Personal Canon

[Isabella]

Tristen Hiregaard is a mess and I threw that whole thing out. Instead I took what the designers have always said - that Malken is the Darklord, not Tristen - and along with the original story of Jekyll and Hyde, expanded on that. If Malken is the darklord, it seemed like the story should start with him, so here's what I came up with:

Malken began life as a caliban, looking much like he does in cannon. He was very smart, very cunning, and very ugly. As a result, his life sucked. Not only did he have to deal with the universal prejudice against his hideous looks, but he had to deal with the ever-present church of the Lawgiver. The priests of the Iron Faith believe that corruption is made manifest in flesh, so Malken's appearance essentially proved he was filthy, evil, and unworthy. This became a self-fulfilling prophecy, as it pretty much put an end to any hope he would ever have of getting an education, a job, or anything that would let him pull his wretched life out of the gutter. The only people who would give him the time of day were criminals and other outcasts, and that was only if he was useful to them and they were feeling nice.

Only one day he got lucky. A noble, for whatever reason, happened to notice the clever caliban and took him in. And this noble happened to be everything the nobility claimed to be, but most weren't - a good man, who tried to do right for his people. Although he always followed the edicts of the Law, and thus could never treat Malken as an equal, he educated the caliban and gave him good work as a trusted retainer. Though Malken hated the nobility and church, he did serve this nobleman well, and considered the man an exception to the rule.

[You may have guessed this man to be Tristen Hiregaard, and you would be correct. However, cannon has the Hiregaard family named things like Katya, Mikhail, Sasha and then we have... Tristen. One of these things is not like the others, so I call him Dmitri Stanov, for myself.]

Unfortunately, Malken's heart had already been poisoned by years of injustice and jealousy. While dabbling in alchemy (an art he'd proved rather talented at), Malken discovered a potion that would let him steal the body of another man for himself, permanently... at the small cost of the other man's life. He waffled over it for a while, filled with thoughts of taking one of the hated noblemen's place - except the only noble who trusted him enough for Malken to get close was Dmitri. He might have waffled indefinitely, or gone for a more difficult target, had a heated argument not pushed his hand. Another caliban was caught for a crime, and the law demanded execution for it. It was a blatantly unfair law, but the law was quite clearly broken, and so Dmitri obeyed the sentence. Feeling betrayed, Malken betrayed, murdered, and stole the face of his former master.

But it didn't quite work out right. Malken could shift between his own form and that of Dmitri, but Dmitri had a mind of his own. Perhaps Dmitri's soul was also caught in the alchemical potion. Or perhaps the part of Malken that was horrified at what he had done, that still thought of his master as a good man, split off and formed a different personality. Either way, Malken now shares his body with a nobleman that is all a noble is meant to be - a shining beloved figure to his people - and a man completely dedicated to a system Malken hates above all else. Malken struggles to regain both halves of his body, with no success. While Malken dares not tear down Dmitri's reputation and property, in the hopes it will one day be his, Dmitri does his best to fight Malken at all turns.

[Maybe too close to Strahd, but what the heck. At least now I might use the man.]

[Rock of the Fraternity]

That is an excellent twist on Tristen/Malken! My compliments.

[Isabella]

A few other differences:

-Nidalia and Avonleigh are part of the Core, south of Mordent and bordering Sithicus. Phirza and the Burning Sands are connected to Hazlan. (The latter being from NeoT's EoA campaign)

-Kartakass and Verbrek are one domain. Alfred Timothy is the darklord of the whole thing. Harkon Lukas remains in the domain but is not a darklord. Alfred hates his guts. (I want to run a game one day just to see the Ravenloft veterans spit-take at finding Lukas outside of his domain borders.)

-Easan the Mad doesn't have an imp in his head. He only thinks he does, and uses it to justify everything wrong he's ever done.

-Von Kharkhov is not a nosferatu ex-Kargat werepanther. He's just a plain old werepanther, a Hazlani experiment that killed his former master.

-Death is a splinter of Azalin's personality that blew off when Azalin exploded himself in the Requiem. Likewise, Necropolis is merely an empty, desolate city... most of the time. If you're unlucky, you fall through the cracks into the shadow version of the city, which is where the undead are. If you're very unlucky, you're there when the Shroud appears and decends.

-There is no physical Shadow Rift. It is instead an alternate reality you can slip into by wandering too far from civilization, usually in forested areas. Tepest is especially prone to these rifts.

-I don't preclude the newer 4e races from the game (though obviously any PC asking for them would get a severe looking over). Dragonborn are gargolye-esque creatures, Warforged are escaped constructs from Lamordia.

-I don't consider every "domain" to need a darklord. The Shadow Rift, Bluetspur, and other bizarre worlds do not technically have darklords (Gwydion and the God Brain remain, but I don't try to make them gothic in any sense). Likewise, Godefroy is still around, but he is not the "Darklord" of the domain, nor does he reside in the House on Gryffon Hill.

[herkles]

isabella, can you explain more on the last one, with not every domain needing a darklord?

[Isabella]

isabella, can you explain more on the last one, with not every domain needing a darklord?

It's considered foul heresy by more than a few people, but alright.

Basically, over time I found that the concept of a Darklord was too "limiting" for my tastes. Not in the case of most domains - Strahd and Ivana and Azalin and Hazlik all remain where they are, and so it should be. BUT I found myself more and more disenchanted with the rule that every different place in the mists had to have a darklord, and every darklord had to be gothic - "there but for the grace of God go I" sorts of characters. I agree with the latter sentiment, which is what made the former a problem. You wound up with "darklords" that were inherently unsympathetic, like the God Brain. People have attempted to fix the God Brain by making him originally human... but I personally felt this only damaged to concept more. To me the God Brain should be alien. That's why it is scary.

This is where it usually gets called heresy, as Ravenloft is a Gothic Horror setting, and the number one rule is every domain has a darklord. But screw the rules, I have (no) money. I wanted to be free to dabble in other genres of horror, and being forced to have a darklord limited that for me. What if I wanted a domain/story where no one was at fault enough to be the darklord?

This mostly applied to the "otherworldly" places, not the human-centric domains. Basically, I felt that any "domain" that was not filled with human, mortal creatures had no reason to have a human, sympathetic darklord. The Fair Folk are frightening because they represent primal forces of nature that have no morality - a tornado isn't evil for wrecking your house, but you fear it because it does not care and cannot be pleaded with. So why would the Shadow Rift have a darklord, when the very concept of morality is alien to these beings?

Likewise, the Nightmare Court of the Nightmare lands make fantastic villains, but I'm not sure I'd call any of them darklords. And if I wanted to dabble in Lovecraftian horror, Bluetspur is perfect... but making the God Brain human and understandable only undermines that brand of horror. The marakith queen has an alright backstory, but I never really felt it did anything to add to the horror of the marikith for her to have it. (Something like the broodmother, from Dragon Age, might be more effective, if less "gothic".)

The only "human centic" domain I removed the Darklord for was Mordent, because Godefroy never did anything for me as Darklord. He's a good villain, but he's not THE villain, the focal point of the domain. He instead feels like some guy they dredged up because he had the best resume and they needed a darklord - and this is essentially what he is. What stands out to me is the House on Griffin Hill, because it has been there from the start, and it is the focal point of everything evil that has happened in Mordent. It was the home of Strahd's apparatus, it tainted the Reniers, it was the place where Godefroy's family was murdered, and it's been heavily suggested it is the cause of Mordent's slow decline. It has the most story potential, the feeling there is something deep, dark, and incredible buried at the bottom of it, and so I consider it the "darklord". However, there is little one can do to make a house a sympathetic character, and I think it wrecks the horror of it to try.

[High Priest Mikhal]

For my campaigns, and this is detailed in the Lost Journals, the Nightmare Court isn't unique to just Ravenloft, nor are their powers over dreams. They're an extension of a larger, more potent and far more ancient group also called the Nightmare Court. What they have in common is how they've tied themselves to dreams: the Web of Dreams (Dreamweb) located in the center of the Dreamheart in the Region of Dreams. Imagine a metaphysical construct made of every passing whimsy, idea, and dream or nightmare made by every intelligent thing in the multiverse in one big tangle and you get the Dreamweb. Tapping into it on the most basic level is safe enough if you don't go looking for sanity-shattering things. But tying one's own existence to it is to forever be one with dreams. There is great power to be had--immortality, god-like control over dreams, and other things as individual as the entity involved--but at a great cost. Without dream energy the being tied to the Dreamweb will "starve" and die; this dream energy has to be cultivated by the being to consume it, meaning that most efforts will go into the management of such. Because negative energies are so much easier to cultivate, and anyone/thing crazy enough to tie their very existence to Dreamweb is often such, the majority of such beings are evil, insane, or both.

Also this one isn't so much "personal canon" as throwbacks to 2e AD&D Ravenloft, the halflings in Sithicus are kender from Krynn the Lawgiver is the god Bane from Forgotten Realms (albeit still called the Lawgiver post-GC), and Hala is NG as opposed to just N.

[Hogan Van Monsterband]

There are a bunch of Falkovnian expats in Lamordia, and a bunch of big, well-off families which exist in both contries. As my Falkovnians are straight-up Nazis, this led to my PCs finding themselves at a party with the Lamordian sides of these families, all of whom were more than happy to endorse Falkovnia's crazy politics and agresion but had no desire to actually get their hands dirty themselves.

[NortonGoldsmith]

Even if I've nevere actually run a ravenloft campaign, I have many idea on how i might modify the setting. These are some:

*Falkovnia, Lamordia and Dominia are folded in one domain, Drakov being the Darklord. The domain has Dementlieu-level culture, even more advanced in certain aspects but is still a harsh military dictatorship. Dr Modenheim and dr Heinforth both work for Drakov.

*Tristen/Malken works exactly like Jekyll/Hide, and Nova Vaasa is known more for its alchemists than its horses.

*Bluetspur lies below Dementlieu, much like Timor for Paridon, and The Living Brain is its Darklord.

*Invidia, Valachan, Kartakass and Verbrek are folded in one "Dark Wood" domain, Timothy being the Darklord. The domain has no central political power.

*There is no Shadow Rift.

*There is no core, but rather a group of domains linked by very reliable mistways.

[herkles]

I myself haven't ran a Ravenloft PnP campaign but there are things that I would do.

-Falkovinia is much much closer to the holy roman empire than it is nazi Germany. It used to be separate kingdoms before drakov came in and conquered it all. There are some connections to Ivan the Terrible's russia.

- tepest and the shadowrift are one domain, and the shadow rift is a giant massive wooded area instead of a rift.

-the domain borders are not the same as political borders. Some domains have a few countries in them, while vice versa; some lands are split up between several countries.

-scourgne is a colony of dementlieu

-false history has always annoyed me, so it is ignored and a more closer bound together history is being worked on. So the core as I see it always existed, and the concept of 'rising out of the mists' for forming new domains is strange to some. However all islands of dread and other none core places, can and do form out of the mists.

-along with the above this means that the world and so are the organizations in it, much older.

-several of the religions have been modified, some far more heavier than others.

[HuManBing]

There are a bunch of Falkovnian expats in Lamordia, and a bunch of big, well-off families which exist in both contries. As my Falkovnians are straight-up Nazis, this led to my PCs finding themselves at a party with the Lamordian sides of these families, all of whom were more than happy to endorse Falkovnia's crazy politics and agresion but had no desire to actually get their hands dirty themselves.

I like that! A very "Charles Lindbergh" or "Henry Ford" flavor to the advanced nations.

[Nathan of the FoS]

I spend quite a bit of time developing my "personal canon" at one point, pretty much going all the way down to bedrock and then building up. Much of it's recorded here.

[herkles]

hmm, I been thinking of doing something similar to post the variety of ideas I had for my altered world. I wonder what others would think of that?

Also another change that I would have is far less magic. Most clergy men can't cast spells. their are people who can, but they are very odd or holy people who can use magic. Of course being a monster, say a vampire does help in the magic area but not by much.

[Hogan Van Monsterband]

While we're talking about clerics, practically no-one's heard of the Morninglord outside Barovia. The people who have are typically high-ranking Paladins and Clerics of other religions, all of whom have nothing but admiration for the Morninglord's followers - they see them as this crazy peasant cult who go toe-to-toe with elder vampires armed with nothing but a sharp stick.

[Sareau]

In my Ravenloft, there is the Church-staffed mainly by Experts who maintain the lands, copy books, etc. Most of the good gods are worshiped as saints by the Church, the Morninglord taking up the mantle Sts Cosmo and Damian held in the Orthodox churches, Ezra filling in for the Virgin Mary, who supplanted a lot of pagan Earth Mothers as Christianity spread. The Church is a body politic that performs mostly charity work, etc., and has a lot of clout.
Clerics, on the other hand, seem to be called by a specific patron, just as Paladins are likewise called into their professions.

[brass]

In my Ravenloft, there is the Church-staffed mainly by Experts who maintain the lands, copy books, etc. Most of the good gods are worshiped as saints by the Church, the Morninglord taking up the mantle Sts Cosmo and Damian held in the Orthodox churches, Ezra filling in for the Virgin Mary, who supplanted a lot of pagan Earth Mothers as Christianity spread. The Church is a body politic that performs mostly charity work, etc., and has a lot of clout.
Clerics, on the other hand, seem to be called by a specific patron, just as Paladins are likewise called into their professions.

I was equally thinking of toning things down slightly on the religious magic end. I've been using the inquisitor class more and more for religious types from the pathfinder rpg.

http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/adva ... sitor.html

Their spell list is more low key and has a bard progression.

Of course they are fantastic monster hunters as well.