D&D General Reading Ravenloft the setting

[Bedrockgames]

• Gabrielle Aderre: Wants a man and a baby.

Just look at my whole post on Gabrielle Aderre. This is extremely reductive. I would say it even greatly misses the mark. You are fitting her into the lens of a critique. She is made up of a lot of tropes people today wouldn't like (heck I mentioned part of her motivation is a hatred for gypsies). But I think she a much more compelling villain, a more complete and interesting character, than that bullet point suggests. These are villains after all. They are not heroes. I always found Gabrielle Aderre one of the more fun characters to play in the setting as a GM (and I found players generally feared her the way they might fear someone like Strahd). I think for horror, she works.

 

[Bedrockgames]

When a Darklord kills his spouse/lover, this is usually for a reason such as an accident (Adam), he needed a corpse and she was handy (Markov), or because he was out of control with bestial rage and she was in the way (Von Kharkov).

When a black widow/femme fatale kills a man, it's because she hates men (most of them), because she was jealous of him (maybe) having an affair (Ivana), or because she was jealous of someone else being happy (Jacqueline).

Completely different reasoning there.

I am not saying they aren't different (though as someone pointed out, the black widow character is basically like Bluebird; and Strahd isn't that different (after all he killed his brother to get Tatyana for himself). Adam is definitely an interesting character, and the way his story plays out with Elise makes sense for what he is, and what is tragic about who he is. But Markov is hardly as interesting or good of a villain as Ivana Boritsi or Jacqueline. Just because he has some other kind of motivation around the killing, that doesn't make him better. Like I said I think we are confusing quality with whether or not we think the content reflects present day sensibilities. And further I think we are confusing content for message (which it isn't always, especially in the 90s).

 

[Tonguez]

When a Darklord kills his spouse/lover, this is usually for a reason such as an accident (Adam), he needed a corpse and she was handy (Markov), or because he was out of control with bestial rage and she was in the way (Von Kharkov).

When a black widow/femme fatale kills a man, it's because she hates men (most of them), because she was jealous of him (maybe) having an affair (Ivana), or because she was jealous of someone else being happy (Jacqueline).

Completely different reasoning there.


There's also a huge difference between being uncomfortable and being bored because of lazy writing.

Bluebeard is a Darklord of Blaustein, his entire shtick is to murder his wives and hang them on a hook in a cool room, while their devoted ghost come back each night to caress him.

All the Male Darklords are looking for either love or power

 

[tetrasodium]

Just noting that in 1664 there were 2,500 citizens in the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam (Manhattan Island). Lamordia has a population of 3600 - and I always got that Dutch settlement vibe from the place

Would you not say that having to deal with all of those problems and monsters takes a somewhat larger population?

 

[Voadam]

Where is the female Markov - the woman whose evil isn't focused on her connection to the opposite sex and instead performs acts of evil for some other reason? One who murdered her loved one only because they got in the way or found her dark hobby. That's what I am talking about. Male Darklords who don't have to kill thier women to become irredeemable, female Darklords whose evil isn't tied to being denied male intimacy.

Going from Darklords the 1st detailed female Darklord seems an answer.

Tristessa, the grief maddened banshee whose evil comes about from worshipping Lolth, whose child was deformed but she would not kill it in a betrayal of Lolth, and whose grief when she lost her child and was staked in the sun to death were enough to bring her back as an undead who incidentally wails and kills everything around if reminded of her grief.

There is a line in Darklords about failing to sacrifice a consort, but the guy is not the focus of her story.

There is also the three hags.

The hags story is about sisters murdering travelers for imagined riches and even when they individually decide to woo a traveler to use him to leave their poor beginnings, the betrayal is that he would favor another sister and leave them behind so they murder him as a sisterly betrayal to stop their sisters from advancing without them as they each tried to do, it was not about any loss of his affections.

Elena Faith-Hold, Dark Lord of Nidalia from Islands of Terror is an overzealous paladin inquisitor. Romance is not part of her story.

 

[Faolyn]

Bluebeard is a Darklord of Blaustein, his entire shtick is to murder his wives and hang them on a hook in a cool room, while their devoted ghost come back each night to caress him.

All the Male Darklords are looking for either love or power

The vast majority of the male Darklords are not killing women because they hate women. Yes, there's one who does, Bluebeard. The rest do not.

The vast majority of female Darklords that kill men do so because they hate men or are trying to prevent other women from having the men.

That is the difference between the murderous male Darklords and the black widoe female Darklords.

 

[tetrasodium]

I've been casually watching this go back & forth for a few days & not really sure who is on what side of the female darklord thing as there appears to be 2-3 or more sides to it. Out of pure curiosity, what are some acceptable examples of fictional or historical female villains not already represented by some existing darklord

 

[Remathilis]

Tristessa, the grief maddened banshee whose evil comes about from worshipping Lolth, whose child was deformed but she would not kill it in a betrayal of Lolth, and whose grief when she lost her child and was staked in the sun to death were enough to bring her back as an undead who incidentally wails and kills everything around if reminded of her grief.

Tristessa's grief though is about motherhood. Not that its a bad origin story; la llorona is popular for a reason. Still, with all the evil manipulations of classical female drow, the only drow darklord left is a banshee searching for child, reminding us that even in a matriarchal demon-worshipping society, her tragedy is defined by the very womanly role of mother.

The hags story is about sisters murdering travelers for imagined riches and even when they individually decide to woo a traveler to use him to leave their poor beginnings, the betrayal is that he would favor another sister and leave them behind so they murder him as a sisterly betrayal to stop their sisters from advancing without them as they each tried to do, it was not about any loss of his affections.

While money is cetainly an important role in their origin, their story mostly involves killing a guy who was two-timing all of them and working them up into a jealous rage. I guess sistas-before-mistas?

Elena Faith-Hold, Dark Lord of Nidalia from Islands of Terror is an overzealous paladin inquisitor. Romance is not part of her story.

Agreed. She is one of the few female darklords that aren't obsessed with the traditional feminine roles of wife or mother. They need more like her.

 

[Faolyn]

Just look at my whole post on Gabrielle Aderre. This is extremely reductive. I would say it even greatly misses the mark. You are fitting her into the lens of a critique. She is made up of a lot of tropes people today wouldn't like (heck I mentioned part of her motivation is a hatred for gypsies). But I think she a much more compelling villain, a more complete and interesting character, than that bullet point suggests. These are villains after all. They are not heroes. I always found Gabrielle Aderre one of the more fun characters to play in the setting as a GM (and I found players generally feared her the way they might fear someone like Strahd). I think for horror, she works.

I would say it's not reductive at all. Why does she hate the Vistani? Because her Vistani mother cursed her to never be able to have "a man, a babe, a home" (as per Black Box) because such things would only bring her tragedy.

Villains are supposed to be interesting; they are often much more interesting than the heroes. A villain whose entire identity is "likes to screw others over because she can't have a man" is a high school villain.

I will respond to your other points when I have time, I want to give them fair consideration. But here we simply disagree. I definitely would not regard the black box set NPCs as lazy writing, in the least.

It's lazy because the male characters get intriguing backstories and goals while the female ones don't; because their characterization is centered entirely around the ideas that a Complete Woman needs a man and a child in order to be happy, and a Woman who doesn't have them is Incomplete and Evil.

I would gladly take a female darklord who:

• Kills people in order to make their corpses into art or as the models for her art, and now her art style is unpopular or actively reviled throughout her domain; plus, artistic zombies and other such undead haunt the realm.
• Does social experiments on children, and the mental horrors she inflicts on them turns them into literal monsters who now haunt her domain; worse, she can never get the results she wants to under lab conditions.
• Claims to be a prophet or even reincarnation of Ezra and has amassed a devoted group of followers--but her view on who is saved by Ezra and who is secretly part of the Legion of the Night is highly skewed.
• Became a ghost who possesses people in the hopes of helping them fulfill their life's goals, but whose own issues cause her to inevitably ruin her host's lives; she can't allow herself to not meddle, and therefore can never be free of her curse.
• Arranged for her rivals to die or be ruined because she feels she would do a better job as the political leader of the country, and upon being made a Darklord, she's proven to be a terrible leader.
• Got so fed up with her job as a lowly servant that she gladly took that strange person's offer to become a beautiful princess--but who turned her into a monster princess; now bereft of her humanity and the princess of a realm where everyone fears her greatly, she tries to fulfill her new role, but her human and monster sides constantly clash.

You know. Backstories that don't involve needing to have a man.

I think what you are describing isn't so much about quality of writing, but about how well the writing aligns with the reader's worldview (or a set of moral principles). To me that is very different from whether something is well written and clever.

No.

Because the male Darklords have interesting backstories and goals and engage in interesting activities.

The female Darklords do not.

This isn't about how well the writing clashes with my worldview. The writers very clearly had the ability to make truly interesting villains. They exercised that ability frequently. But when it came to writing female Darklords, they stuck with the very standard and sexist trope of "women need men and babies, and those who don't have men and babies are evil."

 

[Faolyn]

I've been casually watching this go back & forth for a few days & not really sure who is on what side of the female darklord thing as there appears to be 2-3 or more sides to it. Out of pure curiosity, what are some acceptable examples of fictional or historical female villains not already represented by some existing darklord

Create an interesting villain.

Make the pronouns she/her.

Voila! You have a good female Darklord.

Or, another way to look at it: Take Azalin. Imagine a female Azalin. Does it work? Can you have a lich desperate for magic and to escape to another world who happens to be female? Would you have to change anything about her story to make it work?

Now, imagine a male Gabrielle Aderre. Assume that he, too, wants a lover and child but is cursed. Well, male (half)-Vistani don't have the Sight and can't really use the Tarokka, so he would have no reason to know that Malocchio was the Dukkar--and thus would have no reason to care when this baby is dumped on his doorstop, assuming he even got together with a (presumably female-shaped) Phantom Lover in the first place.

And female Gabrielle's other big plot is that she doesn't know if her baby is a human, like one lover, or a wolfwere, like the other lover; either way, it will spell disaster for her and for relations with other Domains. Male Gabriel doesn't have to worry about this issue at all.

And, of course, a Gabriel Aderre would likely not have been dismissed as "The Witch Aderre" by his people.