Here is the villainess of the current adventure. Just a reminder, players: This contains spoilers, so keep out of the Secrets section!
The Ten-Minute Background of Mistress Nicolette Montaire, Shadar-Kai WitchStep 1: Background
1) Forty years ago, when St. Clarice was just a small port village, the Montaire family feuded with the LeVaines of Verincourt, dueling for influence in the southern province of Coralton. While the teiflings of the LeVaine line were known (rightly or wrongly) for their ties to devil worship, a preoccupation with death and the Shadowfell gripped the Montaires. Perhaps it was a curse, perhaps just natural inclination, but there have always been members of the Montaire family with a black fascination with necromancy and the undead.
2) What is known today is that old Enzo Montaire, Lord Mayor of St. Clarice, had five children: Donello, Raphael, Nicolette, Anatole, and little Jean-Claude. Donello was disowned for eloping with a LeVaine woman, Raphael was killed by the Troll of the Black Hills, Anatole joined the clergy of Cyra Morwyn, and Nicolette went to Kelsenon, never to return, leaving only Jean-Claude to carry on the family line. After the tragedy that destroyed Abbeville, Enzo declared that he would build a new mansion within the city grounds "in order to be closer to his people," though he never said why he and his youngest son would not stay on the old family grounds during the construction, nor would he ever explain his daughter's sudden and unexpected travels abroad. With all the confusion that resulted from the destruction of Abbeville, however, it is understandable that a few details might have been overlooked.
3) The truth, however, is far more twisted. About two years before the tragedy of Abbeville, Donello, the prodigal son, returned home to beg for his family's help. He sought to destroy the horrible Troll of the Black Hills, a desire that seemed to have personal meaning for him, and he needed his father's financial support to continue his crusade, for he had spent his own fortune tracking down magical items rumored to contain great potency over the undead. Among these items was a book, an ancient tome of great and terrible power. Nicolette, who was fascinated by magical texts, desired to peruse this work, but Donello would not part with it. He was concerned that the work would fall into the wrong hands. Nicolette would not be deterred, however, and while father and son argued over past recriminations and present situations, she stole the book away, tore from it a few choice pages, then returned it to his bag. When Donello left, he was none the wiser.
4) In secret, Nicolette studied her stolen prizes. The work was that of an unfathomably ancient necromancer and his quest for total mastery over death. Nicolette was thrilled, but her pages did not hold the whole story. They did, however, provide her a few rituals with which to work, and she secretly transformed her basement into a ghastly workshop for her experiments. They were tame at first, just light experiments in manipulating shadow energy, but she grew bolder. Tragically, one of her experiments, a reanimated monster, got free, and mauled her brother Raphael, a death which was blamed on the Troll of the Black Hills. Even this tragedy did not deter her, however, and she threw herself more into her dark experiments.
5) Eventually, however, someone caught wind of her games. He was a tiefling of the LeVaine line, and he was also a secret necromancer, just like Nicolette. Despite the bad blood between the LeVaines and the Montaires he wooed her, promising her a true path to immortality and power. he revealed to her that he was a secret devotee of The Dark Reaper, and knew ways of attaining power from that dark lord through an infernal pact. Nicolette was drawn to these promises, and eager to escape the chains of mortality, so she eagerly agreed to make the fell pact. He taught her a blasphemous ritual that would strip the souls of the freshly dead to create
residuum, which could then be used to keep her from aging. He also taught her a ritual that was mean to allow her to create a secret hideaway in the Shadowfell itself. But the ritual went awry. It pulled the soul of the old Montaire mansion itself into the Shadowfell, and Nicolette along with it, and trapped them both there. And this was when the tiefling revealed his true intentions: to take back the pages of the tome that Nicolette had stolen from Donello. And he left her there, trapped in the Land of the Dead, with a pact to a jealous and demanding deity and no way home. In The World, old Enzo and his youngest son returned home from a party to find their house no longer felt like a home, and had become haunted and strange, so they reluctantly abandoned the place. And so Shadow House has remained empty and rotting to this day...at least on this side of the Veil.
Step 2: Goals
1) Nicolette remains beyond the veil, immortal but trapped in a Shadowfell version of her mansion. She has made the best of her immortality, attracting servants and ghostly minions, but her influence is limited. She would like to change that.
2) Her strongest desire is to avoid having her soul taken by The Dark Reaper, so she works to fulfill the terms of her pact. Along with avoiding having her soul taken as forfeit, she wants revenge on the tiefling who trapped her in this state.
Step 3: Secrets
PLAYERS KEEP OUT!
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1) Nicolette must sacrifice souls to the Dark Reaper. She does this by using a ritual that strips residuum out of freshly dead souls, and she has turned her mansion into a trap: the newly dead find her mansion, which has an eternal party going on. She invites them to join, and then keeps the soul there until she needs to strip the magic from it. She sends most of the residuum to The Dark Reaper, but she keeps a little for herself, in order to stockpile enough magic to hopefully break herself free from the mansion's grounds.
2) Lately, more souls have been coming to her than normal, and she suspects that this is because a cult of Dark Reaper devotees have set up shop in the city. She has heard from the souls coming in that there is a tiefling doctor that has ties to the Daynalite church, and most of the souls coming to her were patients of this doctor before they came to her. She suspects this "Doctor LeVaine" may be related to the tiefling that stranded her in the Shadowfell...
Spoiler:
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3) The tiefling that bound her to this fate is none other than Gerard LeVaine himself, in the days before he was a vampire lord. He is using the house as a sort of dampening field--the vampire spawn he creates act human and are immune to the sun as long as their souls remain close to town. Every so often, nicolette destroys a soul for her pact, and a vampire goes berserk, causing injuries that get sent to him, and he makes more spawn. Gerard has found, however, that the house's usefulness is at an end, so he has planted rumors that the source of St. Clarice's troubles are at the old mansion's grounds, and he is counting on a team of adventurers to explore the place, destroy the mansion, and free the souls within, which will make all his spawn become monstrous and feral in one fell swoop.
: Contacts
1) Jarg, a Dark Creeper, and some of his relatives have laird on the grounds. Jarg harbors a secret lust for the Mistress, and serves as her manservant in an attempt to prove his devotion to her. He is probably fooling himself in thinking that his desire will ever be reciprocated, but he is devoted to her nonetheless.
2) A cadre of vampire spawn lurk about the grounds, acting as guests. They serve The Dark Reaper, and it is their job to collect the
residuum that Nicolette generates to keep her pact going. Though they technically serve the Mistress, their true allegiance is to another master.
3) Victoria Montaire, Nicolette's niece, has found a way to use the mansion grounds in The World to travel to the Shadowfell. She came to Nicolette to learn the ways of necromancy, but lately she has not been coming as often, and Nicolette fears that Gerard LeVaine has already gotten his clutches on her.
4) Gerard LeVaine is a doctor in St. Clarice that Nicolette suspects of secretly being a necromancer in the service of The Dark Reaper That he is a tiefling and a LeVaine remind her of her own tragic past, so though they have never met, she harbors a deep hatred of him and would love to find some way of thwarting whatever plans he has brewing.
