I introduced a side plot in my homebrew campaign in which my PCs met and helped a fey knight who was on a centuries long quest to find an artifact known as the Bane of Sorrow. At the time, this was mostly just an interesting tangent. I figured the character might show up again periodically, have some interesting and quirky interactions with the party, then disappear again.
However, later in the campaign, I'm finding this side plot to be more compelling, both to me and the players, and a point is coming up where I think it'll mesh pretty well with the main plot. The only problem? I can't for the life of me figure out what the Bane of Sorrow actually is. Care to toss out some ideas?
Here's what the party already knows:
The fey's name is Faerghallagan. He is a member of the Knights of Winter, a group of quasi-legendary fey knights - something like the Knight of the Round Table meets the Chandrian out of Patrick Rothfuss' Kingkiller Chronicles. Asking them for help is something of a gamble, as they tend to be unpredictable. Sometimes they're the hero who rescues the princess, other times they're the monsters who kill the grieving family. A common thread in their stories is that they don't really understand mortal races and their problems. They're not evil, but neither are they good. Humans tend to speak of them as boogeymen, elves tend to think of them as a capricious force, like a bolt of lightning, best avoided.
The Bane of Sorrow is their Holy Grail - the thing they quest for above all others. Their other stories are just interludes in this main quest. The Knights serve a queen, and they believe the Bane of Sorrow "will end the winter of her heart."
I didn't tell the PCs much about the Bane of Sorrow. They know it's old. They know it was originally part of a trio of artifacts: the Bane of Sorrow, the Crown of Envy, and the Star of Wrath. The Knights don't seem to be interested in the other two.
The main story involves the PCs looking for the final resting place of King Olgrimm the Bloody, an ancient king who disappeared while leading an army northward to defeat the Winter Witch, a sorceress who had been terrorizing the land. He lived some 900 years ago, ans was famous for heroic adventures (but not well loved by his people, who he pretty much abandoned while gallivanting about the world). King Olgrimm had an item that the PCs need for main quest (a key to a vault that imprisons the... You know how these things go. It's not really related to the Bane of Sorrow). My current inclination is that the Winter Witch and the queen that the Knights of Winter serve are the same person. Further, I like the idea that King Olgrimm isn't dead, but frozen in magical ice. To get the item they're after, the PCs will have to free him, which could lead to problems if he decides to lead his army back to reclaim his kingdom.
In all, I'm left with a few questions that I need to answer.
- What is the Bane of Sorrow? (What does it do, where did it come from, etc)
- Why do the Knights of Winter need it?
- Why would the Winter Witch spare Olgrimm by freezing him?
Any discussion or ideas much appreciated.
This sounds like a fun exercise! Alright, I've got some questions.
How close are your fey to mythological fey? Do you have the Seelie/Unseelie Courts? It sounds like, if you did, it would be more of a Summer Court and a Winter Court situation.
You use the Knights of the Round Table as a comparison. How much do you want to lean into the Grail lore and the Camelot flavor for your story?
I've got a few ideas that could be elaborated on, but they depend a lot on the answers to the above questions. In any case, I'm intrigued by this set-up, insofar as it casts the fey in some way as an active force with their own agenda that has real implications for the world. So often fey simply are and they rarely seem to do anything besides help/hinder mortals for their own amusement. As such, it's certainly a viable choice to make the Winter Witch and the Winter Queen one and the same, whereas under the more strict mythological paradigm I wouldn't use the fey as main antagonists in this manner.
Concerning your third point, have you decided that freezing Olgrimm is actually sparing him, or are you open to other interpretations? Depending on your campaign's cosmology and/or the particular views and philosophies of the Winter Witch, it may actually be a "fate worse than death", or at least prolong death in an unpleasant fashion. To that end, the question of "Why?" could be simply that it amused her to do so, or to punish him for a personal offense. If you do like the idea of it being a (small) mercy, perhaps there's a possibility of a love story angle? Did the Winter Witch actually kill anybody during her reign of terror? If not, perhaps killing is something of a magical moral event horizon that she's not willing to cross. Or perhaps she was saving Olgrimm for later, either to be killed later or used for other plans or as part of an internal conflict she might be having with herself.
This "winter of her heart" bit is awesome, and I love how evocative it is of that certain kind of magic that permeates post-Celtic mythology (like the King Arthur myths of Britannia). If the Bane of Sorrow will end the winter of their queen's heart, deciding what the winter of her heart means will help us to form a more concrete idea of the Bane of Sorrow. If you like the Seelie/Unseelie (or Summer/Winter) Courts flavor for the fey, perhaps this is an opportunity to add an interesting twist to the classic paradigm. Maybe ending the "winter of her heart" will cause a transformation and the Winter Queen will become the Summer Queen. That would play well with the idea of the Winter Witch having some sort of internal conflict, as these two aspects of her identity struggle for primacy. Along those lines, perhaps ending the winter of her heart is a little more involved than merely retrieving the Bane of Sorrow, and Olgrimm might be a necessary part of whatever it is that has to happen to fulfill it.
The bane of sorrow is a single rose, frozen forever by the queen as the only remembrance of a long dead former lover. Unlike the other artifacts, this ones sole claim to fame is that it is truly indestructible, not that durability saved from theft long ago by thieves who saw its icy beauty as a valuable treasure.
The Bane of Sorrow is a mirror, given from one lover to another, originally given by a courtier to the Queen as a gift.
The mirror, according to legend, shows the person how they truly are, or when gifted by another how they see you and so is the ultimate tool for lovers to see true how they perceive each other.
Not true. After all love can bring great pain as well as joy.
The mirror shows you how you see yourself, all your imperfections and the things you see as good about yourself shown without shame nor malice. Its a tool of self-reflection, to help a person realize and admit their own flaws and improve on them. The Bane of Sorrow isn't love, its self-assurance and self-confidence, being happy with who you are and the courtier believed the young Queen would benefit from the strength that being able to look yourself in the face and see those flaws slowly fade would bring.
Of course, things didn't quite go to plan.
So, the Courtier gave the Queen the mirror and rather than realizing what it was, she assumed that the aloof Queen of Ice that appeared before her was how the world (Even her wooer) perceived her and obsessed over it, growing colder and colder until her heart literally froze over and she withdrew from the world.
The Knights of Winter don't realize this and think that the mirror is the reason for the 'Winter of the Queens heart', that if they break the mirror it will free her from the curse of the mirror when in reality all it will do is lead her deeper into a spiral of self-loathing and alienation.
Olgrimm meanwhile brought his army not to challenge the Queen but to woo her, his intention being to unite their forces and so on, so forth.
She found this adorable, that anyone could love one such as her and basically froze him to avoid the disappointment once he found her of her 'winter frozen heart and to let his love live forever (In a very fey definition of live)
As for the Crown of Envy and the Star of Wrath, two equally valuable artifacts for spiritual benefit, the former showing us the flaws of others and how their lives aren't perfect either (Basically perception of others) and the latter showing the damage that ones anger causes to those around them (Basically how actions influence others)
As you can imagine, knowing how to improve yourself far beyond your limits and manipulate how you come across to others, knowing others weaknesses and how to best hit them where it hurts and the exact way to cause the most damage to others are all incredibly dangerous abilities if put in the wrong hands, but that's the fey for you.
How's that?
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The Bane of Sorrow is not an item.
The Bane of Sorrow is death. The fey are destined to search in vain for it, but when they find it, their quest ends. Stories among fey speak of the Bane of Sorrow as being just out of reach, and yet always slipping between their fingers.
The ageless fey hunt for this close encounter with death because it gives them a thrill to test the bounds of their immortality. Some of them know that the Bane is just a metaphors, but others hunt it as if it was the holy grail.
When I read your pitch I was leaning in a similar direction to BLloyd.
The name "Bane of Sorrow" provides some psychic dissonance with the other two artifacts in the trio, but then again you are dealing with fey creatures for whom the familiar patters we operate in either do not apply, or apply without the trappings of conventional morality. It sounds like a "goodly" artifact in general, whereas the other two sound bent a little more wickedly. But again, that's forcing a moralistic interpretation on names that arise from fey culture.
I like the idea that King Olgrimm and the Winter Queen met during his "heroic adventures" away from his kingly duties, and met in the way Captain Kirk would meet any exotic woman. They both sound like they were very passionate, headstrong people, and their relationship likely reflected this.
Advance forward several years and complications arise that prevent the relationship from proceeding. One strong cause may be intense pressure from Olgrimm's friends and supporters in continuing his line with an heir; his passionate romance with the Winter Queen (who may at the time not have been a Winter Queen, but only turned Wintery once she was spurned!) was nothing but a dalliance, one that either physically could not produce an heir or his subjects would never accept an heir that was anything other than human. So when he took a wife and got to work on that, the Winter Queen was born and her "terrorization" of the people may have been her blaming his subjects for pressuring him to ruin what she had. Or lashing out to hurt him in the worst way, to erase his kingdom, and thus him, in an effort to erase her shame and the source of her pain. Or all of the above at the same time.
At the end of the day, after ruining his kingdom, she could not bring herself to murder the man she loved, so she opted to imprison him in ice forever out of some notion that, given enough time to "think" about what he did to her, he will learn. Or, barring that, he will one day return as a king with no kingdom, no heirs, out of time and out of life and nothing to live for her aside from her.
In practice, this resulted in her visiting Olgrimm on ice every year and instead being constantly reminded of the pain he caused her. When he thaws (or is thawed) by the PCs, her heart is at its hardest, perhaps having neglected his frozen form for decades.
I can imagine the PCs must be instilled with the idea that whatever the Bane of Sorrow it is, it is something that banishes sorrow or, conversely, brings joy. How the PCs choose to interpret this within the context of this relationship is probably what will surprise you. So that said, you may be best to leave the actual nature of the Bane of Sorrow vague until you know where the PCs will take the game, and how you see Olgrimm and the Winter Queen's relationship coming out.
The nice ending is the PCs helping the two to forgive one another for past grievances and find joy that way, in which case the Bane of Sorrow is "forgiveness" and can be embodied in the form of something that can represent forgiveness. This could be tied up in the theme of "love thawing the icy heart", but that's a trope that's been done to death. With a backstory like this, forgiveness is more of what one is going for.
The not so nice ending is the PCs helping one or the other to finally eliminate the other, and thus sorrow is banished in one of two ways: it is banished because the Winter Queen is slain and there is no more sorrow, or Olgrimm's presence as a "mirror" reflecting the trials of her past is gone. In this interpretation, there is an element of "judgment"; in the past, she judged him an unfaithful coward and he judged her a vindictive sociopath. The PCs in this case must judge, and the Bane of Sorrow is represented as a symbol that represents "judgment", reasoning that the first step to overcoming sorrow is resolving injustice.
In either case, an appropriate symbol might be something like a scepter, which a ruler can raise in either judgment or forgiveness. Or you could get even more obscure and simply have the artifact be something that isn't tangible, but rather something learned or experienced. But then that may be too metaphysical for your group of players...
A far better response than I expected. Lots of good thoughts here - not enough time & room to mention all of them, but I'll address bits as best I can.
How close are your fey to mythological fey? Do you have the Seelie/Unseelie Courts? It sounds like, if you did, it would be more of a Summer Court and a Winter Court situation.You use the Knights of the Round Table as a comparison. How much do you want to lean into the Grail lore and the Camelot flavor for your story?
...
Concerning your third point, have you decided that freezing Olgrimm is actually sparing him, or are you open to other interpretations?
Honestly, until now I hadn't done much with the fey in my world at all, but I think I took to this plot for the same reason you seem to like it - it's a rare chance to give the fey some real agency in a story, and I like the potential that comes with that. The only fey story I had up until recently was a legend about the fey's first (and only?) king, largely unrelated to the knights of winter (written long before they took shape in my head).
I'm not opposed to a seelie/unseelie distinctions in principle, though I'm not sure I'd include a literal unified court for each. The knights themselves feel more seelie than unseelie to me despite their winter theme, but I could easily see the Queen herself having a very cold and cruel exterior - unseelie. The idea of seelie knights serving an unseelie queen seems contradictory at first, but I think your suggestion (echoed by others here) that the Bane might transform her back to the seelie "Summer Queen" works really well here. This can give us some meaning to "the winter of her heart" - she's a seelie queen, cursed and frozen. I think it likely that her knights remember what it was like before, and want to free her.
The Knights of the Round Table were an instrumental inspiration to creating these characters, so I definitely want to allude to them slightly. I wanted something with that feel in the world, but of course, with players already used to the idea of heroic adventurers and questing for the great maguffin, it needed something to make it stand out. Hence the recasting the knights as fey - wild and strange and twisted. I don't think it needs to be a literal representation by any stretch but, as I said, I like the allusion.
Concerning the freezing of Olgrimm, I'm definitely open to other interpretations. I think the Winter Witch likely killed people - Olgrimm's kingdom is full of hardened northerner tropes, and I doubt they'd consider her a serious threat if nobody ever died. The idea of a romance plot has been brought up by a few folks, and this seems like an interesting angle to take the story. Of course, it still leaves a lot of options for motivations - does she free him to preserve him? To punish him? Because it is a forbidden romance? Even if we go this route, the question still remains is freezing him a good thing or bad? I think there's room for internal conflict here, which is a good thing in a story.
The Bane of Sorrow is a mirror, given from one lover to another, originally given by a courtier to the Queen as a gift...
This idea is really interesting. I especially like the double edged nature of it - the Bane is intended to be a good thing, a useful tool, but is perverted and corrupted by those who aren't ready for it. However, I'm not sure it fits as written for two reasons: First, it gives her a big self-image/confidence complex, which isn't a trait I'd super love to give to a female character, even if the result is to make her a badass ice queen. Second, a big trope among fey stories is that they don't really understand others (well, mortals, at least), and this interpretations of the artifacts runs counter to that. I think they would fit really well into a spiritually awakened empire or some sort of theocratic monarchy, but not so well in the wild and alien world of the fey. The big takeaway you've given me is that the Bane of Sorrow should be a double-edged power, one that does as much harm as good. I also hadn't considered the idea that they might have already had the Bane and lost it - and maybe it's not just the solution, but part of what caused the problem in the first place. I think that's an interesting possibility.
The Bane of Sorrow is death. The fey are destined to search in vain for it, but when they find it, their quest ends. Stories among fey speak of the Bane of Sorrow as being just out of reach, and yet always slipping between their fingers.
This is an interesting interpretation as well. If I were writing a short story without players to consider, I might use this interpretation - it has a satisfying philosophical bent to it. However, I think given the expectations of the gaming group in the D&D playstyle... I'd better keep it something tangible.
I like the idea that King Olgrimm and the Winter Queen met during his "heroic adventures" away from his kingly duties, and met in the way Captain Kirk would meet any exotic woman. They both sound like they were very passionate, headstrong people, and their relationship likely reflected this.
This description alone has convinced me that this is the way their story needs to go. The romance idea came up a few times, and I think you really nailed the feeling. You've done a good job fleshing out the possibilities of their relationship as well. It's plausible and I think leads to a good set of potential outcomes depending on the player actions.
I also like your suggested symbolism as a scepter, in particular because it fits surprisingly well with the other two artifacts. A lot of western monarchies used a crown, a scepter, and an orb as symbols of royal power. Here the Crown of Envy is the crown (duh), the Bane of Sorrow becomes the scepter, leaving the Star of Anger as the orb. Not that that tells us what they do, but it gives them a potential shape at least.Of course, none of these are set in stone yet. Great discussion so far. Can we keep it going?
A goblet, that when you drink from it you are cured of any mental conditions, but all memories of the condition will be gone.
The Winter Queen may be cursed or otherwise transformed, and resolving the plot may transform her back to the Summer Queen. There's a conflict here, with it unclear which side of her is her "true" self.
Food for thought: humanity is very caught up on the idea of objective truth. That there is a "true" nature and a "false" demeanor. It is a very static interpretation - we are who we are from birth until death, and although the statements holds true that "people change", that change comes through exceptional hardship or over long periods of time and lots of exposure to circumstances.
Fey beings have always struck me as far more mutable, or perhaps just not constrained by the static. They are naturally more dynamic creatures, and in that respect perhaps ironically more honest. Thus the Queen is the Queen whether she is the Summer Queen or the Winter Queen. There is no falsehood either way; her exterior is merely a reflection of her interior.
Thus, transformed works. It might be neat if the PCs assumed "cursed" but the Winter Knights set them straight on that. She isn't cursed. She is exactly who she is, at the time.
You have a narrative opportunity to accentuate the static vs. dynamic when you consider how King Olgrimm acts when he is thawed. He may not even speak the PCs language. He may adhere to some seriously outdated principles. He may be completely unable to reconcile the fact that he is living a millenium in the future and everything that was familiar to him is gone. He clings to the static in spite of reason because it gives him comfort, and that may be part of the challenge the PCs have if they choose to try to convince him to forgive the Queen.
I believe I addressed most of the other possibilities you suggested.
The Bane of Sorrow is a +6 fey bane heavy mace (sceptre). 1/day, it can cast resurrection by touch. However, neither the creature resurrected nor the creature using the sceptre have any memory of each other.
If the Bane is not used to kill a living creature each day, the wielder must make a DC 25 will save or be subject to a vengeful outrage spell by a 20th level caster on waking from sleep, with the target being the closest living creature (may be no more than one size category smaller) as the wielder's target.
The wielder of the Bane of Sorrows may not voluntarily surrender it.
The Bane is destroyed if willingly used to resurrect a hated foe.
This was King Olgrimm's goal all along - to slay the Winter Witch, resurrect her, and destroy the Bane of Sorrows so that he could finally be free of it. Unbeknown to him (or anyone else), doing so opens up the possibility of he and her falling in love.
Edit: changed spell.