Falk-fury rages on!

[Mangrum]

Alfred Timothy can't close his borders either, though I don't think there's as strong a reason for why as there is with Malken and Darkov.

He's an impotent predator. The dark powers won't help him prevent his prey from escaping.

[The Lesser Evil]

On the topic of Vlad, somebody earlier this thread said Vlad was a good merc unit commander but not so good as the overseeing general or lord of a nation. That got me thinking, Vlad's losses started piling up after he became a darklord (and thus unable to leave his domain.) I wonder if part of his curse is that he can't be there on the front lines leading his troops (he's effectively given up that role in favor of becoming a head of state- the whole ironic wish-giving thing Ravenloft does.) If this is true, then perhaps it's the weak links in his command chain that cause his failures (well, beyond his hidebound warrior nature thing he has going on.) I could see his temper making his insubordinates tell him what he wants to hear, even if it's not quite true.

[ewancummins]

On the topic of Vlad, somebody earlier this thread said Vlad was a good merc unit commander but not so good as the overseeing general or lord of a nation. That got me thinking, Vlad's losses started piling up after he became a darklord (and thus unable to leave his domain.) I wonder if part of his curse is that he can't be there on the front lines leading his troops (he's effectively given up that role in favor of becoming a head of state- the whole ironic wish-giving thing Ravenloft does.) If this is true, then perhaps it's the weak links in his command chain that cause his failures (well, beyond his hidebound warrior nature thing he has going on.) I could see his temper making his insubordinates tell him what he wants to hear, even if it's not quite true.

As I see it, Vlad's curse is similar to that of Harkon Lukas; both are trapped in domains that don't meet their desires and find fulfillment of their great ambitions impossible.
The people of Kartakass will never make Lukas their king, for all that one of the two towns is happy to reelect him as Meistersinger. Kartakass will never become a developed, wealthy, large and powerful state. The folk reject such ambitions. They won't federate, they won't launch an ambitious colonization effort, and they certainly won't march into neighboring realms and annex territory the way Barovians did.

Vlad conquered Falkovnia, but failed to win the respect and glory he wanted from doing so. And now he can't ever conquer anyplace else.
Falkovnian agents could assassinate the entire gov't of Dementlieu, thus eliminating D'Honaire, and the Living Brain would become the new darklord. Soon after, any invading Falkovnian army would be subverted.
I don't think the DPs will ever let Vlad add a square foot to Falkovnia.

Vlad's seeming triumphs will always turn to ashes in his mouth.

Being doomed to lose in this way is a harsh curse, but I wonder if it weakens him a little as a villain?
Would he be scarier if he could win?

Or does he work well as a threat mainly to people within his own realm?


NOTE/EDIT-

I've never really liked the ''hidebound warrior' stuff. It's not part of how he was originally presented. In the Black Box, he doesn't care for magic, but he's smart enough to make use of magic items. And he has no limitations arising from a code of honor or any adherence to laws of war.
He doesn't really seem hidebound.

I wonder if maybe it would make sense to raise Falkovnia's CL to 8 and give Vlad's armies some bombards and culverins and such.
They can use bows for the same reasons that England maintained archers in military service rather longer than some other realms.
Then apply draconian gun control. Guns and powder are state monopolies: anyone caught with contraband of this sort is liable to be impaled.
Civilians are forbidden to own such items for the same reason they are generally barred from owning weapons (that last part being canon).



This would make his defeat by small states like Dementlieu all the more humiliating. It's not even the result of a big technological disparity. How humiliating!

His commanders in Demenetlieu betray him after initial successes, and the cunning Dementlieuse spies always seem to ferret out his plans. In Borca the officers and even whole detachments get poisoned (which has probably only enhanced the unpleasant reputation of the Borcans as poisoners-- it's chemical warfare, basically).
In Richemulot, hordes of filthy rats devour the supplies and spread disease in camp. No doubt the work of witches and priests!
All this has support in 3E canon, as I understand it.

[The Lesser Evil]

Vlad conquered Falkovnia, but failed to win the respect and glory he wanted from doing so. And now he can't ever conquer anyplace else.

I guess I was more talking about how the curse worked, basically, the gritty details of how he is foiled.

I've never really liked the ''hidebound warrior' stuff. It's not part of how he was originally presented. In the Black Box, he doesn't care for magic, but he's smart enough to make use of magic items. And he has no limitations arising from a code of honor or any adherence to laws of war.
He doesn't really seem hidebound.

I probably should have mentioned what I meant by "hidebound warrior". By hidebound, I don't mean he's totally against innovation. I meant he was holding onto old world viewpoints, even stereotypes, of what makes a true warrior (that is, elite skill, toughness, and manliness). He goes by a model of trained professional soldiers comprising the armies rather wizardly bookworms or untrained commoners armed with pea-shooters.

Letting battle-mages, common firearms, and women take prominence in the army threatens his image of proper men (read: him) conduct war because any of these elements would (to him) fundamentally change the nature of the battlefield (and more importantly, the soldier) away from something he identified with. What Vlad does he does not out of true honor, but of pride. He wants people to that recognize his ways are right. (Being a brutal thug with somewhat outdated perspectives is what got him laughed at and dismissed in the first place.)

Now because the restrictions he puts on his army is done out of pride rather than honor, he's free to do some mental gymnastics to make special exceptions. The magic items, the human augmentation of the Ministry of Science, these sorts of things augment the warrior's tools or the warrior's already existing skill and grit. Even the weird alchemical war machines are good in his eyes because they are require lots of training and physical skill to use at all. This separates them from common firearms (relatively easy to train for) and magic users (dependence on a primarily mental or external source of power that runs counter to what Drakov prefers.)

[ewancummins]

Solid analysis.I think you are spot on with the official version of Vlad as it was developed after the Black Box and subsequent changes and additions to the setting.
I'm suggesting a reworking and reappraisal of the darklord and his domain, for use in home games and as alt-fanon.

[The Lesser Evil]

Solid analysis.I think you are spot on with the official version of Vlad as it was developed after the Black Box and subsequent changes and additions to the setting.
I'm suggesting a reworking and reappraisal of the darklord and his domain, for use in home games and as alt-fanon.

Hey thanks. If we were to go an alternate route, I might go something like this. If we look at the Hith (frequent employers), we'd see they were often priests (and evil priests at that, so users of the undead). (They may have even animated his dead soldiers and drafted them into their armies!) Azalin could be seen as a reflection of the Hith that snubbed their noses at him, for Azalin is a spellcaster that uses a lot of undead and more or less sees Vlad as insignificant. Furthermore, I could see him blame Azalin for why he can't ever physically leave the domain- the wizard must have put some kind of curse on him. This is where we have the hate for "all magic", spells, and spellcasters. His hatred for spellcasting is a generalized hate born from past slights at the hands of wielders of the magic arts.

The black box also notes Vlad as doing the impaling thing as a substitute for war, basically implying it's a method of stress relief. So we have a guy with anger problems, fitting in well with the judgement above that he hates spellcasters because he's interacted with a lot of spellcaster jerks in the past.

Vlad's human supremacist bent could come from Thenol. From a quickk look on the dragonlance nexus, we've got a focus on dominating the other races (not specifically wiping them out per se, but conquer). So he draws some ideas from his homeland (might makes right, humanity dominating demihumans) and discards others (the priests above all, the soldier is the top caste). So we could gather that Vlad may want to re-imagine society in a way that puts his kind at the top in both status and power.

Vlad shows something of a theatrical bent: how the person slides down the stake hes impaled on can be matched to the meal progression. And he can have an orchestra for when he has visitors. Finally, he likes mock combats. However, he can't stand to risk the one thing he cherishes more than anything (his hawks). What I take away from this is that Vlad has a fairly fragile ego and compensates (or tries to) for this by showing off (or even acting out) in the hope he'll get recognition. Anything linked to those who have snubbed or defeated him could be labelled with the hated by association brush (as in spells and spellcasting). I'm also surprised to see the Black Box mentioning a lot of the same domains defeating Vlad as the Gazs also mentioned. So if you could find a common element of hate there (such as civilian leadership?), you might have another thing to generalize a hate for vlad.

[ewancummins]

That all sounds great!


Nice stuff.

I believe HumanBing's fan fic plays up an association in Vlad's mind between Bishop Trandamere (evil Hith cleric ruler of Thenol) and Azalin.

If Vlad is suspicious of magic and also of organized religion, he seems like a natural ally for certain factions in Lamordia. And, indeed, some Falkovnian-Lamordian links are there in 3E canon.

[The Lesser Evil]

That all sounds great!


Nice stuff.

I believe HumanBing's fan fic plays up an association in Vlad's mind between Bishop Trandamere (evil Hith cleric ruler of Thenol) and Azalin.

If Vlad is suspicious of magic and also of organized religion, he seems like a natural ally for certain factions in Lamordia. And, indeed, some Falkovnian-Lamordian links are there in 3E canon.

I think this would also be a good place to bring in the Syndicate of Enlightened Citizens (Gaz II, p. 79). It seems like this bunch of Lamordians would be like peas in a pod with our alt-Drakov.

Building upon Drakov's "breeding out" strategy of dealing with demihumans, what if we brough in some of the weirder guys from the Divinity of Mankind philosophers? Not the clericy types, but the alchemist "Rearrange their basic biological structure to make them human types" talked about in Van Richten's Arsenal (see Agatha Clairmont's entry) and the Zherisia Gazetteer netbook. I'm talking about the ones that try to operate on doppelgangers to try to get them to adopt a fixed human form. Breeding out demihumans definitely sounds like a strategy these dingbats would come up with. Indeed, since Dementlieu has doppelgangers on the encounter charts, we may surmise that D'Honaire might have a few on the pay role as spies and saboteurs against Falkovnia. This in turn may attract the attention of the Divinity of Mankind types.

Although Paridonian, the Divinity of Mankind philosophy is one that might gel with Vlad Drakov pretty well, albeit with some alteration. The perfection through the building of mind/body/soul could work well for a warrior ideology, and monks of some variety or another seem like they could go with Vlad's soldiers. If we take something like the alchemist class from Pathfinder (see below), alchemy could give us a viable alternative for healing and spellcasting that might be more "scientific". High alchemy (from Van Richten's Article) could work well too.

http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/adva ... mist.html#

[thekristhomas]

Vlad shows something of a theatrical bent: how the person slides down the stake hes impaled on can be matched to the meal progression. And he can have an orchestra for when he has visitors. Finally, he likes mock combats. However, he can't stand to risk the one thing he cherishes more than anything (his hawks).

My reading of the more theatrical impalings, has always been that they were tools to illicit certain responses. When Vlad invites you to dine amongst the impalings he wants you to complain, because he wants to kill you. The dining amongst the impaling comes from one incident in the RL of Vlad Tepes, the Voivode of Wallachia was dining with a noble who he suspected of having made some kind of deal with the Turks, Vlad was going to kill him long before they'd sat down to eat, it was just a question of when. For me then it's part of the politics of fear that he has created, for the peasants the standard impalings serve as a warning, but for the higher ups, officers, foreign merchants, diplomats a more personal, unpredictable (for the victim and the audience) approach serves better

[tomokaicho]

I rather like the original 2E version of Vlad Drakov, where he is clearly inspired by Vlad Dracula-- only he's a mercenary who wants to conquer other lands instead of a prince defending his homeland against its would-be conquerors.
You could say Drakov resembles the negative images of Vlad Dracula that the Wallachian ruler's enemies/victims spread around Europe.
Not that the historical figure, even in a charitable reading, was exactly a nice guy!

But sometimes you have to fail a few powers checks to beat the Turks.

EDIT- This post probably belongs in the Falk-fury thread, so I'll move it there.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Apologies for the thread necromancy. The interesting thing is that in the novel 'I, Strahd', Strahd Von Zarovich is exactly this in his struggle against the Turks, uh I mean "Tergs". Perhaps that is why Vlad Drakov had to change.

I found Falkovnia to be absurdly oppressive in all of the canon iterations. Every ruler needs a base of support among the people. From what is presented in canon, Drakov doesn't seem to have any real support at all. I find that very unrealistic indeed. "The military supports him" doesn't count.

[The Lesser Evil]

Apologies for the thread necromancy. The interesting thing is that in the novel 'I, Strahd', Strahd Von Zarovich is exactly this in his struggle against the Turks, uh I mean "Tergs". Perhaps that is why Vlad Drakov had to change.

I found Falkovnia to be absurdly oppressive in all of the canon iterations. Every ruler needs a base of support among the people. From what is presented in canon, Drakov doesn't seem to have any real support at all. I find that very unrealistic indeed. "The military supports him" doesn't count.

To be fair, Vlad has a couple of things going for him beyond mere bullying to keep the population in line. First, he's good at getting people to fear and hate the Darkonian other even more. Secondly, in Gaz II they have several arenas to fill the populace's thirst for blood and distract them from thoughts of rebellion. However, I do somewhat agree that Falkovnia is a bit too out there to be taken as seriously as it could be (Drakov's a bit too demanding in the number of impaling deaths he has just for dinner amusement, for example). In any case, a more toned down atmosphere of oppression is present in the 2e Dungeon Magazine module "Horror's Harvest" (#38).

[Mistmaster]

Here there is my hopinion regarding Falkovnia, Drakov and his curse.viewtopic.php?f=1&t=10254

[brilliantlight]

Vlad conquered Falkovnia, but failed to win the respect and glory he wanted from doing so. And now he can't ever conquer anyplace else.

I guess I was more talking about how the curse worked, basically, the gritty details of how he is foiled.

I've never really liked the ''hidebound warrior' stuff. It's not part of how he was originally presented. In the Black Box, he doesn't care for magic, but he's smart enough to make use of magic items. And he has no limitations arising from a code of honor or any adherence to laws of war.
He doesn't really seem hidebound.

I probably should have mentioned what I meant by "hidebound warrior". By hidebound, I don't mean he's totally against innovation. I meant he was holding onto old world viewpoints, even stereotypes, of what makes a true warrior (that is, elite skill, toughness, and manliness). He goes by a model of trained professional soldiers comprising the armies rather wizardly bookworms or untrained commoners armed with pea-shooters.

Letting battle-mages, common firearms, and women take prominence in the army threatens his image of proper men (read: him) conduct war because any of these elements would (to him) fundamentally change the nature of the battlefield (and more importantly, the soldier) away from something he identified with. What Vlad does he does not out of true honor, but of pride. He wants people to that recognize his ways are right. (Being a brutal thug with somewhat outdated perspectives is what got him laughed at and dismissed in the first place.)

Now because the restrictions he puts on his army is done out of pride rather than honor, he's free to do some mental gymnastics to make special exceptions. The magic items, the human augmentation of the Ministry of Science, these sorts of things augment the warrior's tools or the warrior's already existing skill and grit. Even the weird alchemical war machines are good in his eyes because they are require lots of training and physical skill to use at all. This separates them from common firearms (relatively easy to train for) and magic users (dependence on a primarily mental or external source of power that runs counter to what Drakov prefers.)

That is largely the way I see him. I do give him a "warrior code" though and I make him extremely lawful. It's just that he sees that as king he has a right to do almost anything he wants as long as he fights wars "properly". There is a right way and a wrong way to make war and he will do it the right way come hell or high water!

[tomokaicho]

I'm not so sure I buy that he's anti-innovation, especially not if he contracts Lamordians to build him war machines.
That doesn't seem like the choice of a man who fears or mistrusts new technologies.

I buy very little of Drakov's shortcomings. Supposedly he is so set in his ways that he refuses to adopt new technologies and deploy new tactics. He keep doing this despite continual failure. Is Vlad Drakov simply autistic and not evil? If this is his problem, it would seem so.

His curse is to lose his wars. If he's responsible for losing the wars anyway then it is hardly a curse, is it? It lacks pathos. Turn this on its head. Instead of being an incompetent buffoon, Vlad Drakov is actually a brilliant tactician that does everything right. Despite mastery in directing the field of battle he always loses the wars at the end, and the best that Drakov manage is a stalemate.

[Mistmaster]

My point exactly, and I have gone a little further of that; his curse his to never get a lasting victory; every time he is on the brick of triunph, something happens back in Falkovnia, and he needs to divert its attention on it. Since he can't close his dominion, I leave him actually being able to pass the borders, even forcing them open for his armies; however, every time he leave Falkovnia, something happens back there, and he need to leave his successfull campaign, break an hasty peace who leave him unsatisfied, exc, exc; as it now, he had managed to keep any conquest he made the maximum of four years; this different take on his curse is due to the difference I have put in his background; since he betrayed his best friend and killed the latter family to accentrate all the power in his hands, his curse is his inabilty to play both roles, that of the micromanaging Kaiser, and that of the conquering Fuhrerr;