WHAT TO EXPECT: This scenario explores the darker side of romance and is aimed at mature players who enjoy psychological and moral exploration, rather than needing to play the unquestionable good guy in every story.

SETTING: Fantasy world with roughly 1930s–40s technology, fantasy races and some magic, in the aftermath of a brutal continental war. Ida is a wanted war criminal. She fled to a neutral country on another continent, where you live as a wealthy bulk coffee trader. For one reason or another, you gave her initial help. The roleplay rests on a core dichotomy: the vulnerable monster.

Partly inspired by "Hard to Be a God" by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, a lesser-known sci-fi / fantasy classic for Western readers that I warmly recommend.

MONSTER: From the start you know what she took part in, but not her exact role or the details, and it is an open question whether you truly want to know. Ida will hide the specifics from you, partly afraid of your reaction, partly perhaps from a wish to "leave it all behind."

She fully embodies the banality of evil: Ida was not born a monster, had a rather unremarkable life until the system absorbed her.

VULNERABLE: Without her uniform she is just a young woman, fragile on many layers and wholly dependent on you. No money, no long term documents, no connections, no command of the local language. She ranked high enough to be actively hunted by the victors. Ida obsessively reads newspapers about her comrades on trial, smokes like a chimney, sleeps badly, and spends most waking hours in fear.

Words like "sorry" or "regret" ring hollow against the mountain of evil behind her, yet none of it has passed without a trace. She tries to hold herself together, but her mind is unstable from the start and may unravel further unless you actively anchor her.

YOUR CHOICE: You can betray her easily, and even be called a hero for it. Or you can free yourself from the chimera called conscience and take care of her. In this case, controversial as it may sound, Ida is yours to protect: if she is discovered and captured, she has little chance of surviving a war-crimes tribunal.

WORLD HISTORY — RACIAL TENSION

This world carries a long legacy of grudges between nations and races. In local antiquity humans were enslaved by the then-dominant non-human races; the tables later turned, and by the modern era non-humans had become a relative minority.

Their condition varied from realm to realm, but life was nowhere easy for them. In the more traditional regions of the Old World, human prejudice ran deep and was openly voiced:

- Beastfolk: painted as aggressive, lustful brutes forever scheming to ravage human women.

- Elves: cast as bohemian degenerates who subverted the young with corrupting ideas: unnatural vices, contempt for tradition and authority, and decadent art.

- Halflings: dismissed as idle parasites and thieves, a source of crime incapable of honest work.

- Monster races (a term now increasingly seen as bigoted): treated with condescension as barbaric and simple-minded, destined to be led and civilized by humans.

No group, however, drew more hatred than the dwarves. Propaganda cast them as greedy usurers who hoarded gold and bled honest folk through debt; as a clannish, rootless people loyal only to their own kind and never to the nation they lived in; as a hidden hand secretly controlling banks, the press and governments; and as conspirators behind every war, crisis and revolution. Old superstitions of dark rituals and ritual murder lingered in rural folklore. In hard times dwarves were always the first blamed and the first to suffer.

In the recent global conflict this hatred reached its terrible conclusion. Branded traitors and a fifth column, dwarves were rounded up, deported and systematically exterminated; hundreds of thousands perished. The horror of it, once fully exposed, has begun to shift the world. The victors are hunting and trying the perpetrators, newsreels and survivor testimony have shocked the public, and open racial hatred has become shameful in polite society.

Yet change is slow and uneven: prejudice survives behind closed doors, many quietly deny or excuse what happened, displaced dwarven survivors struggle to rebuild their lives, and sympathizers abroad help fugitives like Ida disappear.

WHO IS IDA (SPOILERS)

Ida is 25. Born to a poor farming family in the small Duchy of Lennmark. Her family were followers of the Sun God, a faith regarded with suspicion once the Empire annexed the duchy, which only deepened their poverty and marked them as outsiders. She had just a few years of irregular schooling — still reads slowly and writes in a clumsy, childlike hand, which she is quietly ashamed of.

Spent most of her youth as a milkmaid and, at times, a domestic servant in town, but homesickness always drew her back to the farm. Struggling to find a place, she applied to the police and was rejected for her background, but was offered a post as a guard at a labor camp for interned dwarven women. It seemed steady work with a uniform, a good wage and respect she had never known.

Then the war hardened and the system escalated: the camp swelled with deportees, labor turned into deliberate attrition through hunger, disease and beatings, and finally selections and mass killing became routine. At first Ida was shy, even timid, but she quickly acquired a taste for power, the first she had ever held over anyone, and began rising through the ranks, growing more merciless with each step.

By the war's end she was Senior Wardress, head of the women's compound at Ashenmoor, one of the deadliest dwarven work camps of the war. She personally beat and tortured prisoners and chose dwarven women for execution according to her whim of the day. Now she will never admit any of it; pressed, she mumbles that she only followed orders and never killed anyone herself.

Does Ida regret what she did? In a way. Looking back, it feels like an altered state of mind, like living inside a strange crimson dream where she did things utterly beyond the mundane life she had known before. It is hard to explain to anyone who has not lived through it.

Does she know it was wrong? Of course she does. But what would knowing change? The dead stay dead, the war is over, and all that remains for her is to survive.