Café de Nuit

"Ship of Horror" is set in any body of ocean or sea water with a ship, but requires islands and Meredoth, a unique darklord (albeit rather bland).

I`ll have to run this module soon and my PCs are still too weak to strugle with such an high level necromancer. Anyway as you said, he is quite bland ...

I also found out a few years ago the loneliness effect still works well with 2 characters.

Unfortunately our group have some availlability problems. Even if we play long sessions (8-10 hours long), we play only once every two weeks , which is the bare minimum if you don't want to lose track of the ...

One of the most used horror trick in literature and movies is loneliness. It is always easyer to make a lone character affraid than a whole group of PCs.

Unfortunately, most campaign are played by a group of PCs so those situations are difficult to manage simply because you can't always take ...

I can't believe nobody said Dementlieu yet !

Thanks Scipion, I'll take a look.


Ail, Horror needs contrast. Without light, there's no shadows. You need just enough light to spread the shadows. I agree it is not possible nor desirable to keep the players continually stressed.

In any case, the goal of a good DM should never be to continually ...

You planted an interesting seed there...

My idea of an Egyptian exposition in Port-A-Lucine could be even more interesting if the "crazy" egyptologist actually left Port-A-Lucine over 50 years in the future and was cursed to return home at a previous date.

My Pcs could be interested in returning ...

About the timeline, I gradually added a thousand years to it, otherwise Dementlieu would be only about 40 years old, which means a large part of the population would still remember the old days before RL ! Current year is 1747 (when Mallocchio, son of Gabrielle Aderre, is revealed to be the next ...

About ressources, I'l actually place the gold mine deep under Port-A-Lucine. Knowing that some poor folks have to go down the very deep shafts leading under the city to get the gold while the nobles are having fun drinking fine wine and listening to the Opera may provide an interesting contrast.

I ...

I guess we all have our own places we like to focus. I'm sure I spend more time than most people think necessary doing stuff like: reconciling my campaign timeline with the canon one, figuring out where Dr. Van Richten was at a particular date and who was traveling with him, searching for and ...

My second sort of 'beef' with Ravenloft (and it isn't just RL, Forgotten Realms is TERRIBLE for this), is that the campaign setting in certain areas is just to concerned about what happened in the novels. .

FR is purely a commercial product of TSR. Absolutely no logical planing went into it ...

Another complain : The Governor.

Did these guys cared to check what a governor is ? I guess not.

I mean what kind of political system is this ?

Here's the Wikipedia defenition : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governor

Usually a governor is in charge of a colonie and is placed under an higher ...

Good idea for the Lamordian iron.

There`s probably lots of Iron in Falkovnia too but they certainly keep it for themselves to build more weapons and armors.

Lamordia may be one of the rare places where the control of firearms and other technological trades is low because the Darklord is not ...

, politics, war, espionage,

I understand what you mean but those informations are required to build a good campaign around politic, war and espionage ...

War requires ressources and if your player can change something to the outcome of a war, it may be by striking supply lines or striking a deal ...

So for future reference, I`ll double the size, which according to the above numbers, croplands from Dementlieu can feed 120,000 people. Problem is, lots of cropland area is used to grow vine and various herbs to make absinthe so they can actually just feed 75,000 people anyway.

I`ll set the ...

I found numbers for the year 1700 ...

Population (billions) 0.5
Cropland (area) 270 Mha

So we could say that an hectare (100Mx100M) feeds 2 peoples.
In a medieval setting that would certainly be much less than that, maybe 1 for 1 would be a generous ratio.

That means, according to the size ...