Café de Nuit

Looking for tips and experiences from peoples own games.
Have you ever done anything with Scaena, The Nightmare Lands, and especially with Boogeyman? I am working on some campaign stuff involving these and interested in hearing how others ran such open ended things.

Gautsu wrote:Looking for tips and experiences from peoples own games.
Have you ever done anything with Scaena...

While I have not done anything with Scaena yet, I have been planning on using it for one of two options. Option A) Have the PCs enter a theater for the purposes of watching the show and use an old module that would have already occured (Feast of Goblyns, Touch of Death, etc) as a means of presenting them that first hand information. Given the nature of the domain lord, I would alter somethings here and there (for dramatic license) and then allow the PCs to shatter the illusion and escape the domain. Essentially, use this as a means to make certain places, events, or people have more meaning to the PCs than they would without it, a teaching tool as it were.

B) Could be similar to A, but instead of relying on it to teach, use it to bring a non-Ravenloft campaign into Ravenloft. Again, I would use a fully fleshed out adventure, but keep it more to the story and have the PCs play parts only to find they are no longer in the world they began in.

Dark Angel wrote:Option A) Have the PCs enter a theater for the purposes of watching the show and use an old module that would have already occured (Feast of Goblyns,

That's precisely how I used it. They went to see a show, got brought on stage to meet Juste afterward, then thought they went back to the inn, but never left Scaena, and "awoke" the next morning in Kartakass, 30 years prior, to run through Feast of Goblyns. At the end of the module, they broke through the illusion and fought their way out of the theater.

As for the Nighmare Lands, I've been sprinkling it through my campaign, building up to something big. I had a dream spawn escape into the waking world, bursting out of one PC's dream, using a nether stone, and into another PC's dreams. The party had to first go into the 2nd PC's dreams to find the stone and pull it into the waking world. Now they have to get it back into the 1st PC's dreams to seal the breach. In the meantime, he's the nexus connecting the two worlds and things keep slipping through. Also meanwhile, dreamspawn are trying to open the breach wider, sending sleepwalkers and other minions to get the stone.

I have a theory that the nightmare court are all the dreamselves of normal people sleeping somewhere in the demiplane. The climax of a nightmare lands campaign could be to find them and wake them. (Or kill them in the waking world). I don't know whether I'll go that far with my Nightmare Lands plot. For now, the planned climax is that someone the PCs know has taken up residence in the dreamworld, bullied himself into a position of power there, and taken to calling himself The King of Dreams. He's behind all the dreamspawn shenanigans, trying to build an empire for himself.

I used Scena one time, when my players wanted to use their favorite characters, which were on another world and waaay too much powerful.

They simply awake at the end of their campagne, standing in front of an applauding crowd and discovered they were just characters in one of Lemot's play.
They fled the scene and had to run from him during all their career in the domains of dread, he wanted to continue his story.

It was fun.

I tried to use the nightmare land but more as a "freddy's" short stories than a whole developed one itself. More for the fun and change of pace than anything else.