The Three powers of Barovia are the Sorted/Morninglord, Mother Night, Master Dusk"

• A Brief History

  • Long before Strahd came and civilized the valley, Barovia was once a wild land. The valley was largely populated by scattered familial villages, usually no larger than a couple dozen people living in three or four houses to a village. These people were used to the harsh landscape and were overall hearty, somewhat barbaric people.

  • In addition, there were also groups of forest folk (druids) that lived in the wilds and didn't settle. The settled people and the forest folk have had a famously tumultuous relationship over the centuries, with periods of hate and periods of peace scattered across history.

  • In a general sense, the land was separated into three Fanes, or environments: The Swamp Fane, the Forest Fane, and the Mountain Fane. This isn't the exact definition of a fane, but for the sake of this history it's the easiest way to picture them.

• The Ladies Three

  • The original residents of the valley worshiped a trio of Archfey that were magically connected to the three fanes of the land. Because of their magical nature, these Archfey were literally "the land." They were:

    • The Weaver from the Swamp Fane

    • The Huntress from the Mountain Fane

    • The Seeker of the Forest Fane.

  • The Ladies of the Wood almost never showed themselves to the people that worshiped them. Instead, they would appear in auguries, dreams, and omens, speaking through the mouths of animals and in the wind that mused the leaves on the trees.

• Shrines

  • The people of the valley used to worship the Ladies through a series of shrines scattered across the land, some small and some large. The three most prominent shrines were located inside large stone circles that still stand during the present time of the campaign.

    • The swamp shrine is the circle of stones in Berez.

    • The mountain shrine is the circle atop Yesterhill.

    • And the forest shrine is the collection of monoliths behind Old Bonegrinder.

  • The worship of the Ladies usually came in the form of minor religious practices and offerings. It's easy to let pop culture taint our imaginations and let us picture some horrific blood sacrifices for this worship, however that isn't the case here. The offerings were usually things like, "The best fruits from the first harvest" or "the antlers of a buck we killed on hunt." Sometimes the people left small, carved statues or other bits of artistic labor.

  • The practices were usually communes with nature, where folk would wonder into the woods and live entirely alone in respect for the Ladies. Those who survived would return home spiritually awakened. Other rituals were long nights spent in respect and worship or village wide pilgrimages to the major shrines.

• The Fall of the Ladies

  • The Ladies presided over the valley until Strahd conquered the land. Strahd, seeing the power of the fanes, desecrated the three main shrines to the ladies and reconsecrated them in his own image, giving him dominion over the valley. Now, Strahd is literally, "The Land."

  • By taking over the Fanes, Strahd has the following benefits:

    • The permanent protection of a nondetection spell

    • Resistance to Fire, Cold, and Lightning damage

    • +4 to his Armor Class

    • With the combined control of all three Fanes, he controls the waters, winds, and wildlife in the valley. The only of Strahd's environmental powers that does not come from the Fanes is the ever overcast sky. That comes from Vampyr.

• Reinstating the Ladies

  • Part of defeating Strahd will entail disconnecting him from the land. He's obscenely strong at the moment, even for a Darklord. Breaking down his power is key to his fall.

  • To reconsecrate the shrines and therefore bring back the Ladies of the Wood, certain rituals will have to be performed.

    • To reconsecrate the shrine of the Mountain Fane at Yesterhill, someone must survive a journey through the caverns under the Gulthias Tree and prove the worth of their soul. (A dungeon of my own making detailed in a later post.)

    • To reconsecrate the shrine of the Forest Fane behind Old Bonegrinder, the players must face one of their possible dark futures, to understand just how far they could have fallen.

    • To reconsecrate the shrine of the Swamp Fane in Berez, someone must provide a great service to the Weaver to prove their respect and servitude. More specific to the campaign, someone will have to kill Baba Lysaga, the witch currently poisoning the swamp fane, and present her heart at the shrine.

The Ladies Now

So where are the Ladies of the Wood now? Here are a few options you may use to incorporate the Ladies into your game.

• Physical Beings or Ephemeral Spirits

  • Firstly, you should decide whether you want the Ladies to be physical beings in your campaign or extrasensory entities. Are you prepared to use them like NPCs throughout the story? Are they actual people that exist and have their own personalities? Or are they more insubstantial? A presence that lives in the very wind and doesn't have an actual form or voice?

  • If you prefer a non-physical route, there are less NPCs to deal with, but it becomes a bit more difficult to communicate the idea of the fanes and the shrines to your players. You'll likely have to use a living devout follower of the Ladies to advance their agenda and incorporate this information into a new or existing NPC. The Martikovs, certain werewolves, and Exethanter the Lich are people who might have knowledge of the Fanes.

• Physical NPCs

  • Hags or Beauties?

    • Dragna and I had a brief talk about this and in the end I loved both ideas. They're different, but equally valid takes on physical representations of the Ladies. So, I've decided to detail them both here for you guys.

  • Hags

    • In this version, the Ladies of the Wood appear to their followers as beautiful women. They are idolized for their beauty and so inspire all the more devotion.

    • However, the Ladies' beauty is only a magical glamour. In reality, they are hideous hag-like creatures that love to toy with all things. They are beings of nature, yes, but they have a semi-sadistic streak and love the influence they have over mortals.

    • This idea plays right into the theme of CoS. The players might believe they are helping these beauteous goddesses from days old. And then, once they reconsecrate the shrines, the Ladies "gift" the players with an in-person thanks and their true forms are revealed. The Ladies in this version don't have to be evil, necessarily, but their grotesque appearances should shock and disgust the players.

  • Beauties

    • The Ladies are naturally beautiful, in their own wild and magical way. In this version, the Ladies of the Wood are naturally glorious in appearance. However, their separation from the land has drastically drained their powers and warped their image. During the time of the campaign, they appear as withered old women, some with hideous deformities.

    • When the shrines are reconsecrated and the Ladies restored to power, their hag forms will melt away to reveal their true beauty.

    • I like this version of the Ladies because it goes against the dark nature of CoS. In a campaign filled with so much darkness and evil, towards the end it might be nice to throw in something beautiful, especially if you sense your players are getting emotionally worn out by all the horror.

• True Neutral

  • Should you decide to add the Ladies to your game, ugly or beautiful, you should make their personalities directly reflective of nature itself. They can be both beautiful and terrifying, as ever changing as the winds and as fickle as a lightning bolt. Sometimes they bless, sometimes they punish, and sometimes they don't answer at all. The Ladies are the chaos of nature personified and do as they please in the end.

Within the Campaign

Should you place the Ladies in your campaign as physical entities, here are the NPCs I developed to help out. I personally went with the Beauties subplot, in which the ladies all appear as ugly hags until reinstated and assume their true forms.

• The Swamp Fane

  • Appearance and General Notes

    • The Weaver is an old hag named Jeny Greenteeth. You can actually find this witch throughout the dnd Adventure League modules, but I took her and changed her rather radically for the Ladies.

    • Jeny is a quirky old bag who lives as an herbologist just outside the walls of Vallaki. You can find the location of her shop in my Shops guide here.

    • Otherwise, to quote myself: Jeny is an old woman with an eye for mischief. She knows just about every plant in Barovia and is a master potion maker. She takes no nonsense from anyone and loves playing pranks on people with her potion making. For instance, she sells a love potion meant to "help men in areas of physical conquest." However, if Jeny senses her buyer is adulterous (or is just an overall pompous butt to her), she sells him a "faulty" version of the potion which makes his entire manhood grow long, course hair for a month.

  • Campaign Sitings

    • Jeny is likely the most helpful of the three ladies and is more than willing to gently guide the party towards restoring the fanes. Unfortunately, she can't actually tell anyone she's a Lady of the Wood, because believing in the fanes is a part of reinstating their power.

    • The players can meet Jeny in her shop when they get to Vallaki. They may also encounter her much later in the campaign, on her way to Berez to try (for the umteenth time) to save her sister from Baba Lysaga. If encountered on the road, Jeny rides in a tiny rickshaw puled by a giant boar named Toady.

    • If the players make a friend of Jeny, she'll give them a little wooden coin with the words, "Pretty peny, show me Jeny" carved into the surface. If a player flips the coin and utters the rhyme, a massive tree will grow from the earth beneath where the coin lands, with Jeny inside. She warns the players that the coin should only be used in emergencies and never indoors, but is otherwise elusive to its function. (much thanks to whomever on discord came up with this wonderful idea! <3)

• The Mountain Fane

  • Appearance and General Notes

    • The eldest of the three ladies, the Huntress of the mountain fane is currently an old, withered hag by the name of Laura Stoneheart. Unlike the fun and quirky Jeny, Laura is crude and blunt, detesting company and mortals altogether. She's the harshest of the sisters and borderline rude when met in conversation.

  • Campaign Sitings

    • Though hags and drained of their power, the ladies are still immortal archfey connected to the land. As such, even as hags, they can't die. To truly kill them, one would have to burn and salt all of Barovia.

    • This is truly unfortunate for poor Laura, because she fell into the hands of Baba Lysaga many years ago.

    • Instead of killing goats to keep her alive, as the published book tells us, Baba instead has Laura tied to the ceiling of her hut, right above her bathtub. Every week or so, Baba slits Laura's throat and baths in her blood. The blood of an archfey is naturally uncannily powerful and has been keeping Baba alive and well all these years. The goats are just food. ;)

• The Forest Fane

  • I've personally made the Seeker Madam Eva.

    • Now, Madam Eva as written is a baller concept, but I had trouble consolidating her into the campaign into a way that the PCs could actually find out about and then make relevant to the story. Yes, she's Strahd's long lost sister, but how has she been alive so long then? How in the world would the PCs find out her goals without her actively telling them? And if they did find out she was looking for a Strahd successor, how would you rework that to be relevant for your party's overarching goal?

    • Since starting my campaign, I've seen some super interesting answers for these, mainly from the wondrous u/guildsbounty. For instance, the semi-canon info about Vistani being immortal and out of place from the natural flow of time. That's super interesting, but was still harder for me to figure a logical way to tell my party. Also, my players are the kind of people who'd find witches much more plausible than an immortal race of humans.

    • You can take or leave my idea of making Eva a Lady, of course. But if you find the time traveling bit more interesting I highly recommend going and reading guildsbounty's reworks of Eva and Arabelle. While I didn't use the ideas in my own campaign, they're super cool and may fit your own game. ;)

  • Madam Eva's new Background as a Fane

    • So. All that about Eva being Strahd's sister? Scratch it. We're starting fresh here.

    • Instead, way back in the day when the Ladies were at their peak, the Forest Fane took an interest in offering predictions to her followers. Glimpses of the future and the gift of foresight often came to her most avid followers. Over time, she eventually became entwined with the Vistani and their blood became saturated with her gifts.

    • One particularly gifted fortune teller and most avid follower of the Ladies Three was a woman named Eva. Eva eventually grew old and died, but passed her gift to a successor who became the next Madam Eva. And so on and so forth. However, when Strahd came to the land, desecrating the shrines and entombing the Ladies in their hag forms, the Forest Fane herself decided to take up the position of Madam Eva and live safely with the Vistani.

    • Though her common name is Maggie Treenail, the Seeker has gone by Madam Eva for quite literally centuries now. Though the Vistani know she's powerful, they have long since forgotten the Ladies for the most part and don't know Eva's true nature.

Ladies in the Endgame

If you're going with a super buffed Strahd, as many DMs do, the Ladies can prove a fun addition to the game and a vital tool to Strahd's defeat.

As modified, Strahd is immortal due to his connection with the Dark Power, Vampyr. He literally controls the weather and has extra buffs because of the Ladies. And, you'll likely end up buffing his stat block and spell lists to extend his terror throughout the game. After all that, Strahd is verifiably a terrifying demon for any party. Chipping away at his defenses will prove crucial to taking him down and give most parties much needed purpose to go galavanting across Barovia.

The Origin of Lycanthropy in Barovia

As another bit of lore and practical application for the Ladies, they are actually the origin of Lycanthropy in Barovia. As I detailed in my Lycanthropy post, I separated Lycanthropy into two categories: Inherited and Infected, or natural born and cursed. While similar, one version is a blessing and incredibly useful and the other is a game shifting curse.

The Ladies originally used Lycanthropy to gift their faithful followers and to curse their blasphemers. The Huntress (Mountain Fane/Laura Stoneheart) is responsible for wolf lycanthropes in Barovia while the Seeker (Madam Eva/Forest Fane/Maggie Treenail) is responsible for raven lycanthropes in Barovia. In their current, weakened states, they are incapable of granting or curing lycanthropy however.

The Winery Gemstones: Gifts from the Ladies

The book tells us that the gems were created by a wizard long ago. Now, I find it almost too convenient that there are three magic gemstones that seem to inspire plant life and three Ladies of the Wood who rule over nature. So a tiny rewrite was in order.

To borrow directly from u/DragnaCarta again, a young mage came to Barovia long before Strahd's time and fell in love with the land. She formed a bond with the locals as well as the more nature-based tribes living in the woods (the old druid tribes) and managed to broker a peace between the two factions. Her negotiations brought a beautiful era of peace and understanding between the early settlers of the valley and the forest folk, which impressed the Ladies significantly. To help the mage settle the land and start a bountiful vineyard, they each gifted her with a gemstone to plant in her fields.

That's all folks. I know, this post turned out to be more about the Fanes than the gems. But this seems like a good amount for a chapter in my series. I'll be sure to include more on the gems in the Winery post. Until then, love you guys!

• Mandy