Role: Sole survivor of a slaughtered convent
Sister Geraldine wanders the halls of Castle Ravenloft muttering in half-madness about eyes watching, thirst quenched, and arms that shadowed and protected — the sole survivor of a convent slaughtered by wolf-like beasts. At the party, when Ivek attempted to bless a glass of champagne with the power of St. Terragnis and offer it to her as comfort, she recoiled in terror, smashed the glass against the wall, and fled the room. The Count brushed off the incident with practiced ease, apologizing for “poor Geraldine.”
Session 3
Geraldine was waiting for the party in the castle courtyard as the midnight bells began, kneeling with a rosary before a bonfire that had not been there an hour earlier — with Brother Kristoff burning on a cross at the heart of it. She had no eyes left, only blood running down her cheeks, and her holy symbol was an inverted cross scored through with a pentagram. Her habit had become something closer to tight black leather. She greeted Randoah as “my sister,” told the party the gods of this realm could not protect anyone and only Strahd had shown her true protection and the light, and said that since they had been given the chance to leave and had not taken it, she believed they truly wished to stand at his side.
Her story, as she told it: the wolf-like beasts came for her convent, she hid from them shaking with terror, and the Count swept in, destroyed them, and took her under his wing. Now the beasts listen to her.
She was the session’s final fight and the party did not beat her. Her presence radiates an unholy aura that smothers divine magic outright — Ulfgar failed repeatedly to reach Ord in her vicinity, the image of the burning priest filling his mind each time, and only broke through late in the fight. She fought on all fours like an animal, grew claws and fangs, elongated into something bestial, held Enki kneeling and mesmerised at her feet, called the dead up out of the graveyard soil and off the chapel pews, and shrugged off two spears, a thrown pew’s worth of violence and a fire that caught her dress — through the fires of agony I shall prove my true devotion. She heals when she feeds.
The party escaped her by sealing the hidden stair beneath the chapel altar behind them, and then by crossing the swollen river on the far side of the mountain: she could not follow over running water. She warped into something huge and wolflike at the water’s edge, howled at the blood-red moon, and clawed at the bank in fury while Enki promised, from the far shore, to come back and kill her.
Status: Alive, still in Ravenloft, and — per Christine — perfectly able to reach the party by the bridge once she calms down. Strahd afterwards described himself as “very disappointed in my wives,” which may or may not include her.