Café de Nuit

I'm reading Bleak House part 2 carefully. Found a few bugs...

1) the house is reliving during the day the murderous events that happened on the last day where there was servants at Richten Haus.
But since those events really happened in the past, like 30 years ago, wouldn't Rudolph know about these events? There is no mention of any comment by VR on this. So he meets people he know are dead in a terrible drama from a while ago but do not seem to care / notice...

2) Book two, p 14, sentence that starts with "However" doesn't make sense! No idea what this is about. What undead is hunting the ghost dog at night? Can't be casimir as he manifest during the day only and "dies" around 4 pm.

3) during that day drama scedule, the little daughter/sister Gretta is missing around 3 pm, and they search for her, yet, after 5-6 pm, seems like nobody cares anymore (they have diner, joseph and elisa are in the house after diner... nobody keep searching for the missing girl!)

4) end of day 4, the fury starts at 7h15 when night is there. But what of the unfinished day event scedule? (Which ends after 9 pm). How should the "day scedule of events" end on day 4?

Is it me or the method for drawing cards on page 8 is flawed? It is the method to find if there are spirits at night in each room - one of the nine ghost, or a minor or major manifestion. There are many flying monkey business in this section.

The way I get it, each time they enter a room at night, there are 36 chances out of 54 to meet one of the nine ghosts. It is quite high! At this rate, they'll meet all the ghosts very quickly, leaving nothing for the other rooms.

Also, something is happening each time in every room?

I changed it to

Card drawn is 1 to 5 - nothing happens
Card drawn is 6 to 10 - house manifestation. 50 % each for minor or major.
Card drawn is high deck - a ghost. Redraw another card (1 to 9 to chose a ghost, other card - plus major manifestation and draw again a card 1-9 to find out which ghost it is)

Joël of the FoS wrote:I'm reading Bleak House part 2 carefully. Found a few bugs...

1) the house is reliving during the day the murderous events that happened on the last day where there was servants at Richten Haus.

VIEW CONTENT:

at the end of the day everyone is dead

But since those events really happened in the past, like 30 years ago, wouldn't Rudolph know about these events? There is no mention of any comment by VR on this. So he meets people he know are dead in a terrible drama from a while ago but do not seem to care / notice...

I don't have this adventure, alas, but I can think of a few answers.
The three evildoers who got together to destroy Van Richten wanted to break him in mind, body and soul. Heinfroth has already been ripping at Van Richten's mind before he's trapped in the House; his inability to process the death of everyone could be due to mental trauma and posthypnotic suggestion, if not magical coercion by Madama Radanavich. If Van Richten could foresee the doom, he would be able to deal with it, rather than suffer it again and again and again and again and...

Rock wrote:

Joël of the FoS wrote:I don't have this adventure, alas, but I can think of a few answers.
The three evildoers who got together to destroy Van Richten wanted to break him in mind, body and soul. Heinfroth has already been ripping at Van Richten's mind before he's trapped in the House; his inability to process the death of everyone could be due to mental trauma and posthypnotic suggestion, if not magical coercion by Madama Radanavich. If Van Richten could foresee the doom, he would be able to deal with it, rather than suffer it again and again and again and again and...

Interesting. He is broken. When they enter the House, I plan that Van Richten will be confused, in a dream-like trance, something speaking as a child VR would, or a young adult, or a mature VR. So he will be able to tell what the PC needs to know, or react to the ghost of fallen friends, but otherwise will be more or less useless, until the ending where he is fully back.

One problem I had with Richten Haus was with the ghosts of Van Richten's former comrades. Most of my players hadn't read any of the Van Richten Guides, so they didn't know or care about who these people were when they were alive, or what they meant to Rudolph. Some foreshadowing on my part as DM might have helped with this, I suppose.

I did re-use the house in a sequel adventure, though. This time my group went in with George Weathermay and his nieces to figure out what had happened to Van Richten. I repopulated the place with old enemies of the doctor who had each been drawn to the house for different reasons, and it worked really well, mostly because my players had encountered nearly all of them in previous adventures and knew who they were.

It can be tricky to use characters your players do not know.
If you ever run the adventure again, maybe you could run them by Van Richten's home in Mordentshire and the Weathermay residence, let them see some paintings and hear some stories.

Great ideas Rock, I will use them if I ever decide to re-run Bleak House. Another thing I came up with would be a visit to a cemetery (on a sunny morning!) with Van Richten to pay respects at the graves of some of his fallen allies.

Lingering especially by the grave of the lady who may have loved him... but never got to tell.

El Gambito wrote:One problem I had with Richten Haus was with the ghosts of Van Richten's former comrades. Most of my players hadn't read any of the Van Richten Guides, so they didn't know or care about who these people were when they were alive, or what they meant to Rudolph. Some foreshadowing on my part as DM might have helped with this, I suppose.

Agreed. I've been sprinkling the friends who would become those ghosts throughout my campaign so that when we finally get to Bleak House, the PCs will know all or most of them.

I like this cemetery visit idea. Here's what I have planned: a memorial to fallen friends. VR had it installed in Rivalis (his home town) years before. Found this pic - see below.

It will be located in the Rivalis cemetery, where the PCs will go before going to Richten Haus for Bleak House - a side trek at Crystal Garden.

In "darkonese" on the monument, it is written "we miss you".

But it is broken, one head is missing. Seeing this, VR will say "Oh, probably the lightning. I will have it repaired later" (but the broken head is not around the monument, and investigation could show it was broken with a tool)

Fun point is, Mme Radanavich has with her the broken head from the monument to fallen friends, and that was a part of the ritual how she summoned the ghosts of former VR friends, and how she controls them.

In Richten Haus, they will find the broken head. After BH, the players will have to put back the broken head on the monument to make these fallen friends truely RIP.

You might want to try a Latin inscription, rather than German, for Darkonese.

If you're sticking with German, I suggest you replace 'dich' with 'euch'; 'dich' is singular, 'euch' is plural. ^_^

Rock wrote:You might want to try a Latin inscription, rather than German, for Darkonese.

If you're sticking with German, I suggest you replace 'dich' with 'euch'; 'dich' is singular, 'euch' is plural. ^_^

You are right. But this was found on the Internet as is, I do not have the image editing skill to change it to latin