Help needed Please

[Jamescuk]

Hi my first post, and i don't know if i have the right room.

Any way, i have just got a copy of ravenloft PG and DMG..

Any way i've been reading some old adnd modules that i would love to run for the game, i also want the pcs to start in anougth realm at lv 1, then as of lv 2 they are drawn into ravenloft

now i'm gonna list the stories that i wanna run and ask for help at the end.

The created
Night of the walking dead
Howls in the night
Neither man nor beast
Touch of Death
When Black Roses Bloom
Hour of the knife
The Evil Eye
Circle of Darkness
Adam’s Wrath
A Light in the Belfry
Dark of the Moon
Web of Illusion
Ship of Horrors

Ok i already own the created, i have the stats for carrionettes but i can't seam to find any stats for Maligno, i see he is mentioned as a domain lord but no stats...anyone have any ideas...

Also for lord Soth in When Black Roses Bloom(i'm asming his in it) should i just use his stats from dragonlance book cuz its alread been done for 3.5.

also how the hell can i link them togeth, i know i could have the mist dump them in the lands, but if thats over used it could get teadus...

I can get y hands on most o them, eatther from a friend and/or rpgdrivethru.

erm i cannot think of any thing else to put for now.

Any one can help, i mean some of u sound very expericaned and may have done some work on these old moduals.

thanks

James

[HuManBing]

Hey there, Jamescuk! Welcome to the Fraternity. (And your name reminds me of the "French Connection UK" T-shirts I'd see on the streets of Durham every now and then...)

I'd suggest picking a domain, or a few domains, and then really fleshing those out for a campaign. Give your players a few little adventures here and there to get the feel of the domain, and then when it comes to the ready-made ones, see if you can transplant them to the domains you're already at. Darkon and Nova Vaasa are usually a good pair to start off with, because they're large and they have both urban and rural areas.

For ones like "Night of the Walking Dead", "Howls in the Night", "A Light in the Belfry", and even arguably "Hour of the Knife", you could conceivably set those in any domain that matches the terrain and "feel" of the game.

Some of them are harder because, like "Web of Illusion", they focus on exotic locales AND unique characters.

For example, I am planning to run a lengthy campaign in Darkon (mostly) that features the original six Grand Conjunction adventures. However, I don't want to run them in the same order, because the difficulty is not consistent if I do.

So this raises a few hard questions of geography and storytelling "flow". In order of increasing difficulty level, the adventures are set in these locales:

"Night of the Walking Dead" is set in Souragne, in a swamp, with many undead creatures. The setting is replicatable elsewhere, and there are no "big name" characters in it. I start to think to myself "Maybe I can replace this somewhere else?"

"Touch of Death" is set in the blazing deserts of Har'Akir, and features Anhktepot the Pharoah Darklord himself. This will be hard to replicate, both in terms of cast and setting, so I decide to just leave this one in Har'Akir as originally presented.

"Feast of Goblyns" is set in Kartakass and Gundarak (and the adventure actually has one of the most well-done and in-depth domain details that I've ever seen in a 2nd ed. adventure... so I'm reluctant to reset it geographically). It also features Akriel Lukas in a main role, and Harkon Lukas in a minor role, with Daclaud Heinfroth (Gundar's henchman) in a medium role. These make it hard to relocate this adventure.

This adventure also has a weird after effect in that it creates (and then destroys) a new domain called Daglan.

"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). In 2nd ed., there was no Nocturnal Sea to the east of Darkon. In 3rd ed., we have greater choice. I'm thinking to myself, maybe I can set this there - after all, that's where the designers finally chose to put Meredoth's domain of Graben.

Finally, the two adventures "From the Shadows" and "Roots of Evil" are pretty much the keystone of my campaign, and I don't want to change their setting at all. So that makes things easier.

So looking at the above, it's clear we've got problems. The PCs start off in an Island of Terror, and then make it to another, non-contiguous Island of Terror, and then hit the Core in a few different places, then run onto a ship, and then finally get back to Darkon. (Whereupon they proceed to sunder the Demiplane entirely, unleashing an evil hitherto unknown upon the multiverse. But that's just incidental )

It's enough to make any DM's logic circuits fry.

Below, I'll look at ways of trying to make some sense out of it all.

The Invisible Collar
You will need a way to shepherd your PCs without "railroading" them. The Mists technique, as you've correctly pointed out, is quite heavy handed if done too often or too blatantly, so you want to limit that. Instead, figure out a way to influence their decisions with other tools, usually NPCs.

NPC organizations are great mechanisms for this, if you have the time to flesh them out. PCs are notorious for getting into conflicts and ending up working for or against a given army. Likewise, in urban areas, wizards and rogues sometimes cooperate and found a guild. Priests almost always have temples that nominally at least can order them around.

Armies, churches, noble patron houses, trade organizations, even brute street gangs can all be ways of getting your PCs to go down certain plot paths that you want them to.

This can be as vague as "The temple tells you..." or it can be in depth with detailed character names and thumbnail personalities. I've gotten a lot of mileage out of my NPC organizations as PCs learn to maneuver around the NPCs' egos and personalities.

More to come in a later post...

[HuManBing]

Okay, so I've decided I'm going to have an NPC organization in the background, helping me to direct the plot. (It doesn't have to be a whole organization, either - I've seen DMs do this well with just one NPC henchman in the adventuring group.)

My PCs, I've decided, will not truly be "free agents" wandering around the countryside. I want to have some social control over them, so I decided to make them part of a mysterious trade organization called "L'Agence D'Affaires". The Agency sends them on small missions here and there, usually just safeguarding caravans, but sometimes they do more daring stuff like breaking and entering to sabotage rival organizations.

I'm also going to throw in a cool sub plot about the Agency's leadership undergoing a power struggle, that will have the PCs wondering whom to support and whom to oppose. This will lend itself nicely to mini-adventures where the PCs will be role-playing, rather than swordfighting.

Okay. So now I've got a plot mechanism that can disguise the geographical shifts. Also, the plot mechanism provides some non-fighting adventure plots for tension relief. Why is this important? Well, the theory here is called...

The Well-Fed Boa Constrictor
For a good plot to work, you don't want your PCs to feel like they're embarking on a save-the-world epic every day. This is especially true of Ravenloft. Give your PCs some times when the action comes thick and fast, and some times when they have to stop and ponder things before doing anything.

Thus, your plot will look like a well-fed boa constrictor. Instead of being uniformly thick, it will have lumps of high-intensity swordfighting or drama or action... interspersed with periods of thinner action, perhaps greater role playing instead of fighting, and fact finding instead of sword waving.

That way, if you intersperse a few minor adventures between the major ones, the PCs don't feel like they're being jerked from one locale to the next. Say my PCs go to one pre-made adventure in Kartakass, and then finish that. If I can give them a few little mop-up tasks to do there afterwards, it will feel like they're spending more quality time with this locale they've just arrived at.

When the next pre-made adventure inevitably takes them to the seaside (hundreds of miles distant), it will feel more like a major party decision rather than the latest in a series of unexplained set changes.

So I decide to set it in Darkon, and my first adventure is "Night of the Walking Dead". I'll need to change the terrain to swampy, but Darkon's so vast that it should be reasonable to insert a forgotten village somewhere in the Bogland Fens. The good news is that NotWD doesn't feature any unique characters (Anton Misroi doesn't even get mentioned, to my knowledge) so that's good. Plus the undead theme meshes nicely with Darkon's darklord.

So not much change required there. My PCs will be sent there through an Agency member, and when they solve the adventure's main mysteries, they'll be rewarded by the Agency member. No problem.

Then I'm going to give them a bit of an interlude adventure - maybe something that can be solved in a single session or two. Say, the Agency needs to safeguard a shipment of valuable ore. Or the Agency needs to smuggle a few refugees out of Falkovnia. Even something as mundane as helping the city's stray dog pound find out who's killing all the dogs can be a nice adventure that takes a short time to finish, and gives your players a sense of being grounded in a real setting, rather than a series of interchangeable backdrops that flash by.

(Interestingly, you can also ween future plots out of this. The "Valuable Ore" adventure eventually foreshadows a later adventure with Styrix the Night Hag - because the ore is iridium, which goes to fuel her dark projecft. The "Few Refugees" adventure is my way of introducing the PCs to the Vistani, as they're helping to smuggle Vistani out of Falkovnia. And the "Stray Dog Killer" can be an effective introduction to the Kargatane - just have the killer be a reluctant newly-born vampire who can't bring himself to kill humans.)

[Rotipher of the FoS]

For such a disjointed series of adventures, the "scavenger hunt" is always a decent option. You could give your PCs clues to a means of getting out of Ravenloft, early on, but only if they can re-trace the steps of some other adventuring party or lone explorer, who'd supposedly found a way out in the past. While the fact that the NPC(s) in question got back home is verified (probably by one of the Vistani), just how they managed such a rare feat is a mystery.

To track down the secret, the PCs can follow the same route which the previous escapee took, from place to place within the Core, while making only occasional side-trips via the Mists to outlying regions. Early on, their Mist-journeys could be mostly accidental (e.g. when they first get to Ravenloft, they wouldn't be aware that the Mists are anything more than ordinary fog, so could walk straight into them). Later, you'll need to give them a reason to venture farther afield (e.g. they realize that one vital component of the escape-ritual is a plant only found in Sri Raji, so they have to go get samples of it). Along the way, they can find clues to the previous escapees' experiences and discover things about the Land of Mists and how it works.

Note that some of the modules you named are available as free downloads on the WotC website. Most shouldn't be that hard to adapt to the scavenger-hunt format -- just add some clues to what the previous escapees were doing there, and you're set -- and you can always ignore the whole "Grand Conjunction" metaplot IYC, setting the adventures in whatever time-period is easiest for you.

If/when you get to Ship of Horror, James, feel free to ask me any questions you have about that part of the game-setting, BTW. I'm the one working on Nebligtode for the FoS Survey, and can provide ideas if the Nocturnal Sea Gaz (which will almost certainly be out before you finish all those modules ) doesn't suffice.

[HuManBing]

So now I'm trying to add in "Touch of Death", the next adventure in the Grand Conjunction series. This looks like a much harder task than "NotWD" was, because a) I can't transpose a desert to suddenly appear anywhere in the Core, and b) I definitely can't transpose Anhktepot to anywhere else (and I think he's cool and I don't want to dilute his character by substituting an average mummy in his place).

So what do I do?

Well, look back to the NPC organization. The Agency was the one that sent the PCs to the swamps on a hard mission, and they came back victorious. It's easy for me, as DM, to say "well, you guys did really well, so now we're sending you out to head up a new venture in a distant land". The land, of course, is Har'Akir... but how do you get to an Island of Terror from the Core?

The answer lies in the "Falkovnian refugee" sub-adventure I mentioned above. The PCs will have spent a brief adventure helping a few Vistani escape from Falkovnia, and the Vistani can see their way through the mists. In gratitude, one of them agrees to go with the PCs on a ship into the mists and to guide them to Har'Akir.

NPC help can be very handy in this, especially if you give the PCs a chance to influence their reaction so it doesn't seem like they're just a scripted signpost. If the Vistani don't fit in, place a native Har'Akir merchant as the refugee. Giving the PCs a reason to believe and to trust this NPC - even if it's only because they saved his life, and not the other way around - will help ease the details of transition.

So the PCs play through "ToD" and get back. I'm going to have to change a few small details in the game to accommodate my new facts. For example, in the original module, the PCs meet a Vistani group and the group is almost entirely destroyed in the course of the adventure. They serve as cannon fodder, basically.

However, I don't want to do that. I've already got a Vistani going along with the PCs to guide them. So maybe I can take only those scenes involving the Vistani, and rewrite them with just one Vistani guide. The same sort of urgency can be communicated by having the PCs desperately protect the Vistani in their midst (who's their ONLY way to leave this island once they're done), rather than just killing off cannon fodder.

The adventure finishes, and the PCs return to Darkon and the Agency to get their debriefing. Now my next magic trick, ladies and gentlemen, will be to bring them to Kartakass as part of "Feast of Goblyns"...

* ~ * ~ *

You get the idea.

To cut a long plot synopsis short (and I'm happy to give you the long version if you want) these are the methods I use to make a campaign out of Ravenloft standalones:

* look at ways that you can adapt far-flung locales to nearby domains - whether it just means changing a few names, or changing an entire species of monsters/NPCs

* try to put an invisible collar on your PCs by associating them with an NPC group. It doesn't have to be friendly, either. A hostile NPC group can harass and bar your PCs from going to certain places. (However, I find that giving the players the illusion of choice works much better - and you do need a friendly organization to do that.)

* use the well-fed boa constrictor to give your PCs some "down time" and breathing space between major adventures. That will help build a sense of community and identity for them, and make the gaming experience more real.

* have fun with the arc of your campaign. Throw in clues very early on in the first few adventures of what may happen in the final few adventures. If your PCs notice them, that will make it even more convincing and fun. Look at the main plot or geography jumps in your campaign and come up with ways to bridge them. Sometimes, just putting more game time between jumps is an effective tool.



As a final note, I actually plan to destory the Agency near the end of the campaign plot arc. Why would I do this to an organization that I'd labored so hard to make my PCs feel at home with?

It was actually in direct response to the difficulty of plotting "Ship of Horror".

Perhaps the most effective terror tactic to use against PCs is to make them very comfortable and familiar with an NPC, and then to kill off the NPC. Of course, you have to be very careful using this tactic (no more than maybe twice during the whole campaign, I'd suggest), or it loses its shock value.

Well, what better way to shock the PCs than to kill off an entire organization? I decided the best way to get them on a ship heading east was to sic the Kargat on them, and the best way to do that was to disassemble the Agency and deprive the PCs suddenly of their best allies.

As the Kargat presence closed on the PCs, they would flee eastwards, away from the capital, and eventually get to Nevuchar Springs. The adventure "Ship of Horror" begins when the Kargat manages to find and raid their last refuge... while they're away from it.

(To make the destruction of the Agency convincing, though, I also realized I had to script a few key signs of that early on. The PCs get to see infighting and political maneuverings within the Agency, including one leader who later turns out to be a Kargatane member and who betrays the entire organization to the Kargat.)

Hope this helps and post again or PM me if you have any questions!

[Jamescuk]

I love the ideas that you have given me HuManBing, but my problem is I want to start the pc’s off in a different realm for the first level, then have them go to Odaiare before it becomes a ravenloft domain. I like the act that the whole thing starts of normal, and then changes once the murders take place in the theatre.

But how do I get the pc involved with the organisation. I was thinking of having the mists dump the pc some where after they have defeated Malingo, and that’s why I thought notwd would be good, but I could always have the party meet the organisation before they start doing notwd, and have it as a mini sub story where they are hired by them. Any suggestion how they get hired or mugged off in joining?

I’m going to have to steal some of your ideas HuManBing, the other thing is that I don’t want them to know they are in ravenloft out of game as well as in game, I was thinking I could hand out a index cards with the things that changed like class feats, and if any of them are clerics then describe to them about their god being distant.

What would be a good starting domain u may have said this already but I probably missed it (it was a lot to take up), and any suggestion of starting worlds?

James

P.s my user name is Jamescuk because James is my name; C is for my surname Chambers, and uk well cuz I live in the uk
s.

[Gonzoron of the FoS]

Hey James, welcome!

In my campaign, I ran Feast of Goblyns in post-conjunction Barovia by using Scaena. (The traveling theatre domain from Islands of Terror and Domains of Dread.) The party was invited to a play at the new theatre in town as a reward for a successful adventure. They met Juste on stage afterward, and he trapped them in an illusionary world where they thought they had traveled back in time and to Kartakass. And when they escaped after the adventure, I dropped them in the mists, and they emerged in Dementlieu, 5 years later.

It's just as forced as using the Mists, but it's different enough to be interesting and not as repetitive.

(For details, you can check out my campaign journals:
http://themistway.com End of session 6 through start of Session 9.)

[Joël of the FoS]

Hello James, and welcome!

For bandwidth reason, we do not accept images in signature. Please remove it, thanks In case of doubt, I suggest you reread the forum rules (top of the board)

Joël

[wolfgang_fener]

"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 so I`ll replace him anyway. I`m still thinking about how I`ll rewrite the second part. I certainly want to keep the haunted ship but all I need to keep is the part about the captain dumping dead bodies in the water instead of making proper delivery. What`s really happening on the island is accessory. Actually, the module would still work as a short adventure at sea useful to get from point A to point B even if there`s nothing special on the island. Still my players would certainly prefer to find something interestng on the island so I`ll brew something for them.

Now if someone don`t mind to adjust this module for lower level characters, it can be used to get to wherever you want to run Touch of Death.

[HuManBing]

Hey, that's a good idea! Wonder why I didn't think of that...

In my campaign, the PCs are intentionally sent to that ship as a means of executing them. The Kargat is aware that the cursed ship exists and they have used it as a disposal mechanism for political prisoners before.

It's possible that you could change the captain's backstory so he has some mystic tie to Meredoth and the Island of Graben. Perhaps the captain has an artifact that can counteract some of Meredoth's powers, and once you kill Meredoth then the captain becomes a mortal man again.

The captain would then begin to age very rapidly, facing the prospect of death in a few weeks. However, he is thankful to the PCs for releasing him from his undeath, and he returns them to Darkon's east shore as a reward for their services. Once they disembark, the captain allows himself to die peacefully and the ship decays and collapses into the harbor.