Role: Ruler of Marin’s Hold
An older man, by most reckonings in his fifties, Reeve Tarly Winters rules Marin’s Hold as though born to a throne — though his court is a modest, cold hall with an animal-skin carpet rather than any real seat of power. He commands twenty to thirty men-at-arms and answers to no higher authority; the kingdoms that once held this frontier let it go long ago, and Winters simply kept ruling in the silence that followed.
He has no heir, and a much younger wife who has not yet changed that fact — a subject he is visibly sensitive about. He believes magic is what draws the Gloaming’s demons to Marin’s Hold, and enforces the village’s ban on it accordingly.
He also has a daughter. Nora Greymoss is his bastard, unrecognized, by a mother nobody can name. She is not an heir because he has never said she is one. She still went into the Gloaming alone to gather his favourite mushrooms.
When invitations to Count Demetrius’s party arrived for four strangers in the village, the Reeve — having never heard of a “Count Demetrius” in any record of the local nobility — tasked Enki with discovering the Count’s true identity, and killing him if he proved to be a pretender.
Session 4
The Reeve has closed the gates (about a week before the party’s return) and left the refugees from Orlaine and the corrupted farms camped outside. He lets out small amounts of grain at Egrid’s urging but says there is no way to feed them through winter, and many will die unless another source of food is found. Men he sent to the other towns have not returned. Four soldiers now guard the mill by the fishing quay.
Told that Count Demetrius was Strahd, a vampire no army could kill, he refused to believe it — “men are men” — and ruled that the party had only half completed the mission: half the reward, 25 gold, poured out by the Castellan. He still called the information useful.
He recognised the Bittermold seal: a family “of equal importance to my own” until their keep was overrun — clearly less esteemed, since his house survived and theirs did not. He knows nothing of the slime.
He sent the party to Castellan Vane (the Bittermold job) and to “Lord Inquisitor” Morvath, and mentioned in passing that his bastard keeps begging him to send someone into the woods after something, and he can’t be bothered (\“https://app.notion.com/p/3d71f65dc6c48180972af86dacc0ab8c\\” and her lost ring). His chef served him a late-morning second breakfast in front of the party while the village outside starved. Enki has him on a list.