Who: Wereravens. Ravenkin. One of the two cursed kindreds of this valley — the wolves are the other. Our barman is one of them.
Where: The Blue Water Inn is an information hub. Their clan holds the winery. The agent minding us turned out to be Muriel Vinshaw — “Mirabel” was a mangling; she is quite clear on the spelling — and as of Session 11 she is not minding us. She is with us.
Status: Revealed (Session 10). Allied in the field (Session 11): Muriel fights beside us, and their courier Falkon is missing at the winery.
The reveal
It went: a second impossible letter through a warded window — trust is hard — a squirrelly landlady, a fluttering just out of sight, and a barman invited upstairs to help us understand our window situation. We walked Urwin through the logic (“but you never told us the cake was poisoned”), said as gently as an armed room can that we all knew — and he turned into a wereraven in our bedroom. Same mass. Feathers like scrolled black iron. One of the most beautiful and alarming things any of us have ever seen.
What they told us
- Seven hundred years they have worked against the devil, in a land where “he is almost literally the land.” He is not omnipotent. They do what can be done.
- The Vistani say a party of adventurers will one day topple him. There have been seven hundred years of parties. Urwin does not hold his breath, and said so, kindly.
- The raven the last heroes killed — the one Roger’s band cut down on their first road — was his Great Uncle Frederick. Don’t kill the ravens was never a superstition. It was a family.
- They are information brokers, not fighters. “The fighting is what you are for.”
- The lore of the bones (St. Andral’s Church): the bones of the saint and the church together cast a hallowing over the whole city — while they rest in place, no lesser dead thing can pass Vallaki’s walls at all. The devil himself could enter the city — but never the church. The bones rest there no longer. Do the math on six coffins.
- Wachterhaus is warded to the nines — a black hole to raven agents. In ten years they have never gotten inside. (As of the end of Session 10, we have.)
Session 11: the active part
Not all of them are brokers. Muriel Vinshaw — married into the clan, trailing us since the pie days in the village of Barovia — introduced herself at a corner table (“I heard you were admiring my plumage. You also snore.”), described herself as the Ravens’ active sort (“I can stab things”), and lent us her arm on the grounds that we have been mucking it up. She then killed two vampires with her own beak. The brokers-not-fighters rule has a magnificent exception.
Her partner Falkon flew to the winery to report to the main clan and has not come back. “Something afoul in the winery,” she reckons. “A future endeavor.” Urwin, meanwhile, has sent Danika and the boys there. We are trying not to do that math out loud.
Where we stand with them
Their offer to gather intelligence stands — at their risk. Their advice, given free and kindly meant: “There is more to Barovia than Vallaki. You can just leave.”
We are not going to leave. Demonstrably. There is dust on our boots to prove it.
- Standing order, party-wide, upgraded: never harm a raven.
Appears in: S9, S10, S11. See also: Muriel Vinshaw, Urwin Martikov, Roger, The House of Wachter, Quests & Threads.