Café de Nuit

http://www.roleplayingtips.com/readissue.php?number=289

Check out "3. A Queen Infernal" on that page, esp the authors notes:

This one actually comes from Ravenloft villain Jacqueline Montarri who, in turn, I'm sure is based on a short story I remember reading when I was a kid (which was back in the 70's, so I know the short story is the original). In the story, a husband marries a woman with a yellow ribbon tied around her neck, which she warns him never to remove.
Eventually, his curiosity gets the better of him, and he removes it while she's asleep, only to have her head roll of the bed crying out, "I told you not to remove it...."

So is Jaqueline Montarri the killer that Ratik Ubel is hunting? Did she change the yellow scarf for a red ribbon after the deed?

I doubt it. The red ribbon was wrapped around her neck when her curse came into effect.

But if you want her to be the killer, she could have been wearing yellow at the time.

Not to mention he has been killed in Darkon and he wasn't particularly pretty...

Ravenloft comes hard on vanity these days!

Especially when the Telling Man is around

It's not only the telling man and J.Montari. Look at the porcelain lady for example...

The Giamarga wrote:http://www.roleplayingtips.com/readissue.php?number=289

Check out "3. A Queen Infernal" on that page, esp the authors notes:

This one actually comes from Ravenloft villain Jacqueline Montarri who, in turn, I'm sure is based on a short story I remember reading when I was a kid (which was back in the 70's, so I know the short story is the original). In the story, a husband marries a woman with a yellow ribbon tied around her neck, which she warns him never to remove.
Eventually, his curiosity gets the better of him, and he removes it while she's asleep, only to have her head roll of the bed crying out, "I told you not to remove it...."

So is Jaqueline Montarri the killer that Ratik Ubel is hunting? Did she change the yellow scarf for a red ribbon after the deed?

The author is simply mistaken; first, this story (from the anthology Long After Midnight) features a woman with a black ribbon. While this may have been incorporated into Montarri, most if not all of the inspiration came from a character in the Land of Oz series who...wait for it...chopped off girls heads to replace her own, so that she could live forever.

In the movie she's named "Mombi," but in the books she goes by another name, can't recall right now.

HOWEVER, as to whether Montarri is Ubel's murderer, it's possible. IIRC she often covers her ribbon with scarves, etc. so that this one feature isn't recognizable from one form to another. Really, there aren't enough details to be so sure about Ubel's killer. We know he saw yellow, perhaps a scarf; he thinks it must have been a rogue; the killer is still walking around somewhere; that narrows it down to any number of high-level rogues.

The biggest missing detail is motive, and in that regard, it seems the authors have left it open for DM's to insert their own characters.