Dragna's Blog: Reinventing the Fanes (Fanes Part III)

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

Two weeks ago, we discussed the real-life history of the Fanes of Barovia—their origin in Expedition to Castle Ravenloft and their potential connections in Curse of Strahd. In last week's devblog, we discussed why we might bring the Fanes into Reloaded—both to explain the history of Barovia's druids (and the Dark Powers' command over Barovian souls) and to provide a satisfying external arc to the campaign.

Today, we're going to examine how we might bring the Fanes into a modern context. But to know where we're going, we first must review where we've been.

In my pre-Reloaded revisions for running Curse of Strahd series, I proposed the concept of the "Ladies Three": a trio of "ancient fey creatures [once] worshipped by the druids and warrior-tribes of Barovia as goddesses." The Ladies (inspired by the Ladies of the Wood of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt—Brewess, Weavess, and Whispess) ruled the Barovian valley "as its sovereigns, making their will known through auguries and omens" and, "[t]hrough intermediates . . . wield[ing] powerful magic" tied to the natural world.

The Ladies, known as the Weaver, the Huntress, and the Seeker, were honored at three Fanes—circles of standing stones—scattered across Barovia. The Forest Fane, found near Old Bonegrinder, honored the Huntress; the Swamp Fane, found near Berez, honored the Weaver; and the Mountain Fane, found upon Yester Hill, honored the Seeker. (The locations of the Forest and Mountain Fane would eventually change in Re-Reloaded—with the Seeker's Mountain Fane now located near Old Bonegrinder, near a spur of Mt. Ghakis, and the Huntress's Forest Fane now located atop Yester Hill, at the edge of the Svalich Wood—but their purpose would not.)

As in Expedition, upon conquering the valley, Strahd von Zarovich desecrated and claimed each of the Fanes, thereby "becoming the Land" and gaining powerful boons. The players could, of course, sever Strahd's connection to the Fanes, thereby depriving him of those boons and claiming them for themselves. But how?

As we've previously discussed, Expedition provides four possible ways the players can sever Strahd's connection to the Fanes: (1) the players can kill the Fane's fell guardian and place the guardian's body atop the Fane; (2) the players can unearth the three corrupted relics buried at the Fanes, then battle the monster arises from the united relics; (3) the players can recover three holy relics hidden in Castle Ravenloft and bury them at each relic's respective Fane; or (4) the players can spend a night in constant prayer at each Fane.

Let's call these cleansing (kill the guardian/corrupted relics), sanctification (bury the relics), and communion (complete the prayer ritual). Each option has its own pros and cons:

Cleansing presents a strong Doylist upside: Dungeons & Dragons is, at its core, a game where climactic conflicts are best solved by combat, and this approach provides a clear, strong avenue for gameplay. There's one big downside, however: if the guardians aren't themselves created by and/or magically bonded to Strahd, it makes little sense that killing them would reconsecrate the Fanes and/or sever Strahd's connection to them.

On top of that, if we want to provide the players with a tangible reward for reconsecrating each Fane, there's no Watsonian way to explain how "kill the guardian" naturally leads to "the players, or a particular player, get(s) magical powers."

Sanctification provides a strong thematic resonance and Watsonian justification: Strahd stole the holy relics, and putting them back allows the saints' natural holiness to cleanse his corruption. From a Doylist perspective, though, it's unsatisfying—especially if the players are already going into Castle Ravenloft (e.g., to recover Argynvost's skull), then are they really undertaking any additional gameplay by scooping up the relics while they're there?

Plus, given that the final chapter of the campaign will almost certainly involve recovering the Sunsword from the Amber Temple, and the Ravenloft heist must, necessarily, occur before then (because otherwise the players might as well just kill Strahd while they're there), then why allow the players to significantly weaken Strahd by reconsecrating the Fanes before they've even obtained the Sunsword? Plus, as with cleansing, sanctification provides us no mechanism to award the players with any sort of boon—it's the relics, not the players, that bear a spiritual connection to the Fanes.

Communion allows us to directly tie the reconsecration to the players, thereby allowing us to give the players special boons as rewards for carrying out the quest. However, there's no clear gameplay here; D&D is a game that unfolds over the course of rounds, not hours, which means that any ritual would need to be drastically compressed in time to take place over the course of a minute or less in order to be meaningful.

Let's call each of these requirements the gameplay requirement (reconsecrating the Fanes provides a satisfying gameplay experience), the connectivity requirement (a creature reconsecrating a Fane bears a clear narrative connection to that Fane), and the verisimilitude requirement (reconsecrating the Fanes is directly tied to removing Strahd's corruption and/or restoring the Fane's own divine power). Just for fun (and additional thematic/immersive effect), let's also toss in the uniqueness requirement (reconsecrating the Fanes was impossible before the players came along) and the elegance requirement (reconsecrating each Fane should feel beautifully resonant, simple, and fitting).

My first, pre-Reloaded stab at modernizing the rituals was a clumsy attempt to harmonize these options: the players must defeat each Fane's guardian—the hags of Old Bonegrinder, the druids of Yester Hill, and Baba Lysaga of Berez—then sanctify each Fane with a particular ritual: a burnt offering of a predator beast (for the Huntress), an offering of fruits and berries smeared with honey and goat's milk (for the Weaver), and the willing blood of a mortal (for the Seeker).

While it made strong sense from a Doylist perspective—I kept the combat and allowed a quick and easy "flavor win" after each fight—this approach combined the worst Watsonian aspects of each path: there was no evocative reason why defeating the guardians (e.g., the night hags of Old Bonegrinder) might allow a Fane to be reconsecrated, why carrying out a particular ritual (aside from the Seeker's) would grant a particular ritualist a boon, or why these (relatively simple) offerings could possibly empower a Fane sufficiently to overthrow Strahd's claim. The offerings themselves also felt like pointless non-gameplay—why force the players to say "I smear honey on the Fane" or "I hunt down a wolf" if there's no real gameplay associated with it?

When I finally reached the Fanes in the original Reloaded, however, I expanded this approach:

• At the Mountain Fane, the players had to descend to a dungeon beneath the (hostile, animate) Gulthias Tree, fight a pair of corpse flowers, then have one player cut out their eye as a Norselike offering to the Seeker (a goddess of foresight/foretelling, who I'd now decided had incarnated as Madam Eva).

• At the Swamp Fane, the players had to descend to a dungeon beneath the swamp (which Baba Lysaga would try to kill them to stop), then fight an elder "grandmother" giant spider.

• At the Forest Fane, the players had to descend to a cave beneath the Svalich Woods and free an ethereal dire wolf ensnared in a web of shadows, then duel the wolf in single combat while Strahd's tides of vermins attempted to disrupt the fight.

This preserved the gameplay requirement (since each site had meaningful gameplay in the form of combat) and won the uniqueness requirement (since each Fane was in an underground cavern hidden from the world above). However, all three failed the verisimilitude requirement (how does cutting out your eye or wrestling a wolf empower a half-dead fey goddess?), and, for the Swamp Fane, failed the connectivity requirement. All three also failed the elegance requirement—rather than creating beauty, I'd kludged together three vaguely-related encounters and called it a day.

I was, ultimately, so dissatisfied with this outcome that I revised all three Fanes before the original Reloaded was even complete. Now recognizing the gameplay, connectivity, verisimilitude, and uniqueness requirements explicitly, I laid out each Fane's reconsecration as follows:

• At the Mountain Fane, after recovering a stone athame (ritual dagger) from the trunk of the Gulthias Tree, one player had to go on a vision quest through the Whispering Wall—including combat and social encounters—while the other players underwent a skill challenge to protect their body from an onslaught of natural disasters and ghostly assaults. At the end, the players and roc of Mt. Ghakis would team up to defeat an army of ghosts and return the Seeker's blessing.

• At the Swamp Fane, after obtaining a magical "spindle" of ethereal viridian light from Baba Lysaga's hut, one player had to use the spindle to "weave" the symbol of the Ladies Three across a patch of cobblestones bearing concealed symbols. Meanwhile, the other players had to fend off multiple waves of undead that threatened to kill the ritualist or break the pattern. The Fane would be reconsecrated once the symbol was complete.

• At the Forest Fane, after obtaining the stolen remains of certain beasts once sacred to the Huntress from the hags of Old Bonegrinder, one player had to fight the beasts' spirits in one-on-one combat while the other players worked to stop Strahd's tides of vermin from disrupting the fight, killing the ritualist, and/or stealing back the remains. Once all beasts had been properly defeated, the Fane would be reconsecrated.

Each of these rituals bore a common pattern: the players had to (1) defeat the Fane's guardian (Gulthias tree/Baba Lysaga/night hag coven) in order to (2) obtain a sacred relic(s), which they then had to (3) figure out how to use in the appropriate ritual, which required (4) a particular ritualist completing a particular task while (5) the other players defended the ritualist from Strahd's forces.

This was, in effect, a perfect synthesis of the original four methods of consecration; there was gameplay, verisimilitude, connectivity, and uniqueness aplenty. My work was done.

Or was it?

In next week's post, we'll talk about why these "perfected" rituals still failed the final elegance requirement—and how the (as-of-yet unwritten) Reloaded Fanes aim to fix this.