Liesel Hartmann

Overview

Fräulein Liesel Hartmann is a 28-year-old nurse who serves the Brotherhood in victim care and management. She administers sedatives, monitors vital signs, and comforts the “volunteers” during their stay at the sealed anatomical theatre. She genuinely believes she is caring for terminally ill patients in an experimental medical program who have volunteered to “donate their bodies to science.”

Liesel is the most compassionate member of the Brotherhood — the only one who still sees the victims as human beings deserving of care and dignity. This compassion is built on a foundation of lies, but it is genuine nonetheless.

Physical Description

A handsome woman of middle height with kind brown eyes and dark hair worn in a practical nurse’s arrangement. She dresses in simple, clean clothes suitable for nursing work — aprons, sturdy shoes, sleeves always rolled up. Her bearing suggests someone comfortable with medical work and with physical comfort of others. She moves with quiet efficiency.

Statistics

Skills

• First Aid 65%
• Medicine 40% (practical knowledge, not academic)
• Fighting (Brawl) 25%
• German (Native) 90%
• French 40%
• Comfort/Bedside Manner 70% (innate)

Personality

Compassionate, conscientious, and genuinely devoted to her patients’ comfort. Liesel is motivated by the desire to help those suffering. She is intelligent enough to be good at nursing but not sophisticated enough to question Herzfeld’s explanations. She has constructed a narrative in which she is performing an act of mercy.

Key Traits:

• Compassion: Genuine care for those she perceives as suffering
• Conscientiousness: Meticulous in her duties
• Naiveté: Accepts Herzfeld’s explanation without critical examination
• Humanity: Treats the victims with dignity and kindness despite their true circumstances

Daily Patterns

What Liesel Knows

• Where the sealed anatomical theatre is located
• The identity of all victims currently in the Engine
• Details of victim medical condition, pain levels, and consciousness
• The schedule of victim “integration”
• The routine and protocols used in the theatre
• How to access the theatre (she has a key)

What Liesel Doesn’t Know

• That the victims do not consent and are not truly terminal
• That the “integration” process involves dismemberment and incorporation into the Engine
• The true nature of Herzfeld’s work
• That the victims remain conscious and aware during and after integration
• That she is complicit in systematic atrocity

Vulnerabilities

Conscience: Liesel’s greatest vulnerability is her genuine compassion. If she learns that her patients are not willing participants and that their “integration” is actually dismemberment while conscious, her entire moral framework will collapse.

If Confronted with Truth: Liesel will:

1. Deny it (this can’t be true)
2. Become profoundly distressed and guilty
3. Potentially have an emotional breakdown
4. Be willing to provide all information and assistance to undo what has been done

Breaking Point: A direct conversation with a victim (if any remain conscious and accessible) or with evidence of a victim’s awareness would break her immediately.

Interactions with PCs

If Encountered at Theatre

Liesel will be cautious but not hostile. She will not voluntarily reveal information but will try to protect her “patients” from disturbance.

If Directly Questioned

Liesel will defend her work as compassionate care. She will insist that her patients are volunteers and are being treated with dignity. She will be defensive but not deceptive — she genuinely believes what she is saying.

If Confronted with Proof

Liesel will experience immediate, acute emotional distress. She may collapse, weep, or become hysterical. Once her mind accepts the truth, she will become a completely cooperative witness and asset.

Combat

[!warning] Keeper Override — Session 12 Liesel’s combat profile has changed. The “not a combatant” status from her original profile was accurate through Session 8. By the time of the University assault (August 12, 1814), days of confinement inside the locked-down University with an increasingly unhinged Herzfeld, caring for prisoners she can no longer pretend are willing patients, have transformed her. She now carries a short knife concealed under her apron.

Weapon: Short knife (concealed under apron), 1d4 damage, db 0.

Fighting (Brawl): 25%.

If encountered during the assault, Liesel’s response depends entirely on context. She is frightened, furious, and exhausted, not insane. She will use the knife if she perceives an immediate threat and has the advantage of surprise. She will not press an attack once the initial strike is made. She drops the knife and talks.

If threatened by someone she recognises as sympathetic (or someone who recognises her and speaks to her first), she surrenders the knife without violence. She has been holding it because she did not know what else to hold.

If cornered with no avenue for conversation, she may still attempt to shield patients from harm rather than fight.

Assault Encounter — The Corridor (Session 12+)

When: During the assault on the University (11-12 August 1814).

Where: Medical wing ground floor, south corridor between the stairwell and Caroline’s room. She is dressed in work clothes, apron, on her knees scrubbing. She looks like a cleaning woman.

The Varrio Encounter:

If Varrio is part of the team moving through the medical wing, Liesel is directly in his path.

If Varrio recognises her (Spot Hidden or Memory, Regular): He sees the face from the masquerade, the nurse who asked about Brenner. She is watching him with an expression that is not fear and is not welcome. He has a choice: speak, restrain, or pass by. If he speaks, the Brenner confrontation begins. If he restrains her, she struggles, and the knife comes out. If he passes without engaging, she lets him go and he finds her behind him when the fighting starts.

If Varrio does not recognise her: She is just a frightened cleaning woman. If he gets close, within arm’s reach, passing her in the corridor, she drives the knife into his stomach and twists. Mechanically this is a surprise attack (automatic success, target has no reason to suspect danger). The knife does 1d4 damage. The abdominal wound requires First Aid (Hard) to stabilise. If not treated within minutes, Varrio loses HP per round from internal bleeding.

After the strike: Liesel drops the knife, backs against the wall, and says one word: “Brenner.” The question she asked at the masquerade, stripped to its bone. The knife was for the lie, not the murder, and she does not yet know how much worse the truth is.

The Brenner Confrontation:

If the encounter becomes a conversation (Varrio recognised her, someone restrained her, or the stabbing opens dialogue):

• Liesel asks what happened to Brenner. The question has calcified into something sharp over days of asking it inside her own head.
• If Varrio tells the truth (“I killed him”), her reaction is complex: horror and, beneath it, relief. Brenner was the last thread connecting her to who she was before the University became a prison. The truth frees her and destroys her at the same time.
• If Varrio deflects again, she does not believe him. She has spent days watching Herzfeld lie. She knows what a liar’s face looks like now.
• If another PC intervenes (Persuade, Regular, or compelling roleplay), Liesel can be talked down.

If converted: She provides everything: Caroline’s exact location and condition, interior guard positions, the route to the basement stairs, the state of the Engine (she has heard it running), Herzfeld’s schedule, and the key to the Sealed_Anatomical_Theatre that she has carried on her person since the day she was hired.

If killed: The party loses the theatre key, the interior intelligence, and a witness whose testimony could have mattered after the assault. Varrio carries another death. The secret does not crack open. It calcifies.

Session Appearances

Liesel can be encountered if the party reaches the sealed anatomical theatre or the medical wing during the assault. She is present at the University continuously from approximately 9 August onward (the lockdown prevents her from leaving). Her presence complicates direct assault on the medical wing. If the assault team passes through her corridor without converting or neutralising her, she becomes an unpredictable element behind their line of advance.

Final Notes

Liesel represents the category of essentially good person complicit in evil through systematic deception. She is not wicked, but she has failed a crucial moral test by not asking enough questions. Her conversion from unwitting accomplice to traumatized witness to cooperative ally is likely if she learns the truth.

The emotional moment of Liesel’s realization and breakdown can be a powerful narrative beat. It represents the moment when the horror becomes personal and undeniable.

[!info] Keeper Only Liesel’s role in the party’s access to the Engine can be crucial. If they can convert her without violence (through confrontation with truth, through appeal to compassion for her victims), she can provide legitimate access, warn them about security measures, and help extract any victims who might be salvageable. If they must neutralize her forcefully, they eliminate a potential source of information and create a witness against them.

Session 8 Update — First In-Play Appearance (August 8, 1814)

Liesel’s first in-play appearance happened on the night of the Grand Masquerade, not at the theatre but at the masquerade itself. She was present in service livery (a quiet, plausibly explicable cover for a nurse making an off-site appointment) and approached Varrio directly, asking after a man named Brenner.

What Happened

• Liesel made the approach herself. She was not summoned, threatened, or escorted — she chose, on her own initiative, to find a member of the party in the middle of a public ball and ask a question. This is the first canonical evidence that her faith in Herzfeld’s narrative is already cracking before the party has had to confront her with anything.
• The name she gave was Brenner. This is Dr. Wilhelm Brenner — the defected Brotherhood surgeon whom Varrio personally killed in a Leopoldstadt boarding house on the night of 4 August 1814. Liesel does not know that Brenner is dead. She does not know that the man she is asking is the man who killed him.
• Why she is asking after Brenner: Brenner spent eighteen months in hiding before his death, drinking, half-mad with guilt, occasionally surfacing in the city. As a nurse working at the Sealed_Anatomical_Theatre, Liesel almost certainly knew him from the Brotherhood’s University days — Brenner was a senior surgical figure inside the Brotherhood before he broke. He may have visited her, written to her, or simply been a colleague she remembered. Whichever — she has noticed that he has been missing for several days now and she is asking the wrong people about it in the right places.
• Varrio’s response is canonical to the Keeper’s read of the encounter, but the dramatic weight is fixed: the murderer of the man she is looking for is standing in front of her, and neither of them yet realises the symmetry. What Varrio chooses to tell her — the truth, a deflection, a careful half-answer — defines the next stage of Liesel’s arc and the next stage of Varrio’s secret.

What This Reveals About Liesel

The compassion she has built her conscience on is starting to fail her. The defensive narrative (“they’re terminal patients, they consent, this is mercy”) has cracked far enough that she is independently asking questions outside her chain of command. She is doing it cautiously — she came to the party rather than to the Geheimpolizei — but she is doing it. The “if confronted with proof” breakdown described above is now closer than her profile suggests; the Keeper should treat her conversion threshold as substantially lower at the start of Session 9 than it was at the start of Session 8.

She also took an enormous personal risk by approaching the party at the masquerade. If Adler or Kaunitz saw her speaking to Varrio, she is dead within forty-eight hours. That she chose the risk anyway is the loudest possible signal of where her conscience now sits.

Where the Wächter Attack Found Her

Liesel’s location during the Wächter attack is not yet established in canon. The most plausible options:

• Already withdrawn. Her tradecraft is non-existent and her conversation with Varrio would have been brief; she may have been heading for a side exit when the first creature came through the glass.
• Still on the floor. If she lingered to watch Varrio’s reaction or to overhear the room, she may have been in the ballroom proper when the attack began. A nurse with no combat training in a room full of trampling aristocrats and an inhuman creature is in extreme danger.
• In the corridors. The same servants’ corridors the party used for Anna’s extraction are the corridors a nurse in service livery would use. She may be ahead of the corridor cluster, behind it, or moving past it in either direction.

The Keeper should pick whichever placement makes Liesel most useful for Session 9. The strongest narrative option is that she survives the night and seeks out the party again within the next 24 hours — having now seen, with her own eyes, a creature she cannot explain away as terminal medicine.

Current Status (top of Session 9)

• Physically: Status undetermined; default assumption is alive but shaken
• Operationally: Has identified herself to the party as a contact willing to speak. The next move is hers, or theirs.
• Psychologically: Conversion threshold substantially lowered. The masquerade may have been the moment her faith in Herzfeld broke.
• Tactical value: She holds a key to the Sealed_Anatomical_Theatre. If she defects, the party’s University problem becomes substantially easier.

Open Questions for Session 9

• What did Varrio tell her about Brenner? This is the central question. If Varrio was honest (“Brenner is dead, I killed him, I had reasons”), Liesel’s reaction is unpredictable — she may break, she may bolt, she may collapse, she may turn cold and report back to Herzfeld. If Varrio deflected (“I don’t know him, I’m sorry”), Liesel will keep asking and the lie will eventually catch up with him. If Varrio offered a careful half-answer (“Brenner was a man who knew terrible things and got away from people who wanted him silent”), the door is open for Liesel to reach the truth on her own terms. The Keeper should ask the player what Varrio said and write the consequences from there.
• Does the party reach out to her, or does she reach out again? Either is possible. Liesel has already demonstrated she will take initiative; she may come to them at the Goldener Hirsch or at Palais Kinsky if events do not bring them together first.
• Does the Brotherhood realise she has talked? If Adler (currently fleeing) or Kaunitz saw her at the masquerade speaking to Varrio, she becomes a Brotherhood target. The party may need to extract her before they can debrief her.
• What does she actually know about the theatre right now? Her access has been continuous through August. She may know which victims are currently in the theatre, what state the Engine is in, and what Herzfeld’s August 9–14 schedule looks like. Her debrief is potentially the single most valuable intelligence delivery the party can secure before the ritual.
• Does Varrio’s Brenner secret crack open here? Liesel is the first person outside the party to ask Varrio directly about Brenner since the murder. If she persists, or if Charlotte/Georgiana ever overhear the conversation, Varrio’s secret enters the open. This is the most natural exposure vector for the murder that the campaign has produced so far.

[!warning] Conversion State Updated The “if confronted with proof” breakdown in this profile assumes Liesel is encountered at the theatre and confronted by the party. As of the masquerade, she is already converting. The Keeper should not require a dramatic confrontation — a quiet, sympathetic conversation with a PC who can confirm what she already half-believes is sufficient. Her breakdown is not a scripted moment; it is a state she has been moving into for the past week, and the masquerade was the trigger.

Session 13 — The Assault (12 August 1814, pre-dawn)

The rescue team — Adrien, Katherine, Nell, and Ferrante’s Sardinians — found Liesel mopping the hallway outside Caroline’s room in the south corridor. The Sardinians moved quickly, restraining and silencing her before she could react. Adrien recognised her as someone he had seen speaking with Varrio at a previous social event. She was tied, gagged, and bundled into a nearby cupboard.

The rescue team did not search her. The theatre key remains on her person, undiscovered. The Varrio/Brenner confrontation was bypassed entirely — Varrio was on the main assault team entering through the front, and never encountered Liesel.

Current state: Alive, restrained, in a cupboard in the medical wing south corridor. Still has the theatre key. Still has the concealed knife. The rescue team does not know her significance or what she carries. If someone realises who she is and goes back, the key and intelligence are available — but every round spent costs time on the ritual clock.

Relationships

• Serves Albin Herzfeld — Provides patient care; believes victims are terminal patients
• Maintains Harmonic Engine — Cares for victims; does not understand their true fate