The Faceless Woman

Question: Who's Rohe?

There's no context with this, but I'm going to go ahead and assume you mean the Polynesian figure Rohe, who is mentioned as one of the denizens of their Underworld, Rarohenga, in our Atua supplement. We had originally intended to include Rohe under the Antagonists section of the supplement, but there were so many possible choices for that section that we eventually ended up cutting her since we already had Miru as an option for all kinds of unpleasant Underworld tales.

However, Rohe is a neat (and tragic, alas!) goddess, so we are happy to talk about her here!

Rohe is actually the wife of the infamous demigod Maui, and the sister of the sun god Ra (the Polynesian one, not the Egyptian one); like her brother, she was exceptionally bright and beautiful, making her a fine match for Maui and well-liked among the rest of the Atua. However, Maui became jealous of her great beauty since he was himself rather ugly and off-putting, and he demanded that she trade faces with him. Appalled, she refused; Maui then waited until she was asleep one day and stole her face with a spell, applying it to his own head so that he would become beautiful and there would be nothing she could do about it. Rohe was furious and mortified when she awoke, but she could not reverse the spell, so she divorced Maui and fled to the Underworld, vowing to have nothing to do with the treacherous world of the living (and light, which illuminated her loss) any longer.

Now, she lives alone in the portion of the Underworld known as Urangi-o-te-ra, or "sun's arrival", which is the portion that her brother Ra (also grievously mistreated by Maui) limps through each night on his eternal solar journeys. He is the only visitor she's likely to receive warmly; her anger over her treatment has never abated, and she is said to attack, beat and maliciously torment any traveler, living or dead, who comes too close to her domain or bothers her in her solitary home.

We don't know a whole lot about Rohe other than this story; some have theorized that she was a sun goddess thanks to the description of her shining face and similarity to her brother, while others have pointed out that her self-imposed exile and residence in the Underworld echoes the story of Hine, who is up a few levels from her, and that together with Hine and Miru she helps form a triad of dangerous and not necessarily friendly Underworld ladies who are more likely to eat you than make friends with you. There's also some debate about what exactly she looks like now; some retellings of the tale suggest that Maui simply stole her face, leaving her without one, while others say that he exchanged his ugly face for hers or even took her entire head off her shoulders to replace with his own.

Rohe is a great choice of antagonist for Demigod-level Scions who dare to make a foray into Rarohenga to bother her, although what they might need from her and how they would go about getting it without being beaten to within an inch of their lives is up to the individual Storyteller. But kindness, which she's had in very short supply since her ill-fated marriage to Maui, would probably be a good place to start.