Die Zauberflöte

I am embarrassed. As a musicologist, my training (primarily) deals with Western Art Music ("Classical" Music or dead-white-guy music). One of those dead white guys was this dude named Mozart, and he wrote an opera about a flute which has magical powers, the Zauberflöte (literally, "magic flute") that takes place in a quasi-medieval environment with witches and curses and princesses. And it never occurred to me, until Jon Miller's comment, to mine it for D&Dables.

Short synopsis ofDie Zauberflöte:

Act I

Prince Tamino is attacked by a giant serpent and faints

The Queen of the Night appears, kills the serpent, and vanishes

The professional birdcatcher, Papageno, (costumed as a birdman) enters the scene just as Tamino awakens

The Queen of the Night reappears, gives Tamino a quest to rescue her daughter from the evil sorcerer, giving him the titular Magic Flute, which transmutes grief to joy, and some magic bells for protection

Tamino and Papageno set out to rescue said maiden

Pamina, the maiden in question, failed in her most-recent attempt to escape and is rechained by the slavemaster (who happens to be black)

Papageno bursts on the scene and is so horrified by the slavemaster's blackness that he flees (while the slavemaster is also revolted by Papageno's birdman appearance. Yay 18th century racial norms…)

The "evil sorcerer" appears and, surprise surprise, is actually a good guy (since if you have two magicians in the 18th c., the evil one is always female) who allows Tamino and Pamina to get married (because love at first sight and, well, it's an opera and that's what ingénues do in opera) if Tamino can pass some manly trials of reason and love of nature and other Freemason-y things.

Act II (this act is better than it looks, but it's less interesting for our purposes)

Tamino passes the trials

The Queen of the Night is pissed

Conflict is resolved through magic

Everyone gets married

Things to pull out of this opera:

2 magic items: the Zauberflöte and protective bells (all bells are magical for most of European history, and it is a terrible shame that most people have forgotten this. I need to talk about bells in a way that probably steals from Garth Nix's Abhorsen series).

Creatures:

Giant serpent (meh)

Birdpeople (yes!) that talk to birds and can look like people or like bird-people and have difficulty finding other members of their species

Bigger things:

Unproblematic Patriarchy (nope. I want to be done with that part of D&D's history. Thank you very much)

Women and night and magic and mystery

Men and day and order and logic and reason and "nature"

Unproblematic Racism (Ibid., Ibid. Just nope)

But I will take conflict via cultural misunderstandings and lack of communication, potentially leading to meaningless hostility and generation-spanning conflicts between "men" and "monsters"

Family Drama (yes)

The top-level conflict in the opera is between two divorced parents (the two magicians) and their approach to parenting. That is super cool. We should think more about what happens when two married archmages get into a pissing contest. (Maybe that's where the Owlbear comes from…) This is simultaneously totally banal and utterly fantastic, which is perfect for D&D.

Overall takeaways:

The emergence of the Zauberflöte, just as Alexis is working on a metric to measurehappiness is perfectly timed. Once he gets to a conclusion, I will adapt it to my world/rules and have a brand-new artifact.

I need to spend a lot of time thinking about how bells are fundamentally magical objects (and how that ripples through everything)

A reminder that NPC motivations are often simple, personal things that can explode into huge issues. We don't learn that the "evil sorcerer" and the Queen of the Night were married and had a daughter (Pamina) until late in Act I at the earliest - there is no reason for the PCs to know that the reason they've been asked to burgle the townhouse is because that's where the cheating spouse likes to go with their special friends. Or that the reason there are two teahouses on the same block that conduct nightly raids of the other is that the owner of a business, a retired adventurer, promised his vast wealth to whichever kid could operate the best teahouse and then died before specifying how the teahouse was to be judged, but left the clause in the will, and through the generations the cause of the endless rivalry has vanished into memory but the feud remains virulent as ever. It's a reminder that when things happen to affect our players, they do not need to be only one level deep or exceedingly complex - seemingly-"ordinary" relationship dynamics can spawn something vast and sweeping, inviting the players to investigate and find out the small thing that has generated the larger issue.