The characters are staying at the castle of Baron Albemarle. They needn’t necessarily be honoured guests; they might just be passing through, eating on the lower tables while Albemarle wines and dines some more exalted travellers. All that matters is that there is some visitor here whom Lord Albemarle wants to impress.
Albemarle’s court wizard is Olaudah, a Mungodan who typically dresses in feathers, war-paint and animal skull necklaces despite being a scholar raised the palace of his father, a prince of the Desert of Songs. Olaudah is considerably more cultured than most of the Elleslandic lords and knights around him, but he recognizes the degree to which strangeness can affright a foe, so hides his aristocratic refinement and instead plays the part of a ‘savage’.
After the meal, with night drawing in, the baron calls for Olaudah to read his guests’ palms, which he duly does, issuing them cryptic predictions in the form of riddles. Feeling that the guests are insufficiently impressed by his having a Mungodan sorcerer at his beck and call, Lord Albemarle then insists that Olaudah perform a trick he’s seen him do before, making two ancient servants imagine themselves to be young again. That’s easily achieved by hypnosis, the guests laugh at the old pair’s deluded antics, and Olaudah is hoping he can return to an alchemical experiment he has had to leave at a critical point.
No such luck. One of the visiting knights tosses an apple core into the hearth, belching to show he’s unimpressed. ‘I saw a wizard in Cantorbridge who made rain fall from the ceiling,’ he says to Albemarle.
(If one of the player-characters chooses to be obnoxious, so much the better. It will be more effective if this lesson in manners is not precipitated by an NPC. But don't force it. If your PCs are all well-mannered, the arrogant visiting knight will do.)
Olaudah gives them a self-deprecating smile. ‘My lords, the roofers of Cantorbridge are notorious for their shoddy workmanship.’
‘Oh well,’ says the arrogant knight, ‘there are true wizards and then there are mere conjurers.’
Olaudah’s eyes flash at that, though he retains his bland smile. Lord Albemarle, though, takes it as a personal challenge. ‘My man can do anything those Cantorbridge wizards can. Name anything. Come on, any miracle you like.’
One of the knights sits forward with a leer. ‘Let us see that peerless maid of Argos, whom all the world admires.’
Another nods. ‘The angry Emphidians pursued with ten years' war the rape of such a queen, whose beauty passes all comparison.’
‘Elena of Ilion, she is the one we speak of,’ says the arrogant knight who first spoke. ‘Have your… witchdoctor show us her face and form.’
Olaudah bends to whisper in Albemarle’s ear. The baron scowls, nodding grudgingly. He gives an irritated gesture to indicate that Olaudah should tell the guests what he’s just told him.
‘My lords,’ says Olaudah, ‘I could conjure the Princess Elena here, and you would see her beauty with your own eyes, but that the Church forbids necromancy.’
‘Oh,’ says the arrogant knight, leaning back in his chair with a disdainful grin. ‘Necromancy, I see. Of course. Otherwise you’d do it, obviously.’
Nettled, Olaudah snaps back: ‘I can do better than summon up the shade of a mortal beauty. What of the pagan goddesses? Not one, nor two, but three. Their heavenly beauty is as terrible as the sun at noon.’ He looks around, raising his voice. ‘If anyone is afraid to behold the faces of the comeliest of the immortals, leave the hall now.’
Lord Albemarle leans forward and takes his wizard’s arm. (No one else hears what passes between them, unless the characters use magic to eavesdrop.) ‘Is this wise?’ he whispers in Olaudah’s ear.
‘My lord, it will be but an illusion,’ Olaudah assures him under his breath. ‘But it will be vivid enough to quail the hearts and still the tongues of these yapping dogs.’
Olaudah makes the conjuration more dramatic with a deep, droning chant, a series of flamboyant gestures and lithely executed dance steps, and ends by throwing powder onto a burning brazier to release clouds of pungent yellow smoke.
Silence in the hall. After a moment the arrogant knight speaks up, though his voice sounds less assured now: ‘Is that it? I don’t see – ’
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Three tall female figures, covered from head to foot in robes, are present. It seems as though they have been standing here all along, though no one had noticed them until now. Even concealed by the veils, their face and form are enough to excite both desire and fear in all the men. The goddesses glide forward gracefully, silk robes hinting at magnificent physiques, and speak in unison with voices that inspire both admiration and awe:
‘There can be only one to wear beauty’s crown. We three wait to hear the mortal’s verdict. Who will say which of us is fairest? Come to us and render judgement. We await you.’
In the same manner as their arrival, it is now clear the three are no longer here. All around the hall there are looks of ‘wild surmise’. The arrogant knight is shaken, but dissembles with loud derision: ‘Goddesses? Three wenches wrapped up head to toe like sacks of flour – not much of a trick, is it? One brat on another’s shoulders, throw a sheet over them, anyone could do…’
His voice trails off as he notices what everyone else has seen. The far wall is now open to the sky – and outside is no longer the gathering darkness but the bright light of day.
They file out, awestruck, to discover that though inside the room still seems to be the great hall of the castle, outside it’s a ship with lowered gangplank. The ship is moored at a rocky island that rises steeply from the jetty to a high peak where a temple of gleaming white stone can be seen. While the rest of the island consists of dry scrub and a few dusty trees sweltering under a merciless sun, the temple enjoys sparkling water from a spring and is surrounded by lush green foliage. All around the island, an ocean the colour of brass stretches to the horizon.
‘The sun,’ says one of the guests after a while. ‘It’s not moving!’ And indeed he is right. The sun is fixed here at the moment of noon.
They are approached by a youthful-seeming pair: Phalaena, a green-eyed dryad with hair that resembles lush reeds, and a capering satyr called Flute. The two are quite embarrassingly infatuated with each other, openly canoodling even while the characters are talking to them.
‘We are servants of the great queens above,’ they say, pointing to the temple. ‘One among you is to judge their beauty. As you go to meet them, decide who that will be.’
Somebody has to volunteer, and it’s clear that the arrogant knight is in no hurry to put himself forward. Ideally it’ll be one of the player-characters, though they don’t need to decide until they get to the temple. A steep, narrow path winds up the mountain.
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What has happened
Olaudah cast the illusion of three beautiful goddesses and then slipped away to check on his alchemical experiment, figuring it would be safe enough to leave the hall for a minute or so. What he failed to take into account was that a convincing illusion of a goddess includes the illusion of her divine power. In effect, when he conjured the three goddesses he effectively gave them the ability to create a holodeck. And it would not be a convincing illusion of pagan goddesses if they meekly submitted to a beauty parade for the titillation of mortal men, hence their turning the tables by making it a contest – the Judgement of Paris, well-known from myth if only half remembered by most of Lord Albemarle’s guests. None of this would matter if Olaudah were really back right away, but the illusion has altered subjective time for everyone in the hall. While Olaudah adjusts the heat under his alembic and mixes in a few ingredients to the bubbling mixture, seconds are passing for him but minutes are passing for the people experiencing the illusion.
This is supposed to be an adventure seed, not a whole scenario, and in any case I’d expect it to be used to incorporate ongoing themes in the campaign, so I’ll leave the rest as an open canvas. The island can be a stage for various dream encounters, a slightly sinister locus amoenus similar to the Athenian wood in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As it’s an illusion you can contrive to split the party as they climb to the temple, giving them some strange experiences and hopefully also some clues as to what’s actually going on.
They will have noticed that Olaudah isn’t with them, but if they have a typical adventuring party’s attitude to sorcerers then it’s likely they’ll ascribe that to malice rather than oversight. Is this a ploy to strand Albemarle and his guests in a strange place at the mercy of pagan gods while Olaudah seizes power back in the real world? Work up the paranoia the way Tarantino or Sidney Lumet would.
What might tip them off that this is all an illusion? If they examine any coins, for example if Flute asks for a tip after showing them the way to the mountain path, they may notice that the coins are lacking in details – the king’s face blank, the inscription around the rim only random symbols. Books are unreadable, as in a dream. If they stop to pluck a flower that looks fine at a glance, they’ll see it has no more structure than in a child’s drawing.
They might also notice Flute and Phalaena using a phrase of endearment that the hypnotized old servants did earlier – which is who they are in reality.
After spotting some flaw, if somebody guesses that this is an illusion then they have a chance of finding their way back through to the fringes of reality where they could encounter Olaudah, hurrying back from his lab now that he is beginning to realize that his spell might have been a bit too effective. The sensible thing then would be to get him to dispel it, but if suspicion is running high – he is a wizard, after all, and a foreigner, and probably a pagan, and in the eyes of ignorant knights he might even be supposed to be a cannibal savage at heart – then there could be a fight.
Dispelling the illusion is one way to go. Another is to embrace the experience and see it through to the end. That’s trickier as you’d rather avoid the wrath of the two goddesses who don’t get picked.
First the characters have to decide which of them is going to be the judge. Obviously it’s a lot more fun if that’s a player-character. Other male characters are barred from entering the temple, but female characters are free to do so, and in fact the best way to avoid jealousy is to have the contest judged by a woman. The goddesses, having the pagan mindset that Olaudah imagined them with, don’t mind if a woman judges one of them more beautiful than the others; it’s only a man’s judgement that could annoy them.
At the threshold of the temple, a character might spot something behind a pillar. It’s a soot-blackened apple core. This is a last opportunity to twig that everything is illusory (it’s the same apple core the arrogant knight lobbed into the hearth earlier) before the beauty contest begins.
Inside the temple the goddesses are revealed without their robes – and they are as dazzlingly beautiful as only a dream-image or a true goddess could be. As Olaudah has misremembered the Emphidian myth, the three are Artemis, Athena and Aphrodite. All are tall, radiantly lovely beyond all mortal measure, and incidentally dark-skinned because they sprang from Olaudah’s imagination.
‘You may set any conditions you wish to the contest,’ they tell the appointed judge. ‘We will submit to your wishes. But you must choose which of us is the most beautiful before you leave here.’
If given an opportunity to speak to the judge in private, each goddess attempts to bribe them: Artemis offers grace and sharp senses; Athena offers wisdom and skill at arms; Aphrodite offers the knack of making others fall in love with them. But tempting as these bribes may be, the escalation of the stakes carries an implicit threat that the two disappointed goddesses will find some way to punish them.
Other than appointing a judge, how could the characters avoid having to pick one over the others? One way might be to trick them into making the choice themselves. Another might be to defer the decision to a higher authority such as one of the gods. A clever player-character may find a way to wriggle out of having to choose at all, or to convince each of the goddesses that she is the winner. That’s going to come down to improvisation, quick wits and fast talk, but if your players are anything like mine there’ll be more than one trickster in the party who is up to the challenge.
The illusion ends with clouds drifting across the sun, a reek of chemicals on the sea breeze, and then everyone is back in the great hall. Fumes from Olaudah’s lab fill the air. Anyone who was in the temple finds they are standing in the cavernous hearth. The two elderly servants are entwined like youthful lovers, and perhaps some of the characters are also in compromising positions – the arrogant knight crouching furtively under a table that he thought was a bush in the goddesses’ garden, for instance.
All’s well that ends well? If a character judged the contest then they certainly showed bravery, risking the displeasure of two goddesses, so it would be nice to let them keep a shadow of whatever bribe they were offered – a +1 on Agility from Artemis or whatever. Is that because the illusion actually reached through into a true mythic realm, or simply that the dream gives the character a new confidence? That’s for them to decide.
And there is a lasting effect on anyone who saw the goddesses unrobed – ie the judge and anyone who sneaked in for a peek. They can’t recall exactly what the goddesses looked like, but they are left with an impression of ineffable beauty. A glimpse of heavenly allure, half remembered, snatched away by the return to this world of dirt and discord and time – that is a bittersweet reward indeed.
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This originally appeared in a slightly different form as an adventure seed on my Patreon page that tied in with the post on court magicians. It's available to all followers there, paid or otherwise, along with a lot of other good stuff. Pop over and join us.
And although I said above that it's all the men present who are affected by the goddesses' beauty, I intended to specify the hetero men (and any women who are lesbian/bisexual), meaning that a gay male character could have an unexpected role to play in the adventure. Alternatively, you might opt for a less literal concept of physical attraction; perhaps the goddesses' appearance arouses the admiration of men and not women regardless of their sexuality, on the simple basis that the goddesses are not mortals and so their attributes don't have to conform to mortal notions.
