#Vistana

[aqours]

pssst you! yeah you!!! person who is probably seeing this through looking up Ravenloft related tags!

do you like the Vistani? do you want to expand on the Vistani but also you aren't sure of what to change other than the Obvious Really Bad Problems They Had To Errata And Still Didn't Fully Fix It? not 100% satisfied with the direction they went in Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft? want to expand on Vistani culture and ideas but not 100% sure if you want to create a ton of homebrew or not? you interested in seeing Van Richten's 2E character growth where he was a prejudicial man who was a victim of a horrible crime but realized he can't just blame an entire ethnic group for it and gradually learned to overcome that prejudice into becoming a better man?

please consider giving Van Richten's Guide to the Vistani a read, and here's a free link! consider it me just sharing the pdf given i bought it legally so even if you for some reason don't like piracy i'm just sharing what i bought!

it's an old 2E supplement that's completely about fleshing out the Vistani. it's not a perfect guide: it's for 2E so pretty much anything it adds gameplay wise doesn't work with 5e/5.5's mechanics, some of it is still pretty dated (it says gyp*y a few times still). but it still delves a lot into Vistani culture and stories (including some of their origin stories they claim is responsible for the Vistani becoming who they are), and the Tasaques: essentially the three large ethnic clans among the Vistani and the tribes that make up said Tasaques (i say the main group of Vistani in Barovia during CoS are Kaldresh Vatraska), and some other stuff!

nothing's perfect, but if you're looking for a step 1 for fleshing out the Vistani more and you don't want to do a complete homebrew from scratch route, consider giving it a read and see if you can build off of it if you want!

[akpaley]

Oh Sensation Sharp and snapping Long companion Hold me close Tell me I am bleeding slowly Torn to pieces Broken bones For all of that is just Sensation To hold, to love To live, to know

So the above artwork is a visualization of the above poem, but this whole thing is also... more than that?

Kaijja as a character in her current form draws a lot from my experiences with pain therapy and managing a chronic pain disorder. Half the prompt for her magic was this set of gifs and the other half was my experience of the psychological element of pain. Which is to say that pain is a response to a certain kind of nervous system activation and how manageable it is often depends on whether your brain thinks there's actually something wrong that needs fixing. Pain in erotic circumstances (not a thing I'm into, but) is often converted to pleasure because brain perceiving strong sensation as pleasurable and pain is strong sensation. I have dealt on and off with a chronic pain disorder for years now, and it is never so bad as when my nervous system is highly activated and I am afraid.

When you are thinking about pain all the time and experiencing sometimes very severe pain all the time and you are aware of that psychological piece but your thinking self still can't quite internalize that nothing is actually physically wrong with you, the concept of erotic pain becomes something of a power fantasy. Imagine you could feel this way, register all the sensations, and be able to treat the whole thing with the kind of joyous curiosity or even pleasure that would make this experience empowering instead of scary. Imagine that instead of making your world smaller this kind of sensation could expand it.

Kaijja was always going to be some kind of flesh paladin, but a lot of what is very core to her comes from that power fantasy, the pain that makes me visualize things moving under my skin or my flesh peeling away being both true and also beautiful. Kaijja isn't someone who doesn't experience pain, but the type of neutrality I have spent the last couple years learning and still don't have all the way down is her default. The bodily warning systems are sometimes informative, the texture of the sensations is interesting, and through the last decade or so she has been conditioned to find the extremes of both erotic. When Kaijja is in too much pain to function well it's because the experience is overwhelming and distracting, not excruciating.

Which presents a problem when the cause of that kind of overwhelm is suddenly actual bodily harm instead of being safely taken apart and reassembled by someone who loves you, and all of your instincts still say this is interesting and lovely and you should settle in and ride it out. When you are aware that there is a difference between your body signals and actual reality and on an emotional lizard brain level you can't tell the difference.

This poem is about not being able to tell the difference.

It is also about me. Not being able to tell the difference.

I don't think it would be so gentle as it is if it weren't also a kind of soft, self-soothing reflection. For her, it's the quiet acknowledgement that this is real. For me, it is the gentle reminder that it is not. A statement that I am in love with the wondrous thing of living, even when the hard parts speak to me from underneath my skin.

[c-cloudyy]

Fanepov! Fanepov! Fanepov! What if they held hands?!

Karpov is @azrithart ‘s!

[nakitacatart]

I, a foolish mortal- unsatisfied with an Eberron and Strixhaven campaign.

“Can we please run Curse of Strahd”

[baroviablues]

Hey. Tell me about your interpretation of Arrigal Curse of Strahd. One of my players is determined to romance him after meeting him in the tavern, and unfortunately I’ve become moderately obsessed

[xyanmajor]

What my PCs has done in our Curse of Strahd campaign is ok for him.

He regrets nothing of what he did (except maybe the poor and innocent girl he "hunts") and he will be proud of all the way he has achieved for now.

He does not regret helping Lord Strahd to have his tome back.

He does not regret stealing it from his former group of adventurers.

He does not regret his choice becoming the nzw puppet with a collar of the Ancient (he is his new warlock)

He helped her soulmate to be free. He helped himself into not drowning deeper in the abyss he fell and he even made a real friend.

I think his formers companions will kill him if they know all of that. But I think in a way he doesnt care.

He makes his own choices with pride. He will be pride of his own path until the very end. Dare said its not true and he will stab you to death.

#I said.

[palidoozy-art]

So since we're going back to Curse of Strahd, I figured I'd go back to Kasimir's character design, since honestly he was... woefully under-designed. I don't think I ever even knew what was under that big blanket of his.

In our campaign, his backstory got fleshed out a bit more. When the first genocide occured (Barov's conquering of the dusk elf lands), he was still a child. His parents were killed in the genocide and Patrina was an absolute dogshit parent, leaving him essentially orphaned.

So he wound up being raised mostly by Velikov, a vistana in the camp the group settled by. I realized because of this, he'd probably wind up more culturally vistani than dusk elvish. His reason for being the leader of the Barovian dusk elves in our game was due to the fact that he was the only one fluent in Patterna and was knowledgable of vistani customs, making him great at serving as a mediator between the two groups.

Sadly, the death of Velikov strained his connection to the vistani. It more or less left him culturally without a home -- pushed out by the culture he was raised in and not feeling like he fully fit in with the dusk elves. His current design is to better reflect that change.

Also there's some bonus Patrina and Rahadin because I do love me my dusk elves.

[calebisdrawing]

Arabelle the Vistana (her stuffed saber-tooth’s name is Ramses).

Feel free to use in your game if you like!

[xyanmajor]

Absolute fan too.

Thats a game that never end.

im an absolute fan of when characters have their own twisted perceptions of love. like holy shit that guy thinks inflicting pain is affection! woah this silly man believes love is a form of ownership! give me more.

[akpaley]

K: Here and alone I would eventually retain nothing. Not Issanar, not Iokhar, not my colleagues or my siblings or my values or my son. // V: You can’t fight change, whatever kind it may be. I think I chose it before I ever set foot in this city, though I don’t think I realized it then.

Forgetting.

[revivivivify]

I feel bad for everybody whose curse of strahd game doesn’t replace baba lysaga with an incredibly hot nonbinary vistana who happens to have a house with chicken legs

(and the vistani are cold-resistant variant tieflings. with fuzzy tails. and magic markings they can store weapons in.)

[anantplayingdnd]

The Story of Kazimir and Patrina

Yeah so I ended up writing like two thousand words about them and Barovia, and I can't share it with my players yet, so... here you go, loves. Not gonna be canon-compliant and I do not care. Enjoy!

Also Curse of Strahd Spoilers under the break. Obviously. Read at your own discretion.

Before Barov von Zarovich began his conquest, the Balinok Valley was vibrant and full of life. Among the traveling Vistani, the wide-spread clans of werewolves and wereravens, one of the largest people groups was the Dusk Elves. Distant relatives of the subterranean Drow, they were gentle, peaceful people that never sought to harm their neighbors, but rather to learn from and collaborate with them. They worshipped the Three Ladies of the Weave, with particular deference to the Weaver herself. They took to heart her teachings about remembering the past, keeping detailed records of both their own histories and those of others. However, they were not defenseless and unprepared when Barov and his son came to destroy them. Due to a warning from the Weaver’s sister, the Seeker, they were able to ready themselves for the coming attacks.

The twins Kazimir and Patrina were born in the midst of this preparation, knowing from birth that their people would face a terrible war. Although they were very young, both showed great talent for magic, Kazimir even more so than his sister. But the war came too soon. Before they had even reached their centenium, the war began. The Dusk Elves’ preparations were able to resist for many years, but their resources were finite and soon began to dwindle. People started dying – fast. There were some who believed it was best to surrender to the would-be-conquerors, but the supreme council of Dusk Elves rejected this. Unfortunately, this schism led to Rahadin’s betrayal, as he deserted his own people in favor of the Von Zarovich family. As a member of the council himself, Rahadin was privy to many secrets and plans that the Dusk Elves would have needed to secure their survival.

After that, the defeat was quick and brutal. The vast majority of the Dusk Elves were killed in battle, but many more were slaughtered after the fact, until fewer than five hundred remained in total. Those that remained were forced into a single village, largely cut off from the rest of the new society that Strahd was building. Kazimir and Patrina were among those that lived, in no small part due to Patrina’s cunning. Kazimir did his best to adjust to a life without a war, but Patrina was not content to live in a run-down village and scavenge for whatever scraps they could gather. She had heard whispers of power that she could use to enact her will and take anything she wanted from their oppressor’s hands. Kazimir was initially in favor of this plan, until he learned one final detail: Patrina would go to none other than Strahd Von Zarovich himself for help. Horrified, he tried to convince her not to do this, but it was too late. His sister had made up her mind.

That was the last he heard of her for several years. Kazimir found himself in a position of leadership within their clan, and began building relationships with the Vistani, who were somehow spared Strahd’s wrath. During this time, he took on a Vistana name, Velikov, after a man who helped to lead and mentor him. Despite having only a few friends, Kazimir was well-respected as a leader despite his relative youth.

The Dusk Elves, small and few though they were, began to recover. They started healing from the pain of the war, having children, building homes. Maybe it was because of their slow healing that, when Patrina suddenly returned, Kazimir didn’t hesitate to welcome his sister back home. However, this wasn’t the sister he remembered. Her dusk-purple skin had become hollow and thin. Her eyes, he found, could no longer see color. And what was more, after her return, people started dying. Otherwise healthy people suddenly dying in the night, their bodies missing without a trace and then appearing a few days later as just piles of bones. Many began to question if this was Patrina’s doing, but she refused to answer any questions, even from Kazimir. She would not tell where she had been or what she had done, but it was clear that she was mad with power.

Unfortunately, there would soon be much bigger problems at hand. One evening, a dark mist rushed upon the valley, descending from the southern mountains and spreading across all of Barovia, blotting out the sun. At first, it was thought that this was merely strange weather that would pass quickly. Days turned into weeks into months, and it became clear that this was not something that would simply go away. At least during the first war, the grass was green and the sky was blue, the warm sun would rise every morning. But as Barovia descended into madness and chaos, there was no light. No sun, no clouds. The grass and trees began to wither. Some tried to leave, but any who did were swiftly killed by the mists. The Three Ladies they had long worshiped were attacked, and the shrine of the Huntress was desecrated and destroyed.

In this new darkness, Patrina’s insanity only grew. She began whispering to herself at all hours of the day, sometimes seeming to argue with no one at all. And then one night, she simply disappeared. The deaths stopped. Though relieved, the Dusk Elves couldn’t rest. Only months after vanishing, Patrina returned again, now overflowing with power and anger and hate. Kazimir and the rest of the village confronted her and, finally, Patrina answered.

Yes, she had killed all of those people and more. In the years she was gone, she was at the side of Strahd von Zarovich as his partner and lover. At the same time that he made the deal that led to his Vampirism, she took a deal of her own, in exchange for unimaginable power. But Strahd forgot about her. He was consumed with love for another woman, and so she fled Ravenloft. But she heard word that his new, young lover had died, and so she attempted to return to his side to use his vulnerability to help restore the Dusk Elves. Instead, she was cast aside even more quickly than before, and now she was here, home.

Kazimir couldn’t believe his ears. He was overcome by grief, horror, and fear at what his sister told him. The villagers began taking up stones to kill her, but they were too late. A monster appeared. Not Patrina – Kazimir. Practically unknown to even himself, their male lineage was cursed by a terrible beast that would transform and wreak havoc on their surroundings in times of great stress. For all of his life, Kazimir had been able to stay calm and collected enough that the beast was never released, even during war. But the anger within him at Patrina’s words was too much. Patrina was dead before the first stone was even thrown.

He only returned back to his humanoid form after his sister was gone. Dazed, confused, and nearly unconscious, Kazimir struggled to find his senses after the act. The other Dusk Elves, now scared of him too, refused to get near. He had only just begun to reason with them when none other than Rahadin the betrayer arrived. He demanded to be taken to Patrina, and when he was pointed to Kazimir and the body he was laying over, Rahadin was deeply displeased. Strahd had requested Patrina alive, and Rahadin had long loathed his own people. This was the final straw.

In retribution, Rahadin and his soldiers systematically slaughtered every female Dusk Elf they could find regardless of age, from the oldest woman to the youngest baby – and they did not stop until anyone who could repopulate their people was found. Kazimir and the others fought back, but those who tried to fight were swiftly killed. When he finished, there were barely a hundred-and-fifty men and boys left. As specific punishment for Kazimir, who at that point was already badly wounded, Rahadin cut off his long elven ears. After it all, Rahadin took Patrina’s body and vanished into the night.

[xyanmajor]

@hikarinokusari this scene has a little vibe of "i will be teaching you :) " ...if you know what i mean 👀

BALDUR'S GATE 3

[darklordazalin]

Azalini Reviews: Darklord Rag Man

Domain: Histaven Domain Formation: Unknown Power Level:💀💀💀 ⚫⚫ (3/5 skulls) Sources: Domain of Dread: Histaven (4e) from Free RPG Day 2011

The vengeful undead known only as the Rag Man is the Darklord of Histaven, a Domain plagued by blight that was pulled into the Mists, because of the actions of two individuals forever locked in their selfish hatred and vendettas.

Histaven was once a prosperous, peaceful village ruled over by Count Histaven, a retired adventuring bard who thought his charms alone gave him the rite to rule. Not too surprising. I often find that adventurers have lofty opinions of themselves. The citizens adored their Count. Of course, the peasantry rarely look beneath the mask their rulers wear. In truth, Count Histaven was a ruthless, petty individual who held his power in a vice grip through the subtle assassinations of potential rivals and dissidents.

Political rivals were not his only targets. Indeed, one such ‘rival’ was a young man who married a fiery haired woman the Count wanted for himself. That puts me in mind of a particular Count I would rather not think of, but suffice to say, redheads in the Mists often inspire the murderous tendencies of others. Count Histaven had the young man killed, which in turn caused his mother to kill herself in grief. One of the Count’s sons, Artius, witnessed these events, yet did not lift a finger against his father.

Artius, as any dutiful son would, followed in his father’s footsteps. He became just as ruthless and vindictive as his father. He played the part of the charming hero for the townfolks while orchestrating plots that lead to the deaths of all his siblings

After he successfully killed off his siblings, Artius waited ‘patiently’ for his aging father to die. At this time a ragged soldier appeared in Histaven, wielding his blade without prejudice against guilty and innocent. Artius found entertainment in the ragged soldiers acts, doing nothing to stop it. That is, until the soldier made his way to the Count’s estate.

He targeted Artius, exposing him as a villain and not as the hero he pretended to be. Enraged, Artius attacked the Rag Man, letting his hatred and selfish ambitions drive him. In turn, the Rag Man was consumed in his vendetta against Count Histaven and attacked his son with nothing but thoughts of revenge in his mind. In this moment, the mists claimed them both and Histaven with them.

There is another version of this tale, in which the two men fought one another for the love of a woman with fiery hair. Naturally this is nothing more than poetic nonsense and the result of the forgotten history of Histaven’s former Count, who slaughtered a young man for being married to an object of his desire. It is interesting, however, that both the Rag Man and Count Artius are said to be drawn to a redheaded Vistana named Naeva who reminds them both of a woman from their past. No doubt, she resembles the young woman Count Histaven desired who was married to this nameless ‘Rag Man’.

After the Mist claimed it, the once prosperous village of Histaven was plagued by blight and rot, acting as a mirror to the Rag Man and Count’s own corruption. The coming of the Rag Man is known as the Season of Rot in Histaven. For even if he is slain, the Rag Man always returns.

The Season of Rot begins on the new moon when the Rag Man appears in Histaven at night as a beggar, silently extending his hand out as villagers pass him by. Any that dare disturb him during this time, are slaughtered for their efforts. As the moon waxes, the Rag Man murders any he believes to be an ally of Count Artius. The more he kills, the stronger he becomes. Finally, on the night of the full moon, the Rag Man forces his way into Artius’s manor and the two face each other and the violence that ensues inevitably ends one of their life’s.

If the Rag Man dies, the blight persists. If Artius dies, Histaven experiences a brief respite from the persistent rot. Regardless of who dies, both are reborn in time. It is said that the only way to end this cycle is to have the two men forgive one another for their past deeds. Perhaps Naeva is the key to this rather unlikely event, but that is none of my concern.

The Rag Man, on the surface, appears to be a mindless killer bent on vengeance and, for the most part, this is exactly what he is. However, when not harassing the people of Histaven, the Rag Man resides in a grove in the Nightwood forest that surround Histaven. The grove is a peaceful place, full of life and a crystalline pool that the Rag Man often stares into, brooding.

The grove is a form of torment for our little slasher-happy murderer. Here, every night ghosts of his past dance happily around the grove, reminding him of what once was. One of these ghosts resembles Count Artius, though is likely his father. Another is a young, fiery haired woman who, just before sunrise, places her ghostly hand upon the Rag Man’s shoulder before disappearing.

The Rag Man is clearly a revenant, rising every new moon to seek vengeance against the one who wronged him. Yet, unable to seek out Count Histaven, he is reduced to seeking out the man’s son and no matter how many times he kills Artius, the Count comes back. A rather pathetic cycle of vengeance. I will grant him 3 skulls since he is, techincally, difficult to kill.

[xyanmajor]

Just in love with the female version of my vistana PC character.

♡

I want to share her with the world ♡

@hikarinokusari when you will be in better health, she'll be yours to see. (Yeah im bothering you again with useless things)

[htlrmvw]

Sheraton Vistana Villages Resort, #10-309, Orlando, Florida, September 2024