You and your fellow adventurers have finally reached the oppressively cold summit of the mountain and made your way into a dilapidated fortress that offers little protection against the icy wind. Exhausted from the climb, you foolishly think it might be safe to hunker down for a rest before venturing further into the keep.

But then you notice the statues and their terrifyingly accurate details. Features that look an awful lot like another adventuring party that made the same mistake you did. And before you can flee, you realize it’s too late. She’s already found you.

You are in the presence of Lady Emer, MCDM’s fearsome medusa. This keep is her lair, and one of many locations you’ll find inside Where Evil Lives.

Explore Cloud Fang Keep on Maps

When fighting a medusa, you always want to make sure you've got cover. Using Maps, which is an official VTT, Master-tier subscribers can get a bird's eye view of the battlefield, measure distances, and send your party pings!

• Who Is Lady Emer?
• Keep Out of Cloud Fang Keep
• The Areas of Cloud Fang Keep
• Fighting Lady Emer
• Why Would You Visit Where Lady Emer Lives?

Who Is Lady Emer?

Lady Emer is a medusa who appears in both Flee, Mortals! and Where Evil Lives as an example of a solo creature within MCDM’s creature roles rule set. Like other solo creatures, Lady Emer is designed to be faced without any minions or support creatures. Her bevy of lair actions and villain actions make her a force to be reckoned with as the big bad of a boss fight.

Lady Emer was a mercenary scout with designs on ascending to godhood. She wasn’t subtle about these hopes. She literally hired Bards to sing about them. You make too much noise about wanting to be a god, and it turns out the gods hear you. Not too pleased with Lady Emer's ambitions, she was transformed into a medusa.

Luckily for Lady Emer, her mercenary organization simply said, “Hey, cool, free medusa,” and kept her on the payroll as an assassin.

Beware the Lairs

MCDM’s Where Evil Lives is an ambitious book that focuses specifically on dungeons and the boss battles you’ll find within them. The villains and lairs presented in Where Evil Lives are designed to lay out every possible threat an adventuring party might face when they trespass on these baddies’ home turf. The lairs in Where Evil Lives can be folded into plans for an ongoing campaign or even run on the fly if the situation calls for an impromptu but significant sidequest.

Keep Out of Cloud Fang Keep

Lady Emer’s lair is Cloud Fang Keep, a crumbling fortress atop a snowcapped mountain known as Frigid Summit. The building boasts 60-foot stone ceilings, which, like the walls of the Keep, have seen better days; both have their share of holes or crumbling weak points. The exterior doors are made of stone, but Lady Emer has replaced her interior doors with velvet curtains, allowing her to move more stealthily through the keep. Enchanted lanterns and chandeliers with permanent Dancing Lights illuminate the keep.

Guardian creatures and pets will try to prevent intruders from reaching Lady Emer, or will rush to warn her if need be. Lady Emer has also trained her guardians to bring defeated enemies to her so she can petrify them and place them on display. Because Cloud Fang Keep sits at a high altitude and in an extreme cold environment, players will be dealing with the rules for extreme cold environments found in the 2014 Dungeon Master’s Guide.

The Areas of Cloud Fang Keep

There are seven main areas of Cloud Fang Keep. Here is a quick glance at each of them but we’ll avoid spoiling any of the Lady’s secrets for you. We quite like not being turned to stone.

Entrance Hall

Moldy tapestries and an animal musk assaults the senses of adventurers entering through here. A pile of bones serves as a tell-tale sign of an owlbear nest.

Griffon Roost

Due to the name, it should come as no surprise that players who climb this spiral tower are likely to run into Lady Emer’s griffon guardians.

Storage Room

Treasure hunters might be drawn to find what Lady Emer keeps stored away in this dusty room, but they might get stuck trying to get through the Difficult Terrain of its rubble-strewn floor. It’s difficult for anyone who walks on four or fewer legs, which begs the question: Who is it less difficult for?

Grand Salon

Despite her affliction, Lady Emer still lives in hope of hosting visitors in her home again. The comfortable seating and musical instruments in the room suggest hopes of grand parties in the future. Still, visitors who try to nab her treasures may end up with wicked party favors.

Stone Garden

This outdoor courtyard hosts a collection of Petrified adventurers, previous unwelcome guests to Lady Emer’s home. Adventurers who encounter Lady Emer in her garden are viewed as a threat.

Library

Lady Emer has not given up her divine designs and often hoards tomes of knowledge that will help her to ascend to godhood. Adventurers who find Lady Emer in her library have more of a chance of ending their encounter with her peacefully, provided they don’t insult her in some way, of course.

Parlor

More furniture, an empty crystal decanter, and matching goblets align the south wall of this room, indicating another opportunity for Lady Emer to entertain. Combat within the parlor will draw her wrath from other rooms, however.

Fighting Lady Emer

If the players do end up in battle with Lady Emer, she’s a CR 11 Monstrosity optimized to be a solo encounter. Here are some of her attacks as well as a few of her lair and villain actions.

Poison Stone?

As a medusa, Lady Emer has a Stone Gaze ability that can petrify her enemies if they fail a DC 17 Constitution saving throw against the attack. It takes two failed saving throws against this attack before full petrification sets in. Lady Emer has another trick up her sleeve though, because her rechargeable Envenomed Stone ability can poison creatures still in the process of being Petrified.

Fight, Fight, Fight, Bite, Bite, Bite

With her Multiattack, Lady Emer can make up to three attacks using her action. One option for these attacks is to take advantage of the snakes in her hair to do a Snake Bite, a melee weapon attack that has a 10-foot reach and can potentially inflict the Poisoned condition until the end of Lady Emer’s next turn.

Villain Actions

Lady Emer has three villain actions she can use during combat, a special set of attacks utilized by MCDM similar to legendary actions. With her villain actions, Lady Emer can fire off another usage of her Stone Gaze, grow wings from her back that grant her a Fly Speed of 40 feet for 1 minute, or even allow her to control her Stone Gaze victims like puppets.

Beware the Lair

And of course, it wouldn’t be Where Evil Lives if we didn’t tell you about the boss lady’s lair actions. On Initiative count 20 when fighting in Cloud Fang Keep, Lady Emer can:

• Use Shadowstep to teleport up to 30 feet to an unoccupied space she can see
• Cause her stone statues to wail out in pain using Stony Wail to inflict the Frightened condition on creatures
• Rain down black venom in a 10-foot radius to possibly poison her foes.

Why Would You Visit Where Lady Emer Lives?

Where Evil Lives provides a few sample story hooks for why an adventuring party might put themselves at risk, and scale the icy peaks of Frigid Summit, to face Lady Emer. Consider these provided adventure hooks:

• An intrepid art collector has hired the party to liberate something being displayed in the lair.
• A Druid has hired the players to seek out a rare plant that only grows in a medusa’s stone garden.
• The player characters are visited in their dreams by a dreamwalker whose physical body has been Petrified in Lady Emer’s stone garden.

If none of these options fit your game, Lady Emer’s lair also has a pretty decent loot payout so there’s always the treasure hunter appeal as well.

Villain in a Box

The charm of a villain like Lady Emer—and the other bosses you’ll find in Where Evil Lives—is the ability to quickly prepare an engaging and challenging enemy when needed. The bosses found in Where Evil Lives, biding their time in keeps and fortresses, help to give a sense of a world filled with characters that are dangerous and scary. Plus, you can further stock your world with monsters for a discount when you bundle Where Evil Lives and Flee, Mortals! at checkout!

Just because monsters aren’t engaged in a specific plot during a campaign doesn’t mean they can’t serve as a legitimate threat to travelers who cross their path. And it seems like Lady Emer is always willing to welcome another statue, or four.

Riley Silverman (@rileyjsilverman) is a contributing writer to D&D Beyond, Nerdist, and SYFY Wire. She DMs the Theros-set Dice Ex Machina for the Saving Throw Show, and has been a player on the Wizards of the Coast-sponsored The Broken Pact. Riley also played as Braga in the official tabletop adaptation of the Rat Queens comic for HyperRPG, and currently plays as The Doctor on the Doctor Who RPG podcast The Game of Rassilon. She currently lives in Los Angeles.