Café de Nuit

Apparently part of Falkovnia's false history includes a female tyrant-queen known for the armor she wore, called the "Cruel Panoply." This armor may resurface in my game as an example of the dark side of female empowerment. Any suggestions for powers of the armor, or other ideas related to the original wearer?

Fear aura which only has an effect on men?

Charm aura too maybe when the wearer wills it?

Picturing a fearsome Elizabeth the 1st in conquistador-style armor able to awe enemy men and inspire her male subjects by her mere presence.

Of course a curse too which slowly makes violence towards men so commonplace that the wearer must succeed a roll to avoid unneccessary male blood-shed when the oppourtunity arises.

For instance a squad of soldiers caught stealing liquor gets beheaded instead of merely whipped as the wearer deems the male sex as irredeemable anyway.

Perhaps the armor allows the wearer to build an army through seduction. Maybe something along the line of a Kizoku's Euphoria ability, effecting victims on a larger scale, only instead there is a vicious, mad loyalty and protective rage in her male victims.

That sounds a lot like how War (as in the Four Horsemen) was portrayed in the Pratchett/Gaiman novel "Good Omens". In that book, War's incarnation was as a hot lady news correspondant who kept getting all the juiciest stories on military conflicts, because no sooner would she visit a country than a war would break out. All she had to do was smile at a group of males, and they'd start beating each other to a pulp.

small point here, "Cruel Panoply" was the first ruler of Falkovnia after the fall of the Silver Kingdom of the Falcon and is not connected to Lamordia in any way.

She is described as being brutal and cruel. She also introduced the state-sponsored slavery that Falkovina has for non-humans. so its possible she might have had like many real tyrants tainted memories of them from childhood, for example a child of say semi-elven blood looked down on by her parent for her non-human or human ancestery to the point where she reacts to extremes for fear of others finding it out.

The armour itself is described as demonic looking, so a demonic background (perhaps a demonic pact for vengence) would not be unfitting, together with a mystical means for the armour to be defeated. Afterall she was defeated by the next ruler of Falkovnia, Falcon the Great, Falkovnia's own wizard-king (Vlad is the one that bumped him off)

Sorry, I meant Falkovnia, not Lamordia. I'll correct that.

Okay, so the Cruel Panoply was the first to institute slavery of nonhumans. Geez, some of the slaves might be old enough to remember her, and their stories would hold her as bad or worse than Vlad. So that would be a good source for info.

I also noticed the demonic appearance of the armor, and immediately thought of demonic armor. The contagion ability made me wonder, could this armor be the source of some of the diseases in Falkovnia? Several of the recurring plagues mentioned in Gaz2 are fiendish in origin, and would have to be brought in by an outsider or by other magic like a contagion spell. Could this armor's diseases have lingered this long

Has anyone yet done any scenarios involving the Cruel Panoply's armor? Or anything else in which her existence (albeit as part of a falste history) is relevant? I'm thinking of sending my players on a /w/i/l/d/ /g/o/o/s/e/ /c/h/a/s/e/ quest for her armor.

IMC, quite a lot of that false history may actually be real history, only distorted. I've never cared for the idea that Ravenloft has no ancient history. It really robs the world of depth. I've taken care to integrate the histories and mytholgy of the various domains to a greater degree than is seen in canon. This is an ongoing process.


IMC Cruel Panoply's namesake suit of armor would really exist- for she would have really existed. Falkovnia is demonstrably much older than its current ruler. That doesn't mean everything written in old books of history or told in bards' tales is true- but there is more to the story than just Drakov.

I think canon will back up the fact that "false" history does not mean there's no physicality to back it up. There are plenty of cases where so-called false history carries into the present reality.

My problem is with the name. False history implies that it's all a fraud, when that's only true from the perspective of surrounding domains. The people who appear in newly-formed domains have lives and memories that extend into a past of some kind. I imagine that when a new DL enters the Mists and creates a domain, the domain passes through real time in an instant, acquiring all the features that would come with all that "false" history.

With regard to the Cruel Panoply, IMC her armor will be real and the PC's will have a chance to find it. This will be part of a multi-part confrontation with a rising annis hag who wants to claim the armor and reestablish the Panoply's reign as queen.

It's likewise possible that the DPs simply borrow their "false history" from the recalled histories of various people (darklord or otherwise) who've passed through the Mists' clutches over the centuries. Certainly, I cut and pasted the Grabenites' historical background from a number of different Norse-flavored cultures and chapters of Mystaran history. So the "Cruel Panolpy's" story might well have been a bit of recycling on the Dark Powers' part: an outlander villain who'd been taken up by Ravenloft decades before, and lasted long enough to earn a creepy name, yet not long enough to enter the Mists and become a darklord.

Interestingly, there's another reference to "demon armor" in a Ravenloft product: the black and red plate worn by the blackguard Rodjan Dilisnya, in LotB. As the donning of D&D magic armor is limited only by size and humanoid shape, not finer details like the wearer's sex, a DM could rule that it's the same suit. Perhaps the original villainess appeared in Barovia when it was still an IoT, died there, and passed her armor on to the then-hidden Dilisnyas?

Yes, I've considered saying that Rodjan Dilisnya's armor is, in fact, the Cruel Panoply, but it rubs me the wrong way. The original armor would have been made for a woman, no matter how masculine, and while magic items in D&D sometimes reshape themselves for new owners, I think this diminishes the uniqueness of the item.

Really, I think it's a way to justify PC's being able to use whatever they find off the rack.