Player: Stephanie
Race: Halfling (Stoutheart)
Appearance
A stoutheart halfling who stands 3’3” and is proud of it — the tallest in her family. Her skin is chestnut, a rich brown with warm reddish undertones, and her face is pleasantly round, her plump cheeks sprinkled with dark freckles. Her hair is big and curly and forever getting in the way of the task at hand, so she keeps it out of her face in two twin tails, evenly quartered and bound along their length with intricate ties she braids herself. Hair and eyes are both a deep brown that reads reddish in sunlight. Her thick eyebrows are usually furrowed — not because she’s angry, but because she’s always thinking.
She dresses in cloth she wove herself, a craft she learned after settling in Lyohna, and favors linen and cotton thread. Her usual is an off-white linen blouse with billowy sleeves gathered and tied at the elbow and the wrist, the shoulders banded with a row of small diamond motifs. Over it goes a deep orange apron embroidered with nature motifs and cross-laced across the bodice, which doubles as a cape. She wears trousers or skirts as the day calls for it, but either will always be a dark shade of purple, cropped just above her green leather boots — turned down at the cuff and sitting like leaves wrapped around her humongous, hairy feet. The boots are on purpose: she has been playfully teased her whole life for preferring to wear shoes at all. In bad weather she adds a thick wool cloak in the same green as her boots, and she travels with a walking staff taller than she is.
Origins
Randoah escaped the Trial of the Slime Lord’s dungeon five years ago alongside Burr, a close companion who — unlike her — had never actually called the village home. For a while the two tried to find their way back to what was left of it, but as Randoah grew more withdrawn and isolated in the aftermath, Burr eventually chose to return to researching the nomadic paths of his own ancestors, and the two parted ways. She was left haunted by the feeling that she hadn’t done enough to save her brother, who never made it out of that dungeon at all — she has carried his skull with her ever since.
With no other family left, Randoah wasn’t even sure it was worth trying to go home. She wandered the woods instead for years, her brother’s skull becoming something like a constant companion — a silent “Wilson” to talk to in the isolation. Eventually she found a small, hidden fey village of weavers and basket-makers, tucked away deep in the Gloaming and not always possible to find, even for those looking for it. They took her in, and she learned their crafts alongside them, finding a measure of peace there and feeling something close to herself again.
When the black invitation to Count Demetrius’s party arrived, Randoah’s first instinct was to ignore it entirely. But the village encouraged her to go, and set about making her something to wear: a copper-colored dress of Tasar silk — an abundant resource in that moth-rich forest town — tailored to cling like a second skin to her sturdy halfling frame, paired with an anonymously gifted cloak embroidered to resemble a giant oak moth when she extended her arms. She packed her things and left. The village cared for her and wished her well right up to the end, but everyone there shared the same strange, unplaceable unease around her — equal parts sadness and relief when she finally departed.
The Gloaming
Randoah is one of only two survivors from the village destroyed by the cultists of Mugdulbulb five years ago — the other being Brielle. She is on friendly terms with Mathilda, the hedge-witch who lives just outside Marin’s Hold’s palisade.
During the party’s escape through Count Demetrius’s castle, Randoah proved herself a resourceful witch in her own right — cutting her own hand to feed a gargoyle statue and open a hidden passage, drinking blessed water to purify it, stupefying a giant frog with a charm, and hauling a trapped priest from a boiling cauldron by main strength. When Brielle was later pulled into that same cauldron and began dying, it was Randoah who fished her out and fed her the healing potion that saved her life.
In Session 2, cornered by the same witch in the aftermath of that fight, Randoah struck one more bargain before the moment passed: her life, in exchange for a potion that would let her swap two of her own stats. She fed the brew a fistful of her own hair, torn out at the root, to give up Strength, and her off-hand glove to gain Intelligence — and came out of it sharper than she’s ever been, if measurably weaker in the arm. That new intellect served her well: she recognized (if not entirely disarmed) a rune trap on a gold-embossed diary belonging to Strahd himself, and later claimed the book as the party’s own spellbook once its four spells — Alter Self, Feather Fall, Invisibility, and Mage Armor — were freed from its cover. She used Feather Fall to make her own graceful descent off the castle’s exterior balcony, and, cornered in Strahd’s own bedchamber near the night’s end, talked her way out of an invitation to become his newest bride by claiming her soul was already spoken for.
Session 3 gave her back a piece of her brother and then took him away again. Breathing in the perfume of Christine’s coffin, she lived through the bride’s own memory — a noble girl courted by a dark stranger, eloping, and understanding far too late what she had married. In Strahd’s own coffin she found a black signet ring bearing the double-headed raven of the Zaroviches, tied to a letter: a letter her brother had written her on some long road years ago, asking how she was, which she had never received. She read it standing in a vampire’s crypt and put the ring on her thumb.
Her spells failed her almost completely through the courtyard fight — the Willow Man could not touch Sister Geraldine, and she fell twice under the risen dead, saved the second time when Ivek blessed the goblet of endless blood into a healing draught and poured it down her throat. She came back with fangs of her own, small and snaggled and faintly ridiculous. She crossed the river in a shimmer of the silk cloak, green shoots springing up and dying at her feet on both banks. She gave Enki the feather duster afterward, on the grounds that if he couldn’t kill the nun he should at least have something of the maid he’d taken a liking to.
At Christine’s forest banquet she sat down at the table and drew the bride out about her courtly life — and when the fight came, held up Strahd’s own signet ring and caught Christine’s eye with it, leaving her drooling and blank in her chair while Enki drove a stake into her heart. Her Willow Man finally landed on one of the fanged servants and sent him screaming into the trees. Fleeing on horseback, she cast off her stolen witch’s hat where it would look dropped rather than discarded, and it was that decoy that pulled the hounds off the party’s trail.
In the mist, Strahd conjured her brother alive in front of her and offered to return him — both of them, together, forever. Randoah answered that she feared the Count greatly, but feared spending one more moment in his company far more, threw his signet ring at his feet, and refused him a second time. He beheaded her brother in front of her, burst into flame, and hurled the skull back at her with then begone from my realm. When the party woke at the crossroads, every trace of the curse had drained out of all of them — but the skull now bore a glowing rune on its brow. It turned in her hands, looked at her, and asked where it was. Her brother will answer one question of divination a day.
In Session 4 Randoah slipped behind the farmhouse of the woman who fed the party breakfast and mended her broken well with a vial from her cauldron, letting her believe it was providence. At the rotted farm next door she kicked at the dead rats until they rose, and went down under them; Enki forced his own demonic power into her to drag her back from death, and Ulfgar’s healing finished the job. At the gate she pocketed a charm from the charlatan crucified there, meaning to give the woman a decent burial, and she was the one who recognised the mark on Inquisitor Morvath’s lead coffer as a witch’s seal of binding. Ysolde Brack stopped her in the street — “I know what you are, lass” — to ask for the moonlight-flower tincture Mathilda used to make for her sickly granddaughter. Mathilda’s cottage turned out to be waiting for her: a note addressed R of O telling her to destroy the red jar if Mathilda did not return, a flask tagged with the same initials, a book of folk tales left open to the route to “the place of learning,” and a pressed flower labelled moon lily. There, for the first time, she asked her brother’s skull a question and heard his voice answer: the Threshold of Twilight is a catalyst for transformation, a doorway from this realm to another, a path through the Feywild, a gift and a curse. She wept. She tucked the moon lily into his eye socket for safekeeping, buried a box of keepsakes and a rib bone outside the cottage to reclaim on the way home, and chose to wear Strahd’s cloak into the Gloaming rather than leave it behind.
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