Picking Up Nicolae's Trail--Barovia

General Summary

After some discussion, you opted to cut through The Balinoks  rather than go through Kartakass. Rose felt very strongly that being away from civilization was the best way to avoid the Gentleman Caller, and as a druid, she had less to fear from the Balinoks than most. (I'm going to use the Balinoks page as a cheat sheet for all the ideas you've come up with for surviving it so far. Let me know if I'm forgetting any, and I'll add more as you come up with them.) Vanya wasn't crazy about it, but agreed that werewolves weren't exactly the safest new buddies for Julien, so Balinoks it was.
You went to Vallaki, and pretty much every bookseller remembered the wild-eyed man who kept talking to someone that no one else could see. One of them pointed you toward a store that sold actual magical supplies. The man there couldn't tell you anything about breaking witch pacts because he refused to deal with that stuff, but he did tell you that any time he tried to point Nicolae toward an actual useful book for would-be demon hunters, he'd start to look interested, then something in his eyes would shut down and he'd go back to demanding the nonsense that said you could exorcise someone by abusing them badly enough and also witch's pacts were maybe not so bad. The bookseller thought he had too much autonomy for it to be dominate, but seemed too specifically directed for it to be charm; his theory was that Nicolae had been subjected to a near-constant stream of something like suggestion that had warped his mind so badly that he could no longer tell what ideas were his own anymore. He also told you that Nicolae had been asking quesitons about the Fraternity of Shadows and the Brautslava Institute in Darkon, and had bought a few books about traveling in Darkon. The Fraternity was a society of wizards, and the Institute was a magical college. Vanya bought copies of the same books on Darkon that Nicolae had.
Between knowledge arcana and spellcraft, you were fairly certain that dispel magic would be a good start but wouldn't go deep enough for this level of deprogramming; Rose's father has internalized too many of the suggestions by now. Something like dispel evil or break enchantment could also work, and protection from evil or magic circle against evil might break the enchantments long enough to buy you time to talk to him. (Out of character, dispel chaos would work much like dispel evil, but I don't think you know in character that incubi are chaotic. You'd would know in character with those checks that either dispel law or dispel chaos would probably work depending on the Caller's alignment, but given that he loves contracts and one of his sons is a fascist bureaucrat, that might not help you.) Vanya didn't know if his old standby countersong would work because, unless the Caller was invisible and whispering them into Nicolae's ear, the suggestions were telepathic rather than verbal. 
Heartened that you had an actual course of action now, you headed to Krezk, where you could both pick up Julien and try to ask some clerics at the Morninglord's Sanctuary of First Light about the sorts of spells that could help.

Related Reports

Previous session: Nira's Return and Nicolae's Journal--Barovia
Next session: Scaling the North Face--Barovia

Report Date

02 Aug 2022

Primary Location

Barovia