Madame Araby Tuvache

Madame Araby Tuvache, Araby Dunsany by birth, owns the tiny walled estate of Jerretiere in Pont-a-Museau. She and the remaining family servant, Mr Graves, reside in Tuvache house, the ancestral home of the Tuvache family. She has had added to the structure a clock tower. Her husband, Renault Tuvache, turned out to be a wererat, and the young wife traded her wedding ring to the local alchemist for the vial of silver-mercurium with which she poisoned him to death. She managed, remarkably enough, to rebuild the depleted fortunes of the estate by luring adventurers into the basement of Tuvache house where an end would be put to them using poison gas. She would subsequently strip them for their wealth. She soon had enough money, even more remarkably, to add the clock tower and create the Puppetworks, one of the greatest feats in clockwork making and mechanical engineering in the known world. For during her brief marriage, she had acquired a passion for clockmaking and indeed has developed an extraordinary aptitude for it. Her madness runs in the direction of the macabre. The puppets are made of the preserved corpses of her poisoned victims. She also has a fondness for collecting individual body parts in jars. Upon her death she is fated to become a greater animator possessing the Puppetworks.

Note

Given the cost of constructing both a clock tower and the Puppetworks, given the cost of the poisons that Madame Araby Tuvache deploys, and given the relatively inexperienced adventurers that she targets as being readily killable, the economics of her venture simply don't add up. She needs to have inherited a very large fortune or to have an extremely deep-pocketed benefactor. Alternatively, the lethality of the adventure needs to be substantially increased so that fairly wealthy adventurers can be targetted and successfully killed on a consistent basis.

A further complication is that this adventure defies simple conversion from second edition rules to third edition rules. Poison is not the cost effective weapon that it once was. In fact it is not the weapon that it once was either. Plus silver-mercurium may in fact be of no practical use against wererats (see: silver-mercurium).

Statistics

Female human, Lawful Evil, 0-Level Character

Female human, Expert, Lawful Evil

Feats: Master of Poisons, Mechanical Aptitude, Skill Focus (Craft (clockmaking) (and possibly Skill Focus (Knowledge (architecture & engineering)), Poison Expert and Poison Master)

Skills: Craft (clockmaking), Knowledge (architecture & engineering)

Data from the Ravenloft Catalogue

		Dungeon #64: Last Dance
		Dungeon #64: Last Dance
		Dungeon #64: Last Dance
		Araby Dunsany