[Ravenloft Reincarnated] Souragne

[hidajiremi]

I know it's a fan-favorite, so here it comes!

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Souragne


Souragne is a domain that swarms and slithers with life, a lush river delta choked with dark bayous. The wooded swamp that covers most of the domain stretches out like a languid snake, its muggy air thick with grey fog and buzzing insects. Pale green moss hangs heavy on cypress trees, home to scurrying raccoons and opossums. The few folk who dwell in the bayou pole their wooden rafts through the fetid waters, keeping a wary eye out for alligators and more unnatural threats. At night, the swamps come alive with the trilling of frogs, crickets, and cicadas.

The delta of the swamp fans northward toward the warm shallow coastline of the body of water the natives call the Murky Sea. Most settlements are in the north and east of the domain, where the ground is slightly higher and flooding less severe. Souragne’s villages are cramped and sweltering, their grey stone edifices looming over narrow, muddy streets. Two-story homes are often adorned with balconies and gates of wrought iron and decorated with stone carvings of snakes and dancing skeletons. The plantations of the nobility feature magnificent estates with lustrous white pillars and gloomy willow groves.

Unrelenting, oppressive heat and humidity are the hallmark of the weather in Souragne. The autumn rainy season brings temperatures that are only slightly cooler than the norm, while “winter” in this domain would be warmer than spring in most other places. The high-water table in Souragne prevents traditional burial while the wet weather prohibits cremation, so most of the dead are entombed in morbidly beautiful mausoleums.

Souragneans are generally short in stature and slight of build, but their appearance otherwise exhibits remarkable variation. Their skin tone can range from milky pale to a deep brown, and eye colors vary just as wildly, from pale blue to hazel to nearly black. Hair colors tend to be dark, however, with auburn being the lightest common color and raven black being most common. Men rarely let their hair get longer than shoulder length, and only that for the nobility; facial hair is shunned. Women let their hair grow very long; commoners prefer wild, tangled tresses, while noblewomen style their hair elaborately in braids, buns, or ringlets.

Among commoners, clothing tends to be threadbare and humble, woven from local cotton. Men’s fashion leans toward loose shirt and trousers, while women generally wear blouses and long skirts. The nobility is known for their interest in fashion, going about in exquisite garments of vibrant hue. Men wear blousy shirts under jerkins, sashes, and breeches with high boots. Women wear revealing ruffled dresses in pastel colors. Jewelry is common among both men and women.

The class divide in Souragne is deep and bloody. Property owners, no matter how humble their assets, are the elite, and all others must toil to serve them. Commoners are little better than slaves, exploited until they are no longer useful and then discarded. Regardless of class, however, most Souragneans tend to be earthy, passionate folk who have little respect for academic knowledge and instead value cunning and strength of character.

Souragneans are also a superstitious people, their beliefs revolving around spirits of nature and the ghosts of the dead. Many of the local religious ceremonies are intended to placate the dead, lest they become angry and rise up against the living, or to tap into the power of the spirits for personal gain.


Languages

The descendants of the natives speak their own language, Souragnien, while the descendants of the colonists primarily speak Mordentish (RR 38). As with everything else in Souragne, these two languages have blended together into a local patois that uses elements of both without regard for the origins of either.


Connections

Souragne is unusual for an Island of Terror in that it is an actual island, surrounded by water and not just the Mists. Because of its coastal connection, it has access to the Sea of Sorrows and often enjoys traders from many other domains at Port d’Elhour. As the colonists who came to Souragne generations ago were originally Dementlieuese, the oceanic connection between Souragne and Dementlieu is particularly reliable.


Voodan

Though the nobility of the island are largely members of the Church of Ezra, the commoners pay only lip service to the Goddess of the Mists. Instead, they practice an ancient native faith known as Voodan which has become tinged with the trappings of Ezran religion. The practitioners of Voodan believe that everything in nature has a spirit, and that the most powerful spirits are like a divine noble court, ruling over related groups of lesser spirits. These spirits, both greater and lesser, are known as the loa.

Voodan priests, called houngans, are trained in methods to speak with the loa and intercede with them on humanity’s behalf. A skilled houngan is a healer, laying blessings on crops, relationships, and new births to bring positive attention from the spirits. They also listen to the spirits, learning lessons and gaining insight into the nature of destiny. Perhaps their most important role is in summoning the loa to possess, or “ride,” their followers during rituals, which is considered a great and sacred honor for the individual chosen.

Some corrupt houngans turn to the practice of black magic, using their arts to lay curses and bring sickness. These bokor are widely despised but greatly feared. Though common people hate them, they also believe that harming them will bring the displeasure of the bokor’s patron loa.

Voodan Practitioners: A houngan can take Arcane Background (Miracles). Their “holy symbol” is a special bag of trinkets, components, and personal items of faith called a gris-gris. Houngans have access to the following powers: arcane protection, banish, barrier, beast friend, blessing(FC), blind, boost/lower Trait, confusion, curse(FC), darksight, deflection, detect/conceal arcana, dispel, divination, empathy, fear, havoc, healing, locate, object reading, puppet, relief, sanctuary(FC), smite, speak language, stun, warrior’s gift, and zombie.

Requirements: In addition to their need for their gris-gris bag (the symbol of their faith), a houngan must spend some amount of time caring for the needs of their community to maintain their connection with the loa. A houngan gains the Obligation (Minor) Hindrance for no extra points.


Sidebar: Voodan and Vodou

Vodou is the native religion of the island of Haiti, a faith practiced by millions of people in the Caribbean and beyond. Its syncretized beliefs combine native island spirituality, the folk beliefs of enslaved peoples, and the Catholic practices of their enslavers. It is a real and living faith that is frequently exoticized and “othered” by outsiders who misunderstand it.

Voodan is a made-up religion that utilizes some of the trappings of Vodou, especially those popularized by Hollywood films beginning with White Zombie (1932) and continuing through The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988), to the more recent London Voodoo (2004). Its practices and depictions should not be taken as a judgment of real-world Vodou. Its existence can be conceptualized as mistaken beliefs about a real faith by the domain’s darklord, Anton Misroi—a colonist, slaver, and practitioner of black magic—as well as the ignorance of game writers in the 1990s writing about a culture not their own.

For those uncomfortable with the depiction of Voodan as being too close to a real-world religion practiced by marginalized people, feel free to remove it entirely and replace all references to it with a spirit-worshiping faith of your own design.


Tropes

Souragne is a direct pastiche of Louisiana during the early colonial period as well as a mashup of the various French-Caribbean islands of the time. Interestingly, the traditional Gothic literature period (1770-1860) matches up closely with the classical era of the antebellum South, making the two periods not all that disparate in their depiction.

This domain is intended for the genre of stories known as “Southern Gothic,” which are an American version of the traditional Gothic tale transplanted to the Deep South. Like the traditional Gothic tale, such stories are dark tales about decay and loss, but they also typically include elements of gender transgression, native magic, and meditations on the nature of poverty and alienation. Southern Gothic literature didn’t really exist until the 20th century, making its themes closer to modern deconstructions of the Gothic ideal than the literature of earlier periods; in many ways, it can be said that Southern Gothic tales are the postbellum South looking back at the antebellum South with an eye toward the macabre and the dark.

While William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy might be the best examples of Southern Gothic literature, a more useful reference might be Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, which spends most of its narrative in Louisiana during the late 18th century. The more recent American Horror Story: Coven is likewise set in New Orleans, and the first season of True Detective captures the flavor of the decaying South while also incorporating elements of horror.


Themes

• Colonialism: The intrusion of colonial powers into the lives of the natives forms the backdrop of modern Souragne. Although the empire that colonized the island is long since gone, the nobility of the land is descended from the colonizers—while the descendants of the natives are oppressed and beleaguered. The nobility claims legitimacy from a foreign power that no one has heard from in generations and holds onto its power through force, money, and turning the “colonials” against one another whenever they come too close to unity.

• Liminal Forces: The clash between the “foreigner” and the “native” is strong in Souragne, even though virtually everyone alive in the present day is of mixed blood. No one is “pure,” despite what some groups claim, and everyone has family ties to both groups. The religion of the colonials and the faith of the natives gives rise to hybrid beliefs that combine the elements of both, making for strange results. Everything in Souragne is liminal, caught between two opposing forces—the foreign and the native, the water and the land, the living and the dead.

• Slavery’s Legacy: Slavery has been illegal in Souragne for many decades now—but not long enough that the eldest folk of the island can’t remember it. A few of the older commoners are freed slaves, passing their anger and pain down to their children and grandchildren. Worse, the older generations of the nobility remember slavery quite fondly and have poisoned their descendants with stories of “the good old days” when people “knew their place.” Powerful organizations openly call for the return of slavery; in the meantime, those same organizations do all they can to destroy any attempts to move toward a more equal society. For the poorer descendants of colonials, their superiority to ex-slaves is the only thing they have of value.


Notable Locations

The waters of Lake Noir, near the center of the island, are so deep and dark that they appear like ink. The lake is home to several families living on houseboats and in elevated huts along the water’s edge. The most notorious inhabitant of the region is the voodoo priest known to outsiders as Chicken Bone. The old man is known to be able to perform many magical feats and is willing to sell his services to those willing to pay in favors rendered.

Two-thirds of Souragne is covered by Maison d’Sablet, a murky and nigh-impenetrable swamp crawling with insects, alligators, and wildlife of all sorts. The swamp is home to a few small family groups and even some villages, but these people are regarded as mad by those who live in the coastal regions of the domain—and for good reason, as the swamp is also teeming with the undead. Those who die in Maison d’Sablet rarely rest easily, rising again as zombies to hunt the living.

Port d’Elhour is the largest settlement in Souragne, a coastal city named for the sheltered waters that make it the best port on the island. The vast majority of the city’s population are the urban poor, kept to their own sections of the city by hired swords paid from the pockets of the wealthy minority. The city is prone to flooding, so the wealthiest families built a drainage system powered by steam; because of its expense, the system is only used in dire emergencies, leaving manually powered sumps to be used most of the time. The backbreaking and low-paying labor kills at least a few people every week from exhaustion and accidents.


The Darklord

Anton Misroi was one of the wealthiest men in all of Souragne, the grandson of the man who founded the Dementlieuese colony on the island and the owner of a vast plantation. He was also one of the cruelest men in all of Souragne; on his plantation, slaves were regularly beaten to death or simply worked until they died of exhaustion. After all, Anton reasoned, they could always be replaced.

Even a man as despicable as Anton could manage to find love, and he was eventually wed. Though he and his wife were happy together for several years, Anton was a deeply jealous man. He came home one day to find his wife in the arms of another man—her dance tutor, who was simply teaching her a new dance. Anton would hear none of their excuses, however. He beat them both unconscious, tied them up, and dragged them to the swamp where he threw them in to watch them drown slowly.

The tutor died first, bidding Anton’s wife to climb onto his shoulders so she could survive a little longer. She pleaded with her husband for her life, but her cries fell on deaf ears. Finally, as the swamp muck closed around her, she cursed him with her last breath, telling him that he would die as they had. Anton laughed at first—but his laughter died when the swamp all around him erupted with grasping hands. The slaves he had killed had returned from death to exact their vengeance, brought forth by a dying woman’s curse.

Anton was dragged into the swamp and drowned—but he did not stay dead. Instead, he rose again as one of the undead, staggering back to his mansion. His slaves and servants did not recognize the abomination that came to them out of the night, and they drove him away with arrows and torches. Anton spent months in the swamp until pity was taken on him by the Maiden of the Swamp, a nature spirit who mistook Anton for one of her own. Under the Maiden’s tutelage, Anton learned about his own nature and how to command the dead.

By the time the Maiden realized her mistake, it was too late. Anton returned to his mansion at the head of a small army of zombies, slaughtering all he found and sending the survivors fleeing in terror. His destruction of his own plantation would ironically be the beginning of the revolt that would end the practice of slavery in Souragne, but Anton cared not at all. He had slaves aplenty now—ones that would never disobey him. In time, all would come to fear him as the Lord of the Dead.

Anton discovered that the same rituals that gave him mastery of those that died within the swamps of Maison d’Sablet also tied his spirit to the land. He cannot step a single foot out of the swamp, though he remains supremely powerful within it. So long as he has his manor and his slaves, he cares little for the daily lives of the living, though he sees necromancers as potential rivals for his throne and always works to bring about their ruin.

[Joël of the FoS]

And this post reminds me that there is a new version of Ravenloft Reincarnated! Woot! Woot!

Here's v3!