Pâté de Rolo

Pâté de Rolo is a puppet created by Laudna made of a raven skull affixed to the body of a dead rat. Pâté is named after the de Rolo family of Whitestone, where Laudna is from. When she puppets Pâté, speaks through him using ventriloquy in a deeper pitched, almost Cockney accent. After Laudna's resurrection, Laudna awakened Pâté as her Pact of the Chain warlock familiar.

Description
Pâté de Rolo is a small puppet created by Laudna made out of the body of a rat and the skull of a raven that died after flying into a wall inside Laudna's home. In official art, he is depicted wearing a red ribbon around its neck. As a puppet, she carried him on her belt, and as a familiar, he lives in her hair.

As a puppet, Laudna maneuvers him using magical tendrils from her fingers as strings like a marionette and performs ventriloquy through him. She stated that he can be puppeteered a maximum of six inches away from her fingertips. As a familiar, he sprouts from his back "awful-looking" tattered wings; Marisha described that "his ribcage is now his wings". Both as a ventriloquy puppet and as a familiar, he speaks in a deeper pitched, gravelly voice and has a Cockney accent.

Once, when Laudna summoned him to her side (mechanically, temporarily dismissing him into a pocket dimension, then re-summoning him), he exploded into a syrup, then re-incorporated himself from the ends of her hair.

Puppet
Before 841 PD, Laudna created Pâté to keep her company alongside "the voice inside her head" to prevent her from going mad in her solitude. She seems proud of the work she did in creating Pâté herself. She named him after Percival de Rolo of Whitestone, where Laudna is from. Laudna recalled there being many de Rolos whose names began with the letter P and felt that the puppet looked like dead liver, so she additionally named him Pâté.

Pâté was introduced to the yet-to-be-named Bells Hells in. Though Laudna was excited to show him off, reaction to Pâté among the group was mixed: Fresh Cut Grass and Ashton Greymoore reacted positively, Dorian Storm was polite but disliked him, and Imogen Temult remarked that she had not gotten used to Pâté in the two years she's known Laudna. When Laudna, speaking through Pâté, told the group that he kept her company to maintain her sanity in solitude, Orym whispered to the puppet that he did a good job.

Laudna later excitedly introduced Pâté to Little Mister, Fearne Calloway's monkey-shaped wildfire spirit. Little Mister screeched at Pâté, and Fearne attempted to encourage Little Mister to befriend Pâté by petting Pâté, which only made Little Mister jealous. Later that day, Laudna showed him to Milo Krook. Thrilled, Milo called Laudna "cool" and became inspired to create similar rat-creature hybrid constructs.

Laudna presented Pâté to Chetney Pock O'Pea, who was initially delighted to make the acquaintance but was more hesitant when Laudna proclaimed that he and Pâté were now friends. When the group considered having Chetney pay them for their help by making toys, instead of in gold, Laudna asked if he could make a girlfriend for Pâté. Chetney said he could and, when Laudna through Pâté said he was "quite horny", Chetney added he would consider that in the design. The next day, when Fearne used Wild Shape to become a rat, Pâté said she was "a fresh hunk of meat"; Imogen said this was inappropriate to say, and Laudna admonished Pâté for offending Imogen.

When Laudna returned to Trove of Marwa alone, she offered to take Marwa Endalia's "trash" (valuables without current uses) to make masks for Bells Hells and a tiny bowtie for Pâté in order to pay for a too-expensive purchase. Once she revealed Pâté, Marwa sold her the goods for all her gold and threw in free scraps for such arts and crafts.

Imogen later gifted Laudna a "creepy marionette" that Laudna named Sashimi and made her Pâté's girlfriend, causing Chetney to abandon crafting the one she requested from him. He instead gifted Laudna a house, so that Pâté and Sashimi could do things "behind closed doors". Fearne later surreptitiously placed a gnarlrock shard into the house with Pâté, Sashimi, and another doll Caviar while Laudna slept, causing Laudna to believe that the two puppets "manifested" the shard with their love.

After Laudna was killed in the fight with Otohan Thull, Imogen took Pâté. When the party was in a shade realm trying to free Laudna's soul, Chetney found a rat body and bird skull that a shade of Laudna was crafting with in a stone hut and took those materials with him. The real Pâté was formed part of Imogen's offering to help call Laudna's soul back to her body during a resurrection ritual, and he was returned to her upon the ritual's success.

Familiar
In the evening following her resurrection, Laudna said that, while she remembered creating Pâté while in the shade realm, she felt the others. This felt to her like she was able to "rewrite" the memory and imbue the essence of the others' presence into Pâté. She cast Find Familiar, transforming Pâté into her winged familiar.

In Bells Hells room at the Lakecap Skyport and Lounge, Ashton thanks Pâté for his assistance in protecting Laudna and then interrogates him of his convenient appearance after Laudna's resurrection and says if he contains any inkling of Delilah, they'll end him.

As Bells Hells returned to Ebenold Kai's house from the Elemental Plane of Fire, Laudna had Pâté change shape into a spider to investigate a group of the Ruby Vanguard, searching the house upstairs. He was eventually swept up in an air elemental and remained with it for some time, but Laudna called Pâté back to her when it fled. She tasked him with keeping an eye on Tuldus, a member of the Ruby Vanguard who was captured and magically charmed. Laudna then summoned Pâté back to her so that the group could depart for the Feywild.

Abilities
Pâté is a familiar summoned by Laudna using Find Familiar and behaves according to the details spell. He uses the imp stat block, a special familiar form available to Laudna as a Pact of the Chain warlock. The imp stat block has the following abilities:


 * Darkvision (120 feet)
 * Resistance to cold damage and bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage from nonmagical attacks that aren't silvered
 * Immunity to fire and poison damage and to the poisoned condition
 * Shapechanger
 * Devil's Sight
 * Magic Resistance

In accordance with the stat block, Pâté may also use his action to make a melee weapon attack with his bite or to turn invisible.

Appearances and mentions
This tracks only Pâté's appearances as a familiar.
 * Campaign 3: Bells Hells

Behind the scenes
Pâté was created during the development of Laudna's character design for her official portrait. Artist Hannah Friederichs added scissors, yarn, and other objects hanging off Laudna's belt, prompting Marisha to remember Taliesin's advice on Renaissance Faire costumes: "You need more dead things hanging off of you." Hannah added a dead rat, and Marisha had a raven skull added to make it more "crafty". The decision to use Pâté as a puppet was felt out in the moment because of Laudna's necromancy connection rather than decided in advance.

Once Pâté was incorporated into the design, Marisha felt that she needed to name him and settled on Pâté's name well before she decided Laudna's. Though she felt that the idea that Pâté and Sashimi are named after the foods Laudna ate at the dinner Delilah Briarwood held before killing her, Marisha said that the names were not related. She wanted to "fuck with Taliesin" by naming the rat "something de Rolo". She wanted to play on Percy de Rolo and wanted the name to reference something dead, so she chose "Pâté". She found the name funny because it was "dead and liver", which Laudna herself observes in-campaign. This led into Laudna's general habit of choosing gourmet foods when naming things, like other puppets and horses.

Trivia

 * A pâté (French: "paste") is a food made from a seasoned mixture of ground meat and fat, usually slow-cooked and served cold. Given Laudna compared the puppet to liver, pâté de foie gras is made of the livers of fattened ducks or geese and is considered a delicacy associated with the rich and noble.
 * Pâté's raven skull is reminiscent of Percival de Rolo's personally crafted bird-beaked mask and his raven skull clasp crafted using a skull given to him by Keyleth, who like Laudna was played by Marisha.