Important: This post has a theme song.
So. Swan maidens. (Or swanmays, if you want to be
old school about it.) They’re a classic trope of folklore, one that tends to follow the similar tales involving selkies,
crane wives, kitsune, etc.—either a man steals a swan maiden’s cloak and they
live together until she finds it, or a mysterious woman marries a man but hides
her secret from him and is compelled to leave if he ever discovers her true
nature.
Thanks to the heavily influential (meaning I haven’t read it
but know I should) Three Hearts and Three Lions, swan maidens have floated in and out of fantasy gaming for years,
taking on a much more active role as defenders of nature with aspects of the
ranger or druid classes. Sometimes they
are fey; sometimes they are human; in 3.5 they were even a prestige class.
Pathfinder goes the fey route, making them agile fencers and
archers with a dash of fey magic to go with.
Their fey nature is still heavily tied up in their cloaks, though—a swan
maiden can’t transform into swan form without one, and a good-aligned female of
any humanoid race can be transformed into a swan maiden through a 24-hour
ritual (which you have to imagine involves the investiture of a feathered cloak). If you’ve got a good female PC whose player
wants to switch characters or leave the campaign, a retirement as a swan maiden
would be a hell of a send-off.
That said, you can scrap the female requirement as far as
I’m concerned. The stories of Lohengrin
and the Knight of the Swan are nearly swan maiden tales already, give or take a
swan-drawn chariot or two. So maybe next
adventure throw some swan men your PCs’ way.
Or, if you like gender fuckery—I normally keep this blog FCC-clean but
it’s the appropriate term of art—maybe men become swan maidens when they
acquire the cloak, too, and only retain their new gender as long as they retain
the feathered mantle. So the PC hoping
to get a new cohort (or a new bride) by stealing a swan maiden’s cloak might be
surprised to find a very angry bearded man demanding his clothing back.
And as for trumpeter swans…dude, swans are territorial. Don’t mess with them. Urban legend has inflated their reputation
somewhat, but still.
“Flush the rebels out
of Durham Wood.” A seemingly simple command. But when adventurers discover that grigs,
brownies, and even unicorns are aiding the rebels, it’s clear that this is no
ordinarily hullabaloo over taxes and crop seizures. A scouting mission into the nearby valley
reveals someone is clearcutting trees, crafting strange clockwork soldiers, and
holding local children in locked pens. Do
the adventurers ride out their contract or switch sides? And how can you convince the baron you’ve
captured the rebels’ charismatic swan maiden leader when she turns into a man
24 hours after her cloak has been removed?
“Retrieve the king’s
swan.” A seemingly simple
assignment. But when the swan in
question is a gift from a nixie queen a continent away, the gamekeeper has been
poisoned, there are goblins on the loose, and the swan itself is rather adamant
about not being retrieved…then it becomes another assignment entirely. The price for failure is the king’s
displeasure…but succeed or fail this just might be the assignment that turns a
ragtag band of nobles’ bastard children, acolytes, apprentices, and promising
servants into a bona fide adventuring company.
“Steal the banner
from the top of Château Cygnus.” A
seemingly simple dare. Unlike the dapper
(when they’re not publicly carousing and brawling) musketeers, church magi, halberdiers,
city watch, and other public and private armies roaming the streets of Sierre,
the Swan Knights spend most of their time dispatched leagues away in the Royal
Game Preserves and keep to the château when in town. Musketeers who take up the challenge will
find that the Swan Knights are not precisely human and have unique ways of
foiling the plans of ambitious braggarts.
But—assuming the swan maidens don’t kill them outright—the musketeers
may also be on hand to stop a disturbing plot by some cold-iron wielding
rakshasa agents intent on destroying the fey shapechangers who might spot their
machinations.
—Pathfinder Bestiary 4
257
I think some Tamora Pierce snuck into that first adventure
seed.
I first came across swanmays in the pages of Dragon Magazine #155, a fey-focused
issue you’re probably sick to death of me talking about. (It’s so good, though!)
Dragon #266 had a
whole article on variant swanmays from James Wyatt, “Feathered Friends and
Foes.” It’s actually kind of great, and
if you’re a big fan of swanmays/swan maidens, it's worth checking out.
For me though, that issue has always represented something
grim. It came out in December 1999, amid
a series of issues (the amazing Underdark-focused #267 being a very notable
exception) that were clearly marking time until Third Edition came out. In fact, it was worse than that…these issues
just felt exhausted and out of ideas.
(Even James Wyatt’s article, while I like it for itself, in context is
symptomatic of that exhaustion: “You know that one shapechanger near the end of
the alphabet that you’ve never used?
Here are four more of them. I
hope you like gull-people.”) Normally I
dread edition changes the way most people fear an IRS audit, but the decline of
late-2e Dragon really makes the case
that it was time. Reading from fall of
1999 through 2001 is to watch a magazine surrender to exhaustion, then be
utterly reborn with the shot of adrenaline 3.0 provided.
Worse than that, this was around the time the hobby store in
my local mall just gave up on RPGs whatsoever after a remodel. But for some reason, they had stacks of issue
#266 lying around. Stacks. And they just
lingered there unbought for months, propped
up on a bottom shelf in the remodeled store as this awful mocking symbol that the
magazine I loved was barely wheezing along and that my favorite hobby store
didn’t care about my hobby anymore.
So I hate this issue.
But props to James Wyatt for a nice article.
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