Meaning of Liffe Discussion

[Jester of the FoS]

S'okay. Brainstorming and other ideas and reminders are all good.
The Fraternity as a whole is primarily looking for sidebars. Dread possibilities, adventure hooks, small ideas and the like. Sub-articles that can be woven into the text without a break in narrative.
But other submissions are good too, so the University is fine.

Keep in mind Armeikos only has 3 thousand people. There are two cities in Barovia larger than it. Liffe is sparsely populated.

[Lord Cyclohexane]

Keep in mind Armeikos only has 3 thousand people. There are two cities in Barovia larger than it. Liffe is sparsely populated.

I realize, but similarly, Armeikos has the only university in the whole of the Nocturnal Sea. As Nova Vaasan schools aren't very good, and as students attending Darkonian schools tend to rebel against their former culture ("What's this rubbish about Junior being a Darkonian now? He doesn't even act like he's family. We never should have sent him to study abroad..."), it seems like the University of Liffe would be the primary center of learning for Liffe and Graben, with students coming from Nova Vaasa and perhaps some from Darkon as well.

Or at least, that's my thought on it.

[Rotipher of the FoS]

I have no idea how Baron Lyron Eversong can play an active part in ruling his domain since he spends a hundred years in isolation for each night that passes on Liffe. I suppose he could be a tyrant by day, eager to do as much as he can like imposing heavy taxes and draconian laws that he has learned from Elena Faith-hold's bestselling novel How To Alienate Your God before he returns to his isolation at night. This also means that Liffeans - Liffites? - will breathe easier at night. I don't know.

Presumably, ol' Lyron must have found some way to cope with his nightly centennial imprisonments by now, else he'd have long since been reduced to a catatonic vegetable out of boredom. One interesting option might be that he's found some kind of unaging creature -- vampire, fiend, well-scrubbed golem, who knows? -- to keep him company, but he has to allow it certain "liberties" with his subjects' welfare, in order to remain on its good side and prevent it from abandoning him.

Beyond that, Evensong's desperate need to fill his empty hours might set his vassals to ransacking the libraries of the world, to bring back books to keep him occupied that he hasn't read (literally!) a million times before. Who knows what dangerous texts they might bring back to their boss? As a spellcaster, he could also take up the hobby of crafting magic items -- Lyron's a twerp, but he is a darklord, so we could assume the Dark Powers waive the XP cost, or let him leech XP from captives -- simply as a way to kill a few decades' spare time. The items he creates could then be sold to pirates and other riffraff. Some might have nasty side-effects and curses, that are either deliberate additions (remember those scrolls that drew people to his mansion?), or else a result of Evensong having no greater talent for item-creation than poetry.

[Rotipher of the FoS]

Indigenous Religions: There is apparently a mismatch of religions in Liffe, including Lendor, a GREYHAWK deity, possibly DRAGONLACE deities and one known only as the “Crop-watcher”

Hey, why not assume that Lyron was snagged by the Mists in the post-Cataclysm era, when few folks on Krynn had a clue who the Krynnish deities were? If that's the case, then Liffe's inhabitants would've quickly adopted the faith of any cleric who stumbled across their island, and whose divine magic actually worked.

[Bluebomber4evr]

When you consider the fact that everything in the Book of Crypts about Baron Evensong screams Greyhawk--his own journal entries are in the days/months/year of the Greyhawk calender!--and the fact that it's only mentioned *once* he's from Krynn, it's pretty obvious that it was an uncorrected error. He's clearly supposed to be from Oerth. I suggest you ignore this one gaffe and correct it, rather than try to make such a glaring error work. He's not exactly Krynnish anyway, nothing about him is.

I did a write-up of Liffe for PotM's website. I'll make that information available here for you guys to use as you see fit.

[Jester of the FoS]

Well, there's nothing very Oerthian about him either. And the campaign settings for Ravenloft have assumed he's from Krynn before, hence why people in Liffe speak Sithican.

[Nathan of the FoS]

Maybe he's from Oerth but the people are from Krynn, and the reason no-one likes his stuff is because it doesn't translate well across planet/cultural lines.

...
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What?
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How come you guys are looking at me like that?

[Lord Cyclohexane]

(shrugs) It makes as much sense as anything else, really.

I'm still trying to figure out how Moondale went from being a dinky 200-odd person village in Book of Crypts to having 1,600 people in Domains of Dread....

[Jester of the FoS]

His background sez he's from Krynn.

[Nathan of the FoS]

Well, whatever. Not my domain, not my problem!

[Bluebomber4evr]

Well, there's nothing very Oerthian about him either. And the campaign settings for Ravenloft have assumed he's from Krynn before, hence why people in Liffe speak Sithican.

It's up to you how you want to do it, but I'm just speaking from my own experience that pounding the square Krynn peg into Liffe's Oerth round hole creates more work than it is to overlook the one relatively small typographical error in The Book of Crypts.

You not only have to account for the presence of an Oerth deity (Lendore), but for the Baron's journals being written in Oerth's calender...and the complete lack of anything even remotely Krynnish in the whole of Liffe. I preferred to use the principle of Occam's Razor and went with the simplest explanation.

[Rotipher of the FoS]

FWIW, I'd rather stick with the Gazetteers' practice of not openly making mention of outlanders' worlds of origin, even if we do know them from the 2E products. The Arthaus material might've been required to do that because of copyright issues, but I think the omission of references to Oerth, Faerun, Krynn, and so on helped to keep the 3E products more self-contained -- they focused strictly on Ravenloft, not on "cameo appearances" by NPCs from umpteen other game settings -- and more atmospheric (because S had never heard of Greyhawk, and rightly so!). Sure, we know most darklords come from other D&D settings, but there's no reason that has to distract us from this one.

That also means we should avoid using game-created deities from the other settings, IMO, unless we dress them up as was done for Bane/the Lawgiver. Deities from IRL mythology are okay, but gods invented purely for somebody else's campaign world tend to feel as out of place as Ezra would, in a non-Ravenloft campaign, in my experience.

[Lord Cyclohexane]

I dunno, I have no problems with running things from a Krynnish background. I can only think of one other domain, Sithicus, that has a Krynnish background, so having another does sound like a good idea. (Provided, of course, that we remove ourselves from it enough to keep the 3E Ravenloft feel).

I hadn't really meant to start up this whole "Oerth vs Krynn" super-smackdown spectacular... I'd just thought that, since The Dark Minstrel mentioned that the people followed a Greyhawk deity that it might be interesting to keep with that. I was more than happy to have a Greyhawk deity in a Krynnish domain, seeing as this *is* Ravenloft, where there are immigrants from *everywhere* and it's *meant* to be a mismash of things. I don't mind having aspects of this and that so long as it's all Ravenloft in the end.

[Jester of the FoS]

Well, there's nothing very Oerthian about him either. And the campaign settings for Ravenloft have assumed he's from Krynn before, hence why people in Liffe speak Sithican.

It's up to you how you want to do it, but I'm just speaking from my own experience that pounding the square Krynn peg into Liffe's Oerth round hole creates more work than it is to overlook the one relatively small typographical error in The Book of Crypts.

Two small typographical errors. Krynn is mentioned twice.

[Bluebomber4evr]

FWIW, I'd rather stick with the Gazetteers' practice of not openly making mention of outlanders' worlds of origin, even if we do know them from the 2E products. The Arthaus material might've been required to do that because of copyright issues, but I think the omission of references to Oerth, Faerun, Krynn, and so on helped to keep the 3E products more self-contained -- they focused strictly on Ravenloft, not on "cameo appearances" by NPCs from umpteen other game settings -- and more atmospheric (because S had never heard of Greyhawk, and rightly so!). Sure, we know most darklords come from other D&D settings, but there's no reason that has to distract us from this one.

That also means we should avoid using game-created deities from the other settings, IMO, unless we dress them up as was done for Bane/the Lawgiver. Deities from IRL mythology are okay, but gods invented purely for somebody else's campaign world tend to feel as out of place as Ezra would, in a non-Ravenloft campaign, in my experience.

Well sure, a Ravenloft native wouldn't know that stuff, but in the case of many domains, the darklord's homeworld does have an influence of some sort (Sithicus and Hazlan being the best examples), and can help in shaping the culture of an otherwise undetailed domain. In my case, I didn't make any overt references to Oerth when I wrote up Liffe, but I did work under the assumption that Evensong was from there. It made languages, names, the physical description of its people, etc. easier to work with.

Take langauge for example. Giving Liffe Sithican as its primary langauge makes no sense even if Evensong is from Krynn. Sithican is derived from the langauge of the Silvanesti elves; they are the primary population of Sithicus. Liffe is 99% humans. Why would they speak the elven language of Krynn even if they have a Krynnish origin? Wouldn't they speak a human language? Like that of Ansalon or something?

What I did is ignored the "he's from Krynn" line in Evensong's background and went along with the rest of the adventure's background on him, showing him from Oerth. The names of Liffe's cities "Armeikos" and "Claveria" sound vaguely Latin, so I made him Oerdian, giving the people of Liffe a distant bond with Darkon, thus making their language and names similar.

I realize it's deviating from Liffe's canon, but since the canon was screwed up from the start, I consider it a better fit than what we've been given on Liffe and Baron Evensong so far. And it actually doesn't "break" much anyway...the Baron Evensong adventure, if ran as it is published, gives no indication to the players that Evensong is from Krynn, and it wasn't until either Domains of Dread or RL3E that Sithican is listed as it's main language, but the domain wasn't given any attention (in any official published material, at least) after either of those products were published.

As for the deities thing, I prefer to use whatever names are published first, but I can see your point about them seeming out of place. For Lendore, I would call him "the Timelord" or something like that.