Laewendas

The Quisling 'Queen' — Rivalon's usurper and the Coalition's first target.
Power-hungry, self-serving, always the blameless victim. In 1357 she murdered the
rightful King Aethelric with his own sword, presented court with his severed
head, and crowned herself. She carved Rivalon to pieces and sold its territories and
tribute rights to marauders and bandits. Aethelric's son-in-law Haelric warred
against her and was assassinated (1358).

The fear throughout Rivalon: she could not have acted alone — someone trusted within
the castle betrayed Aethelric. Laewendas must be the first to fall; the rightful
Sovereign Ysolde waits to be restored in Cathalon.

Session 8

• Per Queen Ysolde's landing speech: Castle Cathalon, where Laewendas and
  her bandit kings "hold the nation hostage," is 50–60 miles from the front and
  could fall within 9 months to 2 years. Her scorched-earth tactics (razed villages,
  burned roads) are the official justification for the island-wide road tax.
• One of her right-hand women named: Euphemia Fayeth, a memory-twisting battle
  mage fortressed at Pinpadge — now Fenric's assigned target.
• Sir Danica broke her knightly oath rather than serve her, and offers her honor
  as a bounty: "place her head upon a pike, then my honor will return."
• The Mage's Society publicly reaffirmed its 15,000-year-old treaty obligation
  to kill her; war with her bandit kings is the #1 cause of death on the island.

Session 11

• Per Zantaya: she has nine henchmen whose collective support underpins her hold on Cathalon; removing even a handful would crack the capital's defenses.
• Her enforcer Garruk the Red goes town to town beyond the Palisade collecting "tax" (effectively protection money); allegedly cursed to have the most punchable face in the kingdom.
• Deliberately burned mailboxes early in her rule to isolate villages and prevent communication — the post guild in Rivalon has been shelved for fear of her ever since.

Session 12

• Shut down The Serpent's old arena 200 miles north when she seized his home region — one more institution lost to her conquest.
• Resents the Southlander bandit lord Mindel Cromelon for losing half her border territory to the Reclamation's Palisade ("if Laewendas wanted to hold the border, she should have sent the army") — Mindel Cromelon is a bandit, not a soldier, per Dominus.

Session 17

• Eldrich the Elder of Gwyndinas's inner-city Palisade is hiring an elite group to kill one of Laewendas's inner circle — and the party has signed on to audition. Her agents' repeated attempts to infiltrate the inner city are cited as the reason its gates stay closed to outsiders.

Session 21

• Her seat at Cathalon is named directly — Eldrich calls her "the Bitch Queen" who "hides herself and tortures her subjects," 30–40 miles from the Outskirts settlements he eyes for a base.
• The land beyond the Palisade is hers and hostile: torched farms, salted fields, Reclamation soldiers hanged from the signposts.
• Her Southlander bandit lord Mindel Cromelon appears in person at last, ambushing Eldrich's caravan on a bridge — confirmed elven, and still operating around the reclaimed Southlands border she lost.

Session 26

• Her reach extends into the Grey Vale Cave: the ledge scholar studying the Queen Grabbler is, by his own admission, an agent in her service — placed to observe the Queen, for reasons left unexplained ("Oh, heaven knows, but probably the best for all of us").
• His line "she keeps us safe... that's what the Heralds say" introduces a new term for her followers/propagandists.

Session 39

• A general down. Garruk the Red — her town-to-town "tax" enforcer (Session 11) and, per the Varian spy Timothy Leisten, one of her chief generals — is confirmed dead ("corpsed"): rumour says an **angel descended, said 'you have been named,' and he exploded into maggots / blood-magma." The GM reveals this was the party's own doing in a session Magra's player missed — they flipped a shrine's Life Domain to the Blood Domain, and a winged "Blood Witch" named him before flying off. One of her nine henchmen removed; the war "getting closer and closer to winning."
• Her mercenary force exposed. A cave ~10 miles upstream of Ponterford (The Snatcher's Cave) holds her private mercenary force — the mirror of the Reclamation — a rest/resupply and action-planning base of 16–40 well-armed agents (with mages), who also run a child-sacrifice shrine there. The party plans to raid it.

Session 40

• The menagerie scouted. Her upstream cave is cased in detail, its door guarded by a blood-spattered sign — "By the orders of the rightful Queen Laewendas, do not enter on penalty of death" — and its agents catalogued: the toe-eating Toe Skinner (+ a botched clone), the boogeyman Penway Hat Man, the near-lich Candleman of the sacrificing shrine, a fire mage, a feral wild man, a stitched-together tea party, and a crocodile man rated more dangerous than her own Grabber Queen.
• The shrine's tombs have been magically scoured of their names by some avenging mage — a hint at old grudges among her dead.

Session 41

• More tax-collectors named, among her cave agents. The raid surfaces two of her tax enforcers holed up in The Snatcher's Cave: the Ghoul of Gythfield — a reluctant, never-strike-first undead collector who promptly defects to the Reclamation, reckoning "Laewendas's days are numbered, nobody wants to be on the losing side" — and the unkillable noble Thunt. Even her own agents see the war turning against her.
• Her cave doubles as a child-sacrifice site to the Candleman (the avatar of a dead god), and a roost for the Hat Man and the pyromancer Simon.

Session 42

• The cave's undead half falls. The party clears the buried boss chamber of her upstream cave — killing the dungeon-lord Halren (an ancient immortal scholar, no agent of hers but a danger her people kept away from) and looting its ~5,000-gold vault. Only her riverside raider camp remains, to be hit at dawn.
• A second defector confirmed. The Ghoul of Gythfield fights the cave's undead alongside the party all session, cementing his switch to the Reclamation.

Session 43

• Her upstream cave falls completely. The riverside raider camp — her last foothold in The Snatcher's Cave — is wiped out in a dawn pincer; her agents the Toe Skinner, the Hat Man, the fire-mage Simon and the rest are dead, the cave handed to a Reclamation garrison. One of her camps, gone.
• Her treasury is empty. Her own unkillable tax-man Thunt lets slip that her coffers are bone dry — "she spent every penny of what she's robbed and every penny of what was there before" — and that he secretly skims a sliver of every tax he collects for her. The Queen is "not as rich as she pretends to be."
• The next blow looms. With Ponterford secured, the party weighs its path to her: Varian dead-drop jobs, Eldrich the Elder's plan to kill one of her generals, or a direct march — all roads bending toward the eventual siege of Cathalon.

Session 45

• The massacre of Halfwood. A dead postmaster, questioned by Silithane's Speak with Dead in the ruins of Old Halfwood, reveals her oldest documented atrocity: ~40 years ago the village's mayor petitioned the crown — a motion of dismissal rejecting the "false queen who has seized the throne," signed by 800 citizens. "The palace refused this delivery. Several days later, soldiers seized Halfwood… and we fell red by nightfall." The town was burned, its dead later reanimated; the loyalist Thanhold (a survivor of that battle) now rebuilds it as New Halfwood.
• A blight, maybe hers. Silithane suspects the woods' spreading necromantic undead curse is her reprisal (as she sent The Snatcher to Ponterford), but Fenric notes the fresh undead aren't local and the blight is ongoing — its source unconfirmed. The capital itself, a week away, is half-jokingly floated as possibly fallen.