt like placing a Legend of Zelda temple at the end of The Witcher III—just completely incongruous with the tone and mechanics that had come before.

Overall, upon reflection, the Reloaded rituals clearly failed the elegance requirement—which meant I had to go back to the drawing board. But what to draw?

Initially, I focused my efforts on simplification—trying to achieve elegance by narrowing the scope of the reconsecration process. I reduced the reconsecration to the simple cleansing model originally proposed by Expedition to Castle Ravenloft: to corrupt the Fanes, Strahd planted a "leech" at each one: a profane monster that would consume each Fane's energy and funnel it back to the Heart of Sorrow at Castle Ravenloft.

Upon adding the spirit of Leo Dilisnya to Arc H: The Lost Soul and realizing that I needed to fulfill the uniqueness requirement, I decided that these leeches—which would include the Gulthias Tree (or something inside it), a giant spider made of bones, and an "elder will-o-wisp"—would be sealed away in hidden demiplanes, accessible only by using the cursed ba'al verzi dagger (which Leo had once used to attempt to assassinate Strahd, and which Strahd had hidden away in the Amber Temple) to cut across one of three ancient obsidian stones marking the Fane.

However, these leeches still felt arbitrary and disconnected from the broader world around them—more Elden Ring than Castlevania. As I pondered further, I took inspiration from one of the series I'd beloved in my childhood—Deltora Quest, and, in particular, its Dragons of Deltora sequel series. There, the "Shadow Lord" placed the "Four Sisters"—creatures of corruption—at the cardinal points of the continent, and set a guardian to defend each one. Two of the four guardians were ordinary mortals corrupted by the Shadow Lord's reach; in particular, the guardian of the Sister of the West was "Doran the Dragonlover," with the Sister of the West forcibly sealed inside Doran's body.

I began to wonder if this might be a way to flesh out other characters in Reloaded's history—perhaps the guardian of the Swamp Fane's leech was Ismark Antonovich the Great, while the guardian of the Mountain Fane's leech was a corrupted monstrosity forged from the Roc of Mt. Ghakis's stillborn egg. But these lines, too, felt arbitrary and strange, and I couldn't figure out how to make them work in a satisfactory way—especially given that Ismark the Great wasn't born until centuries after Strahd first corrupted the Fanes.

On top of this, a nagging issue had begun to pull at the back of my brain—what I liked to call the "traveling problem." Curse of Strahd is largely designed as a fractal of setpieces: the players arrive in a new area (e.g., Vallaki), spend a bunch of time exploring a particular location (e.g., the church), and use that new location as a springboard for a new, short adventure (e.g., St. Andral's Feast), largely contained to the immediate area (e.g., Milivoj's house and the coffin-maker's shop).

Here, however, the distribution of the three Fanes across the valley meant that the entire valley of Barovia, effectively, had become a dungeon containing three tiny rooms, each one containing a combat encounter. With no intervening content between them, the Fanes arc become a sequence of: "go to Yester Hill" -> "kill the leech there" -> "go to Berez" -> "kill the leech there" -> "go to Old Bonegrinder" -> "kill the lech there" -> "profit." Rather than creating a final grand adventure, this sequence made Barovia feel small, if not claustrophobic, and turned the players' triumph over Strahd's corruption into the equivalent of a few checkboxes on a short grocery list. There was no unfolding complexity, no emergent exploration, no euphoria of novelty—just three tasks to check off.

I contemplated, briefly, adding intervening gameplay between the Fanes. Perhaps the land itself, by the will of Strahd, would begin to turn against them? Roads would become mazes; the trees and rivers would come alive to strangle and drown them; the skies would rage with wind and lightning. And yet . . . this was just more content for the sake of content. It was just a stocking-stuffer, bereft of anything meaningful.

And so I took a step back and asked: What is the simplest possible way of allowing the players to reconsecrate a given Fane? The answer was self-evident: sanctification, as first introduced in Expedition—allowing the players to sanctify a Fane by burying a holy relic there. Fortunately, I already had relics that could fit the role: the three wine gems, stolen by the Martikovs' First Folk ancestors centuries before to protect their power from Kavan's conquests and corruption. Two of them—the gems held by the druids and Baba Lysaga—already lay mere feet away from the Fanes themselves. More serendipitously, Reloaded lore already placed the third gem in the claws of the (now friendly) roc of Mt. Ghakis—stolen at the bequest of Madam Eva, the avatar of the Seeker, who had foreseen that this would be necessary long ago.

This satisfied the verisimilitude requirement—it makes sense that burying a holy relic at a corrupt Fane would drive out the corruption there. But what about the other requirements?

I began to wonder: What if the gems were disempowered—that is, inactive or dormant—and needed to have their inner magic reignited somehow? That could bring in our gameplay and uniqueness. And as I began to reflect upon the lingering story threads that remained untied in Reloaded's final act, a picture began to take shape.

First: the curses of Rudolph van Richten and Arturi Radanavich. Months previously, I'd struggled to design an arc (then-titled "The Midnight Murders") somewhere in Acts II or III that would allow the players to unite VR and Arturi and lift both their curses. But I never found a good place to put it, and eventually shoved it off as the as-of-yet-unborn arc "The Monster Hunter," which I anticipated would take place sometime between the Amber Temple arc and the finale.

Second: the tension between Urwin and Davian Martikov. I'd dabbled, on-and-off, with a concept of Baba Lysaga kidnapping or imprisoning the Martikovs of the Wizard of Wines in order to take revenge upon the Keepers of the Feather, but I'd never quite found a way to implement it I was happy with. I wanted, eventually, for Urwin and Davian to reconcile (especially if I could find a way to tie it into a reveal by Madam Eva that she had stolen the gem, and that Urwin had told the truth to Davian ten years ago about a raven taking it), but I didn't quite know how. Again, I expected I'd plop this somewhere between the Amber Temple arc and the finale.

Third: the self-actualization of Lady Fiona Wachter. In Re-Reloaded, Fiona is, ultimately, a sympathetic figure: rather than serving Strahd loyally, she does so only reluctantly, willingly choosing a lesser of two evils (obeying Strahd over a second Berez disaster). She does so because she lacks hope that the valley could be any better or different—but, as her arc intertwines with the players' (e.g., in Lady Wachter's Wish and, especially, The Lost Soul), she comes to take on a more hopeful and optimistic role as the party's patron. I had some vague idea that, eventually, viewing the light of the Sunsword would inspire her to directly defy Strahd or his servants in an Aragorn vs. the Mouth of Sauron-esque way, but I didn't quite have a place to put it.

The key to elegance is, in a certain respect, using a problem to solve another problem. And it began to dawn on me: I could use not one, but three problems to solve another.

Three Ladies. Three seasons. Three divine portfolios. Three plotlines adrift.

What if, I wondered, the magic of the gems could be reignited by fulfilling these three other plotlines?

• To reignite the gem of the Huntress's Forest Fane, the players must achieve a showing of peace, helping VR and Arturi to come to peace with themselves and each other. (This, in turn, would require—as per 2e's Guide to the Vistani—traveling to the site of the Radanaviches' destroyed caravan, burning it, and fending off the undead hordes until morning.)

• To reignite the gem of the Weaver's Swamp Fane, the players must achieve a showing of unity, reconciling Davian and Urwin. (This, in turn, would require joining with Urwin to rescue the kidnapped Martikovs from Baba Lysaga's clutches in Berez.)

• To reignite the gem of the Seeker's Mountain Fane (which the players would receive from the roc of Mt. Ghakis in raven form), the players must achieve a showing of hope, igniting Fiona's defiance against Strahd and her hopes of a brighter dawn for Barovia. (This would, in turn, requiring the players to help Fiona find the courage to defy one of Strahd's couriers demanding that she turn the players over.)

I could still involve a combat against the Gulthias Tree at Yester Hill—that was another loose end that needed to be tied up—as well as a final fight against an amber-corrupted one-winged angel Rahadin at the final Fane (to finally deal with him post-Heist, and to contrast the PCs' choices at the Amber Temple). But the Swamp Fane? That could be as simple as defeating Baba, rescuing the Martikovs, and . . . just burying the gem with its centuries-long guardians watching in reverence and awe.

And they wouldn't even need to zig-zag to any locations! I could place the Radanavich caravan in the woods near the Raven River Crossroads, a short distance from Yester Hill. Plus, Fiona's confrontation with Strahd's messenger, at the eastern gate of Barovia, would itself be a short walk away from Old Bonegrinder and the Mountain Fane nearby—not to mention that all of the intervening plotlines in-between each Fane's reconsecration neatly matched the fractal setpiece nature of Curse of Strahd, making the valley feel real, big, and lived-in.

Altogether, this solution satisfied nearly all of my remaining requirements—elegance, uniqueness, and gameplay. And as for connectivity—

—eh, who needs connectivity anyway, when you've got three ancient, formerly-dead goddesses who are more than happy to hand out boons themselves?