Weird Headcanons Thread

[The Dark]

Port-a-Lucine has a voracious appetite for foreign ("exotic") trends, and the fashionable sort import all kinds of furniture, art, clothing, and even hire foreign servants for front-of-house positions so that they can be seen to be fashionable. Fortunes can be made (or lost) through timing or mistiming trading voyages to places as they come into fashion or suddenly become passe. The current style is Pharazian, but rumor is that Rokushiman will be big next season.

[KingCorn]

Markov likes opera. He uses magical sound recorders from Liffe to listen to it, often while he "operates"

I had a similar idea, with him having a prototype phonautograph (sound recording), which he uses to record music, the sounds of nature, his own musing (I like to imagine he rambles to his servants like Richard Nixon), and occasionally his surgeries. Hearing the surgery ones would inspire a horror check.

[KingCorn]

I have the Falkovnian peasants consider vinegar an artform, much like more civilized realms do wine-making, with its anti-septic qualities being the closest thing the Falkovnian cities and major towns have to public sanitation. Specific types are made for specific reasons, from cleaning clothes to cleaning wounds to seasoning to (of course) food. In some villages, a family's vinegar-mother (a real thing, look it up) is a dowery gift.

[Mistmaster]

I have the Falkovnian peasants consider vinegar an artform, much like more civilized realms do wine-making, with its anti-septic qualities being the closest thing the Falkovnian cities and major towns have to public sanitation. Specific types are made for specific reasons, from cleaning clothes to cleaning wounds to seasoning to (of course) food. In some villages, a family's vinegar-mother (a real thing, look it up) is a dowery gift.

nice but does not work in the Mistworld where Falkovnia is more civilized. However, beer-making might have the same role.

[TheArcaneWeirdo]

I have the Falkovnian peasants consider vinegar an artform, much like more civilized realms do wine-making, with its anti-septic qualities being the closest thing the Falkovnian cities and major towns have to public sanitation. Specific types are made for specific reasons, from cleaning clothes to cleaning wounds to seasoning to (of course) food. In some villages, a family's vinegar-mother (a real thing, look it up) is a dowery gift.

I want an article about this. I have no idea how it would ever come into play in an adventure and I don't even like vinegar, but I need to hear more.

[TheArcaneWeirdo]

I have the Falkovnian peasants consider vinegar an artform, much like more civilized realms do wine-making, with its anti-septic qualities being the closest thing the Falkovnian cities and major towns have to public sanitation. Specific types are made for specific reasons, from cleaning clothes to cleaning wounds to seasoning to (of course) food. In some villages, a family's vinegar-mother (a real thing, look it up) is a dowery gift.

nice but does not work in the Mistworld where Falkovnia is more civilized. However, beer-making might have the same role.

How is beer more civilised than vinegar?

[Mistmaster]

The more civilized part is that they do have access to other means to clean and disinfect.

[Pizza]

...people may want to do things like placing certain plants along the edges of decorative gardens to discourage deer from foraging in them.

I can tell you from a decade of personal experience that deer need a lot of discouragement from foraging in people's gardens, given as how I've seen them mow down my tulips, chew on my tea bush and eat my azaleas with impunity. They will eat cigarettes off of the ground, yet find my goji plants unpleasant.

I’ve always hear to go to a barbershop and get several large bags of human hair and scatter it around the edge. No clue if it works though

[TheArcaneWeirdo]

So by the (canon) rules of the Iron Faith, calibans are inherently evil and must be killed at birth. (IMHO that's by far the worst crime of that religion, which is a pretty hard competition.) In Nova Vassa this abomination had turned into a tradition by now.
But my take is that in Hazlan, things are a little different.

You see, even before Hazlik started quarreling with the church, he banned this practice. It's unlikely he'd done it out of the goodness of his heart - he probably just wanted a few as test subjects. (Some, though, might want to believe that maybe, just maybe, some part in his blackened heart that wasn't completely corrupted yet might have remembered what it's like to be hated for an inborn trait you have no control over.)
The thing is, up until 740, calibans were unheard of in the domain. The rare occasional one was expected to stay in their room, not make noise and pretend they don't exist.
But ever since the removal of the ban on magic and the opening of The Red Academy, the caliban birth rate has been raising exponentially. As per 760, 3% of the overall population is the conservative estimation. In Ramulai we're talking about 15%. There's just too much dark magic around. Some voices in the church use this as an argument in favor of overthrowing Hazlik, but they aren't politically powerful enough for this. Not right now.
The situation is that calibanity had turned from a rare phenomenon to something that can happen in every family. The public doesn't know what to think or do about this, Hazlik doesn't care and the Church of the Lawgiver is too stuck in the past to offer a solution.
Who does offer it?
Stay tuned, I'm writing that as a seperate post so I can switch from my laptop (running low on battery) to my cellphone.

[TheArcaneWeirdo]

I've had the idea that Ivana Boritsi has published several books on horticulture under various pseudonyms. Don't know why, just seems a way to flesh out her character by giving her a hobby.

While we're in borca...

1) As spiciness isn't, scientifically speaking, a taste, Ivan can feel it. Unfortunately, he always had zero tolerance for spicy foods. Bro will eat live worms without flinching, but give him a hot pepper and he'd run away screaming.
2) Actually, Ivan was generally a picky eater before he was cursed. It wasn't that he always wanted the most lavish foods, he simply wanted the specific foods he was used to, prepared in the way he was used to - but people never get this, so it made him look even more like a spoiled rich kid than he actually was (Which is an impresssive achievement). He'd always make a scene out of it, and people always frowned or made fun of him for that.
And this little freudian excuse isn't nearly enough to justify his crimes, I know. It's not supposed to. I just think that's why he trolls his guests with disgusting foods: he's trying to make a point, that everyone has a breaking point where they'd make a scene about food.
3) Lollar Boritsi's childhood nickname was Lollipop. His older siblings still call him that. Bevel does it because he genuinely still thinks of Bevel as of a baby, which is annoying. Helena does it ironically because she believes it's her duty as an older sister to embarass her brother a little, which he takes in good spirit.

[KingCorn]

Continuing from Borca, and mainly just from a vague notion, what if they have a good culture of pig-breeding, oddly enough from stock from Markovia, back when it was next to Dorvinia. Hardy enough to eat the often poisonous crops which spread through the land.

[Seven]

One that's probably not too controversial but I haven't seen discussed is that Ravenloft should mostly be a low-powered setting. Other than Darklords and other significant bads and a couple exceptions like Gondegal or van Richten, the vast majority of NPCs are either 0-level or below name level (for 2e) or are relatively low-level NPC classes (for 3e). It's a setting where the PCs won't find a random 16th-level wizard tending bar, it's where that weird and powerful wizard in a tower outside of town is a 3rd-level adept.

I love tweaking the noses of the modern (?) Ravenloft fanbase by telling them that Ravenloft was, for quite a long time, "designed" to be a low-power, low-magic campaign setting, since the horror "works better" when you can't just blast the shit out of shit.

The 3.5e Ravenloft Players Handbook encapsulates my thoughts quite well: "Magic is rare enough in the Land of Mists that some even insist that it is nothing more than a superstition. They are wrong, of course, but most inhabitants of Ravenloft never knowingly encounter anything magical in their lifetimes"

"Adventurers have an easier time locating magic than the average commoner, since the monsters they face hoard much of it, but even they should find it rare enough that it's discovery is a truly-wonderous event"

[KingCorn]

I've given several of the domains specific hobbies.

I have the Invidians, thanks to their winding river, love to fish. More acturally, they love to talk about fishing, and the best way to get an Invidian to talk to you (if only so they can insult you and show off what they know) is to fish in front of them, perferably very badly. Invidian youth, especially in the city, have also started to pick up Falkovnian 'slang' to try and sound tough.

Lamordians have an uncanny ability to know exactly what time it is without the help of a pocket watch, some being able to tell it to the exact second, and their 'secret' to this strange abilty is treated as a large in-joke to put off foreigners. In truth they don't know how they know either (its just the nature of the domain acting on them). Lamordians also, despite their rationalism, have two distinct superstitions: a love of sailing stories and superstitons, preferably whaling stories and superstitions, and a strange series of sayings and idioms which associates misfortune and chaos with toads (ie: Slaadi).

The Hazlani have a deep love of table games, calling it the 'noble art', loving Nard and the Har-Akir game of Senet. Oddly they aren't fond of chess or similar games. The Hazlani also have a fondness for using inuendos, with even the more prudish ones sprinkling it into conversation, a small form of rebellion against the authoritarian church of the Lawgiver.

[Baron Von Stanton]

The Hazlani also have a fondness for using inuendos, with even the more prudish ones sprinkling it into conversation, a small form of rebellion against the authoritarian church of the Lawgiver.

"Hmmph, an ardent devotee of the Lawgiver, and he can't even get his wives to iron the tablecloth competently."
"How ironic."
*shared dirty laugh*

[TheArcaneWeirdo]

I've given several of the domains specific hobbies.

I have the Invidians, thanks to their winding river, love to fish. More acturally, they love to talk about fishing, and the best way to get an Invidian to talk to you (if only so they can insult you and show off what they know) is to fish in front of them, perferably very badly. Invidian youth, especially in the city, have also started to pick up Falkovnian 'slang' to try and sound tough.

Lamordians have an uncanny ability to know exactly what time it is without the help of a pocket watch, some being able to tell it to the exact second, and their 'secret' to this strange abilty is treated as a large in-joke to put off foreigners. In truth they don't know how they know either (its just the nature of the domain acting on them). Lamordians also, despite their rationalism, have two distinct superstitions: a love of sailing stories and superstitons, preferably whaling stories and superstitions, and a strange series of sayings and idioms which associates misfortune and chaos with toads (ie: Slaadi).

The Hazlani have a deep love of table games, calling it the 'noble art', loving Nard and the Har-Akir game of Senet. Oddly they aren't fond of chess or similar games. The Hazlani also have a fondness for using inuendos, with even the more prudish ones sprinkling it into conversation, a small form of rebellion against the authoritarian church of the Lawgiver.

I looked up what Nard is (Long story short: it's an ancient Iranian version of Backgammon) and now I'm down the rabbit hole of Iranian games. Honestly pretty interesting. Also, my family immigrated from Iran so I had to fill this hole in my education at some point (Though I can't find on wikipedia the one Iranian card game I actually know how to play...)