Harkon's REAL Crime (WARNING! Mature Content)

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Harkon's REAL Crime (WARNING! Mature Content)

Post by Suvie »

Gonzoron of the FoS wrote:
jamesfirecat wrote:(there are no books/cannon material subjects on how human wolfwere interbreeding works to my knowledge)
Closest I can think of is for Harkon himself. His children whose mothers are wolfweres are Greater Wolfweres, while his children with human mothers are merely regular wolfweres. (but never full human). So at least for "big daddy" wolfwere in Ravenloft, wolfwerism is dominant over human genes. Of course, that may be specific to him...
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jamesfirecat wrote:Also hasn't Harkon only had like two children (Casimir and Akriel) that I can recall which is a pretty small sample size (or did he only have two children who were interested in pretending to be human for considerable lengths of time?)
Only two that we know of, but there must be others out there, otherwise Greater Wolfweres wouldn't exist. (Akriel's isn't one, and I don't know if it was ever confirmed if Casimir was.)
Okay, I was reading these statements in the other thread, and something hit me. I can't believe that I missed the part about Akriel being an ordinary WW! That really lends a lot of strength to one of my former players' headcanons about Harkon. His DL origin story seems really lame--he gets a domain for being a more organized version of an ordinary wolfwere?! Something's missing here, and in our group, we often say that the writers of RL will often go strong on the gothic dark stuff at first and then wimp out on execution. We like to read between the lines and see what we can come up with to compensate.

Take the case of Akriel. In the original RoT box, one of the cards was for the Old Kartakan Inn, and it had room 7 as "Akriel's Chamber." It says, "A beautiful girl named Akriel sleeps in this room. She is considered a servant, but no one has ever seen her working."

Anyone else getting a vibe from that last phrase? Put the air quotes around the work "working," and see if you get my drift. Seems clear that Akriel was originally intended to be Harkon's lover/mistress, but was then retconned into his daughter for FoG. This is one of the things that we point to when we talk about writers wimping out. So you can have Harkon regularly torture and murder people in his basement, but can't give him a regular mistress?!

The retcon also has an odd feel. Why would Harkon's daughter be considered a servant? That room writeup sounds like the scuttlebutt from other servants--common knowledge, etc.--so why would Harkon allow people to think that Akriel was his mistress? This would only make sense if it was not common knowledge that she was also his daughter. But even then, why put his daughter in a position of servitude at all?

Upon learning that Akriel is not a greater wolfwere--meaning presumably her mother was human--something finally clicked. What if Akriel was his daughter AND his mistress? What if this was Harkon's crime all along--incest with his own normal wolfwere children, to produce the "master race" of Greater WW's?

In this version, Akriel was raised by her human mother without any knowledge of who her father was. Harkon knew, though, and around the time she came into her powers, he seduced her in the form of a wandering bard, took her away to the Old Kartakan Inn, and put her on the books as an unspecific "servant." He fosters the children that result into the community, but takes very good care of them, and watches closely from a distance, just as he did with her. Eventually she discovers that he is not only her lover and mentor in the ways of wolfwere-ism, but also her biological father. Cue the revulsion and the rebellion that lead to FoG.

Of course, she would be too old to have been his original victim that earned him DLship, but I really think this was his real crime. Where other wolfweres were happy to have children by unsuspecting humans, Harkon actually sought to breed with other wolfweres. To that end, he may have raised his children himself, and groomed them to be the parents of a master race that would rule over human and wolfwere alike.

It's incomplete, but this would suggest why he only gets one human form for each sex: it's part of his curse, because his original tactic was to take one form as a parent and another form as a lover, so that the child did not know they were committing incest. He can't do that any more, which is why he has to foster his kids out, watch from afar, and then seduce them.

So I'll be filling in the holes in this story as I go, but it feels right to me. Harkon's real crime was calculated incest, to create the greater wolfweres.
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Re: Harkon's REAL Crime (WARNING! Mature Content)

Post by ewancummins »

I like it.

It works especially well if the wolfweres of his native country (in or near Cormyr, IIRC) had a strong prohibition against incest.
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Re: Harkon's REAL Crime (WARNING! Mature Content)

Post by DeepShadow of FoS »

Hmmm... I won't be using it IMC, but it actually makes some sense. If he wanted to make wolfweres into a community, starting with his family makes sense. Wolfweres are such solitary creatures, and don't need each other to reproduce, so I can imagine that they don't regularly get together for any reason, let alone have sex. Much like the RL dopps, they might see sexual contact between members of their own species as disgusting.

So if he wanted to break that taboo, he'd almost certainly be breaking another. The surest way to ensure contact between wolfweres is if they are family. So Harkon impregnates an unsuspecting mother and keeps track of the kid over the next few years, then comes back to seduce his own child.

It's also very consistent with the obsessive control he exercises over Akriel in FoG--she even tells the PC's a story of how she has been forced to marry him against her will. What if that story wasn't as big a lie as it seemed? Likewise, it's consistent with his stalker-like obsession with his Casamir as well.
Suvie wrote:Of course, she would be too old to have been his original victim that earned him DLship, but I really think this was his real crime.
This would appear to be the biggest hole: Harkon arrived in RL before he became a DL. He surely didn't have enough time to conceive and seduce a child in Barovia before Kartakass formed! So if this was his crime in Cormyr, why didn't it grant him DLship right away?
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Re: Harkon's REAL Crime (WARNING! Mature Content)

Post by Resonant Curse »

A lot of outlander darklords wandered the demiplane for a bit before getting a domain, Soth for example.
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Re: Harkon's REAL Crime (WARNING! Mature Content)

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That's true, Soth and Hazlik both wandered for a while, but Soth at least had a seminal event in RL before becoming bound to the land. His confrontation with Magda's mother led to the formation of Sithicus. Hazlik IDK, but I think there is more of Harkon's story than what I have here. Perhaps....

Perhaps his crime in Cormyr was just the formation of a community as stated in canon, BUT he was not alone when he was banished into the mists--what if he had family with him? What if incest was not his original plan, but became his plan once he was in RL and his children were the only wolfweres around? He makes some excuse to leave them alone for a while, changes form, and comes back as someone else.

And you're right, DS, that it's consistent with everything we know about him, insofar as his children have been his greatest ambitions and his greatest failures. In Gaz 1 they really made a big deal of that, what with that playwright who knew they were all wolfweres. I wonder what else that guy might have written??
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Re: Harkon's REAL Crime (WARNING! Mature Content)

Post by DeepShadow of FoS »

Y'know, I thought I read somewhere that Madame Lupapus was the name of the female form of Harkon, but it appears she's just a human(!) quisling. Has Harkon ever been named in female form? Didn't he appear in female form in Heart of Midnight?
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Re: Harkon's REAL Crime (WARNING! Mature Content)

Post by Garudos Celestar »

DeepShadow of FoS wrote: Has Harkon ever been named in female form? Didn't he appear in female form in Heart of Midnight?
Haven't read HoM, but he does appear in female form in Feast of Goblyns when he takes on Akriel's favorite form.

I've always taken the write up for greater wolfweres in FoG at face value, and assumed that all the greater wolfweres who are appear are in fact Harkon's children (or maybe grandchildren... he has been in the 'Loft for over a century at this point). As far as no one ever seeing Akriel "working," I assume that the other wolfweres do know that she's Harkon's daughter and just presume that she's one of his agents... it's more of the regular townsfolk who wonder about her (and since wolfweres regularly change their form, she wouldn't necessarily be "obviously related" to him... or this current favored form might be a recent choice).

Also, they didn't cut out Harkon's mistress in FoG... it's Coraline the werefox.
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Re: Harkon's REAL Crime (WARNING! Mature Content)

Post by Gonzoron of the FoS »

DeepShadow of FoS wrote:Y'know, I thought I read somewhere that Madame Lupapus was the name of the female form of Harkon, but it appears she's just a human(!) quisling.
I vaguely recall a long time ago someone didn't know what quisling was and thought it meant an alias. So they put it into the RL Catalogue or something that way. But yeah, she's just a human collaborator, which is odd. Could be a story there... Maybe she helps the wolfweres somehow in return for them eating her enemies?
Garudos Celestar wrote:
DeepShadow of FoS wrote: Has Harkon ever been named in female form? Didn't he appear in female form in Heart of Midnight?
Haven't read HoM, but he does appear in female form in Feast of Goblyns when he takes on Akriel's favorite form.
It's been a long time since I read HoM. I don't remember if Harkon appears as female. In FoG, he uses his ring of impersonation to impersonate Akriel, since he's cursed to have only one male and one female human form. In this thread, http://fraternityofshadows.com/forum/vi ... 46#p211746 we discussed how cheesy that ring was, and I proposed an alternative: That Harkon's female form is a slightly older looking version of Akriel's favored female form (close enough that one could be mistaken for the other in a darkened bar.)
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Re: Harkon's REAL Crime (WARNING! Mature Content)

Post by brilliantlight »

Suvie wrote:That's true, Soth and Hazlik both wandered for a while, but Soth at least had a seminal event in RL before becoming bound to the land. His confrontation with Magda's mother led to the formation of Sithicus. Hazlik IDK, but I think there is more of Harkon's story than what I have here. Perhaps....

Perhaps his crime in Cormyr was just the formation of a community as stated in canon, BUT he was not alone when he was banished into the mists--what if he had family with him? What if incest was not his original plan, but became his plan once he was in RL and his children were the only wolfweres around? He makes some excuse to leave them alone for a while, changes form, and comes back as someone else.

And you're right, DS, that it's consistent with everything we know about him, insofar as his children have been his greatest ambitions and his greatest failures. In Gaz 1 they really made a big deal of that, what with that playwright who knew they were all wolfweres. I wonder what else that guy might have written??

Another possibility some of the "wolves" in Bavoria were actually wolfweres and his own children and he knew it. He killed them so they couldn't spread a rumor that he was "weak" and fled from Strahd.
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Re: Harkon's REAL Crime (WARNING! Mature Content)

Post by The Lesser Evil »

A couple of things on Harkon. First, in canon, not every son or daughter of his becomes a greater wolfwere, though there has been some contradictions as to when they become greater wolfweres. 2e sources (Feast of Goblyns, Ravenloft Monstrous Compendium I&II) say it's only the children of he sires with humans that become greater wolfweres (implying that Akriel was the daughter of a relationship between Harkon and another wolfwere, for example.) In any case, 3e sources don't specify a certain parental source, only that a small number of his descendants become greater wolfweres. Besides the possibility of Casamir, there are two known examples of greater wolfweres: Haldrake Moonbaum (bartender at the Crystal Club, FoG p. 39) and Talasha the Bard (who doesn't seem to have anything to do with Harkon, she shows up and ambushes PCs in Roots of Evil if they
VIEW CONTENT:
disturb her temporal stasis tomb in Azalin's Crypt Lair on Prime Material Barovia, p. 61
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Another possibility some of the "wolves" in Bavoria were actually wolfweres and his own children and he knew it. He killed them so they couldn't spread a rumor that he was "weak" and fled from Strahd.
Now, that's an interesting idea about the wolves being wolfweres in Barovia. One interesting tidbit in I, Strahd is that in 350 BC or thereabouts, prior to the formation of the Demiplane of Dread and Strahd's betrayal, is that Strahd, Sergei and a number of others took out a pretty notorious bandit leader named Red Lukas, who apparently just coincidentally held the same surname as Harkon. However, if it were more than just coincidence, then that might have some interesting implications for what Harkon was doing while running around the Ravenloft Barovian country side.
There have already been some links to Barovia and the Forgotten Realms. Anna, the lover of Jander, is an amnesiac Tatyana that some how got transported to the Forgotten Realms. And having Red Lukas be one of the wolfwere Lukas family could explain the existence of Talasha in Prime Material Barovia. Going further with this, we know that Lukas has always had dreams of conquest. What might happen if he discovered a bit about the existence of an eminently powerful ancestor in the centuries past of Barovia?
We know that Harkon is in Barovia for three years. What if during that time of apparent rampaging, he was also secretly pursuing a plan to sire a race of super wolfweres to use for the purposes of conquest? By combining his own evil seed with the cursed bloodline of his distant relatives, Harkon might've had the potential to draw Strahd's attention. After the vampire lord beat Harkon Lukas and sent him packing, Harkon fled into the Mists and wound up in Kartakass. Here he he cannot readily sire more greater wolfweres. Perhaps he thinks he might replace the need for Red Lukas' ancestry by deliberately inbreeding his own spring. Of course, Hakron's success will be much less frequent as Harkon was in Barovia (or perhaps even in comyr)
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Re: Harkon's REAL Crime (WARNING! Mature Content)

Post by Suvie »

Gonzoron of the FoS wrote:It's been a long time since I read HoM. I don't remember if Harkon appears as female. In FoG, he uses his ring of impersonation to impersonate Akriel, since he's cursed to have only one male and one female human form. In this thread, viewtopic.php?p=211746#p211746 we discussed how cheesy that ring was, and I proposed an alternative: That Harkon's female form is a slightly older looking version of Akriel's favored female form (close enough that one could be mistaken for the other in a darkened bar.)
Yeah, I don't know what was lamer, that he had a ring of "impersonate exactly one person," that he needed such a ring to get around his weird curse, or that the writers gave him that curse AND a loophole to make it meaningless AT THE SAME TIME.
brilliantlight wrote:Another possibility some of the "wolves" in Bavoria were actually wolfweres and his own children and he knew it. He killed them so they couldn't spread a rumor that he was "weak" and fled from Strahd.
Harkon killed wolves in Barovia? When was this?
The Lesser Evil wrote:There have already been some links to Barovia and the Forgotten Realms. Anna, the lover of Jander, is an amnesiac Tatyana that some how got transported to the Forgotten Realms. And having Red Lukas be one of the wolfwere Lukas family could explain the existence of Talasha in Prime Material Barovia. Going further with this, we know that Lukas has always had dreams of conquest. What might happen if he discovered a bit about the existence of an eminently powerful ancestor in the centuries past of Barovia?
Or...Harkon Lucas took his surname from Barovia's ancient bandit. I would imagine wolfweres change names almost as often as they change faces.
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Re: Harkon's REAL Crime (WARNING! Mature Content)

Post by DeepShadow of FoS »

Don't have answers for any of those questions, but something just occurred to me: how does Harkon's cursed sword play into this? That was supposedly a "gift" from the DP's when he became a DL, and he twists the curse to his own benefit, but...how does it reflect his crime?
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Re: Harkon's REAL Crime (WARNING! Mature Content)

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Suvie wrote: Yeah, I don't know what was lamer, that he had a ring of "impersonate exactly one person," that he needed such a ring to get around his weird curse, or that the writers gave him that curse AND a loophole to make it meaningless AT THE SAME TIME.

Not technically one person, but the ring of impersonation allowed him to impersonate any person he knew well. But yeah, still fairly lame.
Harkon killed wolves in Barovia? When was this?
Harkon came to Ravenloft in 610 BC, but he didn't become darklord until 613 BC. Barovia was the first domain he arrived in. (The Mists had claimed Harkon at a point when he was conspiring to conquer Cormyr.) Upon discovering where he had been taken too, Harkon became furious. In his rage, he went on a killing spree, putting down many wolves and werewolves. Eventually Lukas ran into Strahd, whom promptly beat him to a near bloody pulp for killing some of his agents. Harkon fledinto the Mists and then Kartakass formed.
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Re: Harkon's REAL Crime (WARNING! Mature Content)

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DeepShadow of FoS wrote:Don't have answers for any of those questions, but something just occurred to me: how does Harkon's cursed sword play into this? That was supposedly a "gift" from the DP's when he became a DL, and he twists the curse to his own benefit, but...how does it reflect his crime?
Harkon has always had anger management issues. When he became shunned by his wolfwere kin in Cormy after trying to create a wolfwere tribe, he went on a mass killing spree taking the lives of many innocent Cormyreans. Ironically, it was out of this mass murder that Harkon first learned about humanity and decided to live among them. When Harkon taken from Cormyr and deposited into the comparatively backwoods Barovia, he went on another killing spree, this time on wolves and werewolves. Even after becoming darklord, he enters a horribly violent fury whenever one of his plots are thwarted. After Harkon's rage subsides, he enters a deep melancholy where he isolates himself from others.

The Sword seems to both be a symbol of and amplify his anger, and prevents him from retreating or turning into wolf form until he enemies are wormfood. Harkon can avoid the effects of the sword if he is in wolf form at the time of coming into melee combat, but in this form he can't really enjoy the perks of being humanoid. (His hybrid form is his preferred form for fighting, and he seems to embrace the human form over wolf.) Thus, in an ironic twist of fate, Harkon can only truly be fully human in combat when he is in his wolf form.
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Re: Harkon's REAL Crime (WARNING! Mature Content)

Post by DeepShadow of FoS »

When Harkon taken from Cormyr and deposited into the comparatively backwoods Barovia, he went on another killing spree, this time on wolves and werewolves.


I'm not around my books at the moment, but Mistipedia is missing this second killing spree. What's your source on that?
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