RLR: Domains looking for a Darklord 1: Mordent

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Who should be the darklord of Reanimated Mordent?

Keep Godefroy as is, with no change
8
29%
Keep Godefroy with a serious retcon to increase his appeal
11
39%
Use another (existing) mordentish character (Please explain)
6
21%
Create a new darklord to fit the domain
3
11%
 
Total votes: 28

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DeepShadow of FoS
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Post by DeepShadow of FoS »

Isabella wrote:If you want to keep him on as Darklord, I'd tweak his story a bit.
Sure, I was just wondering what prompted the move from "tweak his story a bit" to "make the HoGH the real DL."

The HoGH can be a powerful evil, perhaps more powerful and/or evil than Godefroy. That doesn't justify making it a DL when the amount of work to give the house the proper humanlike qualities is far greater than the amount of work to fix Godefroy.
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Post by Baduin9 »

Godefroy is a small man. A Darklord should be a great man. Therefore Godefroy cannot be "fixed". Leave his as he is; he is an interesting character, but not a darklord.

And who said that Darklord must be manlike? There are many haunted houses in the gothic literature; it would be good to acknowledge it in Raveloft. See eg The Haunting of the Hill House by Shirley Jackson, or The Shining.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Haunting_of_Hill_House

"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone. "

Or read "Our Lady of Darkness" by Fritz Leiber, a great book about the whole haunted city, or perhaps a city being a spell. Megapolisomancy, described in that book, is the art of using citites as spells

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Leiber
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megapolisomancy

So consider the House in the original Mordent - an impersonal, evil, invisible and invincible force taking one by one the other great houses of aristocracy, and slowly beginning to infect the cities, inexorably nearing its final aim: becoming a single living world-city-house, a giant arcology, a tremendous living spell, ruling the whole planet according to its warped will. Red Nails by Howard would be a good description of the life in such a city-house.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Nails

And then, due to some seemingly random events, it is imprisoned in the small rural domain of Mordent. All great houses are under its sway - but they are all empty. It cannot spread; at most it can bang some doors as an impotent poltergeist.
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Post by DasSoviet »

I think my biggest problem with having the House itself be the Darklord is that Darklords should be simultaneously rewarded and punished for their evils. They should be tragic... I think the phrase used to describe them in the DM's guide was "There, but for the Grace of God, go I". The House, it seems to me, is just evil... evil to the nth degree, yes, but that's not a qualifier for darklordship. How is it being rewarded, how is it being punished, how is it affecting the players and making them think?

Evil is not the sole requirement for darklordship... if so, why was Soth scooped up instead of the Kingpriest*? Why Hazlik instead of Szass Tam? Because, Soth and Hazlik are tragic villains, while the God King and Szass Tam are strait up BBEGs. There was no final chance for redemption for these people, the final chance to change their ways and do the right thing. Same with the house. It's simply EVIL. That's part of what makes it so interesting, and deserving of attention... but not darklordship.

Just my two cents, anyhow... you all know where I stand on this :wink:

(*edit: My Krynn-fu is lacking... *hangs head in shame*)
Last edited by DasSoviet on Sat Dec 20, 2008 8:36 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Gonzoron of the FoS »

DasSoviet wrote:Evil is not the sole requirement for darklordship... if so, why was Soth scooped up instead of the God King? Why Hazlik instead of Szass Tam? Because, Soth and Hazlik are tragic villains, while the God King and Szass Tam are strait up BBEGs. There was no final chance for redemption for these people, the final chance to change their ways and do the right thing. Same with the house. It's simply EVIL. That's part of what makes it so interesting, and deserving of attention... but not darklordship.
Precisely what I was trying to say, but worded far better.
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Post by Sorti »

If the problem is that the HoGH is not human enough we can just give them an interesting story *cough*builtonaVistanicemetery:P*cough*, and we also have Godefroy as the "human" part of the evil.

Is co-DLship not an option? they are both evil and each one aliments the other one's nastyness and puppy-kicking but also stops him/it from getting what he/it really wants...

Some ideas:

- Godefroy is not fully aware of how aware the House is, and believes he's the only master of his land

- The House is, in fact, the one sending his family to beat him every night (better than "a wizard (DP) did it")

- The existance and/or behaviour of Godefroy in some way prevents the House from getting something it wants. Maybe the mastery over itself? People who die in the House were to become its slaves, but Godefroy had a strong personality and chose death willingly instead of being killed by the House's evil, and this gave him enough free will to break the chains and become the master of the slaves of the House...
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Post by Rotipher of the FoS »

Well, if the HoGH seems too alien to be a darklord, that's only because its backstory has never been explored in full. It's not that hard to imagine that the entity embodied by the House started out quite human, but has devolved into something inhuman over the centuries. Who knows what happened on that spot, either at the time of the House's construction or far earlier, to make the site spiritually toxic in the first place?

Depending on what satisfies more people, we could develop a complete story behind the origin of Gryphon Manor's curse ... or we could leave it vague on purpose, much as the Telling Man's or Toben's backgrounds are obscured. The latter option could actually be more interesting, and would fit the faceless nature of the House, IMO. Think of the "terrible presence" in the original Poltergeist movie -- "so much rage, so much betrayal" -- that seemed so frightening because its intentions were a mystery. When the sequals gave that "presence" a human face and history, that kind of cheapened the series: it was scarier when we didn't know what it was or why it was so hostile. If we only hint that the House-entity was human once, but refrain from giving it a full backstory, we preserve the air of enigma that distinguishes hauntings from other sorts of horror story.
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Post by Irving the Meek »

Exactly. I really do think that the House should be mysterious and have unknown (possibly unknowable) motives. That alien aspect of things is what makes for really creepy ghost stories.
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Post by WolfKook »

I'm with Roti in this. The reason of the house seeming so alien when compared to Godefroy is that right now, Godefroy has a write-up and the house lacks one.

I also agree that the complete story should have some dark spots, some things unsaid and left to the DMs/PCs to explore. However, as DasSoviet and Gonzoron point out, there should be enough backstory to avoid the House being just a hollow darklord, with no depth to it, or a "being of absolutely evil", which wouldn't be gothic enough, as both have said.

IF we choose the house as the domain DL, we should think about its backstory and "motivations". What do we know about the house? Who build it? Does Gryphon Hill have some secret prior to the building of the house? Who has lived there? What happened there that would be so dark and terrible as to create so potent and pervasive a haunt? What's the house (Or, more precisely, "Da precense in da house" :)) punished for, and in which way?

I really do like Baduin's proposal:
Baduin9 wrote:So consider the House in the original Mordent - an impersonal, evil, invisible and invincible force taking one by one the other great houses of aristocracy, and slowly beginning to infect the cities, inexorably nearing its final aim: becoming a single living world-city-house, a giant arcology, a tremendous living spell, ruling the whole planet according to its warped will.
Perhaps someone wanted their house to prevail over all other houses of the aristocracy, and the house ("da presence") has been working to that end all along? Perhaps more of the strange things that had happened to the other houses had been secretly orchestrated by the presence in HoGH?

I really think that if we put some effort on building on the presence's backstory and motivations we would be able to convince DeepShadow, Gonzoron and DasSoviet of its value as a DL.

(BTW, the idea of having Godefroy as the only being that has somehow escaped part of the house's curse, and believing himself to be the master of the house, while the house manipulates him into doing its bidding, sounds wonderful, and completely macchiavellian... Nice one, Sorti!)
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Post by Rotipher of the FoS »

Maybe the "house" in question is that of the original natives of Mordent -- either a ruling household or an indigenous tribe, depending on how far back we want to date their extirpation -- that was exterminated by the ancestors of the current Mordentish population. Not so much an "Indian burial ground" theme, as something along the lines of Arthur Machen's novels: the former inhabitants had practiced dark arts, and collectively laid a curse to avenge their displacement from the area. That curse has melded their embittered spirits into a malignant gestalt, which absorbs other evil-natured spirits into itself while imprisoning those that aren't as filled with hatred.
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Post by Irving the Meek »

I kinds of like the idea that the House isn't a Darklord because it's an evil creature being tortured, but because of the natural laws of Ravenloft. the House is the darkest sinkhole of evil in Ravenloft; that's a strong enough tether to create a domain.

But that doesn't preclude the Dark Powers from having fun with their toy. The sort of sinkhole is going to attract all sort of wannabe necromancers, new-minted liches, and other evildoers. That sort of evil animates and quickens the house, which chows down on their souls greedily and gets that much closer to true sentience. The House's low-level intelligence craves that quickening, so it deliberately sets out lures to encourage necromancers to come visit - primarily by releasing ghosts to create lesser sinkholes of evil as bait.

The "curse" of the house is that it can never achieve true sentience. Mordent breeds heroes, and invariably said heroes beat the House down to its dimmest level just as it's on the cusp of real intelligence. In a very real sense, Mordent was made for Van Richten.

EDIT: I think my idea on Roti's could be blended without difficulty.
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Post by DeepShadow of FoS »

I thought we were trying to remove the canon contradictons, not muddy the waters more.

The Black Box stated that DL's should elicit sympathy, specifically saying, "there but for the grace of God, go I." An unknowable alien force cannot elicit such sympathy. Either we make the house humanlike so it can be sympathetic, or make someone who's already humanlike the DL.

Or we diverge from the spirit of canon altogether, but then I thought this was an attempt to fix that.
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Post by DeepShadow of FoS »

Irving the Meek wrote:I kinds of like the idea that the House isn't a Darklord because it's an evil creature being tortured, but because of the natural laws of Ravenloft. the House is the darkest sinkhole of evil in Ravenloft; that's a strong enough tether to create a domain.
Sounds like a phantasmagora, not a DL. DL's have to be sentient, so saying it's cursed to never achieve sentience is contradictory.
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Post by DeepShadow of FoS »

Baduin9 wrote:Godefroy is a small man. A Darklord should be a great man.
Explain, please? In what sense is Godefroy small?! He plots against whole nations, he commands an army, he has an ego as big as the Core. All of this is canon.
Therefore Godefroy cannot be "fixed". Leave his as he is; he is an interesting character, but not a darklord.
Even if he was a "small man," as you say, you have not shown how Godefroy is unfixable. Non sequitur.
And who said that Darklord must be manlike?
The Black Box. See above post.
There are many haunted houses in the gothic literature; it would be good to acknowledge it in Raveloft. See eg The Haunting of the Hill House by Shirley Jackson, or The Shining.
Funny, I though we've acknowledged them with the HoGH, Castle Tristenoira, the House of Lament, Richten Haus, Tinctnoire Manor and the dozens of other haunted houses in RL. The House of Lament is already a darklord, so why do we need ANOTHER haunted house DL?!
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Post by WolfKook »

WOW! That was a hearty argument!

Well, let's argue back. First, my arguments in favor of the house.

Let's start calling things by name: My guess is that what Roti originally proposed wasn't that the house was the Darklord per se, but instead that there was a strange presence -that, and you have to agree with me in this, predates Godefroy, the Weathermays or even Jacques Renier, who built the house -. And IMO this presence, which drove away Renier and every other noble who lived in the house after him, up until Godefroy moved into it, seems much more interesting, powerful and mysterious than Godefroy himself.

Then, Godefroy moved in, and instead of fleeing the house as everybody else, stayed long enough to have a "Shining" streak and murder his own family within the limits of the house.

Then, according to GazIII, the House (Or, more accordingly, the presence in the house) woke up in a murderous rage, and took on Godefroy (And everyone else on Mordent, for that matter). And the Alchemist's presence, and the Weathermay sacrificing one of their own for power, and Mordent being transported to the mist did little to appease it.

What I'm trying to say is that we're not talking about four walls and a roof (Which, I agree, is not a darklord), but about a ghostly presence (Ghost, nightshade, animator, fiend, caller in darkness or whatever you want to call it). Once we agree on that, it stops being so alien, starts being sentient and not just a phantasmagora, and -with a good backstory to support it -begins to elicit enough sympathy as to becoming worthy of darklordship, while it stops contradicting canon rules. :wink:

And Godefroy starts being just a pawn, knowingly or not, willingly or not, of the true darklord. :twisted:
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Post by DeepShadow of FoS »

WolfKook wrote:WOW! That was a hearty argument!
I try. I hate to see a project get bogged down in fixing things that needn't be fixed, and that happens a LOT when you start questioning the fundamentals.

"Hey, why does everyone need TWO kidneys?"
Let's start calling things by name: My guess is that what Roti originally proposed wasn't that the house was the Darklord per se, but instead that there was a strange presence -that, and you have to agree with me in this, predates Godefroy, the Weathermays or even Jacques Renier, who built the house -.
Okay, most of that is canon, up to the part where it predated the builder Renier (his first name has never been made known, IIRC). That last part is unclear whether the house-entity predated the construction or was constructed/born along with it.
And IMO this presence, which drove away Renier and every other noble who lived in the house after him, up until Godefroy moved into it, seems much more interesting, powerful and mysterious than Godefroy himself.
I'll agree with that.
Then, Godefroy moved in, and instead of fleeing the house as everybody else, stayed long enough to have a "Shining" streak and murder his own family within the limits of the house.
Good so far.
Then, according to GazIII, the House (Or, more accordingly, the presence in the house) woke up in a murderous rage, and took on Godefroy (And everyone else on Mordent, for that matter).
Okay, here you're getting a little fuzzy with canon. The murders of Lilia and Estelle Godefroy awoke something in the house that was malevolent, yes. Where does it say that presence then took on Godefroy, and/or all of Mordent?

If you're extrapolating, fine. Up til now you've been strictly by the book, but I figured you'd diverge eventually, and if this is it, all well and good. It just sounded like you were citing Gaz 3 as the source, which could be debated.
What I'm trying to say is that we're not talking about four walls and a roof (Which, I agree, is not a darklord), but about a ghostly presence (Ghost, nightshade, animator, fiend, caller in darkness or whatever you want to call it). Once we agree on that, it stops being so alien, starts being sentient and not just a phantasmagora, and -with a good backstory to support it -begins to elicit enough sympathy as to becoming worthy of darklordship, while it stops contradicting canon rules. :wink:
This I can see, but you say "we" as if the others in this thread are with you on this being less alien and more sentient. I was specifically responding to posts that were arguing for more alien and less sentient. All of the creatures you list there might be potential darklords.
And Godefroy starts being just a pawn, knowingly or not, willingly or not, of the true darklord. :twisted:
If that's how you want it, cool. 8) But I think you need to make it clear to the others here on the thread that the presence in the house is going to get a backstory that will elicit sympathy in order to be a DL.

Once that's dealt with, my objection to the relative amounts of work is a minor quibble. This is one legitimate way to reconcile the time discrepancies with Godefrey's DLship, and while my preference would still be for fixing Godefroy, I can't really say which approach would take more work, in the end.
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