Player: Ron
Race: Dwarf
Origins
Brielle is one of two dwarven sisters taken in by the church of St. Terragnis after their family was killed during a trade expedition. Her sister, Karina, took to the church and its teachings; Brielle bristled under its rules and judgment instead, and was no stranger to prevarication — frequently supplementing her and Karina’s meager rations with food pilfered from the village market and the church’s own stores.
Once old enough to see to herself, Brielle set off to become an adventurer, surviving a series of small scrapes before entering the service of a local landowner, the self-styled Lord Haverford, as a drudge in his army. There she befriended Riggs, a goblin soldier whose fearlessness in battle was, if not legendary, at least notable. Riggs began training her in combat after she confided her desire for more exciting work, and within a few months she’d joined Haverford’s army outright as a soldier.
Her first real test came in the form of a coordinated attack from several neighboring landsmen, which routed Haverford’s army entirely — most of his soldiers captured or killed. Brielle survived only because Riggs repeatedly threw himself into danger to protect her. The two fled the battlefield together, avoiding officers from both sides, and made for the nearest town — where they discovered Karina had been quietly following Brielle since shortly after she’d left home, worried for her only living family. The sisters argued bitterly; Karina insisted Brielle come home, and Brielle, with nothing else to do, agreed, inviting Riggs to accompany them.
On the long journey home, the travelers were waylaid by a group of slime cultists — the cultists of Mugdulbulb, sweeping through what would prove to be Brielle’s home village itself. Riggs, Karina, Brielle, Randoah, and the rest of the village were captured and dragged down into the cult’s dungeon to face the so-called Trial of the Slime Lord. Riggs was killed there, before the survivors could find a way out. Of everyone thrown into that trial, only two escaped it alive: Brielle and Randoah. Where Karina’s fate that day pushed her fully into the service of St. Terragnis, Brielle emerged from the ordeal swearing off standing and fighting entirely, vowing that Ramlaat should take her if she ever again had the misfortune of engaging in a fair fight.
The Gloaming
That night five years ago left Brielle and Randoah as the only two survivors of their home village. She has never shared her surname with the rest of the party. Quick-fingered and quick-witted, she makes her way as a thief and card sharp, and is well known to Finch Three-Fingers, the local barter-house fence, who has occasionally put her particular talents to use recovering items that have gone astray.
In the party’s most recent outing to Count Demetrius’s castle, Brielle proved herself the group’s scout and blade — sneaking past a room of illusory guards, landing a decisive sneak attack on a giant spider, and finally being seized by the witch of the castle’s kitchen and hurled into her boiling cauldron, where she was pulled to safety and healed by her companions just before the witch was finally killed.
Back on her feet, Brielle helped free three more of Strahd’s marked guests from a hanging cage in that same kitchen, then very nearly lost herself to the curse entirely: cornered by an ever-refilling goblet of blood at Strahd’s own throne, she failed to resist it and underwent her first true feeding. It left her with a shadow that now moves with a mind of its own — sprouting horns and hunching over as it pleases — and a new, ultrasonic scream capable of shattering glass and dealing real damage. Deeper in the castle’s crypts, she found a crypt already engraved with her own name, containing nothing but an empty coffin, her own lost shortbow and arrows, and a drawing of a childhood imaginary friend: a small, amorphous ball of living shadow that used to keep her company on frightened nights, oddly foreshadowing the shape her own curse has begun to take.
In Session 3 it was Brielle’s thief’s instincts that opened the last of the crypt — finding the lever hidden in the seam of an iron-banded chest, pinning it with her dagger, and recovering every scrap of gear the castle had confiscated. The same chest held a bottle of blood labelled drink me, and she drank it where she stood: it left her able to open her own veins for a heartbeat of terrible focus, and left her shadow horned, hunched and openly independent, wandering off and laughing at her from the corners if she doesn’t hold it in mind. She stripped the lining out of the cobwebbed sarcophagus for a shirt of chainmail and a feather duster, and carried an enchanted ornate dagger Enki traded to her out of a bride’s coffin lining — a +1 dagger.
In the courtyard fight she severed the fingers from a grave-hand with that dagger and held the chapel doorway; when the party broke for the hidden stair beneath the altar, it was Brielle who saw everyone below the level of the steps, offered St. Terragnis a short prayer beginning I’ve never asked you for anything, and threw the switch that sealed Geraldine out. She waded the swollen river below the castle with a rope around her waist on sheer stubbornness. At Christine’s forest banquet she ignored the negotiation entirely, walked to the picket line, and was in the saddle and shouting before the bride was on her feet — then reared her horse into a fanged servant hard enough to break his bones against a tree. She led the party’s escape ride and found the false path that lost the hunt.
In the mist, Strahd told her he had been watching her since she was a small child hiding in the dark, that he had sensed her ability to change the rivers of fate, and that he had made sure she found her way into his court — and offered her his vaults and cities left to conquer. She asked whether he had been under her bed when she was a child, and told him that as much as she loved the idea of a good robbery, she couldn’t stomach the idea of robbing with him. Thieves with a heart of gold are so frustrating, he said. Such an overused trope. So boring.
In Session 4 Brielle came home to a village she barely recognised. At the rotted farm on the road in she turned the dead wolf over with her dagger point, and when it rose again she opened its throat, then circled for a clean shot and took a leaping ooze-rat out of the air inches from Enki’s face. Outside the gate she took quiet stock of Inquisitor Morvath — fine but practical travelling leathers, and a rapier her eye told her was silver. At Finch’s she informed him she held him personally responsible for Ravenloft, then took his new job anyway: a salt-pork importer a week overdue from the Southern Kingdoms, whose finger and signet ring had turned up in a carp’s mouth. Before the party set out into the Gloaming she argued for gathering intelligence on the riddle’s landmarks and for a cart and donkey, and noted that its southward leg might run toward Finch’s missing shipment.
In Session 5 Brielle scouted the whole road down the Fairy Path, and the road fought back. She walked face-first into the first of the spider webs, and on the second night, investigating her rattling can line, slipped down a hillside into a ring of five wolves; she put an arrow through the pack leader’s eye and cut the throat of the wolf that had her by the arm. Her stone, lobbed into the Hangman’s Tree, brought down its huge red apple. She came back from one detour covered in burrs, slid down a muddy bank into a river on another, and on a third chased something shiny into the water and had to be hauled out clinging to a log on the end of Gor’s rope — and held Gor responsible for most of it. Around the fire she juggled daggers, sang an army song in a voice reduced to a croak, and told the old tales of the Fairy Path: of village girls called down it by a voice, some never seen again, others returning years later as healers. Along the river near the Giant’s Playground she found the same webbed footprints the party had seen at the bridge, and the track of a barrel rolled along the bank.
Attendance Log
- Session 1: The Invitation to Ravenloft August 9, 2026
- Session 2: The Bells of Ravenloft August 23, 2026
- Session 3: The Mists of Ravenloft September 5, 2026
- Session 4: The Withered Homecoming September 26, 2026
- Session 5: The Fairy Path October 11, 2026