Dragna's Blog: Redeeming the Abbot

I’m trying something new with these devblogs - largely to try and keep to a more consistent publication schedule. Instead of writing them up after the fact, I’m going to use them as a workspace to brainstorm problems I’m currently facing, then clean them up for publication once I’ve figured out a solution. I look forward to hearing your thoughts in the comments or on the Discord!

The Abbot of the Abbey of Saint Markovia is a fascinating example of a minor non-player character in RAW who has nonetheless taken on a somewhat larger role in the Curse of Strahd community at-large.

In RAW, he’s a simple quest-giver (“Get me a wedding dress, and I’ll give you three free resurrections”), and one who ties in more to Vallaki than to Krezk itself (since the only wedding dress in Barovia is owned by Baroness Lydia Petrovna). He takes no special interest in the PCs, and is generally a forgettable healbot.

If community fanon is to believed, however, he is a far more active villain - one who, like Izek and Strahd, is obsessed with Ireena Kolyana. Should the players bring Ireena to the Abbey, the Abbot insists on taking her face to bestow upon Vasilka, his flesh golem experiment, turning him into a much more straightforward antagonist.

But this approach has major flaws. For one thing, the Abbot appears at a time in the campaign when Ireena should be moving from center stage to backstage; yet another narrative arc that focuses on victimizing her is harmful and unconducive to developing her role as an ordinary member of the party.

For another thing, it’s easily avoidable if the players keep Ireena from the Abbey, and has no meaningful build-up or tension. (Presumably, the Abbot sees Ireena and then immediately demands to take her. The players then fight him, I guess? Or maybe he suddenly kidnaps her, and then the players just fight him anyway, and then he dies.)

Finally, but most importantly, there’s no meaningful resonance or character arc to this plotline. The players show up, the Abbot goes “nyeah!”, and the players kill him. (Or maybe the players find a way to buy him off, he gives them an IOU for some free resurrections, and nothing meaningful or interesting happens thereafter.)

This sort of uneasy detente is a defining problem for the Abbot’s storyline, both in RAW and in community revisions. Even once the players defeat Strahd in the end, there’s no real sense of closure for the Abbot’s character; he just sort of ceases to exist as a meaningful person.

In writing the original Reloaded, then, I had to make a choice: What is the Abbot’s story? The answer came to me immediately - and, funnily enough, did so before I’d ever even read Descent Into Avernus.

The Abbot’s story - the story of a fallen angel - is the story of redemption.

Redeeming the Fallen

But that brings us to today’s key question: How do you redeem a fallen angel?

Here was my original idea: Upon meeting Ezmerelda d’Avenir at the Abbey, the players can join her to conduct a seance, in which the spirit of Saint Markovia informs them that the Abbot’s spirit is corrupted. To purify him, Markovia says, the players must travel to Castle Ravenloft and recover the Icon of Ravenloft, which contains a spark of the Morninglord’s divine grace. If the players defeat the Abbot in battle, they can use the Icon to “reset” his corrupted soul and restore his celestial grace.

This concept of the Abbot being “corrupted” by the Dark Powers - like a computer corrupted by malware - fits well with RAW and fits the vibes of the campaign nicely. The overall adventure would be easy and quick, satisfying the players’ need for catharsis and punishment while tying the quest into the heist of Castle Ravenloft - the mid-campaign climax.

But was it resonant?

“Get the Icon, fight the Abbot, then turn him off and on” is a very functional plotline, but as some members of the Patreon Discord pointed out, it’s not particularly emotionally evocative. The Abbot is restored, yes, but there’s no emotional arc; the players simply kill an angel, then resurrect him and hope that he’s Nice Now.

So the question becomes: How do we redeem him more directly? Here’s the problem: redemption isn’t something that just happens. The Abbot is a celestial being eons-old, and has had his mind corrupted and rotted by the Dark Powers for more than the past century. A bunch of 6th-level PCs aren’t going to argue him into being Good And Sane again now. (What do you think this is, Naruto?)

So we need an external stimulus - some distinct and discrete leverage that makes it possible to redeem the Abbot. The Icon provides a mechanism, but not a method: it explains why redemption is suddenly possible, but not how.

And that’s when I remembered the book High Wizardry, by author Diane Duane.

High Wizardry is the third in the Young Wizards series - a series of YA modern fantasy books I read as a kid. In that series, Our Wizards Are Different - rather than Harry Potter wand-wavers, wizards there are the “troubleshooters” and “programmers” of the universe. They’re also the allies and envoys of the Powers That Be: a pantheon of benevolent elder beings who have assumed the roles and names of gods and angels throughout human history, in service to the One - effectively understood to be the monotheistic God.

The eldest, fairest, and strongest of the Powers is the one called the Lone Power, who created entropy and introduced death into the universe as its “gift” to Creation. It then defied the One, abandoning its brothers and sisters among the Powers, and now walks the many universes alone, offering its “gift” to new species and scheming to have Death swallow Life. (Yeah, this is a familiar story)

The Lone Power is a recurring antagonist throughout the series; as a being outside of time and space, its fragments and shadows appear across many worlds and times, forcing the protagonists to find and defeat It anew each time. But in the third book, High Wizardry, a shadow of the Lone Power is actually redeemed: a species rejects its “gift” of entropy and death, and for the first time, mortals gain a stake in Its soul, rather than It gaining a stake in theirs.

And so the Lone Power sees the light of the universe - the first light from which all others came. And shortly before the Lone Power’s twin - the Winged Defender, once named Athene and Thor and Prometheus and Michael - reveals Herself, one of the protagonists sees the Lone Power’s pain and loneliness, and cries for it:

The Powers are not physical, and the habits of physicality come hard to Them. But the Lone One, after long wandering about Its bitter business, had spent much time in bodies, and much in human ones. The feeling of another’s tears for It - the tears of someone who now knew It more completely than any mortal and yet shed the tears freely - after endless justified cursing by ten billion years’ worth of tormented intelligence: The feeling ran down the pitiless light like the head of an irresistible spear and pierced It to the heart.

It fell down, a great disastrous fall like a lightning-stricken tower’s, and wept darkness with desire for the light.

. . .

“It is too late,” the Lone One said. “I cannot go back. That part of me I murdered, willingly. I cannot find the way into the heart of the light. And They would not have me if I could.”

. . .

The long, prone darkness began to burn, from inside, the way a mountain seems to do with sunset. “Brother,” the Defender said. “They’re waiting.”

The light began to shift. Nita looked up and around in wonder. The planet seemed to be going transparent around them. Or not specifically transparent: It was as if, one by one, other vistas were being added to it - seacosts, forests, landscapes she couldn’t understand, cities, empty spaces that were dark and yet burned; ten other worlds, twenty, a hundred, in an ever-deepening overlay that enriched without confusing.

. . .

“Brother, look up, and see the way home. Let them see what they have triumphed over."

The Lone Power rose up, slowly, like one discovering walking after a life of lameness. And Kit and Nita and Dairine all gazed, and speech left them. Nita's eyes filled with tears as she wondered how darkness could be so bright. Lightbringer He was, and star of the morning; and like the morning star, He needed the darkness, and shone brighter in it, and made it blessed.

"Home," He said, gazing upward.

It is this spark of revelation—of defeat, of vulnerability, of beauty and forgiveness—that redeems the Lone Power.

But how do we give that revelation to the Abbot?

Defeat is easy; players love fighting things. Beauty is easy, too; we can easily steal the “single ray of sunlight” that falls over Tasha Petrovna’s grave in RAW.

Vulnerability is harder . . . unless we somehow turn this into a battle for the Abbot’s soul in a proxy war against the Dark Powers.

What about Welcome? We could take a leaf out of Duane’s book and use another angel, but that seems messy and adds additional complexity; it lacks the elegance of a good solution.

What if, instead, the entity that welcomes the Abbot back into the fold is the spirit of Saint Markovia? What if she can no longer commune with the Abbot due to the Dark Powers’ influence? What if he’s the one who first chose her as prophet of the Morninglord, centuries ago, and now it’s her turn to welcome him with open arms? (This also lets us include a kickass Markovia ghost in the campaign finale to defend Krezk.)

So here’s the plan:

The players need to retrieve the Icon of Ravenloft from Castle Ravenloft. The Icon has a shard of the Abbot’s divine spark in it, which the Abbot directed Tasha Patrovna to bestow upon Saint Markovia as a sign of her consecration.

By defeating the Abbot in battle, the players can then use the Icon to enter the Abbot’s soul. There, they must defeat the Dark Powers’ corruption and free the Abbot's soul from their chains of mist. Once they’ve done so, the Abbot’s spirit is broken and requests execution for his crimes - until Markovia’s spirit, now free to speak to him thanks to the players' efforts, descends from a shaft of pure sunlight and forgives him with tears of joy and compassion.

(As a side benefit, the Icon of Ravenloft - which, until now, has basically been a divine paperweight - is blessed by the Abbot once more, allowing the players to unlock its full capabilities.)

But that’s just me.

What do you think?