Cake Cutters

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Cake Cutters

Key Members of the Faction

Also known as: The Cakers, the Sugar-Addled

The Cakers are an anarchic bunch and don’t have a single leader, a grand plan, or even a coherent philosophy. More a bunch of barmy bakers who mostly tolerate each other (mostly), each Caker has their own scheme and signature baking style. Some of the better-known characters are described below. All of the original members of the faction were escapees from Griselda’s sugar house, but her curse seems to have latched onto the faction as well as its members, for all Cakers either new or original seem to succumb to barminess too eventually.

Fernwick

The Frosting King (planar pixie [he/him] / Coterie of Cakes / NE)

Fernwick the pixie was once the ringleader of the group—sharp-eyed and clever. His wings sparkled like spun sugar and his laugh was as bright as bells. He’d always been the most ambitious of the bunch, dreaming up extravagant bakes and wild schemes with zest (lemon or otherwise). In the Feywild, he was a pixie brimming with joy and whimsy. But now? Now, Fernwick has stumbled into dark obsessions. His once glittering wings have dulled, his hair has grayed, and there’s a hollowness in his wide-eyed stare. He hardly even turns invisible any more.

They used to call him the Frosting King but these days he’s nicknamed the Frosty King—although not within his earshot of course. It’s not because he’s a ruler of anything grand—no, it’s because of his cold-hearted fixation on perfection. His cakes must be flawless, every detail immaculate, every swirl of icing a masterwork. He stays awake for days at a time in the Coterie’s secret underground bakery in Undersigil, mixing ingredients with trembling hands, muttering spells over his confections, trying to capture some shred of the glamorous magic he once had in the Feywild. Griselda’s curse has wormed its way into his core; now, anything less than perfect is prone to send him into a manic rage. He’s been known to smash entire cakes, hurling them at the walls, screaming about the “imperfection of this damned burg.” 

Worse, his baking has taken on a sinister twist. The cakes look delicious, sure—layers upon layers of sweetness and colour—but those who eat them sometimes claim to hear whispers. Little, soft voices tempting them to return, to eat more, to lose themselves to the sugar. Some say Fernwick’s cakes have become cursed, laced with a subtle pixie dust magic that binds people to his confectionary, just as he himself is bound to Sigil. Others reckon it’s not sugar he’s using but something more insidious; addictive substances like pesh or soul dust from the Lower Planes, whatever that is.

Pipkin

The Dough Demon (planar brownie [he/him] / Coterie of Cakes / NE)

Pipkin, the brownie, was once a jolly, rotund fellow with flour permanently stuck to his fingers and a laugh that could make dough rise on its own. He was the heart of the group, always ready with a silly joke or a cheerful quip while rolling out pastry or whipping up a quick rough puff pastry. He adored baking for the sheer joy of it, his hands dancing over dough like a sculptor with clay. But after years of being trapped in Sigil, that joy has turned to sour buttermilk. He’s quick to anger, argumentative, and never forgets a grudge.

Now, Pipkin is gaunt, his eyes sunken, his face usually smeared with flour that never seems to wash away. The other Cakers call him the Dough Demon. His obsession with the stretchy stuff—shaping it, kneading it, always proofing—has grown monstrous. He’s taken to working in the dim backroom of the bakery, where he mutters to the dough as if it were alive. Some say they’ve seen strange things crawling out of his ovens, pastries that move on their own, animated dough-like oozes that slither across the floor before he catches them, knocks the air out and starts the kneading process again. 

Recently, Pipkin has grown silent and brooding. The joy he once had is gone, replaced with a cold determination to master his craft, no matter the costs. He’s convinced that if he can make the perfect sweet loaf, it will break the curse and let them return to the Feywild. But the more he tries, the more his dough shapes itself into things dark and alive, as if Griselda’s curse is mocking him, twisting his magic into something grotesque.

I bake, therefore I am

—Caker Creed

Thistle

The Sweet Assassin (planar sprite [she/her] / Coterie of Cakes / CE)

Back in her Feywild days, Thistle was a sprite with a knack for mischief, buzzing around and pulling pranks on unsuspecting mortals, her wings flitting as she darted like a hummingbird on a sugar rush. She loved creating cakes with hidden surprises—exploding pastries, doughnuts that sang, tarts that told jokes. Her magic was playful, and she delighted in spreading chaos through confectionery.

But Undersigil has twisted that playfulness into cruelty. Now, they call her the Sweet Assassin, and her pranks have a much more deadly edge. Oh, Thistle still loves surprises, but they’re no longer innocent or light-hearted. She enjoys slipping potions into cakes that make the eater hallucinate, or worse—transform into something hideous. One poor sod ate a slice of her chocolate cake and spent the next week wandering around Sigil convinced he was a Abyssal chicken. Another claimed to have seen the Lady of Pain herself after a bite of Thistle’s lemon tart. He was found flayed the next day. At least, they said it was him, it was hard to tell for sure.

Thistle’s laughter has grown sharper, more mocking. She watches people with gleeful malice as her cakes ruin their lives for a day—or longer. She claims it’s all in good fun, but there’s an edge to her voice now, a bitterness that wasn’t there before. She, too, feels the weight of the curse pressing down on her, but instead of fighting it, she’s leaned into it, letting the darkness fuel her pranks. The laughter is still there, but now she laughs at, not with.

Marnie

The Redhat Chef (planar redcap [she/her] / Coterie of Cakes / CE)

Now Marnie is a character with a capital yikes. The only redcap among the Cakers, even back in the Feywild she was never the friendliest of fey. Always grumpy, always scowling, always with her oversized red tophat pulled low over her eyes, and always clanking around in her thick metal boots looking for something to kick. Marnie wasn’t much of a baker, but she loved eating the results, and her magic was more… destructive than the others’. She was the muscle when things got tough, and when Griselda trapped her fey bakery army, Marnie was the first to try to fight her way out.

Now? Now Marnie has become something even darker. They call her the Redhat Chef but she bakes in a way no one else does. Her creations are… violent. She doesn’t use equipment like the other Cakers. Instead, she smashes her ingredients together with iron boots, kicking the dough as if it were an enemy to be pummelled into submission. She sharpens her rolling pins like weapons, and there’s always the faint smell of blood around her, mixed with the scent of red velvet cake.

Marnie’s cakes are brutal things—dense, hard as stone, and yet strangely addictive. There’s something in them that makes you want to keep eating, even though each bite feels like a challenge. Some say that’s from the tiefling blood she uses instead of milk. Marnie barely speaks anymore, just grunts and glares, and the others have learned to steer clear when she’s in one of her moods. However, she’s a valued member of the Cakers, because she’s handy in a fight, and these days the faction finds itself getting into quite a few of them.

Rumblebelly Bill

The Bara Brith Bagman (planar bugaboo† [he/him] / Coterie of Cakes / NE)

Rumblebelly Bill, the faery bagman—now, here’s a tale that’ll make your hair curl. In the olden days, you might have heard whispers of him in the darkest groves of the Feywild, a figure so shadowed in myth even the fey spoke of him in hushed tones. But here, in Sigil, he’s more than a rumour. He’s real, and he’s worse than any bedtime story you were ever told.

Rumblelly Bill was once like any other fey baker: mischievous, charming, and with a talent for crafting confections so sweet they made your teeth ache just looking at them. But somewhere along the line, something went wrong. Very wrong. Some say it’s Griselda’s curse, some claim he always had a bit of bogey blood from a cursed part of the Feywild, where the fey give in to their most grotesque desires. Whatever happened, Rumbelly Bill has acquired a taste for something far darker than sugar and spice—he craves the flesh of mortals, or more precisely, their fat.

Now, you’ve got to understand: in fey baking, butter is more than just an ingredient. It’s a delicacy, part of the secret alchemy that turns a decent pastry into something transcendentally magical. Butter churned by mortal hands is especially prized in the Feywild. But Bill? He took it a step further. He believes there’s nothing richer, nothing more decadent, than making the butter out of mortals themselves to enrich his pastries, pies, and cakes.

So how does the fairy bagman operate? Bill stalks the streets of the Hive, especially after dark when the city’s at its grimiest, hauling around a massive, tattered burlap sack, enchanted so it looks small but can hold, well… anything in. Or should that be anyone. If you catch the whiff of burnt sugar and tallow, berk, you need to get away from there and quickly.

Bill’s a hunter now. He doesn’t bother with contracts or faerie bargains like the others. Instead, he sneaks up on unsuspecting mortals, usually the ones who won’t be missed—beggars, bubbers, or unlucky folk caught wandering in the alleys of the Hive. The fatter the better. With a gleeful snicker, he throws them into his sack, which seems to have a mind of its own. The poor souls inside can’t be heard screaming or thrashing about. The extradimensional magic smothers them, leaving nothing but a muffled silence.

Once Bill’s caught enough ingredients, he drags his sack back to his hidden kitchen. No one knows exactly where it is—rumour has it there’s a portal to his lair hidden in the foulest, darkest alleys of Sigil, maybe even in a drainpipe that leads to some forsaken demi-plane. There, in his nightmarish bakery, Rumblebelly Bill gets to work.

Let’s not beat around the chopping board, the process is grisly, no two ways about it. Rumbelly Bill doesn’t just kill his victims outright—oh no, that would be far too quick. He uses fey magic to drain the fat from their bodies over time, keeping the poor berks just about alive, as their fat is slowly harvested. It’s not just about cruelty for him—he claims the fat is better when it’s drawn out over days, slowly extracted as its rendered down.

And what does he make with it? Well, Bill’s pastries are something else entirely. He bakes pies whose crusts are golden and impossibly flaky, spiced cakes so rich they practically melt in your mouth. His creations are imbued with fey magic to bring on a kind of dream-like euphoria. But there’s a catch, of course—nothing comes without a price. Those who eat Bill’s confections become addicted. They crave more, no matter the cost. They seek out his pastries in back-alley markets and hidden stalls, paying in coin, in secrets, even in years of their life—anything to get just one more bite.

Claggach O’Mally

Snaggletooth (planar leprechaun [he/him] / Coterie of Cakes / CN)

Chant goes most leprechauns are content with pots of gold and rainbows, but Claggach? He’s got a taste for something more… specific. Snaggletooth O’Mally was once your typical trickster leprechaun, obsessed with the shiny stuff, luck, and a good wager. But after the curse and his exile in Sigil, his fascination has twisted into something darker. It isn’t just any gold that makes his heart race—it’s gold teeth. They say one day his enchanted tooth, a trophy from a long-forgotten bet, began to whisper, urging him to collect more, until his obsession with golden grins consumed him. Now, his prized possession ain’t at the end of a rainbow—it’s a secret hoard deep in Undersigil, filled with golden teeth ripped from the mouths of Sigil’s unsuspecting citizens.

To feed his growing need, Claggach enlisted a gang of tooth fairies, twisted little creatures with a taste for mischief and poor oral hygeine. Unlike the bedtime stories, these fey don’t leave coins under pillows of tiefling children. Instead, they sneak into bedchambers and inns and pluck golden teeth from the mouths of cutters across Sigil. The Caker faction, with their endless supply of sugary sweets, makes the perfect cover.

It’s a brilliantly circular scheme. The more sweets the Cakers sell, the more gold teeth pop up in the mouths of Sigil’s sugar-addicted populace. The fairies swoop in, plucking their glittering treasures and delivering them to Claggach’s vault. The leprechaun, once a cheeky gambler, now spends his days directing his strange gang of fairy tooth-urchins adding to his hoard, although it never seems to quiet the insatiable hunger gnawing at him.

But as with all things in Sigil, there’s a price. Claggach has grown more grotesque—his once-jovial smile is now a grotesque row of stolen golden teeth, which gleam too-brightly in the dark. Even his fellow Cakers, who joke about cakes all day, tend to keep their distance from him, for there’s something chilling about the way his eyes glitter when he talks of his dental hoard.

More on the Faction

• Once Upon a Cake — the history of the faction
• The Philosophy of the Cakers — a Harmonium threat assessment
• Cake Cutters (you are here)
• Cake, Glorious Cake! —the musical

Canonical Sources

• Coterie of Cakes: Turn of Fortune’s Wheel [5e] p18-19; Sigil and the Outlands [5e] p57.
• Brownie: Monstrous Compendium I [AD&D 2e]; Bestiary 2 [PF2e] p44
• Bugaboo: Shaman (as Bogeyman) [AD&D 2e]; Legacy of the Lost God [PF2e] p78. While most of the fey creatures mentioned here have D&D stats (most but not all in 5e), the bugaboo is a soul-stealing Pathfinder fey creature, related to the bogey and bogeyman.
• Leprechaun: Monstrous Compendium II (AD&D 2e); Quests from the Infinite Staircase [5e] p205; Bestiary 2 [PF2e] p158
• Pixie: Monstrous Compendium I (AD&D 2e); Monster Manual [5e] p253; Monster Core [PF2e] p323
• Sprite: Monstrous Compendium I (AD&D 2e); Monster Manual [5e] p283; Ancestry Guide [PF2e] p127
• Redcap: The Shadow Rift (as Powrie) [AD&D 2e]; Monsters of the Multiverse [5e] p208; Monster Core [PF2e] p290

Canonwatch: The Planescape [5e] books introduced the Coterie of Cakes as a comedy ‘faction’ and I must admit my first sensation was a taste of bitterness. However, while making the song ‘Cake, Glorious Cake!‘ for them, I started to think about a back-story that made a little more ‘sense’. I hope you enjoy!

Source: Jon Winter-Holt. Inspired by Fight Club and the Great British Bake-Off. And that is a sentence I never thought I’d write.