Ravenloft & D20-Modern and D20-Future ????

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Waldi
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Ravenloft & D20-Modern and D20-Future ????

Post by Waldi »

What do you think of the following idea :
Far away from the domains we know commonly as "Ravenloft", lies a area of the demiplane of dread, that is connected closer to "technological advanced" worlds of the prime material plane.
This are the domains of modern fear and "scientific" loathing !
While the "modern" domains are nearly impossible to reach from the traditional domains, it is (relative) easy to reach them from modern earth or similar worlds.

Possible, that come to my mind domains would be the following (althoug there would be a lot more) :

The moon of the damned:
This strange moon lies somewhere in a remote galaxie and orbits around a mysterios black planet and is something like an intergalactic bermuda-triangle. Hundreds of spacecrafts are stranded here and their crews are devored by the strange alien lifeforms, that dwell under the moons surface.

Undead-mayhem-metropolis:
Once this city was a normal quit town looking like an averange modern american city. Then something went terribly wrong in the laboratories of a local biotechnologie-company. Now, zombies and mutants stalk the streets and the remaining humans (leaded by the few surviving police-officers) try just to survive...

Tranquility-Station:
This is a remote space- or deep-sea-research-facility far away from the rest of modern civilisation. The scientists working there for a militaristic company discovered a strange and ancient creature in a alien spacecraft/ancient ruins/undersee-cavern that now stalks the corridors of the station and hungers for human flesh...

The cyborg-metropolis:
Perhaps the construction of a mega-intelligent super-computer to control
all technical systems of the city wasn´t a that good idea....now the omnipresent computer Cyber-Net and his modyfied halfhuman Cyborgs, Warforged-Terminators and drones rule the city and keep mankind
as cattle....

Barovia - Today:
Count Stradh would be curious if he would know, that far from his home exists a nearly exact dublicate of his homeland. Even the darklord could be his doppelgaenger. But there is one significant difference. THIS Barovia has the technological level of the late 20th. Century !!
The count isn´t the political leader of the "Peoples Republic of Barovia". He remains a shadowy figure that sleeps in his ancient, ruined castle. The poor people of Barovia are gouverned ironfisted by a ruthless socialistic party. Although there are some fierce gundarakite rebels, that fight the barovian red army with machineguns and guerilla-tactics, the situation is hopeless. The capital city of Zeidenburg became a "jewel" of socialist architecture (with grey, baracks-like living-blocks and opulent but crumbling gouvernment-buildings) while the other locations in Barovia still look oldfashioned and somehow medieval.
And ss if it isn´t worse enough yet, under the surface, hidden vampire-cults trie to prepare the return of the Count...
May you live in interesting times !!
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Post by ScS of the Fraternity »

Some of those ideas are good, but could use a little development.
I like that name, though - Tranquility Station.

I've tried to create a Rl modern myself, on and off over the years. There were a few hits I found, such as remaking Dominic as Nick Dixon, a master politican and intriguer, cursed to look hideous and foolish infront of the television camera, and thus never to be president; or Azalin as the richest, most powerful man in the world - who keeps his dead son's mind locked in a computer while he drives his technological empire to build a new body.
For the msot part it was an exercise in futility - i kept trying to play the RlModern as a dream within a dream - in which the cannier characters like Azalin knew that something wasn't right - but couldn't realize that the modern world was an illusion.
I've found Strahd to be one of the toughest things to fit into a modern world.
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Post by Spiteful Crow »

I was listening to the song "Hotel California" and I was thinking "Somebody closed the domain borders!" :o

Not sure how the heck it could be adapted to Ravenloft, though.
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Post by Waldi »

Some of those ideas are good, but could use a little development.
Of course they need !!!! ;). Those ideas, I wrote where just some ideas, I imagined what could be done with a "modern" Ravenloft. I aimed to create some ravenloftian domains, that are based on movies, novels and computergames like Alien (and Alienclones), Resident Evil, Relict (the book, not the movie), Mimic, Silent Hill, The Black Hole, Outland, Martian Gothic, Leviathan and such things...Although, all this stories have a modern, or even futuristic background, there is still this certain, eerie feeling of isolation.

@ the Hotel-California-Idea:
Quit a great idea !!!! Perhaps it could be a colony of modern day fey ?
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Post by mistshadow2k4 »

I like the general idea too. But why modernize the domains of Ravenloft? Why not create wholly new domains dependent on technology that doesn't exist in Ravenloft? Perhaps these technologically advanced domains could be islands of terror. Tranquility Station and the metropolises (metropoli?) are perfect examples of what I mean.
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Post by ScS of the Fraternity »

Point of fact, someone already made a Hotel California. It was about a messed up writer who was trapped in his room in the hotel and wrote the lives of theguests. I think its in one of the USS books.
Word of warning, though.
You can read it any time you like but you can ne-ver leave...
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re

Post by Jack of Tears »

>>I've found Strahd to be one of the toughest things to fit into a modern world.<<

Any time I've incorporated Strahd into more modern settings I've styled him as the CEO of a vast and powerful corporation. He is a mysterious figure rarely seem by his sabordinates, though his reputation for fast and terrible retribution upon corrupt or incompitent company presidents is legendary.

In business he is absolutely ruthless, taking whatever measures necessary to insure the success of his company.

If you watched the old Tale Spin cartoon, I envision him as the character Shere Khan.
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Post by Rotipher of the FoS »

mistshadow2k4 wrote:Why not create wholly new domains dependent on technology that doesn't exist in Ravenloft? Perhaps these technologically advanced domains could be islands of terror.
Between this thread and the RL-Orient thread, I'm starting to think we're headed towards the point where we'll need multiple Ravenlofts -- i.e. we'd accept the notion that the Dark Powers didn't just create one Land of Mists, but several -- and not just additional Islands or Clusters. If that's the case, then each of these demiplanes ought to have its own, largely-separate history, its own "signature NPCs", and possibly even its own set of game-rule modifications (e.g. an Asian-flavored demiplane's Powers Checks might punish 'dishonorable' behavior harder than the Euro-style canon one; a scifi-demiplane should modify what technology can do, just as the canon Ravenloft has its strictures on magic). Each should also have a "founding villain" who's both dramatically and tactically on par with Strahd, and whose crime should be emblematic of the stylistic themes of the horror-demiplane in question.
"Who [u]cares[/u] what the Dark Powers are? They're [i]bastards![/i] That's all I need to know of them." -- Crow
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Re: re

Post by mistshadow2k4 »

Jack of Tears wrote:>>I've found Strahd to be one of the toughest things to fit into a modern world.<<

Any time I've incorporated Strahd into more modern settings I've styled him as the CEO of a vast and powerful corporation. He is a mysterious figure rarely seem by his sabordinates, though his reputation for fast and terrible retribution upon corrupt or incompitent company presidents is legendary.

In business he is absolutely ruthless, taking whatever measures necessary to insure the success of his company.

If you watched the old Tale Spin cartoon, I envision him as the character Shere Khan.
So Bill Gates is a darklord. That explains a lot.

(you saw that one coming, didn't you?)
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Post by mistshadow2k4 »

Rotipher wrote:
mistshadow2k4 wrote:Why not create wholly new domains dependent on technology that doesn't exist in Ravenloft? Perhaps these technologically advanced domains could be islands of terror.
Between this thread and the RL-Orient thread, I'm starting to think we're headed towards the point where we'll need multiple Ravenlofts -- i.e. we'd accept the notion that the Dark Powers didn't just create one Land of Mists, but several -- and not just additional Islands or Clusters. If that's the case, then each of these demiplanes ought to have its own, largely-separate history, its own "signature NPCs", and possibly even its own set of game-rule modifications (e.g. an Asian-flavored demiplane's Powers Checks might punish 'dishonorable' behavior harder than the Euro-style canon one; a scifi-demiplane should modify what technology can do, just as the canon Ravenloft has its strictures on magic). Each should also have a "founding villain" who's both dramatically and tactically on par with Strahd, and whose crime should be emblematic of the stylistic themes of the horror-demiplane in question.
Another Ravenloft with advanced technology sounds a like a great idea to me, but you're talking about a lot of work there. And should it be a demiplane or a planet? What about the Mists? Is the planet in a normal universe, a dark universe or a pocket dimension by itself? If it's in a pocket dimension can they "see" outside of it, preserving the illusion tha they're still in the universe of the planet's origin? Lots of ideas to play with here.
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Post by Waldi »

Why not create wholly new domains dependent on technology that doesn't exist in Ravenloft?
That´s what came to my mind !!! The modernized Barovia was just one idea among others...I liked the idea of a "modern" socialist eastern-europe-style domain. Perhaps this version of Ravenloft can be reached from nowaday-earth by a small mountain-street somewhere in former Joguslavia. To the outside-world, Barovia would just be one of the small balkan-countries that where devastated by the war during the 1990ties. ;)
It should look like Romaina in the Subspecies-Series or Dracula-Resurection III ;)
As for the specialized rules for a modern Ravenloft: What do you think about the idea of introducing power-checks for the use of "dark-tech", (technologie touched by the forces of evil) ?
That would be things like killercyborgs, mad supercomputers, doomsday-devices, mutation-serums, "evil" genetic engeneering, strange and dark alien-artifacts and so on..

Edit:
What about the Mists? Is the planet in a normal universe, a dark universe or a pocket dimension by itself?
On the surface, the ravenloft-galaxie could look very much like a normal galaxie. The mists apear only seldom. Sometimes, they are not spottet on single planets for centuries (at least not officialy). When the mists appear in the modern-ravenloft-dimension, they could seem to be a strange energetic phenomenon, spacemists...ect.pp.
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Post by Rotipher of the FoS »

mistshadow2k4 wrote:[Another Ravenloft with advanced technology sounds a like a great idea to me, but you're talking about a lot of work there. And should it be a demiplane or a planet? What about the Mists? Is the planet in a normal universe, a dark universe or a pocket dimension by itself? If it's in a pocket dimension can they "see" outside of it, preserving the illusion tha they're still in the universe of the planet's origin? Lots of ideas to play with here.
Hey, I wasn't proposing to design it myself! I'm perfectly happy with the Ravenloft we've got, and I'm not especially interested in creating variants for the sake of diversity (culturally or genre-wise :wink: ). I just thought I'd mention that I'm seeing a possible trend, in this and the Asian-Cluster posts, and that if people really are interested in coming up with "alternate Ravenlofts", they might have to start from the ground up (e.g. modifying the setting-specific rules) to do justice to such non-traditional themes.
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Post by NykylaiHellray »

Hmmmm waldi and rot you to have given me an interesting idea.


If we go on the route that there exists many muliple universes, seperate demiplanes of dread.

Welll this could be a good idea to use grand central in.


Maybe each alternate ravenloft, has a grand central, and the trainmaster is the one who controls the gates between them.

I have been thinking of a way to expand the trainmaster and this could be a good way to do it.
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Post by mistshadow2k4 »

Waldi wrote:
Why not create wholly new domains dependent on technology that doesn't exist in Ravenloft?
That´s what came to my mind !!! The modernized Barovia was just one idea among others...I liked the idea of a "modern" socialist eastern-europe-style domain. Perhaps this version of Ravenloft can be reached from nowaday-earth by a small mountain-street somewhere in former Joguslavia. To the outside-world, Barovia would just be one of the small balkan-countries that where devastated by the war during the 1990ties. ;)
It should look like Romaina in the Subspecies-Series or Dracula-Resurection III ;)
As for the specialized rules for a modern Ravenloft: What do you think about the idea of introducing power-checks for the use of "dark-tech", (technologie touched by the forces of evil) ?
That would be things like killercyborgs, mad supercomputers, doomsday-devices, mutation-serums, "evil" genetic engeneering, strange and dark alien-artifacts and so on..

Edit:
What about the Mists? Is the planet in a normal universe, a dark universe or a pocket dimension by itself?
On the surface, the ravenloft-galaxie could look very much like a normal galaxie. The mists apear only seldom. Sometimes, they are not spottet on single planets for centuries (at least not officialy). When the mists appear in the modern-ravenloft-dimension, they could seem to be a strange energetic phenomenon, spacemists...ect.pp.
I love the idea of powers checks for using dark tech like that! Imagine a scientist who designs a terrible virus who fails a powers check; perhaps by accident he is exposed to the virus. It makes him stronger and healthier, but he is also a carrier for the virus, which for some strange reason has a tendency to mutate...

I like the idea of a Ravenloft galaxy. With a setting such as that a domain could be an entire solar system, so it's not as much as work as it appears at first glance. In addition, if you want to avoid coming up with so many places, you could say that this represents the "known" galaxy and/ or follow the modern scientific idea that the ambient radiation level is too high for life to develop in most parts of the galaxy (life would only exist on planets on or near the rim of the galaxy, like Earth is in the Milky Way).

There's just one thing that strikes me. I agree that the Mists shouldn't be used much -- the manifestations of the dark powers need to be far more subtle. But there needs to be the occasional something, something easily dismissable to most except the more credulous. Something that tells you that reality is wrong and changed at some time in the past. I've been trying to think of a suggestion while I read this thread, but I got nothing, except perhaps dreams among the most super-sensitive which would heighten when the dark powers were most active (read "The Call of Cthulhu" for ideas of how the super-senitive would pick up on events through dreams) or what ghosts of the dead might have to say. I dunno.
Rotipher wrote:
mistshadow2k4 wrote:[Another Ravenloft with advanced technology sounds a like a great idea to me, but you're talking about a lot of work there. And should it be a demiplane or a planet? What about the Mists? Is the planet in a normal universe, a dark universe or a pocket dimension by itself? If it's in a pocket dimension can they "see" outside of it, preserving the illusion tha they're still in the universe of the planet's origin? Lots of ideas to play with here.
Hey, I wasn't proposing to design it myself! I'm perfectly happy with the Ravenloft we've got, and I'm not especially interested in creating variants for the sake of diversity (culturally or genre-wise :wink: ). I just thought I'd mention that I'm seeing a possible trend, in this and the Asian-Cluster posts, and that if people really are interested in coming up with "alternate Ravenlofts", they might have to start from the ground up (e.g. modifying the setting-specific rules) to do justice to such non-traditional themes.
Hehe, you might not have to design it yourself if you get enough people interested around here, and it seems you already have piqued the interest of quite a few. If rules are agreed on as to what this world was like, a bunch of people could come up with domains and places for it.

However, we could use MotRD as a framework instead of Ravenloft. Imagine a different planet with the Red Death and early 21st century tech. Or it could be more like the dark powers of Ravenloft. Either way, you could use the basic campaign rules of d20 Modern with the tweaks in MotRD. But the world itself could entirely be the creation of anyone who wants to participate. :-)

Variations on some of the darklord could be interesting. What about Jekyll/ Hyde as someone with multiple personality disorder and one of those personalities being truly evil? With a world where the gods do not communicate with mortals and very rarely ever did, imagine someone like Elena Faith-hold -- all too many people in our history have been like that, but didn't have to fall from grace as a paladin to learn that something was wrong. They went through their whole lives convinced of their righteousness. Imagine Alfred Timothy as a cult leader, but not a werewolf; exactly what would his cult be about? Something not good for everyone else, that much is certain. Adam as a biological experiment gone awry, and so on. In other words, if by taking a Ravenloft darklord and adapting him/her/it to such a world it becomes something new and interesting, go for it.

If you use the dark powers, maybe the rules of darklordship could be tweaked too. They might only have the power to close the borders of their lair to prevent escape, but wouldn't have that power over their land as a whole. Thus, the size of their lands could shrink and enlarge with conquest and civil unrest just as they do in our world. Interesting. :-D
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Post by Waldi »

The idea of brining MotRD into play is great !!!! What about this:
The coredomain of the ravenloft-galaxy is Gothic Earth, but not the victorian-age-version, but the Gothic Earth of the mid 21. century.
This Gothic Earth looks like the earth of our own days for the main parts and the political situation did not change very much. The borders and relationships between the different nations are basicly the same as at the beginning of the century. The obvious changes are few: Great corporations hold more power than today, China is now realy a Superpower (and forms together with the USA, Russia, the European Union, India, Japan and Brasilia the new World-Security-Council).
While small citys and rural areas still look like they did in our days, great urban areas like New-York, London, Paris, Shanghai, Tokio or Berlin seem to be a Blade-Runner-Live-Production.
Interplanetar Spacetravel also became very commonplace. Most industrialized nations and great coorporations have bases on the Moon, Mars, Mercury or greater asteroids in the asteroid-belt. Venus remains a secret - no spacecraft launched to this forbidden Planet ever returned.
Mars has been colonized and gives home to 100.000 colonists, that try to make a new home on the harsh red planet. The moons of Jupiter and Saturn are still a matter of exploration and habour a lot of strange secrets. First (living) alien life-forms have been recently discovered in a subterran ocean on Titan, a moon of Saturn.
Real FTL-Travel hasn´t yet been developed, but a strange space-coorporation holds the secret of using a phenomenon they call the "Mist-Ways" to send ships far far away to other solarsystems. Only three ships ever travelled this way - and rumors say, this ships brought back something terrible...

Eerie Places that could take place in the Gothic-System:

Tranquility-Station ;):
The farest outpost of mankind - established far beyond the orbit of Pluto; on the 10. Planet of the solar-system, the cold and lifeless planet Sedna. No place could be loner and more isolated than this observatory.
The ruins of mars:
Eons ago, sentient race dwelled on the once beautyfull planet Mars. 65 Million years before the age of mankind, this creatures vanished misteriously. The colonists fear the ancient ruins and say them to be haunted.
...more to come...
May you live in interesting times !!
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