Ravenloft Cosmology

[ScS of the Fraternity]

That sounds a little too graphic for something as "mundane" as walking into the misty border.
Water clouds up fairly easily, once cloudy is even more obscuring than mist. i'd say when you crosss into the misty border underwater, you pass through a cloud of swirrling murk.

I don't see any problem with the land and water in the misty border being unidentified. After all, the mists are like a Zero Point location - from there you can get to anywhere. Fir all we know, the misty border may be merely be a quarter mile off the border of each border domain - and travelers walk one border circuit onto the next and so on for however they wander.
Don't forget, if domain lords can turn people 360 degrees around, without them knowing it, then surely the misty border can manipulate space as well.

[Spiteful Crow]

Having trouble with Darklords for Pyre and Blood.

For Blood, I'm thinking of having someone (or something) that really REALLY loves water, but ends up committing a horrific crime involving water, and ending up cursed to have all water around him turn to blood.

As for Pyre, I'm really trying to avoid having a random pyromaniac, since I prefer darklords who treaded a gray line instead of always being flatout jerks.

[ScS of the Fraternity]

For blood, you could stick with the water route and go with a pirate.
The lord may be a sadistic pirate, who drowned his victims (in real life, walking the plank was rarely used by pirates).
Having lived a life of horrible violence, the Lord is doomed to forever drown in a sea of spilt blood.

Of course, when I think of a sea of blood, for some reason I think of a the ghost of someone who committed suicide by slashing her wrists.

As for pyre, I would think that wrath and violence is more important than pyromania per se. Perhaps the Lord was a barbaric raider - a warlord that spread violence across his home world like a wildfire across the sun-scortched plains.
Once he wallowed in his rage - now he burns in the collective rage of all of Ravenloft.

[Lord Cyclohexane]

Of course, when I think of a sea of blood, for some reason I think of a the ghost of someone who committed suicide by slashing her wrists.

Or how about the leader of an apocalyptic suicide cult, where all of the other members committed suicide at the appointed time, only for the leader to have a crisis of faith...

[Spiteful Crow]

Or an emo goth teenager who likes to cut herself!

[ScS of the Fraternity]

As horrifying as emo chicks are, I think I'll say that Cyclohexane's idea is pretty kwel.

[Rotipher of the FoS]

I like Lord Cyclo's idea too. In fact, one interesting approach might be to choose darklords whose histories and abilities correspond to the suits of the Tarokka deck: Blood/Water would have a clerical darklord as per the suit of Glyphs, Pyre/Fire would have an arcane spellcaster a la the suit of Stars, etc.

Granted, that would mean you'd need to revise Alisson's backstory so it better reflects the Earth-suit of Coins. Perhaps she'd charged a fortune for her healing services, and alienated her beloved when she refused to aid the destitute for free? Her betrothed, a less-gfted fellow healer, left to try to treat the needy on his own, contracted the same deadly illness for his trouble, and perished. She blamed the villagers whose whining pleas lured him from her side, and began using them as guinea-pigs to try to bring him back to life as per SC's original backstory. Her present endless search for her love's grave thus becomes a taunting jape, mocking how she'd stubbornly failed to go after him when she'd yet had a chance to make amends. The fact that she could have helped him treat his penniless patients with greater caution and better supplies, and thus could have reduced his exposure to the disease, is something Alisson can be in denial about: a near-mandatory character trait, for darklords.

[Spiteful Crow]

Hey... I like it!

Alisson screams in pain as the very fabric of time and space twists and distorts around her, altering her very being!

"Join the club," grumbles Malken...

[Fuzzball]

I like Lord Cyclohexane's idea. Very nice.

DISCLAIMER: I still don’t know much about RL so I don't know if any of this would work.

You don’t have to have a pyromaniac to have someone who kills with fire. I’d lean toward burning at the stake. Start in a place that doesn’t like spellcasters (or something else...spellcasters are just fun targets).

Take a LN who hunts magic users and kills them by burning them at the stake. While he’s away working the people discover that his son is secretly studying magic. They kill the son and the hunter slowly turns LE through taking revenge on the people who killed his loved one.

Could start with a witch-hunter in a small town (like Salem). Because of the persecution, the witches decide to get revenge by framing his daughter as a witch. Crazed, he started burning everyone at the stake, or just burned down the town.

The DL could have started as a LE (pick a level in government) who used fear to rule/keep order. He burned “magic users” (whomever else he felt like killing) at the stake. The people revolted and burned him at the stake. Of course then he might rise as an Effigy (MM II p89), which is pretty powerful (HD 27, CR 17).


So, those have fire...mmmm fire...anger...lot's of killing. Did I forget anything?

[ScS of the Fraternity]

Marshmallows on sticks?

[DeepShadow of FoS]

While I don't want to quash anyone's creativity, I'm much more in favor of the idea that dread elementals are corrupted by the plane rather than drawn from named planes.

IF I were to go this other route, however, I wouldn't make these domains with DL's, but the realms of four new bogeymen, courtesy of DT&DL. Elemental forces are easy inspiration for tall tales, and this way the original malefactors don't have to have done much at all (or even much in the way of "elemental" killing), as long as the legend has grown large enough.

Another option is to make these more like the creatures from VRGttMists. Many iconic DL's such as the Headless Horseman and the Phantom Lover, work better in this fashion, IMO.

[Rotipher of the FoS]

FWIW, I too rather prefer the idea that dread elementals are corrupted by the plane at the moment of their conjuration, rather than coming from either a set of "dread elemental planes" or some other domain within the Land of Mists. But the idea of a dread-element-themed Cluster is cool, even if it's got nothing to do with where dread elementals come from.


Instead of a sincere (if fanatical) witch-hunter, I'd be more interested if the Pyre darklord was a sorcerer himself, who'd grown up in an arcanophobic society and thus kept his powers secret in horrified shame. In a misguided attempt to purge himself of these "unholy" powers -- powers which, due to his own self-loathing, he's never learned to control entirely -- he became a fire-and-brimstone lay preacher (not a cleric) and led the religious crusade to exterminate "witchcraft" to new heights of extremism and brutality, in hopes the gods would strip him of his magic in recompense.

Though he reviled his sorcerous talent, when he could manage to direct it, he'd used arcane mind-control and illusions to drive witch-hunting mobs into homicidal frenzies and to frame innocents for his own spells (thus, adding hypocrisy to his growing list of offenses). Anyone who suspected the truth about his abilities wound up accused and burned at the stake as well ... even, in the end, his own loving daughter, who'd accidentally seen him invoke a spell effect. As the blaze stole her life and silenced her truthful pleas that she'd never have exposed his shame, the Mists snapped him up.

Now as a darklord, his socerous powers have become stronger than ever, yet they're even more out-of-control. Except when he's fighting to defend himself or attacking and tormenting other arcane spellcasters, his burgeoning magic lashes out in the form of gouts of flame, that incinerate anything he tries to enjoy: food, possessions, human company. Clothes burn off his skin, leaving him naked and ashamed of it; water boils away at his lips' touch, leaving him thirsty and despairing. He's immune to fire damage, but not to suffering as an indirect result of it destroying his food and drink.

He can suppress this effect if he releases one of the pyre-bound corpses from the smouldering bonfires which dot the landscape of his domain; however, the burnt corpses -- which mimic those of his myriad victims -- animate and pursue him, not attacking, but pleading in the voice of his daughter, which can only be silenced if he burns these bodies at the stake yet again. The animated corpses don't actually resist his doing this ... but he fears that one day, he'll accidentally pick his daughter's body to release (the corpses are indistinguishable from charring, and each pyre periodically burns out and rekindles itself in a new location) and that she's the one who'll drag him into the flames with her. Flames, which he'd be just as vulnerable to as any other man.

It's a reversal of Alisson's search for her love's grave, that the Pyre-lord is trying to avoid finding his daughter's body. Unfortunately, he can't bear to keep the same burned corpse running loose, hounding him, for more than a few days at a stretch ... and even as a darklord, he has to eat and drink.

Dumb idea, maybe, but what the hey.

[Spiteful Crow]

Actually, I never said the elemental planes should be the source of dread elementals. IMO, if you killed the darklords and the "planes" disappeared, dread elementals would still be summonable, since they're a direct product of Ravenloft itself. They have the "Mists" descriptor for a reason, after all.

[Lord Cyclohexane]

As horrifying as emo chicks are, I think I'll say that Cyclohexane's idea is pretty kwel.

Sweet, my first nod from a Fraternity member!

[Fuzzball]

Dumb idea, maybe, but what the hey.

No...I like it. As long as he still beats mercilessly on spellcasters, I'm happy!