Café de Nuit

I suppose another way to allow for Lyssa's power boost would be that the magic ritual she performed unleashed not temporal energies but good ol' Negative Energy, strengthening her ties to the plane and making her that much more powerful-- which, IIRC, was part of Van Richten's theories about why the powers of vampires increase with age.

Interesting Brandi. So what happened to the Vampires in Il Aluk at the Requiem? Some high ranking Kargat members were there.

alhoon wrote:Interesting Brandi. So what happened to the Vampires in Il Aluk at the Requiem? Some high ranking Kargat members were there.

GM's perogative (as with changing Lyssa-- remember, I haven't actually run any RL sessions!). Notably, Gaz II mentions a big wave of *positive* energy blowing out through Il Aluk before the following wave of negative energy, so there's a few interesting possibilities, including Kargat who found themselves now inhabiting their shadows (burned onto nearby walls during the surge), or the undead who survived that first surge enhanced-- resulting in a few VERY powerful 'elite members' of the city.

I also vastly increased the size of the Core. For example, rather than have the village of Barovia be a few hours ride from Vallaki, it's now several days. About a week and a half on foot. The population has not changed to at all - my party finds the destered wilds to be a lot more intimidating than tightly-packed villages. More room to freeze to death or starve, or be eaten

Rotipher wrote:Passable, but still pretty lame. IMC, Lyssa aged because she took an extended "vacation" in the Shadow Rift ... where she still has some sith contacts her dear old uncle doesn't know about.

Now that is a much better solution! Great thinking.

My changes would be:

1 - Transform in cannon: blessed knight dread possibilitie = Lord soth as knight of the rose (as part of Inzas Curse), with his stats;

2 - Bluetspur as a underground domain of Keening. (like Timor and Paridon);

3 - Shadowlands added to the core.

In my campaign, I'm trying to re-jig the Grand Conjunction hexad of adventures so they're more coherent - Azalin has a hand in bringing all of them to pass, not just the fifth and sixth adventures. He sends Kargatane to try to get characters to do his bidding, which mostly consists of spiriting minor items out of the adventures along with whatever the original main haul was (scraps of paper that used to be a Scroll of Return, for example, or the pendant that Hazlik allowed Julio the Thief to steal). By the third or fourth adventure, the PCs are dimly aware of his plot and they are now dealing with disguised Kargat. The culmination of this comes with the acquisition of the Holy Symbol of Ravenkind.

When the Grand Conjunction happens, it lasts for much longer. In some worlds, it's a passing week or so of unusually high monstrous activity, but in others, entire years go by with freed Darklords roaming the lands. One special event is that Azalin's years of seemingly fruitless magical research suddenly come back to him when Ravenloft frees him. He becomes a level 26 lich, making his return to Ravenloft all the more infuriating when the PCs unravel his plans.

One Darklord who doesn't really have much of a curse is Vlad Drakov. I don't get any feeling of remorse or punishment for him. He loves to wage war, and he does so every so often and although he fails each time, he never learns from it. Compare this to Azalin, who rails against his curse and comes up with extremely creative (though doomed) ideas to circumvent it.

In my campaign, Drakov's youth and vigor are sustained by the Dark Powers, who keep him in fighting condition as long as he sheds blood for them. Every so often, he orders bloody and gruesome executions, but after a few years go by, the toll of his age becomes clearer and clearer. He must wage war, with blood spillt directly on the earth of Ravenloft's soil, to regain his youth, and the toll must be in thousands or tens of thousands to regain his lost years. This would explain his own lack of regard for his subjects' wellbeing, and it would illustrate a genuine need to prey upon his nation's sons like this, instead of the "can't see failure when it's staring him in the face" template for the standard Drakov.

This also opens up an interesting possibility: Drakov may never be defeated in combat, but what happens when a rival darklord finds a way to fight a bloodless war? Perhaps if Azalin's Kargat were able to take on Drakov's army by turning them into vampires and monstrous creatures, instead of leaving their corpses on the field, Drakov would never get the revigoration he needs so badly.

After a few of these bloodless wars, Drakov would finally pass the point of no return - being too old to lead his armies, he can never reverse the aging process himself, relying instead on his sons to lead the armies. If these sons could be assassinated or eliminated without full-scale war, Drakov himself would surely expire after a few short decades of despotic but militarily impotent rule.

I always liked Drakov's curse. This great military leader (albeit evil) desires empire and expansion (Hitler what?) yet he is bottled up in a small(ish) domain. All of his military attempts at expansion are doomed to fail. The beast is stuck in a cage to small for it. Every defeat is like a sharp stick being plunged into his flesh. Can you imagine the unbridled rage Drakov feels, not to mention the undertones of inadequecy. Of course, I like your curse as well, both work IMO.

Brandi wrote:

cure wrote:Lyssa von Zarovich acquiring power by having a ghost age her is just wrong.

Yeah-- they did a passable workaround in Gaz1, though.

The VRG's always stated (repeatedly) that there is no such thing as a standard monster in Ravenloft, so having a ghost that can age a vampire or a vampire that could be aged by a ghost's aging attack is feasable.

One change I have made since the release of Domains of Dread, I have always used a scale of roughly 1 inch = 80 miles. I also prefer a larger Core.

Me, I'd change... everything

I'd remove the misty border, for one, and make all of the domains be part of a coherent, "realistic" world, a la Toril or Oerth. Make it bigger. Have plenty of unexplored spots, and leave the margins of the map open for exploration. Place remote domains behind nigh-impassible mountains, at the bottom of hard-to-reach valleys, as islands out at sea, or simply so far away from the center of things that getting there proves to be a hell of a big trek. Avoid clearly drawn domain borders, and make it possible for inventive DMs to slip in a small domain of their own making between two bigger ones without having to contradict canon maps.

Get rid of Darkon's memory-tampering effect, and of Azalin's new memory powers.

Place a second continent beyond one of the Seas, to get flows of big merchant caravels, military ships and pirates to sail left and right.

Design at least one major realm for each of the D&D core races, especially dwarves.

Design a Ravenloft cosmology, like FR and Eberron have, and make the Shadow Rift to be a portal into the Fey Dimension, rather than a domain in itself.

Clean erase the whole "Grim Harvest" incident.

That doesn't sound very, what's the word, Ravenlofty. Not to knock you but that kinda kills it.

Augustus wrote:That doesn't sound very, what's the word, Ravenlofty. Not to knock you but that kinda kills it.

Just ignore Iggy.

He hasn't taken his medication

Sorry, Iggy, couldn't resist with all the Kargatane nostalgia.

HuManBing wrote:In my campaign, I'm trying to re-jig the Grand Conjunction hexad of adventures so they're more coherent - Azalin has a hand in bringing all of them to pass, not just the fifth and sixth adventures.

I completely agree with this one. When I last ran FoG, I inserted a Kargat and Kargatane agent searching for the crown, intending to force the sign to come to pass.

Augustus wrote:I always liked Drakov's curse. This great military leader (albeit evil) desires empire and expansion (Hitler what?) yet he is bottled up in a small(ish) domain. All of his military attempts at expansion are doomed to fail. The beast is stuck in a cage to small for it. Every defeat is like a sharp stick being plunged into his flesh. Can you imagine the unbridled rage Drakov feels, not to mention the undertones of inadequecy. Of course, I like your curse as well, both work IMO.

I think the problem is, it doesn't seem so much like a curse because Drakov doesn't understand that he's doomed to failure. If I understood HuManBing correctly, that was the reason he created a slightly different curse (which I like, by the way).

Is there any information on CL 10 or CL 11 online? If not, may I ask what book you got it from- or did you invent these classifications? I also agree about Lamordia being much higher than CL 9.