Here we go folks it is time for me to start doing a full author commentary of Book Six of Monster Party series, based obviously on the adventure called "Shadow Rift." This comment section delayed by my love of blood bowl as I managed to go 4-1 this weekend, my chaos team (the Gridiron Warriors) loosing only to a necromantic team that had a strength four ghoul, a strength four zombie, and a strength five weight, also known as entirely too much strength!
This adventure unlike most, clearly has some continuity behind it. It directly follows after Servant of Darkness, for the obvious reason that even in Ravenloft, most villains the PCs face will end up suffering some form of comeuppance. Loht however, despite pulling the strings behind the boowray that caused so much strife for everyone back in during adventure (not to mention ending up kidnapping a girl himself eventually) got away scott free with the magical sword he wanted.
So this adventure uses the end of that one as a jumping off point.
Now, if you're familiar with that particular adventure, or just have a copy of the book in question you might notice something.
Servant of Evil is roughly 75 pages long.
Shadow Rift is roughly 125 pages long.
Yet Book 5 and Book 6 ended up being within spitting difference of being the exact same length as one another, regardless of if you measure by total number of words or number of chapters.
So how did that happen?
Well it happened because for better or worse there's a lot in this adventure that is really good (well some of it is really good, some of it is just okay) for an adventure, but not very useful/interesting for a novel.
I'll touch on that as I go through it.
That said, let me start out by addressing a fairly obvious question that some of you may be wondering about.
Alex is indeed half-shadow fey on his mother's side. Florence in turn is very well aware of this particular fact.
Florence stars out this story with a deep seated hatred towards shadow fey, and yes she knows that Alex is half-shadow fey.
So, how come the fact that she was in love with someone who was half-shadow fey never caused her to moderate her opinion on shadow fey in particular?
Well, there's an entirely reasonable explanation.
Florence hates/dislikes/is prejudiced against the shadow fey because of their endless cycle of pulling themselves back together after they die unless they are burned by sunlight or have their souls shattered by being energy drained.
It is her opinion that this endless cycle leaves them unable to grasp what it actually means "to die" and so they can't really bring themselves to properly care about the deaths/feelings of other who are not shadow fey.
As a half-shadow fey, Alex has a few minor magical abilities, (that only work if he's not in sunlight) some stat and armor class buffs, extremely long hair, and a lifespan that should be twice the length of a normal human's (now, there's no word on this one way or another, but I'm going to assume that half-shadow fey just age more slowly once they mature rather than taking longer to reach maturity. Alex's entire back story would make no sense if even had twenty he had yet to go through puberty, but as the Van Richten Guide to Shadow Fey only says "Assuming they survive that long, they can live for twice as long as their mortal parent" either interpretation seems equally valid) with no special come back to life abilities.
In short, the thing that Florence hates most about shadow fey, simply isn't present at all in Alex. Half-shadow fey are born, live and die just like every other kind of demi-human, they lack the eternal recurrence which brings with it a deadening of the soul to the importance of people having only one life, and thus it being a crime/shame/horror to cut that life short for no/petty reason.
Anyway, now that we've addressed the elephant in the room, lets move on to talking about the adventure itself!
We start more or less exactly where the other one left off (as I previously mentioned) with the group still in Tepest and still wearing all the various Tepest related disguises in order to avoid drawing too much attention to themselves.
They won't be needing them very much (other than with Kian of course) but they had no way of knowing about that ahead of time.
Our adventure truly begins with the group arriving at the village of Briggdarrow.
Thus begins an interesting situation where the heroes are in a town where no one they can meet is quite "right" at the moment. That said, they're not in any immediate danger from the shadowless townsfolk of course.
As you may have noticed, the book of purchases that the group finds is written in Vassi, since the Tepestani language that Wyan has created is still in its infancy and so is not super wide spread even in Tepest.
Likewise the Gazetteers which normally talk about the names of the coins in any given domain, don't do so in Tepest. This leads me to the (not unreasonable conclusion) that being a small domain with no overall central authority, there is nobody who has the time or authority to bother minting coins in Tepest. Instead, the people get by on either foreign coin from Nova Vaasa or Darkon (Tepest's two larger, more prosperous, and more centralized neighbors) or make do with barter.
In fact, after another round of reading Gazetteer V (five) Tepest has a completely barter based economy and the group probably should have needed to pay for those horses they rented back in book five via goods you can eat/use rather than shiny coins.
Granted, Devi's bag of holding no doubt could have produced enough of whatever they need to acquire the beasts temporarily. Yes Devi's bag of holding is often my catch all solution for most minor miscellaneous problems that the group comes across. That said, I feel this is quite intrinsically true to the setting, I'm sure any of you who have played much D&D have either run into characters who use a bag of holding to carry along all manner of miscellaneous doodads so that you'll never find yourself lacking for some minor tool or trinket, or you've actually been those characters!
When they go and explore the village's church Alex and the others find various remains of how the Muryan who attacked the village dragged its residents there to steal their shadows.
The burnt down candles are the remains of the magic candles used as part of the ceremony and the left over crumbs of food are bits of the magical faerie food involved in the ritual. Eating it, or any other faerie food that the characters encounter over the course of this adventure is not a good idea for reasons I'm fairly certain I've already explained in my chapter author comments, but will do so again here just for completeness sake.
After you eat magical faerie food, it is the only kind of food you can draw sustenance from, meaning that you're either doomed to a life of needing to constantly steal from the Arak, or more likely eventually being taken by them and turned into a changeling/servant of some kind.
Alex who is very well verse in fey fairytale (and some of the ones he grew up with might have had more truth in them than most for obvious reasons) is perfectly aware of the trope of "eat magical food, never be able to return to your ordinary life/friends and family" and so throughout this entire adventure he's very strict on the group only eating the food that they've brought with them, or stuff Florence has cast detect magic on and made sure is safely mundane.
Alex first uses the term "elf-shot" to describe people who have had their shadows stolen which Devi finds offensive for obvious reasons. In the original first draft of Ravenloft the Arak were actually drow, and thus had more in common with elves than with fey (this is probably why so many of them have pointed ears but Florence a Sylvan Fey doesn't).
With the current revisions however, there were still at one point a handful of drow who ended up going to the Shadow Rift thanks to the Mists and spreading the teachings of the Spider Queen there, but it has still been primarily occupied by Arak/Shadow Fey.
Thus Alexander decides to switch to "Shadow-reft" instead. It is a better term anyway given that it does an accurate job of describing what is wrong with those people (they've been left without their shadows) and it has nothing to do with either elves or being shot with arrows.
That covers chapter one, and lets move onto chapter two.
The book contains plenty of fun/interesting stuff to see and do around town, and I only touched on enough of it to give an overall feel of the situation rather than describing each and every possible situation for reasons of not being able to make all of them worth the time to write or read, and I always try to keep these stories moving along at a decent clip with something interesting happening in as many scenes (IE as few pure exposition scenes) as possible.
The situations that the group does run in are all based on stuff that is in the adventure book including a collection of foreign liquors of a decidedly mediocre nature.
Eventually once the PCs have jumped through enough hoops you can have them catch sight of Kian, and eventually chase him down. He being the only human left in the entire village who still has a shadow makes him the best source of information possible for helping the PCs puzzle out exactly what is going on, and what is likely to happen to them if they decide to stay the night.
Our six protagonists being far more powerful than most Ravenloft adventuring parties decide that there's no reason not to take that particular risk, and so make themselves at home in the village's inn, though Alex probably would have preferred an arrangement with a little bit more privacy.
Which takes us to chapter three and the muryan attack.
This attack is is one of those famous/infamous Ravenloft encounters where it is perfectly fine if the heroes are defeated, as it often seems that no Ravenloft adventure is quite complete without a moment where the PC's find themselves in the clutches of the villain and only just barely manage to escape by a great deal of luck and pluck.
If you don't believe me, recall Alex's misfortune at Markov's hands back in Book 1, the wolf run in book 2, or how easy it is to die in Paridon (book 3) if you don't stick to the buddy system or act like a paranoid maniac. In book 4 there is a lesser one where you can wind up getting arrested if you misbehave in Kantora and thus are taken to Othmar, only to be ordered to retrieve his treasure from the bandits. In Book 5 there was no moment of the heroes directly being captured, but you still had to go more or less hat in hand to the Three Sisters to get the Tincture of Midnight from them, which accomplishes more or less the same effect.
Anyway, from what I can tell, it is not uncommon for people to accuse Ravenloft adventures of being railroady. After all, a darklord's power to seal the border is at the very least a blank check to a GM for forcing the PCs to deal with whatever situation they wind up in and not just run away from it. To its credit, at this point in this adventure, it is not at all railroady.
Okay I tell a small lie, but if this part of the adventure is railroady, it is a railroad laid out in a weird spider web pattern where a great many different lines diverge from one central boarding station, and all converge back at another central station.
That first central boarding station is Briggdarrow at night, and the point where they all converge again is in Maeve's dinning room.
There are about half a dozen different ways that the heroes can get from one to the other.
I'll describe the path that our protagonists end up taking as they take it, though it ends up being more or less the second quickest path there.
The quickest path to get there is for the heroes to wind up being defeated by the muryan.
If that happens, then they'll end up being captured by the shadow fey who are after all raiding this particular town for slaves rather than to try and kill people. Loht wants to start creating a huge army to help secure the various pieces of his father's regalia, and also to try and better prove his worth to his father Arak the Earlking once he is finally freed from the Obsidian Gate.
At least that is what Loht thinks he is doing.
In practice, first you turn a human into a changeling to get one servant… then if you want, you're free to kill the shadowless human and reanimate their corpse into another undead servant, it is like a two for one sale!
Loht probably is holding off on giving the order to kill the people of Briggdarrow at the moment because so long as they're still alive they'll end up drawing more people and possibly lure out any remaining villagers who are currently in hiding. So given that the shadow fey won't get the order to start killing off the humans for a while, and the fact that the muryan who would doubtlessly carry out said order end up being a bit 'inconvenienced' soon enough, that is why the villagers will still be alive (if still shadowless) when our heroes get back to them beyond the story's epilogue.
So, to get back to my point… if the heroes, are defeated they get taken as captives.
They wake up in stocks along with a few other prisoners, and eventually end up getting force-fed some of that faerie food I talked about previously. Luckily for them, Maeve shows up and says she has an interest in taking the PCs as her servants.
While the muryan who captured the PCs serve Loht… Loht has never done anything to try and delegitimize his sister, simply shift her and her followers into a lesser role. So the muryan (who were never Loht's most faithful followers) aren't quite willing to disobey a direct order from the Shee Princess herself, not when it is on such an unimportant matter as the fate of a few changelings who are of great interest to her because… well shee are flighty like that.
Maeve then uses some magic to make it so the heroes aren't reduced to the sort of compete and utter apathy most people who have had their shadows stolen fall into… for a while.
Their only hope to get back to normal is of course to go into the Shadow Rift and locate the changelings that were made of their shadows. Not only that, but to overcome their faerie food addiction, they'll need still more help from Maeve's magic, help that she is only going to give them if they do a favor or two for her…. and you can probably guess which ones.
If the heroes manage to drive off the muryan, or manage to flee from them, either by leaving Briggdarrow before night falls, or breaking away from the battle and somehow managing to shake their pursuers, then there are a lot of different things that they can do.
Before I talk about those things… I'm going to talk about what our heroes end up doing.
Florence displays the "correct" method for killing of shadow fey for good just like she did in the last chapter. Except that since these particular shadow fey get fought at night, the only way that Florence can get access to sunlight to deal with them is to keep them prisoner until the sun rises and then have them get burned to death by it.
If that sounds incredibly cruel boarding on worthy of taking a dark powers check… allow me to make the following counter argument. To kill off most vampires for good you need to track them back to their coffin, throw off its lid, and discover that before you now is not a deadly foe but a withered and weakened skeletal figure that is barley clinging to existence….
At which point you need to cut off its head, fill its mouth with holy water, or otherwise desecrate its body pretty thoroughly to make sure that it stays dead.
Nothing I have read in Ravenloft have ever suggested that the proper method for killing vampires should cause dark powers checks.
The fact that a monster is defenseless and in your power does not entitle it to mercy if it is quite literally impossible to kill it completely in honest combat.
As Florence herself notes, the worst thing about tyrants is how they tend to make everyone around them more tyrannical. With the hoops that must be jumped through to permanently kill a shadow fey, Gwydion makes everyone who deals with them just a little bit worse of a person. He's a jerk like that.
Alex and Florence have a conversation that probably makes a great deal more sense now that we know about his heritage and so are more aware of what exactly was going on behind the scenes/inside the character's minds.
At the start of this story, Alex doesn't trust himself to recognize his mother on sight, but he knows for certain that she was a muryan. For that reason, Alex is unwilling to let Florence kill female muryan for good. He doesn't especially like the things his mother did… but he's also on a gut level aware that his father's relationship with his mother went much better than any other shadow fey and mortal romances he's been able to find tales of.
So, in short when it comes female to muryan Alex lets them off "relatively lightly" (in the sense of only killing them for a decade or so rather than doing it for good) even if he can't recognize which one of them is his mother and none of them seem to remember him in turn, just to be on the safe side.
Now granted, shadow fey can change breeds, even without being killed by something other than sunlight, for example, simply because their moods/interests/desires change over time. A muryan who does actually get tired of constantly needing to find new dancing partners because their old ones keep dying and decide to take a more sedate approaching to dancing can become a shee, if they find the process of death itself interesting, they become a sith, or if they find greater and greater interest in dealing pain they will eventually become a powrie.
In short, it is entirely possible that given how much Shadow Rift Time (technically about a year passes in the Shadow Rift for every week that goes by outside of it, but that's not terribly important for what takes place over the course of this adventure, all it ends up meaning is our protagonists will be surprised to discover they get back to Tepest the same day they originally left it but a few hours later) has passed, Alexander's mother could have become any other breed of Arak since they last met.
On the other hand, though Iriwa told Alex a great deal about Arak as part of the fairytales she delighted him with as he grew up, she didn't tell him everything. Either the Arak's ability to change breeds fall into the category of things she didn't tell him about or Alex is of the opinion that if his mother stopped being a muryan she'd be breaking with her past to the point that she is no longer his mother, and thus no longer deserves his somewhat awkward attempts at "protection" anymore.
Florence finds this particular behavior a bit nonsensical, but being a dryad she doesn't have and never had parents of her own so isn't exactly in a position to judge.
Alex and Florence can't exactly come to an agreement on this particular problem (as Alex directly points out) but they're at least able to agree to disagree in a cordial manner and not let it come between them.
Stepping away from what did happen, we'll now take some time to consider what could have happened...
If the PCs try and go in the same direction that Kian's sister was said to go, in which case they'll run into a bunch of powrie… just like our protagonists did…
They can also go into the Goblinwood in which case they'll wind up encountering a bunch of goblins. These goblins being from Tepest are dangerous for reasons beyond just raw numbers. It is entirely possible that they will be able to defeat the PCs, at which point they trade them to the Arak who are willing to pay a very respectable price in metal weapons (which goblins can't make) for healthy human prisoners at the moment.
Which leads us back to waking up in stocks, getting force-fed faerie cake and getting rescued by Maeve as previously explained.
If they decide to take a boat out of Briggdarrow then they end up running into the Avanc, a nasty creature that's like a cross between a crocodile and a shark.
It is a monster that is tied up in the back story of the Lady of the Lake, who we met back in book five and Mirri disposed of. To reiterate/clarify/expand her history, there was once a kind hermit who ended up offending some evil Fey spirit who cursed him, transforming the hermit into the monstrous Avanc, changing his body but not his mind.
Said hermit had already been in mutual love with the Lady of the Lake (a sirine) who was not powerful enough to change him back, and so she refused to abandon him, especially as she'd found herself with child shortly before he was transformed..
Then some jerkish paladin came along who had heard that the waters were infested by a gigantic monster. While the Lady of the Lake was busy… doing… stuff... (this part is never very well elaborated on even in the Gazetteer) the Avanc (who was utterly incapable of human speech) found himself unable to convince the paladin that he was no threat to anyone and ended up being killed.
So the Lady of the Lake comes back, finds her lover dead and swears revenge. She tracks down a bunch of hags (who probably weren't the Three Sisters due to some time related shenanigans that are going to happen before I finish explaining the Avanc's back story) and asks them to help her with her revenge.
They give her a potion that makes her daughter age unnaturally quickly and soon become a beautiful and powerful sorceress. Said daughter seduces the paladin, and his wife finds them in the act.
The wife is horrified, and goes off by herself to cry/fume. Then the Lady of the Lake approaches her and offers to take her to a magical undersea kingdom where she will never again feel pain.
When the paladin's wife says yes, the Lady of the Lake drowns her.
The Lady of the Lake's daughter flees from the paladin as her hair starts going gray and her beauty fades. She gives birth to a monstrous son who looks like a massive half-man half fish creature who also ages unnaturally quickly.
Eventually the Lady of the Lake's daughter and the her (the Lady's) grandson attack the paladin's castle. They're both killed but not before managing to slay just about everyone except for the paladin himself who is "only" mortally wounded.
The Lady of the Lake shows up to offers him a magical potion, promising that it would save him from death.
He drinks it and while it "saves him from death" it doesn't actually heal him. It just leaves him laying there at the edge of death in constant unending pain.
At which point, the Dark Powers throw up a red card.
Mists promptly creep in and obscure everything, when they finally depart, it is as if hundreds of years have gone by. So now the paladin's body is nothing but bones, his castle a broken ruin, and the Lady of the Lake is left alone with her empty hollow victory.
Then just to twist the knife the Dark Powers create another Avanc, except this one is as bestial as it looks and will attack even the Lady of the Lake if she comes near enough to it.
So needless to say, this gigantic predator will show up to severely throw a monkey wrench in any attempt the PCs make to travel by boat and make them feel like they've stepped out of a dark fairytale and into a Jaws movie. The PCs might be able to travel far enough to reach one of the nearby forests, but if they do, well each of the three major forests has it's own scene set up.
I've already discussed the Goblinwoods.
If the PCs go into the Brujamonte woods then they're gonna have a bad time.
Inside it they'll end up inevitably meeting Blackroot a gigantic evil treent who has more or less corrupted all the animal and trees of the forest to his will. He is a really hard fight and loosing to him does not move the plot along, it just leads to the PCs dieing.
Granted, if the PC's bother to actually talk to Kian about which way to go or check for his sister's footprints, he'll tell them/they'll discover that they should go into the Wytchwood which is the correct way forward, and does not lead to any easy ways to get yourself killed.
In short, you only are going to wind up in the Brujamonte if you do something foolish or pay no attention to what is going on, and that can get you killed in any D&D setting not just Ravenloft.
Anyway, if you got into the Wytchwood you are going to get attacked by powries, though as Cal notes in chapter four, the poison on their darts is of a paralytic rather than anything more deadly.
If you fall victim to this poison then the Powrie will capture you and then you're going to end up getting force-fed faerie food, but Maeve will show up, take you as her servants and I've already covered that before…
If they can drive off the Powrie then they'll get a chance to possibly meet up with Maeve on more equal terms.
To do so however first they have to deal with the various magical barriers that Maeve set up to keep out unwanted guests.
Which brings us up to chapter five my book.
As the group approaches Maeve's home, they have to face various different obstacles. The first one is simple to explain, but a little tricky to deal with; a barrier that is impossible to break through as long as you can see it, even though you can only barely see it in the first place.
Half the fun of this is the PC's trying all the obvious approaches (around, over, under, dispel magic) and then see what sort of unconventional (lets cut down a tree and use it as a battering ram!) approaches the PCs may come up with.
They'll either eventually either by luck (damn it this thing is impossible to break… I'm gonna lean against it and catch my breath WOOOAAHHHH!) or by some deduction based on finding a few hints of what Arla ended up doing even if she did it by accident.
Once they're eventually able to get through the first barrier they have to deal with the second, a cloud of strange direction/orientation changing gas.
If you breath in any of this stuff you're not going to be able to tell which way you're going.
The group first attempts one of the more obvious mundane approaches, using a rope line to help determine which way they are going.
The Adventure Book foresaw that PCs might attempt this and suggested how to have this technique fail… and Cal is understandable upset that magic once again gets the better of anything approaching reasonable logic.
Luckily for our protagonists, unlike the first barrier they happen to have a silver bullet for dealing with this obstacle. Mirri can walk through the cloud of gas without any problem at all because being a vampire and dead, she doesn't need to breath.
So she does, the group throws up a bunch of possible (but in this case overly paranoid) ideas about how the barrier might be even more dangerous than it looks… which start to irritate Mirri since no one wants to show her the respect she deserves for so easily defeating Maeve's magic.
After that, she takes some time to get everyone through the barrier and they're now onto the third barrier.
The first and second barriers are relatively passive and pose no real danger to the PCs at all, they're free to remain befuddled by them for hours without being any worse off other than lost time.
The third barrier does not feel like playing nice or giving out second chances.
If you touch the water, then you get one round to have someone cast dispel magic or neutralize poison on you… otherwise you get transformed into a water elemental.
If you make any attempt to cross the brook that involves part of the solution touching the water (a bridge that touches the water, stilts) then water elemental will rise out of the water and attack you.
The good news is that this at least is another "fail forward" situation. If your group ends up all getting transformed into water elemental, then you wake up wet, embarrassed and possibly missing your equipment in Maeve's living room with her having used her magic to revert you back to your normal selves.
Granted you did run afoul of the magic that transformed you while encroaching on her property, and she was kind enough to reverse it, so would you mind terribly doing a few little favors for her? Otherwise she might have to find you hopelessly rude and turn you back into mindless water elementals...
By the way, if you noticed, Mirri was never depicted as using Florence's magic to cross the brook. The others can easily fly across with the aid of her Wind Walk spell, but the brook is running water and so somewhat problematic for her. Even if she was to turn into her natural gaseous form she still wouldn't be able to fly across the brook, because vampires are simply not allowed to cross running water under their own power.
That's why Alex has Kian count to twenty rather than ten, he needs the first ten in order to deal with Mirri. What Kian doesn't see happen is that Mirri transforms herself into a bat, spreads her wings, and Alex hurls her hard. Mirri isn't allowed to cross the brook under her own power, but when Alex gives her plenty of momentum, she is allowed to glide.
Then Alex proceeds to wolf out and toss Kian across the book, with Florence using her dryad plant powers to help catch Kian and make sure he doesn't end up suffering a sudden painful stop.
With the final barrier crossed the group is able to meet up with Arla, though I will point out that in the Adventure Book you actually wind up meeting up with a shee servant of Maeve's at this point. I decided that since our protagonists have have managed to defeat all foes and avoid capture up to this point, there is no real "doom clock" that they/your PCs are directly racing against at this point in the adventure (the people of Briggdarrow aren't going to get any worse the longer they're separated from their shadows) letting the group move at its own pace.
Thus, if like our protagonists, your PCs are clever, they'll probably want to arrive at something approaching noon when the Shadow Fey are most likely to be wrong footed/at their most vulnerable. If the sun it up then it doesn't make sense for an actual arak to be out and about, and no changeling servant would be able to hold anything approaching a complex conversation.
That is why I instead had them run into Arla, inside of meeting her inside Maeve's house, she's the only one who could properly greet the new arrivals.
Which takes us to chapter six, failing to kill one another over appetizers.
In the Adventure Book Maeve's house is the same size inside and outside, but I decided to make it one of those magical homes that is bigger on the inside because it fitted her character to live in a small cottage that suddenly turns into an opulent mansion once you get inside.
Maeve is not evil, she has that going for her. She is however neutral, and she doesn't view most mortals as anything more than especially bright animals, they can be charming pets if they're well behaved, but if they disobey or are dangerous to you then they need to be disciplined/put down.
In short, Maeve could quite easily teach a class on the subject of "not helping your case" when it comes to her interaction with Alex.
Not that Florence is doing the group much good either when it comes to having a polite and reasonable conversation.
Florence can feel the touch of Gwydion in Maeve, just like she could feel it in all the muryan and Onyx, and any other shadow fey that the group has encountered before this adventure. Sadly any shadow fey the group is likely to have encountered was probably causing considerable grief to the mortals of the Core. In short, while there are shadow fey of all alignments, the good ones are unlikely to have done anything that drew the group's attention.
So, on some level you can't really blame Florence since every other shadow fey the group has encountered has been evil. Not only that, but an especially callous form of evil which doesn't even acknowledge the fact that other people can have hopes, dreams, and emotions of their own. Mirri by comparison is willing to grant that ordinary everyday people can have those things… she just doesn't care/doesn't she why her own personal desires shouldn't supersede them.
To put it another way, not all people who score high on the 40 point sociopathic personality test are going to become violent criminals, some of them just become cutthroat CEO's/lawyers. You can have a conversation with Mirri about how much "worth" should be given to the cares and concerns of others. You can't have that conversation with most shadow fey, because they don't believe mortals have "proper"/"real" cares and concerns.
Maeve ends up displaying that even if she isn't malicious, she still holds true to this particular belief, and while she is not actively mean she is coldly callous in the extreme.
Alex is not amused by the fact that she serves him/them food that is illusioned to make it look far more appetizing than it actually is. He is especially not amused by the fact that it is illusioned faerie food, with all the long term consequences for the PCs mentioned previously if they end up eating any of it…
While Maeve would never be so gouache as to directly lie to her guests (even uninvited ones) Alex sees the illusioned food as a sign that the only reason Maeve will not lie to him with words (since she has already lied to him with food) is because she considers it beneath her, and would prefer to simply hide the truth/say it in such a way that those who hear it will infer the wrong thing.
In short, Alex is not especially happy to be sharing a table with Maeve, even if he might find her slightly better company than say the Three Sisters.
In short, after a brief period of trying to be especially courteous, Alex turns the "jerk" side of his personality, twists the dial to "11", then finds a way to set it to "12" instead just to drive the point home.
Maeve refuses to be moved by the "goodness of her heat" to care about or help the people of Briggdarrow, so it falls to Alex to be a big enough bastard to demand those people get their shadows back as payment. He insists that he'd allow a tyrant of god like power to seize control of an entire nation, if not the entire world, if Maeve won't preform (what to a shadow fey is) a relatively minor service for him.
Granted the argument that he presents to Maeve does have one obvious problem with it if approached from a position of perfect knowledge.
Given how time flows differently in the Shadow Rift (once again, roughly one year passes in the Shadow Rift for every week that goes by outside it) Gwydion could spend a century tormenting the Arak in the Shadow Rift and only about two years would have passed outside of it. That means Gwydion's rise to power could very much be a problem on a mortal time scale.
Maeve however loves holding cards close to her chest a little bit too much to explain the time dilation effect to Alex though. Besides, if she had bothered to explain the time dilation, Alex's counter would probably have been to start explaining everything that he's learned/realized about Darklords in his time as an adventurer.
While he doesn't have perfect knowledge of that particular aspect of Ravenloft, he has got most of the corner pieces. He knows for example that Darklords either are not allowed, or do as a rule simple do not wish to leave the places that they call home.
Alex is wide enough read to have probably gotten hold of a copy of Rudolph Van Richten's notes that resulted from him hearing the contents of a particular stolen book (see I Strahd the war Against Azalin) which no doubt mention what happened when Strahd tried to leave Barovia, even when he was walking not into strange mist but simply across a physical border.
Likewise, Vlad Drakov loves to lead his armies from the front in any internal dispute/repressive action (see the Years of the Impaled Rats) but has never taken part in any of his invasions of other land, which is a big clue that Strahd isn't the only darklord who found themselves unable to leave their domain.
He would thus argue to Maeve that since Gwydion is the most powerful and most evil being in the Shadow Rift, who is also currently suffering from an obvious horrific curse, he (Gwydion) is clearly the Shadow Rift's darklord. Which means that even if he should win free of the Obsidian Gate, he'll never be able to escape the Shadow Rift itself, once again meaning that it is clearly an issue for Maeve to worry about, but not him unless she is willing to come to terms with him.
So, faced with Alex evidently somehow managing to care even LESS about the shadow fey than Maeve does about mortals (well that, and the fact that the shadow fey have a gigantic evil magic user of god like power possibly about to be unleashed on them, thus they bargain from a position of weakness) she caves.
Alex continues to be a jerk to her and lays out terms that are basically a gigantic middle finger to showing any sort of trust to Maeve. It is basically him openly saying "here are the terms, and in a few weeks I'll come by to beat you with a huge stick when you try and weasel out of them rather than live up to what you promised me."
On the other hand, he doesn't really have a choice in the mater. Shadow fey are notorious for living up to the word rather than spirit of their agreements, to the point that Alex would probably be able to rattle off at least half a dozen such stories.
He thus after laying out the strongest terms possible, then throws down an escape clause argument ("You don't stop working at this till I say I am pleased with your efforts") which still might not be enough against someone they though they could swindle. Maeve for example could magically crafted an illusion which seemed to meet the required results, then banished the magic once her bargaining partner admitted they were satisfied.
Luckily, Alex has already proven that his eye has the power to see through magical illusion, and so Maeve realizes how pointless it is to try and trick him. That and as bad at diplomacy as Alex is being, Florence is even worse, so instead of good cop bad cop you get bad cop, worse cop.
Other groups of PCs who may find themselves bargaining from a position of considerably less strength would probably not be able to strike such a good deal, but if they in the task to stop Gwydion, Maeve will probably end up restoring the people of Briggdarrow as best she can simply a show of her magnanimity.
Either way, the group manages to make a deal with Maeve, they get her ring which will show the shadow fey (and a few others) who see it that the holders are friends/servants of Maeve and so win the PCs at least a little safety /a few favors in the Shadow Rift.
Which brings us to chapter seven.
In my first draft of this chapter I had the chapter start with Cal complaining about how he didn't know what was going on/where they were all of a sudden with the PCs having just come out the other end of the fracture between the Shadow Rift and Tepest.
It is hard to describe what these "fractures" are exactly, because they really shouldn't exist. They're holes in the border between the Shadow Rift and Tepest which is kept constantly closed/sealed by Gwydion. Thus, anyone who tries to cross the border as it physically exists on a normal map in either direction will end fading away to nothing. If you go through a fracture though, you can make the journey safely.
You can make the journey safely, but for some reason that effects Arak just as deeply as it effects mortals, you will have no memory at all of what crossing through the fracture entailed.
Any maps that are made of the journey are said in the Adventure Book to loose their pigment and abruptly become just blank sheets of paper, I decided to go for something a little bit more ominous, but can you really blame me for doing so? It certainly fits the theme of a journey you can't possibly recall in the slightest.
Getting back to my comments on how the chapter started, instead of beginning with the protagonists freshly arrived in the Shadow Rift, I decided to set the stage a little more, if only to make the end result all the more dramatic/shocking. One moment the group is in Tepest, the next (as best they can tell) they're in the Shadow Rift. What lay between no one can be sure of.
Over the course of the journey, the group lost all their "Tepest disguises": James has lost his hat completely revealing his feline ears, Mirri's skin has lost the dye that hides her paleness and her hair has regained the white streak that she'd dyed black (multicolored hair is probably a great way to draw the wrong kind of attention in Tepest), Devi's hair is now back to its normal blue and she is no longer wearing her fake human ears, Alex's hair is back to silver and it has grown long again, Florence's straw like hair has regrown and just like Mirri, her skin is no longer dyed a more normal human pigment. Oh and Cal's tie somehow ended up changing colors, shock, shock, horror, horror!
In an amusing turn of events, from a meta perspective, the group ends up with three changed hair colors, one of them showing off animal like ears, and to our six protagonists, this is a return the status quo rather than a horrific transformation!
Inside the Shadow Rift, the PCs are likely to be presented with a series of new problems to deal with. For some reason Arak maps are always drawn with East at the top rather than North, which Devi being the solid dependable simple detail oriented type, noticed back when Maeve first drew them, but if your PCs don't, then they may end up getting hopelessly confused. It certainly does not help that given how the Shadow Rift has no sun, there is nothing to use to properly orient yourselves by.
At least there would be nothing to properly orient yourself by if Cal didn't know how to make a rudimentary compass. That is entirely accurate by the way, a bit of magnetized metal (though Cal uses some premagnatized ore rather than having a full understanding of the mechanics of magnetism) left to float freely in a solution with no outside effects acting on it (waves for example) will inevitably point north.
At least, that is how things work in real life. In Ravenloft by all rights it shouldn't work, because Ravenloft is not a globe with magnetic poles, but instead a flat rectangle of a world with the Dark Powers pulling various magical strings in order to keep things humming along.
Luckily they're kind enough to make arrangements that keep magnetism working in Ravenloft (even in the Shadow Rift) so while they may not have a sun, they still have a way of telling the cardinal directions and thus roughly which way they're going.
The first group of Arak that our protagonists encounter are the brag. They're undeniable the most dwarf like of Shadow Fey, as they're true neutral and their great love in life is the steady simple reassuring nature of labor.
Brag don't come up with brilliant ideas, that's much more of a firr thing, no a brag's greatest joy is to see something transform from blueprint into actual being. They also like to play every bit as hard as they work, which is why I said they're rather dwarf like in their outlook on life.
When the PCs run into them, the brag are busy fixing a bridge. There's no reason given in the Adventure Book for why the bridge is in need of fixing, so I decided to come up with a relatively reasonable theory that makes sense based on outside events.
Muryan have been capturing a lot of prisoners/creating a lot of changelings recently, and muryan like to dance. You don't want to have a large group of people dancing across your bridge for the same reason that you don't want to have an army marching across one in lockstep. The science that Cal talks about (resonance frequency) is a thing, and it can in theory be caused by too many people/too many things lining up with the innate frequency of an object.
Cal has at least something in common with the brag, though honestly Devi has the most in common with them Cal is probably more of a firr man, since he's most proud of inventing Phoenix which represents an entirely new and brilliant take on firearms.
Devi by comparison is pretty brag like in her outlook on life, since she finds joy (or at least every day contentment) in making sure that all of life's minor little simple concerns like food, water, shelter, and light are taken care of for herself and the group.
Alex puts his considerable height and strength to good use in order to help the brag fix the bridge. They then offer him a drink, and yes as Alex suspects, the drink is still more faerie food. So, sadly Alex has to turn down some excellently brewed brag beer, which probably hurts him even more than normal given the less than stellar spirits he has been interacting with up to this point in the story.
Which takes us to chapter eight.
In chapter eight we really get to meet some of the "nicer" aspects of the Arak, though even then they can be a little bit on the unpleasant side.
Caradoc is a portune, the scholars of the Arak. Just to differentiate/make clear, the brag are the engineers who build things, the firr are the inventors who come up with new ideas, and the portune are the scholars who gather together massive amounts of information of the course of their long lives.
Granted, not always the most interesting or useful sort of information as mortals might view it, but it is information none the less. Caradoc like most portune is lawful good, but has a somewhat extremely Darwinian view of life/existence.
That works fine enough when you're observing non-sentient animals/plants, but it tends to break down when you try and apply it to beings with sentience and emotions. Such things lead to either concern for those weaker then themselves (as James expresses) or "weaker" but more numerous members of a species banding together to try and wipe out newly emerging "stronger" evolutionary trends of that same species.
If that last sentence left you scratching your head I'll try to say it more plainly.
Natural lycanthropes have a higher CR rating than normal examples whatever race they are. Not only that, but baring a few rare cases where the natural lycanthrope may suffer from some morphic instability, they have next to no draw backs other than dietary restrictions.
In a world that had perfectly level competition, you would expect the natural lycanthropes to beat the non-lycanthropes black and blue, eventually out surviving and out-breeding the baseline humans/elfs/dwarfs, until natural lycanthropy became the baseline and those who couldn't transform into animals are the exception, or completely non-existent.
In point of fact, that is pretty much exactly what is currently happening in Verbrek at the moment. According to Gazetteer IV (4) there are roughly 800 normal humans in Verbrek, but roughly 1,1000 werewolves. Now we've got no way of knowing how many of those are natural and how many are afflicted, but in Alfred Timothy's private "nature preserve" baseline humanity with no challenge rating adjustment is continuously getting the short end of the stick compared to its lycanthropic cousins.
In other lands though this isn't happening. The moment that lycanthropes show up, they're usually hunted down and killed. They're never allowed to really reach self sustaining numbers the way that they have in Verbrek, and so while the individual natural lycanthrope is better able to survive than any individual human, the society favors baseline humans and makes lycanthropic traits undesirable.
Thus, the society in which the creatures live has such a great impact upon them that it acts as a counter balance to the innate individual natural advantages!
Likewise as I previously mentioned, James would argue that there are beings of greater fitness to survive than normal examples of their species, who also posses great moral strength. Those beings (like James) would not wish to out-breed normal human beings to extinction and bring about a society solely of natural werecats.
Of course, Caradoc being an Arak, even if he is a portune, does not believe that mortal human beings have real emotions, and so is perfectly happy to suggest a hypothesis that predicts they'll act and react no differently than everyday animals.
It is worth pointing out that in the adventure book as written, the PCs should encounter the alven first and Caradoc after.
I decided to flip the order for reasons that should be obvious to just about everybody, since clearly the meeting with the alven was much more important both from the plot perspective (giving the group a guide to the Malachite Palace (which according to the Adventure Book you shouldn't be able to do, even if you have show them Maeve's ring and really impress them with your knowledge of plants/flowers they still won't openly guide you, but providing you guys with a good story take precedence over perfectly reproducing what is in the Adventure Book)) and from the perspective of the character development, as Florence finally meets a type of Arak she really does have a similar outlook on life to.
Granted, the alven are chaotic good while Florence is neutral good, but Alex is chaotic good also, so Florence has had longstanding an important relationships/agreements with people of that particular alignment before.
What luckily manages to go unsaid is that for the most part, alven tend to see plant life as actively more important than that of mortal humans, as opposed to Florence who simply has room in her heart for both. If she'd seen any of them transform people into trees and then "prune them" for the crime of stepping on flowers, the situation would have gone south pretty darn quickly.
Still, for the moment Florence starts to realize that the "shadowmaker" influence that radiates from all Arak may be dark, it is not always evil.
Which takes us to chapter nine.
Wasn't it funny how Florence insisted to her new Arak friend that Alex is a muryan, as a way of putting his position in the group into context for her? I mean the context does fit, since both Shee and Sith alike will always defer to muryan when it comes to times of war/battle. Keeping in mind that our six protagonists are constantly fighting against various darklords and other wrong doers, that is why Alex is just about constantly in charge, save for a few unusual cases, like Paridon.
Florence's new friend even realizes that Alex's has appropriately muryan like hair!
Foreshadowing, it is what's for breakfast!
Anyway, Florence parts ways with her new friend, and the group is faced with the Malachite Palace.
The Palace is of course rather sparsely defended, partly because the Arak don't believe that they are likely to be attacked by any foes in huge numbers at the moment, (there simply aren't any possible foes to the Arak domination of the Shadow Rift, except for Gwydion of course but he's a special case) and partly because Loht is playing a deeper game than Alex initially suspects.
Loht knows for a fact that Maeve had the Crown of Arak, the last piece of his father's regalia that he now needs to acquire to open the Obsidian Gate. He knows for a fact that Maeve didn't take the Crown with her when she fled the Malachite Palace and then the Shadow Rift completely. Now it isn't necessarily a given that she hid it in the Malachite Palace, since the Shadow Rift is a pretty big place after all.
That said, it is still a fairly reasonable guess to suspect that the crown would be hidden somewhere in the palace. So, he's willing to let Maeve's servants poke around he place at their leisure, since they've probably been told where exactly she has hidden the crown, and once those particular servants have gotten their hands on the crown, his servants will take it from them!
He underestimates the group and uses far too few Sith to ambush them, but hey, Arak never seem to miss a chance to underestimate their surface born foes.
So the trap gets sprung as neat as you could please…. But the fact that they want the crown more than they want the heroes dead acts against them.
Alex presses that particular fact for all it is worth, and transforms the trap into a Mexican Standoff, before turning the tables.
The muryan in charge of the matter gets the upper hand against Florence, but makes the critical mistake of believing that it is ever safe to be near a conscious enemy magic user whose spell list you do not have utter and complete knowledge of. She makes him regret that particular choice in short order due to an interesting quirk of the sunbeam spell, and then thanks to another use of wind walk the group escapes from the next round of ambushers.
Also, if you've noticed that boy Florence sure does like sunbeam, wind walk, and to a less extent, warp wood, I'll remind you that I'm portraying her as a spontaneous druid rather than a traditional one. That means she knows fewer spells over all, but has more flexibility among the spells she does know, picking and choosing at the moment she decides to cast a spell, rather than needing to lock her spell choices in stone each morning.
Which actually covers all of chapter nine and chapter ten, so lets move onto chapter eleven.
We skip over some pursuit by/a fight with the Teg at this point as you might have been able to guess. It helps show Loht putting the screws to the PCs and keeping the pressure on them, but it doesn't really offer any major chances for character development.
Instead I decide to create my own scene of the group settling in for the night and if we don't exactly have dramatic character development, we at least take a moment to hit some familiar beats, reestablish how they like to interact with each other, and give the tension a moment to dissipate.
After all, if you want your next shocking event to strike home with any real strength, you need to let the reader/PCs have a chance to reestablish some sense of normality/status quo.
So the six settle in for dinner.
Devi and her bag of holding provide just about all the possible essentials, with the one exception of more rats for James, since the bag can't hold anything alive (say better anything animate just to be super clear, it can hold plant life just fine) or anything sentient.
I established those rules back in Book One so the entire issue of James being stuck on an island where nearly all the rats he can find are intelligent actually gives some bite to his dietary restrictions as a natural lycanthrope. In this book however, I actually bother to at least establish some sense of why those rules exist back at Maeve's home.
Sentient beings are not allowed/able/choose not to go into a bag of holding because it is a surefire way to get driven mad. The human/elf/dwarf/vampire mind just isn't built to handle the sort of geometric impossibilities that take place inside a bag of holding, as even Maeve's magical mansion in a cottage is enough to make Cal's brain hurt if he tries to think about it.
Getting back to this chapter, Devi provides the group with most of the materials that they need.
We also get to see that James' mask wasn't the only thing that the kept from that tomb in Nova Vaasa back in Book 4, they've also made off with the no longer necessary jars of preservation.
If you were wondering, indeed Count and Countess will get to live out the rest of their natural lifespan as pleasantly pampered pets of Tristen Hiregaard since even Malken isn't such a fiend as to try and murder Tristen's pets. Okay, he is such a fiend, but he still isn't going to do it because he'd rather use them as spies, which Tristen knows Malken will do, but would rather at least know which cats are spying on him, and in short those two are going to be forever locked in a very complicated game of "I know you know that I know…." among other issues/problems.
Still, for Count and Countess at least they can count on having a happy ending.
James likewise does what he can for the group.
In actual wolf packs (for the given definition of "actual" here meaning "as observed by human study of wolves who are frequently not in the wild when such study is conducted) there are typically two omegas (one of either gender) as opposed to James being an omega while Mirri is classified as a beta.
That said, while Alex obviously draws a lot of personal inspiration from lupine sources, he adapts it as necessary for dealing with humans instead of wolves, which is why he lets Mirri be a beta.
Either way, James actually does more or less fulfill the general purpose of being an omega wolf. He's the lowest on the totem poll, he'll show submission to any of the other members of the group who seriously request it of him, he's the member of the group who most frequently has hunger related issues (though due to his dietary restrictions rather than needing to eat last/there not being enough food left over from the others eating) and he serves as the group's court fool/jester, it is his job to amuse the others whenever they need it.
So, with the ire of Gwydion (who even while sealed within the Obsidian Gate can still make his malevolent presence (if not actually have any direct effects in the crunch) felt throughout the entire Shadow Rift) pressing in on them, the group turns to James for help with fighting off the dire sensations and letting them properly relax.
Like I said, I was listening to "Maiden and the Selkie" a lot at the time I wrote that chapter, and I needed to spend a fair amount of time rewriting the song line by line in most places, not to mention adding another entire verse to it.
The length of time it took me to write that section of the chapter probably did a lot to make that particular chapter stretch out and take far longer to write than it is to read. By the time I finished it, I was ready to get this entire story more or less over with. So I do the next thing in the Adventure Book and introduce the erdulitle.
They function more or less like in the book, in that if you show them Maeve's ring and talk calmly and pleasantly with you then they'll give you aid, but not join you in battle.
The difference between the story I wrote and the Adventure Book is how much help they end up giving you.
In the Adventure Book if you get their help then they will let you avoid the Black Marsh. The Black Marsh contains no opportunities for character development or learning new information, or even interesting situations, it is basically one gigantic random encounter table. You are going to end up fighting a bunch of undead, possibly some other aquatic predators (eels, crocodiles, maybe piranhas) and doing a lot of very slow wading through a very large swamp.
So we completely skip this situation, but the Adventure Book lets you skip it under certain circumstances, so I don't feel bad about that.
Next up we have the Darkenheights.
I let our six protagonists skip this one also, though by all rights if I was playing by the Adventure Book properly, they should have needed to deal with it.
The Darkenheights are basically a gigantic mountain that the heroes need to scale.
As they try to climb said cliffs, they may have to deal with evil spiders. On the other hand, if they try to get cute and use magic to just fly up/over the cliffs, then they'll be attacked by a bunch of muryan riding on flying nightmares.
If our heroes had needed to deal with the mountain, Mirri would have spider climbed her way up it since there's nothing magical about the Darkenheights that would prevent her from doing so. As she climbed, she would have used still more of Devi's nearly endless supply of rope (rare is the adventure where you don't find some use for rope is her opinion) to make it easy for the others to come up after her.
I already wrote one climbing scene though, and while the Darkenheights are at least an interesting set-piece… I had bigger and grander things on my mind, so we just had our protagonists be able to take an upward sloping tunnel that went straight through the mountain.
Which brings us to the final chapter, and what a final chapter it is/was!
So, having figured out certain things in advance, I had a list of situations that needed to take place one way or another.
I wanted to show off Gwydion's ability to control all undead within the Shadow Rift, so I needed to have him take control of Mirri.
Originally, I was going to have Mirri's transformation powers go out of control and have her turn into something vaguely shoggoth like, but that isn't something vampires are normally able to do, and Gwydion doesn't bother to grant his undead subjects extra abilities.
So instead I just had her stay human looking and try to control James in turn. Likewise, I needed to have Mirri be dealt with so that she couldn't harm anyone, or do anything to help Gwydion break fully free of the Obsidian Gate.
It is very hard to knock an undead unconscious since they don't take subdual damage, and Mirri has the unique weakness of starting to die (well starting to cease to exist) like a normal living human if taken below zero hit points, rather than turning to gas and retreating to her coffin. Neither she nor James knows that, but James wouldn't want to seriously hurt Mirri to the point of zero hit points, not if he can avoid it.
Luckily, there has long been an established D&D method for how to take a vampire out of a fight without doing them lasting term harm, the stake through the heart.
The stake through the heart was the obvious approach, and so I went with it.
To James' credit though, he's had a bad habit of failing just about every single will save he's been confronted with throughout these stories, but right here, right when his back is to the wall and Mirri is trying to sway him to Gwydion's side… James clearly rolls a natural twenty and shakes it off.
Then he pulls out his statue of Bastet, and uses the fact that vampires hate to look at symbols of a good aligned god or goddess to make her unable to look into his eyes, and thus unable to use her charm gaze again.
After that, knowing what I wanted to use Iriwa for, I had some groundwork to lay before her reveal. Well that and I thought that it was worth pointing out that Gwydion is one of those rare threats in Ravenloft that is so great that people of wildly disparate alignments will spontaneously come together to oppose him.
Alex by this point knows something of the muryan mindset, both from general past interactions, what he's heard some other Arak say about them, and of course the fact that he was raised by one.
Muryan love to fight, it is unquestionably their most defining characteristic.
So those muryan who initially took flight (either to try and get themselves in a better position and not be caught on the staircase/platform with no room to maneuver or out of genuine fear of Gwydion (if there is anything that can frighten an Arak, Gwydion is it)) simply can't resist a chance to have a good battle once they see one starting up.
That's why Alex attacks. That, and he obviously still remembers Maeve's instructions about what it would take to seal Gwydion away forever, if he can get some piece of the Regalia of Arak from Loht and toss it into the Obsidian Gate, the day can still be saved.
So Alex has James strike up some music and he charges ahead, even if he charges alone.
James' music is a nice little reoccurring even I n this Book in particular, as he plays during Mirri's fight with the muryan, to help the group shrug off Gwydion's general presence, and now directly in defiance of Gwydion himself.
Alex's solo charge encourages the muryan, letting them know that there is indeed a fight going on at the moment, and they might as well be Shee if they don't want to step in and join his dance.
Which they do with great abandon, and start pushing back the undead horde at least a little.
Now, Loht having muryan with him at the Obsidian Gate is from the Adventure Book.
What isn't from the Adventure Book is the aid that Maeve and her servants give our protagonists.
However, and this is an important however, the seed for the idea is very much in the Adventure Book.
It does directly say that in the case that the heroes are killed/driven off, forced to flee the Obsidian Gate and then the domain entirely in the hope that the very nature of Ravenloft itself will be able to contain Gwydion inside the Shadow Rift and prevent him from conquering the entire Core (which is not an unreasonable theory, though making it back to a fracture out of the Shadow Rift will be no easy feat) that Maeve will have a different plan for escape. Her plan to escape is to lead all of her trusted servants into the now open Obsidian Gate, and return to wherever Gwydion came from in the first place, expecting him not to double back (either out of blind arrogance or fear of being trapped again) as he searches for his missing servants.
So Maeve and all of her most trusted servants must be somewhere relatively close to the Obsidian Gate….
Likewise as I talked about the importance of the heroes journey in and of itself (accomplishing more by going on the journey than the actual quest item you've been seeking out) back in book three, and that particular sort of situation promptly unfolds itself again.
If you didn't realize it, the members of the Seelie Court who show up are the ones that the group has encountered in their trek through the Shadow Rift (portune and alven, with Maeve bringing the shee because of course she brings her own breed) and that is why there are no fir in this scene. It is a clever writing device and certainly not because I couldn't think of anything interesting to have the fir do during a great big pitched battle!
In the middle of the battle we get to see Florence reach the climax of her character arc, as after more or less a lifetime of despising the Shadow Fey, she comes within a hairs breadth of being turned into one herself. She manages to throw it off Gwydion's shadowmaker ability several times, but she is honest enough with herself to know/admit that if he'd have been able to pull it off indefinitely, it wouldn't even have taken a full hour for Gwydion to transform her into an Arak.
So, while Florence avoids a suffering a karmic transformation, she does show personal growth by choosing to stand side by side with the alven when they arrive, and match them spell for spell in their efforts to throw Gwydion back into Obsidian Gate.
With all these various factors working against him, and Gwydion still not quite believing that he can be defeated, Alex manages to reach Loht's side
If you were wondering, yes Alex could have just taken the Crown of Arak, or the Sword of Arak, or the whatever (amulet, boots, cloak, dagger, gloves, scepter or signet) of Arak into the Obsidian Gate, so long as he didn't throw all nine objects into the Gate at the same time.
He could have just grabbed the crown or the sword, and left Loht where he was… but surprise surprise after what he did to Lorelei in Book Five, Alex is not exactly a fan of Loht, so instead ops to toss him into the Obsidian Gate, thus saving the Shadow Rift from two tyrants with one throw.
So that is why he grabs Loht up completely (taking a moment to shake the crown loose from him head, both to make sure the sealing works and so that Maeve doesn't have to loose her father's final gift to her) Alex heads for the Obsidian Gate proper. Gwydion himself takes an interest at this point, but Iriwa manages to get the better of his tail through a series of acrobatics and athletics checks before unleashing a series of attacks.
Alex launches a number of knock-back attacks on Gwydion's undead servants knocking them back a few feet, which is pretty important when a few feet behind them there is no floor for them to stand on.
He manages to rush his way through Gwydion's wall of thorns, Florence blinds the eye before it can cast another spell, he jumps over and onto the tentacle, and then it happens.
One moment Gwydion is on the cusp of his greatest victory… the next he is slammed back into his cell with even less chance to escape from it.
Alex took part in such a wonderful fight that the muryan who survived simply couldn't possibly bring themselves to want to kill him. They might want to turn him into a changeling, but since Iriwa was the first one to start fighting alongside Alex, they figure she should have first crack at that particular honor.
The battle for the Shadow Rift ends and there is peace.
Which finally brings us to the epilogue.
Maeve as you can clearly guess sheds no particular tears over the death of her brother, just as she suspects (and is doubtlessly quite correctly that) he would have shed no tears over her own.
With Gwydion sealed and Loht dead, she is now the unquestioned ruler of the Shadow Rift, and thus feeling quite pleased with herself.
Which is why Maeve in a show of magnanimity gives the group one boon each.
Cal and Devi are most interested in material things, and after not making much money in Book Five it was about time that our heroes ended up securing another windfall, they need enough liquid cash on hand to set themselves up as business tycoons in Nosos after all!
James is interested in simply getting back the two things that the adventure had cost him, first his hat, and just now his harmonica.
Mirri is incorrect in thinking that having an icon of Kali would have actually defended her against Gwydion's command of the undead, or in general really do her much good unless she starts taking levels in cleric, but you can't expect most people in a D&D setting to actually be aware of the crunch behind faith based magical superpowers. Still, Mirri is asking for what she sees as the most reasonable/useful thing she can think of at the moment.
Alex has by this point recognized Iriwa (by her sword work if nothing else) and so wants a chance to try and settle matters with, as best as the possibly could be settled.
As it turns out there isn't much chance of that, many because to say matters are "settled" is to describe something as having come to an end.
What happens instead is Alex manages to start something new with Iriwa. Whatever her other faults, it is clear she has nothing but the greatest respect for her son, primarily because he lived up to her hopes of becoming a great warrior.
Florence's boon as you might have guessed ("some little twig") ended up being getting Iriwa promoted to being the new official ruler of/speaker for the muryan, and put in charge of restoring shadows to the people of Briggdarrow.
That's going be a task that takes some doing, (first you need to round up all the changelings, then you need to get a bunch of Arak and convince/order them to contribute some of their own shadow (costing them one point of charisma until the human who gets their shadow back dies) to the mix so that the human fully recovers from the experience.
It'll give Alex and Iriwa still more time to talk, and figure out what exactly they expect/think of one another.
What eventually happens between them/what kind of a compromise/agreement they can come to is a story for another book, for this one has come to its conclusion.