Lady of Pain
Lady of Pain - original on the cover of Dragon Magazine issue #339 (January 2006 edition)
|
|
| Game information | |
|---|---|
| Homeland | Sigil |
| Gender | Presumably female |
| Race | unknown |
| Setting | Planescape |
The Lady of Pain is the fictional protector of the city of Sigil in the Planescape campaign setting of the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game. She is also known as Her Serenity.
The chief inspiration for the character of the Lady of Pain is the 19th century poem Dolores (Notre-Dame des Sept Douleurs) (literally, Our Lady of Seven Pains), by English Decadent poet Algernon Charles Swinburne. The poem is written on the topic of a cruel, ruthless, and sexualized but unapproachable goddess figure, Dolores, Our Lady of Pain. Swinburne's Lady of Pain resembles her D&D successor in some ways. She is ancient, and has destroyed and outlived gods themselves (li. 353-368). Furthermore, she shares her absence of compassion, her moral neutrality, and the brutal indifference behind her actions. However, she differentiates herself in appearing decadent, whereas D&D's Lady of Pain is noticeably austere.
Her image originated in the form of a doodle by Dana Knutson.David "Zeb" Cook, designer of Planescape, explained how the character came about: "Dana Knutson was assigned to draw anything I wanted. I babbled, and he drew - buildings, streets, characters and landscapes. Before any of us knew it, he drew the Lady of Pain. I'm very fond of the Lady of Pain; she really locks up the Planescape look. We all liked her so much that she became our logo."
Troy Denning wrote the hardcover novel, Pages of Pain, in 1996: "It had to be from the Lady of Pain's viewpoint—which is something of a problem, since (as every Planescape player knows) she never speaks—and (this was the really good part) the reader must know less about her at the end of the book than he does at the beginning, and nobody knows anything about her at the beginning." Denning recalled that Pages of Pain "really made me rethink the way I approach stories, and for that reason alone it was worth writing. It also ended up being a much deeper book than I had ever written before, which I think was a result of the extreme approach I was forced to take. Those who have [read it] seem to think it's my best work. It was certainly the most challenging and—forgive the pun—'painful' to write."
...
Wikipedia