Mielikki & Ravenloft

In my Curse of Strahd campaign, the party Cleric is aligned with Mielikki & a lot of the party follow her lead.

I wanted to develop some hooks for this character and their deity, so I read up on Mielikki in the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide:

Mielikki
Our lady of the Forest, the Forest Queen
 
People rarely speak of Mielikki except in quiet forest spaces. Woodlands that evoke wonder are where she reigns supreme, but she is said to keep watch over god folk in any forest, not matter how dark or cruel. When children are lost in the woods, people beseech Mielikki to protect them until they are found.
Mielikki is the goddess of the forest and the creatures that live within it. She is seen as a remote and spiritual deity-less humanlike than many other gods. She’s not unmindful of people, but her attention and favor are difficult to attract. She is the patron of rangers in the same way that Milil is the patron of bards, but even rangers rarely pray to her directly. The instead pray to Gwaeron Windstorm, who they believe will carry their words to the goddess by tracking her to whichever forest she hides in.
Mielikki's symbol is a unicorn, which prompts some to thing of her as such and conflate her with Lurue, queen of the Unicorns and the actual goddess of their kind. But most tales depict Mielikki as a beautiful woman whom Lurue allows upon her back as a rider, and the two are thought to be boon companions. Mielikki’s relationships with other deities of the natural world are more complex. Silvanus is sometimes thought of as her father and Eldath is considered her sister, but Mielikki walks her own path through the wilds.
She has many shrines, particularly in the Savage Frontier. Most consist of a dead tree trunk into which has been carved a likeness of her holy symbol, a unicorn’s head. Alternatively, the likeness might be carved on a separate piece of wood and tacked to a living tree. These shrines typically mark the point in the forest beyond which locals know not to cut timber or hunt. Often these tributes are created by loggers at the end of a logging excursion as a mark of things to the goddess for providing the wood and for keeping the timber cutters safe during the work.

I did not get a lot of ideas from this...there are a lot of Forests in Barovia & the party will spend a significant amount of time exploring in and around them. I can have the Wolf vs Unicorn conflict kind of come up somehow--like make sure that the party knows that the wolves are not just hunting them.

Barovia is old and was not the horror it is today, so an abandoned logging camp with the symbols of thanks makes some sense--not sure where to tie it in--the Windmill? maybe the gallows? Not sure yet, but I will likely find something--still have a few weeks for that.

This image of Mielikki has helped shape some of my thinking



Basically, in the deepest forests of Barovia Strahd has no control--Mielikki still reigns supreme & Strahd is not happy about that at all--he will use the Cleric of Mielikki to somehow gain a toe hold into the Heart of the Forest and start his corrupting influence there...still working on this.