Ravenloft & D20-Modern and D20-Future ????

[Spiteful Crow]

We could include something like that planet from the movie Pitch Black, just a peaceful, yet harsh, desert normally, but a living hell during the eclipse.

[Waldi]

Great Idea !!!! What else SF-Horror-Movies could be included ?
Lets see, what comes to my mind....
Ghost of Mars (yes, the movie was trash....but the idea)
Supernova (for evil alien artifacts)
Event Horizon (a must-be....perhaps this domain could be the flying dutchman of space..)
The first two Alien-Movies
The first two Predator-Movies
Ghost in the Shell
Outland
Resident Evil
the british Quatermass-Series
The Black Hole

[Spiteful Crow]

I was trying to think of a way to include Equlibrium, but I'm not sure how to make it more horrific...

Powers checks would definitely be fun to implement. The general population would probably write them off as "mutations" instead of the result of any sort of meddling by a higher power. Could have stuff like Path of the Cyborg, or Path of the Virus!

[Lord Cyclohexane]

I like this idea as well, of a Ravenloft/MotRD updated to modern or future times. Many of the gothic themes continue to recur and could make modern stories much more interesting.

For example, who wants to make a Darklord based on Do/Applewhite, the leader of the Heaven's Gate Cult? Having an area haunted by the spirits of the suicidal cultists could be interesting, especially if their ethereal shapes are slightly altered by their interaction with the Space Brothers.

Or update Alfred Timothy's cult, only instead of being obsessed with lycanthropic heritage and becoming more wolf than man, have them obsessed with shedding their human forms and evolving into entities of pure information ala Lawnmower Man (cyber-ghosts) or evolving into the kind of mutated horrors necessary to survive in the post-pollution blasted environment of the near future (ala Warren Ellis's run on the comic Doctor Strange, issues 80-82).

Considering the New Age notion of a shift in planetary consciousness that's supposed to occur by 2012 where all humanity will have a personality upgrade simultaneously, perhaps this could be the moment when everything changes and marks how the world is different, ala entering the Mists. Perhaps a combination of updating the servers of the Internet Backbone (the last remnants of ARPANET) to use more highly efficient computers using neural cells for faster transfer rates also unwittingly binds the technological Internet to the vast Collective Unconscious of Karl Jung's, causing this global change in consciousness. And had it not been for the meddling of young Steph Zarov who arranged the server nodes according to alchemic and Kabbalistic designs and made a pact with Death itself to leave its hands off this fledging new form of life, perhaps they would have gotten the peace, love, and universal happiness predicted by the New Age and not this new world of darker shadows. Everyone knows the world has changed upon their change into post-humans but no one truly understands how it is different, it's something that still escapes definition.

[Spiteful Crow]

We should probably have a Magic Rating system for the domains, but instead of indicating how much your spellcasters get screwed over, it could just show how common is magic in the domain. Some domains/planets could have plenty of magic while other areas might rely entirely on technology.

Also, psionics would fit in a lot better in a futuristic Ravenloft, so players who are itching to make a psychic character could finally make one!

[mistshadow2k4]

These are all great ideas! I'd go rather light on the Resident Evil thing though; zombies are too familiar, no to mention justifying their existence without the supernatural is difficult (all of the explanations in the move fall apart when you examine them; and another thing, why don't they eat each other?!). But they can easily be replaced with some other kind of mutation.

Another idea that occurred to me was mutation via alien DNA. Perhaps an ailen race is trying to turn humans -- all or just a large population of -- into something else. Presumably they want the mutated humans to be subservient to them, but what if that's not the case? What would be their motive then?

Can't say I've seen that in any particular movie or a book, but that idea just came to me when reading about y'all's ideas about mutations.

[Lord Cyclohexane]

I'm not certain I like the idea of aliens, mostly for the same reason that people don't like the illithid of Bluetspur. If things are too heavily focused on the never-humans (as opposed to post-humans like vampires, liches and others that had once been human), it's hard (for me, anyway) to keep the gothic feel of the story. That said, if you have an easy time with mixing in the Lovecraftian horror with illithids, feel free to go for aliens.

[Spiteful Crow]

Who would be Darklord on Gothic Earth?

[Waldi]

I think, it would still be the Red Death, who still keeps doing all those things he did in old gothic earth. But his unholy unlife was´nt without problems. During the late 19.th and the whole 20th century, he had to face a serious problem: He relied to much on magic, but corrupted and tainted magic that strong, that even the few humans who knew about magic could less and less practice it. The number of most old supernatural beeings on earth also became lower and lower (with some exceptions; vampires for example can really florish in the labyrinthic subterran slums of a modern megatropolis) In the Age of Ravenloft-Space, magic is an almost extinct art and there are fewer spellcasters than ever. Perhaps in this times, he hides himself inside the vast and enigmatic cybernet of planet Earth. From there, the Red Death tries to manipulate datastreams and archieves and even had a first succses with that. He is now the hidden master of monolithic northern-american coorporation and under his command, slowly horrors of a new age start to rise.

@Aliens:
Within the Gothic-Earth-Solarsystem, there are no known aliens. Officially.
On mars, colonists found the ruins of a strange and unhuman race, that existed millions of years before mankind and reached a level of civilisation, that is still unimaginable for humans. This race was extinct by some unknown reason.
Artifacts of this...creatures...can be found everywhere within the whole solarsystem. Unfortunately, this artifacts can´t be explained by technological science, because the aliens "technology" was based more on psionics and magic, than on technology..

[Lord Cyclohexane]

Who would be Darklord on Gothic Earth?

It's cliche, but Hitler should definitely be a Darklord or similarly powerful entity (not necessarily bound to a physical location, however). In Gothic Earth, his history would go slightly differently from real world.

My idea: The Axis powers fell to the Allies, as in the real world, and Hitler killed himself, again as in the real world. As in the real world, it was rumored that Hitler was involved in black magic and had successfully obtained the Spear of Destiny. In Gothic Earth, however, the rumors were true. In the face of defeat, Hitler takes his Teutonic propaganda to its extreme and, using the energy raised by previous (seemingly failed) rituals and using the Spear of Destiny as a focus, sacrifices himself to himself in imitation of the Norse deity Odin.

To the Allied powers, it would appear that Hitler had merely committed suicide. The secret plans of rites celebrated by top SS officials would all appear to be failures. But Hitler himself would live on as a vengeful spirit and seek to continue the Third Reich but by different means.

At this point, I'd start looking up all of the conspiracy theories out there (and there are TONS) about how the SS officers absorbed into the US's CIA and the USSR's KGB had worked together to continue the aims of the Third Reich, seeking to control the enemies that had defeated Nazi Germany and eventually bring back the Nazi spirit through whoever won. I'd just modify the conspiracy theories so that the spirit of Hitler (now a 4th-rank Ghost) was directing things from very much behind the scenes through his trusted SS officers to control the top levels of both CIA and KGB, but otherwise use the garbage already out there on the internet as the basis of the backbone of the ideas rather than crafting more by hand.

[NykylaiHellray]

I have an idea. There are two animes.....yes animes....which I am going to quote.


Vampire hunter D, and Hellsing.


Actually also for the record deviman, lady deviman, and also things like voilence jack.


Hellsing provides a great campaign type setting. We could reveal a whole new side to the second world war. About hitler attempting to crete super soilders based on vampires.

After the war technology is lost, but then surfaces (similar to hellsing).

Vampire hunter D, and voilence jack provide a nice view of earth in the distant future.

[Waldi]

@NykylaiHellray:
Hmm....Hellsing would fit more to the Gothic Earth of the late 21. century than Vampirehunter D. Perhaps, the Vampirehunter-D-Adaption could take place on a distant planet in some other solar-system ? As for Hellsing, I really love the idea of the "vampirisation" via cybertechnology :D ! The vampire-chip could be a perfekt piece of dark-tech ! Perhaps, they where invented by the Red Death himself to reforce his "Army of Darkness".....or this chips are just a special form of normal implanted cyberspace-interfaces. Because this special implants are dark-tech, they habour a nasty little secret. When infected with a certain computer-virus, the implant starts to change the metabolism of the user - and changes him slowly into an artificial vampire.
The "good" native vampires could be the ricean vampires found on the Ravenloft-Renaissance-Page. They are, at least, allowed to have a neutral aligment.

@Lord Cyclohexane:
Hmm...not a bad idea !!!! Thanks to the Red Death, Nazi-Germany could realy have looked like "Castle-Wolfenstein" or "Ubersoldier". There are some great (completely nuts) conspiracy-theories in the net, we could use.
I would say the following: The secret nazi-conspiracy was a powerfull shadowy threat to the free world during the whole rest of the 20th century and at the beginning of the 21. one. Now, by 207X, the 4.Reich has finaly become a weak anachronism. Still, they have some secret bases in south-america and antarctica and they are still as evil as hell - but they have somehow lost their teeth. More than one century after the end of WW2 the nazi-ideology is just a odd chapter in history-books and the chances are low, that the 4. Reich will come to reality - at least not on earth.
(But perhaps, some nazi-conspirators made their way to venus and are the reason for the dissapearing starships.... )
And, perhaps, more than one nazi-boss found his way to the forces of supernatural evil. I, personly would not make a ghost out of Hitler, but something else. Probably his life was saved somehow by a mad nazi-scientist and now swims inside of a glastube as a living brain or something (Hitler as dark-tech-creature ?). Before you ask i admitt: Yes, the following was my inspiration :
http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/ASIN/B ... 28-8014429
In my opinion, the ghost in the ranks of supernatural boss-nazis would be
Himmler, who commited suicide near Lüneburg in northern Germany, while he fled from allied MP. His body is told to lie buried somewhere in a little forest near the little village Bardowick. On Gothic Earth, this wood would surely be a forbidding haunted place....stalked by....
Another possibility of having old nazis still walking around in the 21. century would be a kind of curse (althoug, I do not know now, what the curse does exactely. An importend part is, that the cursed ones will never rest in peace, but there has to be something else...hmm):
1. The victims-revenge-variante: Those "cursed" nazis where cursed by a magic-practicing cabalist rabbi Prague or a powefull gypsie-witch in.
2. The ancient-german-legend-variante: A old legend says, that the powerfull ghost of emperor Frederick the II (better known as "Kaiser Barbarossa) lies sleeping inside the Kyffhäuser-mountain and will rise to help his people, when Germany is threatened. In 1945, a group of nazi-cabalists from "Ahnenerbe" tried to conjur Old Frederick and use him as a supernatural weapon against the arriving allied forces. Unfortunately (for the nazis) Emperor Frederick was during his life a 20th-Level paladin and is now a very powerfull lawfull good 5th-grade-ghost. And Freddy wasn´t very pleased to see, what the nazis did to his former empire.....

[Lord Cyclohexane]

Ooh, I really love the idea about the ghost of Kaiser Frederick becoming a "Once and Future King" and battling the Nazi remnants to clear the name of his kingdom.

Also, the "They Saved Hitler's Brain" definitely makes the Hitler brain from the comic "Savage Dragon" make more sense. In the latter, though, he was controlling a giant gorilla's body from within a glass brainpan, which is even sillier.

My original idea was to have Hitler be lich-like, with his spirit taking on the Spear of Destiny as his phylactery just so as to really mess with the mythology centered on that artifact. However, since you like linking everything to DarkTech, how about this:

In 2068, a DarkTech subsidiary working for in a backwater country known for brutally enslaving and torturing political dissidents developed a new frightening technology. Based on delicate laser arrays used for detecting and removing brain tumors, this machine removes the victim's skull and slowly burns away each and every individual neuron while recording which other neurons are connected to it. In this way the machine can make a very accurate copy of every bit of information that the victim knows. Obviously, the victim does not survive the process. [Fun fact: this idea comes from a nightmare I had; I watched someone go through this]

Two years previous, the CEO of DarkTech came across an amazing find in the black market antiquities trade, coming across the well (but not perfectly) preserved brain of Hitler. Knowing a bit about the research done by the DarkTech subsidiary (but not enough to be legally responsible), the CEO waited for the technology to be fully realized. In the meantime he sought the creation of an updated model of the TechnoGolem (TM), one with updated audio arrays capable of subliminal audio in the range proper for control of people's minds. This was to fully maximize Hitler's natural charismatic abilities and allow him to become a propaganda master. [In game terms, the subliminal audio will create the effects of the "Bardic Music" Bard class ability and allow a suggestion spell at will (or less, if electrical output concerns)].

In 2070 everything was prepared, the Hitler brain ripped down, knowledge and personality preserved, and this info uploaded into the SubliminaLich v1.3 system, bringing back a horror that should have remained dead.

[Waldi]

Whoa ! Great story !!! To keep some nice clichee´s, I would suggest to place the little, supressed country somewhere in South-America (due to popular myths about nazis after WW2, a lot of them fled to Argentinia...)
The small nation should look like the stereotypical southamerican "banana-republic"...El Presidente is already a ruthless dictator, the jungle is plagued by guerilla-rebells and death-swadrons of some drug-barons...etc.pp....perhaps, the mafia is also a welcome source of money for the 4.Reich-conspirators.
I think, the robo-lich should not look like one at the first glance. What about the ressurected Hitler looking like friendly old plantation-owner ?
That would give a nice touch of "dark and horrible secret" to the whole thing. Who would suspect, that the nice and polite Senor Pablo is indeed the terrible "Gröfatz" ? ("Gröfatz": short for "Größer Führer aller Zeiten" -"Greatest leader of all times". That was one of Hitlers more sarcastic and ironic nicknames given to him during WW2.)

And what do you think about this guys:

"Der kaiserliche Orden" (The Imperial Order)

This secret order of new-age-paladins was founded by Kaiser Frederick himself shortly after WW2. The powerfull ghost showed himself to people, who where righteous and just and formed during the years 1945 to 1951 a new cabal out of former resistance-fighters and now homeless soldiers.
The Imperial Order started soon to fight the minions of the Red Death than run rampant in the destructed Germany (Remaining mad nazi-experiments, ghouls stalking the ruins of Berlin, Werewolves and so on.)
By the middle of the 50ties the Imperial Order allied with Die Waechter (who where on the nazis red list as enemys of the state and formed a kind of supernatural resistance against the NS-regime).
During the first decades of it´s existence (especially during the McCarthy-Aera), the CIA suspected the Imperial Order to be some evil organisation
(they where german and they worked for a "Kaiser"....very suspicious )

Some further ideas for the order ?

[Lord Cyclohexane]

Actually, I'd originally thought to have Hitler brought back by someone *other* than the Nazis, leaving the Nazis horrendously surprised when they find out about it later. I'd thought to have the CEO of the leading manufacturer of DarkTech-based products view Hitler as a pawn, then have Hitler break away relatively soon after. Hitler would later create his own group (perhaps by taking control of the South American Nazis) and there would be tension between the two organizations from that point on.

Mostly, I don't want the Nazis to know that "Hitler" is not exactly Hitler. The brain, which was not preserved properly, should not lead to an exact Hitler clone but should be slightly different, slightly more insane, and even less in touch with humanity due to the damage of the brain, the imperfect technology used, etc.

One quick note, though: I don't think the group should be called "Nazis" as they really should be hiding themselves better. Also, to correct my above post, I don't mean to have named an individual corporation "DarkTech" but just didn't have a better name at the time; I don't believe any company should be called "DarkTech" but have that remain as the OOC term for corrupted technology.

Regardless, though, I think I'm going to stop with this line of thinking until I can stop, go back and create the CEO of "DarkTech" and actually give his/her history a gothic feel. Also, I want to stop and give "RoboHitler" (no, I'm not honestly thinking about using that as the name) a personality makeover to also give the gothic feel. Why am I stopping? Because there's nothing gothic to my idea just yet and it kinda annoys me that I'm doing a crap job.