The Imp...

In case people aren't familiar with the Wishing Imp from Monsters Compendium to Ravenloft: Appendix III, it's a little figurine about a foot high. It looks rather like a cherub, except that it has two tiny horns, bat-like wings, and a barbed tail. Although it is actually a living creature, it appears to be a simple statue made of some sort of black stone, since it only moves to defend itself. Whomever possesses the imp is its master; the imp can communicate telepathically with this master.

What makes the Wishing Imp so nasty is that it has the power to grant its master one wish a day ("With each new dawn...", as I put it to my players). The price for this power is that each and every wish is twisted horribly. The master generally gets what he wants, but not in the form he wanted it. The twisted wishes generally cost the master those things (or people) which he holds most dear. As soon as the wisher realizes what's gone wrong, the imp starts in on him ("You could fix it all with just one more wish."). The Imp can only be harmed by stone weapons. If it is destroyed in this manner it reforms in one day, back in the possession of its master. For an owner to get rid of the Imp, another person must freely accept to take it as its own propriety, with full knowledge of its powers (and curse).

The Wishing Imp cannot leave the mists of Ravenloft. Should its master escape, the Imp stays behind. But it will always seek to be reunited with its master, and will do all it can to bring him back.

There is a way to destroy the Imp permanently, but I'll let you read the book to learn what that is.

The Tale...

My first attempt to slip the Wishing Imp into the party was clumsy, so it serves only as an introduction...

Early Spring. Dorvinia.

The PCs never knew who the Stranger was. He first appeared in the middle of the night while the PCs were staying at an inn in Ilvin. He was dressed head to toe in fine violet and blue silken robes, and he kept his face hidden behind the shadows of a hooded cloak. Although his clothes were obviously fine and expensive, they were also tattered and frayed.

Knocking on the door, he roused the party's dwarven warrior, Drixil, who was keeping watch. Drixil's player was a power gamer who I thought might want the imp's power and wouldn't care about "side-effects." Drixil wouldn't open the door for the visitor (I think he believed he was up against some sort of vampire; in other words, "if I don't let him in, he can't come in"), so the Stranger delivered his pitch through the door:

"...With each new dawn, the Imp offers another wish, but every wish comes with a terrible price. But the Imp will be yours alone; this power can not be stolen from you, used against you. The only way you can shed the Imp is to give it to someone who knows the truth of its power, and then takes it willingly."

For some reason, Drixil got pretty abusive at this point (then again, Drixil usually was pretty abusive). Part of it was that the Stranger, although trying to be as good a salesman as possible, was a little too desperate, a little too cynical to really come off as comforting. Feeling cocky behind his inch-thick wooden door, Drixil called the Stranger a coward, and dared him to do something about! The Stranger immediately stepped *through* the door, no more solid than a ghost! The Stranger held the Imp up in Drixil's face and asked him to reconsider. Drixil panicked, and when Drixil was afraid, Drixil got violent. He slashed at the Stranger with the party's most powerful magical sword, which went right through the Stranger as if he wasn�t even there. Drixil was obviously agitated, and in frustration the Stranger realized he was wasting his time. The Stranger left the way he came. A few hours later another PC was on watch (Toben, a priest), and the Stranger came back. He wasn't successful there, either. I believe I scared both of them out of it.

I never put a lot of thought into the Stranger's background, since I knew the PCs would never encounter him more than once or twice, and then for only a few minutes. All I needed to know was that this was someone who had at one point accepted the Imp and might even have enjoyed its power for a while. Then things started to sour. (The tattered silken robes were my symbol of riches-to-rags.)

How did he walk through the door? I pictured some past scene where the Stranger was hiding in an alley while someone (creditors, the law, someone he'd hurt with the imp, whatever you want) was hot on his heels. Desperate to avoid discovery, he wished that his pursuers would not find him. To his pleasure, he faded into the shadows, and his pursuers went right past him. Later, when he left his hiding place, he learned the wretched truth: the imp had changed his flesh into insubstantial darkness. He was a living shadow, insubstantial, and his touch drained strength.

The campaign continued on for a while, and after a while the party split up. Toben went to Darkon, and during his adventures there (he was trying to find someone to cast Regeneration on him to heal a severed arm), he joined forces with Taermon Gideon and Julianna Cromwell (as well as some other PCs who aren't important here.) Taermon was a PC priest of Mystra run by Drixil's player, which means that he too was mainly interested in his own well-being, and was a towering thug to boot. Julianna was also a PC, although she was secretly a low-rung Kargat sent to keep tabs on the party. He also briefly adventured with an elven priestess from Toril named Azura, a temporary PC who had just left the party when the Imp enters the scene again.

Summer. Darkon.

For his part, Toben was notoriously weak-willed and self-obsessed, known and feared for his abilities to whine endlessly. I knew I could get him to take the Imp; I just needed a good opportunity, and eventually I got it. After being in Darkon for a month, Toben started to lose his memories. A bad day for the weaselly little priest, to be sure, especially since his "friends" Taermon and Julianna abandoned him, leaving him in Il Aluk. (Taermon fled for the border, and Julianna followed him.)

Toben was only an hour or so from completely forgetting himself when there was a knock at the door of his room. When Toben answered it, he saw the Stranger standing in the hall. The Stranger offered the Imp once more. This time, Toben really wanted it; although he'd already sent off a letter asking his companions in Mordentshire he of course had no faith in them. This time, I watched as Toben's player starting wildly rationalizing the decision to take the imp. He started making up rules (and immediately convincing himself of their validity) that I had never implied.

"Hmm... Well, if every wish has a price, then the bigger the wish, the bigger the price. I just want a little wish, so the price won't be too bad."

Toben wished that he and all of his belongings be taken to Mordent...

First of all, he had a few items in his possession which weren't technically -his- belongings; items other PCs had lent him for various reasons.

Toben's player, convinced the Imp's "twisting" of his wishes would take the form of a nitpicking attention to detail, actually mentioned to me that some of his belongings might not make the trip. Therefore, I did indeed leave them behind. When he suddenly found himself in Mordent, surrounded by his meager gear, it was the middle of the night (as it had been in Darkon), and he was standing at the front doors of Gryphon Manor. He immediately fled, and sound somewhere to stay in Mordentshire. He thought he'd gotten away easily this time, and in a manner he had. But the two "bugs" in the wish I just mentioned were simply red herrings.

The real twisting of the wish hit one of his companions. At the moment Toben escaped Darkon, the mystic quill in Avernus immediately stopped scribing his history - and with the next line, started in on Azura (who wasn't due to be claimed for another month or two). This was my main rule for the Imp: it didn't remove maladies, it simply transferred them to someone else the Imp's master cared about.

Toben thought he had the imp figured out. Keep the wishes simple, and the price is a pushover. He made another wish the next day, to recover the belongings left behind in Darkon. One of these items was a magic dagger. What Toben didn't know was that Julianna (the PC kargat spy) had stolen this dagger from him while his mind was unraveling. As Toben slept that night, the imp gathered the missing belongings itself. Julianna (in Lamordia by this time) was woken by the sharp sensation of the imp stabbing her with her stolen dagger! She barely fended the thing off, and it flew out the window into the night. She had no idea what she had encountered.

The next morning, Toben woke up and found the missing items laid out on the bed next to him. The imp figurine was right where he had left it on the nightstand.

Now, at this point, the Imp really had been letting Toben off easy, but in another way I was demonstrating (in ways that the players wouldn't realize until the very last sessions of the campaign) that although the side-effects of the Imp's wishes could be disastrous, they weren't always immediately apparent to the imp's master. Remember, the imp's goal is to addict its master to the power it provides.

Right here, Toben showed a little good sense. He put the Imp on a shelf and swore never to use it again. This good sense lasted nearly a week. Of course, during that week, the Imp would telepathically serenade Toben to sleep each night with promises of all he could accomplish with these wishes, if he would only ask.

Toben lost all common sense and decided he had the power of the Imp in the palm of his hand. After the week of serenades, he decided that, yes, he could do some real good with this power. This is where the story turns ugly.

Months earlier, a PC witch (Nashadoe, aka "Nash") had failed a madness check and had been paranoid ever since. Well, not really any more paranoid than usual, but Nash's "usual" was everyone else's "dementia". Specifically, Nash was convinced that she was being hunted by Akriel Lukas, daughter of the lord of Kartakass. This insistence was a constant annoyance to the rest of the party, so much so that they had her committed to Saulbridge Sanitarium. Unfortunately, the other PCs had her released less than a week later (for questionable reasons). At the time, she was traveling in Nova Vaasa with the rest of the party.

Toben wished that Nash would no longer be insane. And he put the imp down for the day, happy with his work. Meanwhile, as she hiked along a Nova Vaasan road, Nash's mind started to take a little journey of its own. The paranoia dissolved (as far as the rules were concerned), but Nash started to come to certain... conclusions.

I may have mentioned that Nash was an exiled Drow (Although this wasn't immediately apparent to an onlooker. For arcane reasons, she had pasty white skin and jet black hair.) What was important was that she was Neutral: although she cared about nothing and no one but herself, she lacked the cruel, bloodthirsty, anything-to-get-my-way motivations of her CE brethren. Those other Drow would certainly see her Neutral alignment as weak at best, madness at worst. In other words, "sane" for Nash, a Drow, was to be Chaotic Evil. By the end of the day, that's exactly what she was.

I'll compress events a bit. What's important is that while staying at an inn in Egertus with the rest of the party, she murdered another guest (a total stranger) as he lay in his bed, all for his coin purse. She then made no attempt to cover up her crime, and when the militia came around asking questions the next morning, she used spells and illusions to present herself as some sort of bat-winged, undead horror, and fled through a window, using more spells to escape the law. Which left her traveling companions, the rest of the party, to face the brunt of the law. The PCs were told to drop their weapons, and that they would be taken to militia HQ for questioning.

Now, the sensible members of the party complied. After all, they hadn't done anything! Unfortunately, "the sensible members of the party" never included Drixil, the twitchy dwarven warrior I've mentioned in posts past. Drixil had a +2 short sword of quickness he'd gotten in Hour of the Knife. In Drixil's (and his player's) mind, Drixil was "a cool character" because he had the most powerful magical weapon in the party. Put bluntly, he would rather die than relinquish his treasure for even so much as a second. Actually, he already had, once upon a time (another tale for another night).

Drixil fought the law, and the law won -with help from the other PCs, who assisted the militia in his capture while pleading with the dwarf to regain some sense of sanity. Drixil was put in the town jail. Charges: resisting arrest, and three counts of attempted murder of a law enforcement officer. Drixil was facing the hangman. One of his friends, Kevin, came back to Drixil's cell to comfort him and tell him that the party would do everything it could to-

Drixil cut Kevin off with a passionate string of "salty language", capping it off with the promise that if Drixil ever saw Kevin again, he'd cut his heart out. The party immediately left Drixil to rot in his cell (and he drops out of our story).

A few more days went by, and the party stopped in Kantora. Meanwhile, Nash kept up her "foolishness." Her most painful act towards the party was a theft. Celia, another party member, was infected with lycanthropy, but (in Hour of the Knife) had actually obtained a magical object which gave her a way to control her curse. This object was an unbreakable, 5' silver jewelry chain.

Nash stole this chain from Celia's pack (for no particular reason). Nash hid this chain in her saddlebag, which she of course left in the inn's stable.

Well, as we all know, what with Kantora being a large, impoverished city, is it highly recommended that travelers keep their valuables unattended in the stables. Recommended by thieves guilds, pick-pockets, and the various other street rats. One of these street rats stole the saddlebag, and Celia never got her chain back.

Meanwhile, in Mordent, Toben hadn't made a wish in a week, and the Imp was getting antsy again. To spur the rather pathetic priest into action, the imp "hinted" at what fate had befallen Nash. Toben was aghast and made another wish immediately. He wished that Nash was as she had been before he made his wish. The imp graciously complied; it's just that Toben didn't really specify what he meant by "before." That could mean different things, depending on what timeframe you set "before" in. At one point, Nash had been a zombie (thanks to Azalin), her mind slowly rotting as each day went by.

The next morning, Nash woke up back to normal. Except that she was dead, of course, but it took her about an hour to discover this. This sent a shockwave through the party; first to have Nash (always the bizarre troublemaker) suddenly, inexplicably undead; second, to hear her confessions ("yes, I killed the merchant. Yes, I stole Celia's chain. What do you want *me* to do about it?") I dare say it's only because the PCs were such a bunch of pushovers that Nash didn't receive a sound thrashing. (Celia, the NPC, later left the group, insisting that she couldn't bear to travel with the witch, and sentiment shared by all the players but voiced by none.)

What made it worse for Nash was that sure, she was dead, but this was Nova Vaasa in the middle of summer, and the horseflies were swarming around her like the spoiled meat she was.

That night, Toben found out what he had done (the Imp was really putting the hooks in Toben now), so he basically rephrased his last wish a bit.

In Nova Vaasa, Nash woke up the next day quite alive, and apparently back to normal (paranoia and all). Of course, Argent (the paladin) had to help her out by laying hands on her, in order to remove the hundreds of fly eggs deposited under her skin of course. But after that, she seemed right as rain.

Except that, unbeknownst to everyone, the Imp had twisted another wish. Toben had basically wished for her to be like she was before his wishes, and she was -more so every day. She was growing younger at the rate of a year a day. (As an elf, this wasn't easy to spot.)

Nash had the Astrology NWP, and that night she looked to the stars for an answer for her bizarre predicament. I gave her an obvious clue as to who was responsible; I think I said Nash and Toben's stars were in the same House, or some such. But Nash's player always equated "bad things happen to PC" with "the DM is evil and trying to kill my character." In short, Nash asked the stars who was doing this to her, and they gave her an unusually clear and direct answer. And she decided that the stars were lying to her. From that point on, the stars would reveal nothing to her; it seemed as though she *had* no future.

The party chose to split up for many personal reasons, and took different paths, agreeing to meet again in Mordentshire after some weeks.

We have Toben (the priest) in Mordentshire. Julianna (the Kargat) and Taermon (another priest) are hiking overland towards Mordentshire to find Toben's friends. Meanwhile, the rest of the party has suffered greatly due to Toben's wishing. Drixil's gone, presumed hanged, Celia's lost her means of containing her lycanthropy, and Nash now has the sheriff of Egertus hiring bounty hunters to bring her in. (And Nash never put much effort into covering her tracks.)

All these people eventually converge on Mordentshire, each at their own speed. Nash has grown about 30 years younger, but since she's an elf, no one else has noticed. Nash has noticed something amiss; her clothes are starting to hang a little loose. In her inestimable wisdom, Nash has chosen not to mention this to anyone else, nor has she tried to do anything to remedy it herself. (The player spent all three years of the campaign believing I was an "evil" DM, and therefore this "curse" simply couldn't be fixed.)

Anyway, the party encounters Toben at home, and he and the others trade tales of their adventures. Two people in the party announce that they are leaving the party, at least temporarily: Kevin, the PC priest of Tempus, and Celia, the NPC. Kevin's player (who also ran Julianna) wanted to continue with her. Celia simply couldn't stand Nash's actions, or the way the party hadn't done anything about them.

The party had pressing business in Sithicus, and went off (to eventually play through WBRB). On the morning they left, the party consisted of Argent the paladin, Toben, Taermon, Julianna, Nash, and 2 other PCs inconsequential to this tale. Nash asked Toben for help; perhaps he could ask his god what was happening to her? Toben confessed that he was responsible, and produced the Imp from his pack. This shocked everyone else to the core. (Julianna had been nearly slain by the little bugger, and Nash's player was surprised that I really -hadn't- been just maliciously messing with him.) Argent insisted that the damned thing be destroyed at once! Taermon (played by Drixil's player) steps forward, eager to put his magical mace (another Azalin tale there) to good use. He delivered a mighty blow, which did not so much as chip the finish on the little statuette. Somehow, Argent got the inspiration to smash the Imp against a rock- it cracked! Of course, it also immediately came to infuriated life in his hand, but Argent managed to smash it to pieces before it could sting him with its tail. (I picture the scene as similar to someone holding a facehugger in his hand.)

The party was sure to throw the stone chunks of the Imp into the sea before they rode south. Somehow, they all knew this wasn't over...

It's also important to note that no one thought to go tell Celia or Kevin that the mystery of Nash's unnatural problems in Nova Vaasa had been solved.

A day after Argent smashed the Imp to pieces, Toben once again found the accursed figurine in his pack. (The Imp can only be harmed by stone weapons. If it is destroyed in this manner, it reforms in one day, back in the possession of its master. The party had yet to discover the one true way to put an end to the imp's evil wishes...)

About halfway to Sithicus, while riding through Arkandale, Nash and Toben decided they had the perfect wish to solve Nash's problem. In fact, Toben and Nash's players worked out a wish in secret between sessions. They worded it like lawyers, hoping to give me no loopholes, and by not letting me know what they were up to, they were convinced I wouldn't have a chance to come up with a way to abuse them.

Toben and Nash called a halt to the party, and Toben pulled out the imp (and the two players pulled out their wish, written like a speech). The gist of it was "I wish all the wishes I made for Nash would be undone." Oboy. They just weren't getting it, they still thought they could control the imp, mistaking it being evil for the DM being evil. That, and I'd let Toben live a good two or three times when any sane DM would have offed him, and I was still being treated as a "killer DM". So I went with the first idea that popped in my head.

Five, six wishes had been cast on Nash. That's a lot of magical power, and the Imp wasn't just about to snap its fingers and negate all the damage it had done. Using my own rule, the imp took the effects of those wishes and "undid" them by transferring them to someone else. In this case, Toben himself. Nash had shed about 40 years; the Imp gave them back, immediately, by taking them from its master. Toben was only 20, so ended up with about 20 years' worth of never born. In an instant Toben, his gear, even his horse were just plain gone. Even the memories of Toben in the others' minds were strangely dulled. All that was left was the Imp, sitting in the grass. Toben had undone himself.

At this instant, the Imp was like a ticking bomb. Having destroyed its master, it had none and would thus bond to the first person to take it into his possession. Unfortunately, Argent did just this, innocently picking up the Imp to ask the others what they should do with it. Nash yelled at him to drop the damned thing, and he threw it into the underbrush.

A day later, Argent found the Imp in his pack. However, Argent was made of sterner stuff than Toben had been, and for a long time it seemed like he might just be the master who had the strength to resist the Imp's power, despite the Imp's quiet promises. But it didn't last.

The party played through When Black Roses Bloom, during which Julianna was killed. At the very end, the party is presented with a way to escape Sithicus, and possibly escape the lands of mist altogether: a portal which appeared in Soth's armor (actually, his armor *was* the portal). Those PCs who did not escape through the portal would be doomed to serve Soth for the rest of their lives, searching in vain for the fragments of a gem which would at last bring Kitiara to Soth's side.

All the PCs went through the portal. (Nash only because she was thrown through.) All but two, that is. Taermon Gideon stayed behind, mainly because he didn't have the guts to face the dreadful unknown of what lay beyond that portal. Argent stayed behind because he didn't want to abandon his family or his unspoken sweetie, Celia, both back in Mordent. These two fled into the pitch-black night. The next morning, at dawn, Soth found them and declared their fate. The two men lost all hope, and Argent pulled out the trusty Imp.

Basically, they wished for another chance, to go back to the night before. It took some wrangling, but they got the Imp to deliver. Argent and Taermon went through the portal, and escaped into Ansalon.

Argent and Taermon escaped Sithicus. So the imp replaced them with Celia and Kevin. At the moment Argent and Taermon escaped, Celia and Kevin were both relaxing in Celia's home in Mordentshire. Both were in their "civvies," so when they suddenly found themselves in a pitch-black forest. surrounded by eerie, shadow-cloaked figures, Kevin had neither armor, nor weapons, nor useful spells ready. Celia had a silver locket on a silver chain, and a knife on her belt, only because she always wore these items. After much ado, Kevin and Celia fled into the dark forest, eventually hiding somewhere quiet. They had no idea what was going to happen two hours later when the moon rose. Worst of all, Kevin decided Celia should take the first watch.

Celia's pained screams woke him up. Kevin had no way of defending himself from the creature Celia was rapidly changing into, so he fled. He tried to climb trees, but every time he did so, some horrid, barely seen little monkey-like creature (the Imp) would slash at his hands!

After two or three tries at this, the werewolf pounced on Kevin and started tearing into him. He survived only through some quick thinking: he managed to tear the silver necklace from the werewolf's throat, wrap it tightly around his fingers, and then use it (like brass knuckles) to beat the monster into submission. It saved his life. Unfortunately, he was badly mauled, and although he didn't know it, he was infected.

The PC's stories went on, but that's the last direct effect the Imp had on their lives before the campaign stopped. Except one.

Argent was beyond the Imp's grasp, but the Imp knew where Argent was. Azalin had an interest in Argent, Nash, and Taermon, but had no idea where they were.

So the Imp told Azalin where they could be found.

And no one is beyond His grasp.