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I will be introducing Nyrissa to my PCs rather early by having her take the ruler captive. In the guise of the Old Beldame she told to them the secrets of Candlemere Tower and ferried them through the enchanted fog I had placed on the lake, all this on the condition that they grant her whatever she asked in five years time.
Well, the five years are up and this next game session the Old Beldame will appear at the court of Stag's End Keep to take her due. She will ask that the ruler make her his wife. Of course, the players are smart enough to expect horrible curses befalling their kingdom from a broken oath and a spurned witch, and the ruler's an honorable sort, so he ought to consent.
The ruler has taken up residence in Candlemere Tower since clearing it out, making into a center of magic and learning, and one night it will simply vanish. The ruler will awake in his tower, alone except for the Old Beldame, who will assume her true form as Nyrissa in a very Wife of Bath fashion.
From here on out Nyrissa will be using her very convenient spell set to woo and beguile the ruler and she will take him as her lover. But of course she is simply going through the motions, as her ability to truly love is wound up in Briar. Perhaps she is actually trying to convince herself that she can still love but eventually she grows bored and releases the ruler from his spell-addled adoration. But she still needs him. Now, here is where I run into trouble. To what purpose could she use this player?
She ultimately wishes to bottle the Stolen Lands as an offering to powers greater than she. Perhaps marriage to this player is the mechanic by which it can be achieved. Kings are often symbolically linked or "married" to the land they rule, would her attaining queenship by way of the debt claimed as the Old Beldame ceremonially grant her the influence over the land she needs to truly make it hers, perhaps? The character is in fact an Anastasia-esque survivor of the Rogarvia family, so his blood truly is the blood of kings if Nyrissa could use it in some Melisandre-esque fashion.
Or perhaps she keeps the ruler under her enchantment of love, but tells him of Briar as if she were an innocent maiden placed under a terrible curse by awful wizards. The ruler character should be convinced that Nyrissa is his true and destined love and Nyrissa would play to that, saying how she could gladly love him as he loves her were he only to find the sword Briar and return it to her so that "The curse may be broken." In fact Nyrissa may not even need to use too many spells to charm him, as it seems like it would be pretty easy for her to play the part of a GOOD fairy queen. But of course we know that she simply wants Briar so that it cannot be used against her and she's using the ruler as an errand boy.
She has to resort to this because her last consort, Castruccio Irovetti, has gone rogue and keeps Briar to himself. He thinks it a well-kept secret but Nyrissa knows that he withholds it from her and can no longer be trusted. I want to make Irovetti a less outright treacherous, pompous jerk. My Irovetti's actually not a bad guy. He fell under Nyrissa's spell for some time but now has broken free of her will by use of his Technic League artifacts and is aware of her plans. If he attacks the NPCs it is not out of uninspired treachery but because he'd suspect them of being pawns of Nyrissa, and the PC kingdom may well be the aggressors if the ruler catches wind that Irovetti holds Briar, for Nyrissa will place a Geas (actually in her spell list!) on the ruler to seek out Briar and return it to her by whatever means. The Rushlight Tournament will still be an opportunity for Irovetti to size up the PCs, but I will be dropping a hint of Briar's presence for the ruler's Geas to home in on if he notices it.
What do you guys think of these ideas? One or the other? Both? Perhaps there are other ways that Nyrissa could play the PCs like a fiddle?
The idea is good in general, but I agree with pennywit that it might be better to play her as a "good" guy. The problem with Geas is that while it will work unless the ruler has SR (which Nyrissa can likely bypass anyway) it will still become readily apparent to the players that something is up, especially if you have her abduct the ruler and his keep. Keep in mind that for every day the victim of a geas is prevented from completing his quest, his ability scores suffer (granted I'd rule that trying to complete said quest would invoke the penalty, but getting voted down, returning to the kingdom to run the affairs of state, etc., that all would invoke the penalty).
Instead you could use a combination of truthful and good advice "Hey, by the way, that guy Irovetti over in Pitax? Yeah, he doesn't like you and he plans to invade. Oh, and he has this little trinket that used to belong to me called Briar, I'd be reeeeaaaaaallllly grateful if you could see to its return" and some bluffs to make her appear to be good and helpful. Obviously when she bluffs, the PCs will get a chance to sense motive on her, but a lot of what she'd say might actually be true, and thus, no bluff check needed.
In short, if you want an NPC to actually be able to manipulate the party, its best not to have them start by taking hostile actions (like abducting a party member and casting geas on him).
Thing is that while Nyrissa can be beguiling and adept at moving events to her whim, I feel she also epitomizes that erratic and arbitrary feyness and is half-mad to boot from the trauma she's been through. And I won't tell them when the Geas is cast, seeing as there is no saving roll and he has no spell resistance to speak of. It'll be there by default and he needn't be aware. I'd make the call that he doesn't immediately suffer negs for failing to follow the geas, as the course the geas must drive him down is not yet apparent. When they attend the Rushlight tourney and the hint about Briar is dropped, I will say out of the blue that the character suddenly feels compelled to an action.
Also, my players already know something is up. I should mention that this whole thing involves a fifty-year gap that all have agreed upon. I'll explain: One of the players has come to see the flaws in the third-party psionic class of his character and has come to regret it and doesn't really have fun with the gameplay. So I gave him an out and said that we could jump forward in time with little effect on the modules, and he will be playing his character's grandson, now a cavalier. One of the other players had just had his character devoured by Talonquake so he was rerolling anyway and cool with it, but the last player, the ruler, is quite attached to his character. So I placated him by saying we could pull a Rip Van Winkle (or more appropriately an Arthur/Barbarossa "once-and-future-king" deal) of some kind, and here we are. He's expecting to vanish for fifty years, though to him it will seem only as if a single night had passed. I suspect Nyrissa took him and the tower to the First World or the Shadow World. The barrier between worlds is of course thin at Candlemere, and I plan to build on this and use that Ghost Stone in the Varnhold Vanishing as a portal to the Etheral plane, giving them a crossroads to the First World or even a Shadow-version of their own Kingdom in the Shadow World.
It's a shame that they have to have any foreknowledge but sometimes you have to talk them through it, y'know? I'm finding that I've had to negotiate with players in this campaign more than any other. As for the campaign cooperating the only continuity thing with the modules I found that I really had to clean up to account for the fifty years was Irovetti. It says in the Adventure Background of War of the River Kings that he became king of Pitax by swindling two brother-kings out of it. I've simply been playing them as the kings thus far; they've sent the player's the head of the Iron Wraith's commander. When Irovetti comes in somewhere during the fifty years, he'll actually seem like an alright chap compared to those two old bastards. And he is an alright chap, really. Depending on how far Nyrissa can tangle up the ruler character in her schemes Irovetti may end up being the hero with the magic sword.
With my players accustomed to the idea of something fantastic happening, their first reaction won't be suspicion. In fact spectacle such as disappearing towers and becoming kings of local myth delights them. I'd say Nyrissa can play a good guy without having to keep the guise of Beldame and even after kidnapping a player if she just plays up the fey whimsy of it and frames herself as the cursed princess and Irovetti as the oppressor, when in fact Irovetti is the only guy who knows what's going on. But he'll always be an enemy of the PCs out of paranoia that they are Nyrissa's unwitting lackeys, whether that comes to be true or not.
Thing is that while Nyrissa can be beguiling and adept at moving events to her whim, I feel she also epitomizes that erratic and arbitrary feyness and is half-mad to boot from the trauma she's been through. And I won't tell them when the Geas is cast, seeing as there is no saving roll and he has no spell resistance to speak of. It'll be there by default and he needn't be aware.
But I just had a thought that another great way to show her feyness and to just have a flavorful aspect for the spell is to have her recite some jaunty little riddle-poem or nursery rhyme with little references or clues. It'd get stuck in the player's head or come to his mind when Briar is concerned.
I have no poetic skill whatsoever. If anyone with a sense of rhyme at all happens to think up a clever little poem about Briar I'd be much obliged.