Why DMs don't like Ravenloft or Cannon powder and fine wine

[wolfgang_fener]

We've been talking alot about why some players don't like Ravenloft but we can also ask the question why DMs may not like Ravenloft too...

Personally, I find it very difficult to make it believable.

The main purpose of my players will be to find and trade large quantity of food to feed their piece of homeland which just got traped as a new island in the sea of Sorrow. For that reason I need to figure out lots of details about the economics of the Core (mainly around Dementlieu and its surounding domains).

It have been said that the land of Dementlieu is just good to grow potatoes... But I don't picture the fine sophisticated gentlemen of Port-A-Lucine just eating mashed potatoes... Maybe the poor does but the higher class certainly drink fine wines and eat delicacies. Where does it come from ? What do they trade for it ? Who feeds the citizen of Port-A-Lucine if there's not plenty of rich farmland in the area ?

Then I'm not even talking about cannon powder... Where does it come from ? It have been said (in one of the Net book) that Dementlieu easily pushed back the armies of Drakov when he did try to invade Dementlieu because of their tremendous fire power. For sure there must be some kind of mines in Dementlieu to provide the metal to cast those cannon and cannon balls and to make all this powder... absolutely no information have been given about those important strategic details.

Once again, we should see lots of firearms in every domains who trades with Dementlieu and every renaissance level domains...unless the borders are thightly garded and a strong embargo is enforced (and then again, there must be some very lucrative blackmarket around the firearms trade)... No information given about that.

Then there's the size... The Core is tiny, A fast horseman with a good beast can travel across Dementlieu in a single day ! If Port-A-Lucine is large enough to support a big Opera house, it means there must be at least 10000 souls in the city (and that's a bare minimum). Most are certainly too poor to have a seat at the Opera so that leaves even less people to support this venue...

If there's many intrigues in the court, there must be many noble families... most of those families must have some kind of manor and land... But Dementlieu is just about 30x60 miles large ! It doesn't make any sense. They absolutely need a large source of revenue (maybe a gold mine or something or maybe they actually sell lots of cannon powder to some allies) to buy all their fine products from other domains.

I could go on and on but my point is it takes a LOT of work from the DM to make this world believable. I know that if I don't do all this work, my players will get bored soon and will only want to go back to Forgotten Realms or any other larger more believable world (ok, I know, RL is not much better for the political/economic part of its story but at least it is easyer for the DM to figure out). For a weekend in hell you don't need those details but for a long term campaign, you do.


Now how did you guys managed to find your way around those problems ?

[Nathan of the FoS]

By making the Core a lot bigger, mostly. (I did a lot of other things, too, but for your purposes that's the important part.)

IMC the Core is roughly the size of western and central Europe--say, 800 miles top to bottom, 600 miles across--and the biggest cities (of which there aren't that many--Martira Bay, Port-a-Lucine, Silbervas, Egertus) run to 80,000-100,000 people, with Lekar at 200,000. (Il Aluk was also ~200,000--still is, in a manner of speaking.)

There are arguments for a "small Core", but I'll let some else make them, 'cause I don't like the idea.

[Pamela]

I think the only way you can get away with a small Core is if your campaign's focused on the medieval or more primitive domains. If you're basing your campaign in the more modern ones (like I do), then, as Nathan suggested, you have to make the Land bigger both in space and population.

[wolfgang_fener]

I'm tempted to double the dimentions. That would still be relatively small but it would be possible to support more population.

Lets not forget that in the middle-age, a city of 100,000 people was extremely large. That was about the population of Paris in the twelfth century . The estimates for the population for Constantinople in the twelfth century vary from approximately 100,000 to 500,000 and it was probably the biggest city in the world back then.

It would be nice to get some numbers about the agricultural efficiency (how many people can be feed for a year with an acre of good land using agricultural techniques of the renaissance ). It would give us a good idea about the size requirement of the Core to support its population.

[Nathan of the FoS]

I'm tempted to double the dimentions. That would still be relatively small but it would be possible to support more population.

Sure, that works.

Lets not forget that in the middle-age, a city of 100,000 people was extremely large. That was about the population of Paris in the twelfth century . The estimates for the population for Constantinople in the twelfth century vary from approximately 100,000 to 500,000 and it was probably the biggest city in the world back then.

True, but much of Ravenloft is much more advanced technologically, and (at least potentially) much more urban. I like to put the advanced core at roughly equivalent to 1700 AD, when London and Paris were both cities of close to 600,000 people.

[wolfgang_fener]

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 of Dementlieu as seen on gryphonhill.com, that it could feed about 120,000 people if each city, towns and villages are taking care of 10,000 Ha (10Kmx10Km area of cropland). We can assume there's at least a village where the soil is good and other places remains inhabitted because the land is poor. Of course those numbers would work IF the soil was good ... But they say it is not so they can mostly grow potatoes (and vine) in most area. That means we can probably cut the agricultural efficiency in half and say it can feed 60,000 people. We can still say the population is much larger, all we need is another source of wealth and say they buy food from other domains like Mordent and Richemulot.

If they buy 50% of their food from outside, it means for my players it will be very difficult for them to fulfill their trade mission in Dementlieu ... But of course they don't know about it and none have the agricultural proficiency to evaluate that... They will probably be taken into some sheme from various nobles who will see this as an opportunity to make easy money on the back of those poor people from Daggerdale. Or maybe someone won't care if the poors of Dementlieu die from famine if they can sell the crops for twice the price to those Daggerdale medieval "barbarians". Anyway, we will see how my players will manage that. Who knows, maybe they will be wise and will hire a few farmers for the trip as consellors (I doubt!) . Maybe they will be able to negotiate a ''good deal'' if they manage to get a hearing with d'Honaire ... Personally I hope this will turn into some kind of Mississipi sheme a la John Law where the new trend in Port-A-Lucine will be to go trade shares of the ''Ashaba river company'' in the rue Quincampoix

(if you don`t know what I`m refering to, read the Mississipi sheme there : http://www.econlib.org/library/mackay/m ... tents.html )


I`ll probably place a gold mine in the south near the city of Chateaunoir . They will also draw whatever is needed to make powder from this mine.

[Gonzoron of the FoS]

Honestly, it depends on what kind of campaign you're running. In mine, these issues simply never come up. It takes as long as it takes to get where you're going (i.e., as long as the DM requires), and if I need a mine or a farm or a whole extra town in Dementlieu, or any other domain, I put one there. I consider my task to be similar to the rendering routine in a videogame. If I never look behind that corner, I never have to decide what's there. And my PC's are too involved in their own tasks and quests to stop and ask where the metal for the cannons came from.

IMHO, that's pretty much what the Dark Powers themselves do (see also that thread about the number of wolves in Kartakass). When no one's looking, stuff just appears as needed. I appreciate the desire to make things make sense, and I do stress out over what this NPC or that is doing while off screen, but I have no problem blaming the Mists for just about anything when it makes for a good story.

Obviously if your campaign involves large scale economics, you're going to have to look more carefully at this stuff, but my campaign has involved murder mysteries, haunted houses, quests for artifacts, politics, war, espionage, family dynamics, mad science, and monster hunts without worrying much at all about agriculture other than dropping references to Barovian brandy, Nova Vaasan horses, etc.

[wolfgang_fener]

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 population of Port-A-Lucine to 100k. 50k hard working souls lives in the other towns, villages and in between. That places a serious food deficit on Dementlieu.

They compensate by exporting mainly gold and wine. Some absinthe is also shipped outside the domain but most is counsumed locally. I know that real historic absinthe was not really driving people mad but in a fantasy gotic horror world, it does... The governor (actually d'Honaire) is keeping a thight control on export of firearms and powder as he prefer to keep this huge strategical adventage.

Lots of food is imported from Richemulot and other close by domains.

[wolfgang_fener]

, 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 with a neighboring nation to supply ressources. Of course this is only useful for large scale campaign. My players may even never get to that point or maybe they won`t bite the hook but I like to show them that I`m ready for anything. Sometimes even if they don`t develop their character in that direction, they will still appreciate to feel they could actually get involved in large scale politic influencing the world around them.

Between games I feed them with emails about historical references like that so when they come to the game, they feel the world is ''for real'' and not just like in a cartoon or an old video game.

Yes, it takes me more time of preparation than the time it takes in actual play .

[midnightcat]

where does the iron come from?? Trade with Lamordia. That domain has a vast moutain range. The border is not closed often.

[kottakinge]

hey wait a minute!
I love fine wine

[wolfgang_fener]

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 really involved in politics and this domain doesn`t pose a threat to Dementlieu and its rulling elite (except indirectly for the Living Brain if we concider its Lamordian origin).

[Undead Cabbage]

To be blunt, I do not see how some of these issues have any effect on game play.

Personally, I find it very difficult to make it believable.

Believable, you mean like campaign settings with creatures that are born on the edge of battlefield to become combat inclined constructs, or with a giant weave of magic that touches each and everything in reality?

Granted, Ravenloft is a Gothic Horror setting, so it has to make more logical sense than other campaign settings. I just don't see how a Role Playing Game always has to make sense in every regard. However a great amount of detail can help flesh out a campaign, there comes a point when the logistics become obtuse.

The main purpose of my players will be to find and trade large quantity of food to feed their piece of homeland which just got traped as a new island in the sea of Sorrow. For that reason I need to figure out lots of details about the economics of the Core (mainly around Dementlieu and its surounding domains).

It have been said that the land of Dementlieu is just good to grow potatoes... But I don't picture the fine sophisticated gentlemen of Port-A-Lucine just eating mashed potatoes... Maybe the poor does but the higher class certainly drink fine wines and eat delicacies. Where does it come from ? What do they trade for it ? Who feeds the citizen of Port-A-Lucine if there's not plenty of rich farmland in the area ?

Canonically, Falkovnia is the Breadbasket of the Dread Realms. Where Dementlieu will home grow some of its food, it is reliant on trade with Falkovnia in order to support its population (otherwise the nation would rather not deal with the Eastern Tyrant entirely). So chances are your players would be forced to do Trade that way (if you want to keep things 100%, which I'll be the first to say is not always the answer).

Then I'm not even talking about cannon powder... Where does it come from ? It have been said (in one of the Net book) that Dementlieu easily pushed back the armies of Drakov when he did try to invade Dementlieu because of their tremendous fire power. For sure there must be some kind of mines in Dementlieu to provide the metal to cast those cannon and cannon balls and to make all this powder... absolutely no information have been given about those important strategic details.

Anything that is derived from some type of ore is very likely imported from Lamordia, which is very mountainous and has a large population of crafters. As far as Falkovnia being defeated by Dementlieu, I seem to recall them actually pushing past Chateau Faux's Fire arms. Instead, what defeated them was the fact that some of the Falkovnian soldiers were suddenly turning on their own, as due to some form of charm effect (makes sense, considering Dementlieu's Darklord and all).

Then there's the size... The Core is tiny, A fast horseman with a good beast can travel across Dementlieu in a single day ! If Port-A-Lucine is large enough to support a big Opera house, it means there must be at least 10000 souls in the city (and that's a bare minimum). Most are certainly too poor to have a seat at the Opera so that leaves even less people to support this venue...

Is there really enough demand for magic items in Faerun to support Thay's venue?

I could go on and on but my point is it takes a LOT of work from the DM to make this world believable. I know that if I don't do all this work, my players will get bored soon and will only want to go back to Forgotten Realms or any other larger more believable world (ok, I know, RL is not much better for the political/economic part of its story but at least it is easyer for the DM to figure out). For a weekend in hell you don't need those details but for a long term campaign, you do.

Strange, because I've never found these little things to be that much of a big deal. Mind you, it just might be that I run a different kind of campaign. But nevertheless most campaigns do not rely on this much detail about economics, so with a limited number of pages the canon books instead cover a moderate amount of material on a wide range of topics. This also leaves room for expansion and creativity: the bread and butter of any good DM.

I think the only way you can get away with a small Core is if your campaign's focused on the medieval or more primitive domains. If you're basing your campaign in the more modern ones (like I do), then, as Nathan suggested, you have to make the Land bigger both in space and population.

Agreed. My currently running Paridon-Dementlieu-Richumelot campaign relies on having a wide expanse of people and area to cover, so I up the sizes of these realms. However on the other hand when I ran a game in Mordent (although not really a medieval realm) for a year, I even slightly lowered the population to give a much more insular feeling. If I were to dabble into realms like Barovia or Tepest, I'd probably do the same.

True, but much of Ravenloft is much more advanced technologically, and (at least potentially) much more urban. I like to put the advanced core at roughly equivalent to 1700 AD, when London and Paris were both cities of close to 600,000 people.

I'm currently running Ravenloft at the same Technology level as a Masque of the Red Death campaign, and so far the results are remarkable. In previous campaigns my players and I found that the flavor was castrated by the typical LOTR tech level Dungeons and Dragons system, spoiling any work I had done to maintain the atmosphere. Once I lowered magic, heightened technology, and made the classes more like those found in MotRD, we started to have some really flavored Ravenloft campaigns.

This brings me to my position on why DMs might not like Ravenloft. Now, I can't speak for DMs on a whole since no two DMs run a campaign the same way, but for me its that I find that Ravenloft canonically beats around the bush when it comes to Gothic Horror. I would never change the canon material to something less fantastic, since I know that there are plenty of DMs out there that like the Fantasy-Gothic Horror blend. But for me, it's that Ravenloft doesn't go balls-in when it comes to atmosphere, hosting a sherlock holmes npc in order to support detective work, and yet for some reason making him an elf . But then again, this is just me.

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. Not to say anything about the novels themselves: I bet their great reads. But the purpose of a campaign setting is not so the players can go "oh, I remember that from whats-his-names book". It's for a certain style of game play.

woo, long post. Ok, I'm done rambling .

[Gonzoron of the FoS]

, politics, war, espionage,

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

Not necessarily. Let me be clear that I'm not telling you not to delve into these matters, just proposing my own answer to the question you asked at the end of the first post in the thread. You can focus on the brutality and futility of war, or the local consequences of politics, or particular acts of espionage without calculating how many people can be supported per hectare of land.

I'm definitely interested in what comes from where, and I agree it makes things more real feeling. But I just leave off all the number crunching, and assume it all works.

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 with a neighboring nation to supply ressources.

Certainly. And if I had that sort of adventure in mind, then I'd figure out one specific supply to focus on and find a place it could come from. Again, I'm not saying it's not interesting to think about Ravenloft economics, or that it can't lead to good adventures. Just that it doesn't keep me up nights. Like I said, it can be worked out on demand, for my purposes.

Yes, it takes me more time of preparation than the time it takes in actual play .

As it should! (In my admittedly obsessed opinion.)

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 photoshopping NPC pictures to look as I picture them, finding the perfect piece of background music for a location or event, researching all the known people and locations in a particular town, etc.

[wolfgang_fener]

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 ranking lord.

For exemple, if the current governor dies, who will take his place ? Will it be his heir or will the council vote for the next one or will all the noble will vote for the next governor? Can any citizen become a governor or is it limited to a pre-determined elite of noble family ? Can a wealthy merchant buy a title of nobility ?

Maybe Dementlieu used to be part of a large empire, hence the title of governor for who's in charge. Now how the people of Dementlieu explain where this title come from ? Are they aware of their apparition into Ravenloft ? (I don't like the extremely fake idea of saying the Darkpowers created them out of thin air with artificial false memories).

If I want to exploit the element of intrigues within the various nobles and factions in this domain, I need to define what is the political system.

Anybody have more info or ideas from their own game to share about the political system of Dementlieu ?