Help with Ogress

Games Discussion Ars Magica
1

I am currently trying to assemble some ideas for if I become beta SG, but I don't have the Faerie book so I would like some constructive critique please.

Partly inspired by https://forum.atlas-games.com/t/london-tornado-of-1091/11234/1, and after catching an old Count Duckula cartoon, and remembering Von Pinn from Girl Genius, I am trying to create the Ogress Nanny Ugg.

I haven't got the concept fully defined yet.
Basically several Hermetic generations ago a Flambeau magus had his new apprentice kidnapped by a minor faerie lord, who put the kid in the care of a faerie playing the role of Nanny Ugg. The Flambeau magus went into faerieland and kicked butt, and forced the faerie lord to return the kid to the magus, and they left the faerie regio. Only to discover that they hadn't demanded that Nanny Ugg surrender care of the kid, so she came along with them considering the Flambeau magus her new liege lord.

Being a faerie ogress, Nanny Ugg plays her role to protect and nurture the growing child. While kind and gentle to her charge, she is vicious and savage to any threats, tending to rend them limb from limb and them eat them.
Until her charge is grown up. When the child is officially no longer a child (according to her liege lord), then she will hunt the former child down starting at the next nightfall. She will continue hunting the former child until either 1) sunrise, 2) the former child escapes from faerieland (ie leaves a faerie regio to the mundane world), or 3) defeats Nanny Ugg in battle.
If the former child succeeds, they then become the new liege lord to Nanny Ugg.

The Flambeau magus, after learning these details, decided that Nanny Ugg would make the perfect gauntlet for his apprentice. When the apprenticeship reached the end, Nanny Ugg was told the apprentice was no longer a child, and that night the chase and battle occurred. The former apprentice barely managed to survive, officially became a magus and now had Nanny Ugg (who heals) to inflict upon his apprentice when the time came. This has happened several times, with only one or two apprentices having failed.

There is one other story potential. Away from her original faerie court, Nanny Ugg can't change her role from nursemaid and protector, so needs to have a child to look after. If her liege lord doesn't give her one after about one month, she goes out and gets one, by whatever means necessary. Her liege lord can change which child she is currently looking after.

The parens has the choice of when and where to announce the end of the apprenticeship, either near the longest or shortest night of the year, or when there is a full or new moon, or close to a known faerie regio. Thus can make the gauntlet more or less difficult.

Not having run a Flambeau or faerie before, let alone a battle to the death, what would Nanny Ugg have to be like to pose a reasonable but not excessive gauntlet threat?

2

I will have a purely mechanical approach to your problem, then you can skin it as you want with the appropriate powers:

  • First, a apprentice does not have a Parma, so he is easily affected by powers. And since he does not have a Parma, I am not even sure if he can count on the resistance provided by the form. So any powers the Ogrerss has will affect the mage. So to make the conflict interesting, you should grant her power which can be dodged/requires aiming or have not crippling effect;
  • Second a apprentice should not have very high Penetration or Finesse - the exception being (of course) PC's character which are very often "extreme" or at least specialised in something. So a Faerie might of 10 should be enough of a problem for average apprentice, but you might want to tweak that to higher level if the PC has access to high penetration total due to magical focus, high Penetration, etc...
  • Fighting ability: being the apprentice of a Flambeau, it is quite possible that the PC has good enough fighting skills, so the Ogress should have a +3/+4 in her own fighting skills to be slightly weaker that the PC, unless he completely overlooked this part of his apprenticeship.

Because, it is a Faerie, driven by story, it is conceivable that her skills adapt to her child: she took care of him for a decade and a half, she influenced him as much as she adapted to his needs (like being resistant to his random magic). Thus, she could change from one apprentice to the next.

You can also make her very powerful, and part of the challenge is to find her weakness, to collect arcane connection to bypass her resistances. And since the apprentice was under her care for so long, he might be aware that she sneeze in the presence of rose (weakness, weak Parma) and other little hints that he can leverage to build up enough advantages.
It is the story of the apprentice overtaking the master with a twist, or the ritual of passage to adulthood.

3

A few considerations.

  1. If you are running this as a story, you must think about what would make a good story first. Something's that's over in one or two rounds, even if it's perfectly well balanced (say, 90% chance of winning for the apprentice), is boring. Something that makes the apprentice use every trick he knows, every spell he knows etc. might not be realistic, but it's far more fun and it's what you'd see in a blockbuster movie or an old faerie tale. This, however, often requires some railroading, which some players do not appreciate.

  2. an ogress that is just a warm-up exercise for one apprentice, might be a death sentence for another. The ogress-apprentice combinations are too many to come up with an ogress-fits-all. For specific advice, you have to tells us more, much more, about the apprentice.

  3. even without Parma, an apprentice has MR 0+ from his Forms. It will probably be 0, or at most 1, for most Forms, and it's unlikely to be above 3 for any one Form, but it's there, and it's cool if it blocks some 0-penetration powers from the ogress. I mean, he's still an apprentice, but he's a Hermetic apprentice, by Hermes, and he has Magic Resistance - woo-hoo, not even the mightiest non-Hermetic magicians can match that!

  4. even if the ogress has sufficient magic resistance that the apprentice can't beat it, he might get at her indirectly e.g. by making her fall into a magically delved pit. This might be particularly appropriate if the apprentice was raised by a master emphasizing indirect attacks.

  5. the "I know secrets 1,2,3 about the ogress, and I try a trick based on each of them in turn, and each slows her but does not stop her, until I try trick 4..." is a staple of fantasy and for good reason: it makes a good story. However, in "interactive storytelling" the catch is making sure that the apprentice does not proceed to 4 immediately. There are two possibilities to avoid it. First, you can make each trick progressively more "expensive" for the apprentice. Maybe trying trick 1 is free, trying trick 2 requires spending a pawn or two of vis, trying trick 3 requires giving up an enchanted device, and trick 4... maybe it's about confronting an inner weakness? The second possibility involves the scenario "uncovering" the possibility of each trick; maybe the only trick the apprentice can try initially is trick 1, because trick 2 is only possible while the ogress is wading through a river; but trying trick 1 allows the apprentice to beat the ogress to the river and wade it before her.

  6. it makes for an even better story if there's some sort of "moral" about it. Maybe the apprentice saved some mundane/animal/tree/other faerie in the past, and that proves instrumental in defeating the ogress? Or maybe the apprentice failed to study an apparently useless spell that his parens insisted upon, and that would have proved and instant-ogress-slayer? This fits the faerie theme too.

  7. single player stories are often far, far more vulnerable to botches, and similar low-probability, catastrophic events: normally, they would mean a setback, but the rest of the group can limit the damage. A single character has no help to fall upon, however! So, be careful about these potential situations, and be ready to either fudge them, or, better still, make sure they only create a setback rather than being immediately fatal.

4

That is very good. Means the apprentice better have learned Faerie Lore under Nanny Ugg's tutorage.

I had originally been thinking a 1 dimensional Flambeau who was mostly about flames and fighting, but

will help. Or I could have Nanny Ugg always holding herself back to give her former charge a fighting chance as an unspoken rule as well. Or Nanny can't resist "playing" with her former charge one last time.
That way I can have a Flambeau mage with a rather large and dangerous Faerie Companion that doesn't do anything except making tea and cucumber sandwiches, and looking after a child.

Thanks Fafnir and Ezechial357

5

Should you create an oger PNJ you may want powers useful to hunt or eat the preys. I personnally have an oger lord in my running saga. He possesses a magical bag which stupefies anyone who is hold in it. He also owns a faerie greyhound able to ease any tracking activity.

A supernatural knife or a magical napkin may be appropriate too.

Don't forget to describe the ogress' outfit and body. Is she monstruous or can she walk among mundanes ranks ? It counts a lot.