Café de Nuit

Rotipher of the FoS wrote:I think the problem people have with Inza isn't so much that a sociopathic villain isn't believable -- certainly, such people exist IRL and are intensely scary -- but that such a villain doesn't really fit as a darklord. Even if the DPs have indeed caused her to feel guilt, in the wake of her rise to darklordship, the fact that she didn't originally possess such feelings flies in the face of the idea that darklords should be NPCs the heroes and players can understand, and feel for, even if they don't agree with them. Even the ones that weren't ever human, like Adam, Sodo or Jacqueline Renier, share character traits -- alienation, insecurity, a craving for company -- that resonate with Ravenloft buffs.

Assuming they're not sociopathic killers themselves, most gamers can't begin to accept the motives for Inza's misdeeds, prior to Soth's fall, which makes her more of a cartoon villain than a Gothic one. It's jarring to have a one-dimensional psycho as a Core darklord, even if the DPs have made her two-dimensional after-the-fact.

What about the horror of the "really bad egg"? She's human (or was), most people would try to at least relate to her at first but can't when they realize that her thought processes are (on a humanoid level, at least) alien to them. Think about some of the best horror stories involved children being the villian (I think Dominic should've stayed as a child, it would be a better curse than making him unattractive to women he likes)

The players may understand how she thinks (albeit, in layman's terms) but the PCs have no true knowledge of such mental illnesses unless they happen to be familiar with Dr. Ilhousen, Dr. Dominiani, or Alexander Dreamfire.

Tykus wrote:The players may understand how she thinks (albeit, in layman's terms) but the PCs have no true knowledge of such mental illnesses unless they happen to be familiar with Dr. Ilhousen, Dr. Dominiani, or Alexander Dreamfire.

Thanks for the shout out, but I doubt even Alex could piece together her motivations. As a character she rings hollow IMO; her story needs to be fleshed out more and her crimes put into perspective.

High Priest Mikhal wrote:

Tykus wrote:The players may understand how she thinks (albeit, in layman's terms) but the PCs have no true knowledge of such mental illnesses unless they happen to be familiar with Dr. Ilhousen, Dr. Dominiani, or Alexander Dreamfire.

Thanks for the shout out, but I doubt even Alex could piece together her motivations. As a character she rings hollow IMO; her story needs to be fleshed out more and her crimes put into perspective.

Your welcome. This came to me after I went offline after that post, Inza could be considered The Joker of Ravenloft. There's a reason he's the second most popular villian in fiction: On one level we understand him but on another level (or, perhaps, the same one) we don't understand him. This is a woman who is all about betrayal--betrayal of family, allies, people, and heritage; all because she believes that they would do the same to her at a moment's notice. The facts that Sithicus now has examples of people who wouldn't even consider betrayal for personal gain and that her Guilt Lash has a backfire potential are meant to show her that not everybody thinks like her. I relate to this on the level that I'm surprised at times that somebody doesn't know something or hasn't seem a particular movie or TV show. Fortunately, I don't react like Inza and go hide myself in a deep, dark hole until I can convince myself otherwise.

I better stop on Inza, my mind is starting to spin its wheels on the subject of her and to me that means I start getting into circular arguments that make no sense.

BigBadQDaddy wrote:Okay, I got a total waste:

Malus of Nosos.

Ugh, second. I always hated the fact that Malus Scleris was basically a Captain Planet villain. :-/


Jeremy Puckett

hida_jiremi wrote: Ugh, second. I always hated the fact that Malus Scleris was basically a Captain Planet villain. :-/

I keep wanting to turn him into some variant of Karras the Hammerite from Thief II but can't quite get the idea to gel.

And Karras from ThiefII seemed very similar to Yagno Petrovna. They even wore the same headgear.

Can someone explain to me the why's and how's of Azalin is a gothic villian? I mean, he's great and I love his curse but he seems a touch out of place in terms of Gothic villianny. Even Death has something Gothic about him (the irony that he's the only living thing in a city of undead).

Tykus wrote:Can someone explain to me the why's and how's of Azalin is a gothic villian?

IMHO, it's all about Irik. Azalin's treatment of Irik is the symbol of everything gothicly "wrong" about lichhood, and the reason why he's more darklord-worthy than any other lich. Rather than accept his own mortality and hand the reigns of Knurl over to his son, he find faults in the very things that makes Irik good, kills him, and turns to the darkest of dark magic, with the excuse of doing what's best for his land. But he's really rejecting the natural order of immortality in the form of living on in his children, and instead selfishly embracing personal immortality, no matter the cost, and painting a thin veneer of righteousness over it. Hypocrisy, Misplaced Pride, Envy, Greed for knowledge that "Man was not Meant to Know", Lust for Power, Denial, ... those are Azalin's sins...

Malus Scleris

Given his background and his association with industry and disease, I'd expand his domain a little bit more to a larger-scale 1800s Industrial Revolution nightmarish scenario. I'd downplay the druidic element and play up the laissez-faire-gone-wrong aspect of the domain. Very young children working in mines, some killed and revived as zombies to serve their masters, women working in weaving houses until their fingers literally fall off, rotting disease of the lungs as a result of working in coal mines - that sort of thing. Machines created in Nosos are useful and inventive... but always with a horrifying consequence when misused.

A touch of Edgar Allen Poe, a touch of DH Lawrence, a touch of Charles Dicken all incorporated into the domain background and I think we can salvage Nosos and its darklord for some Gothic steampunk adventure in Ravenloft.

Creepy Old Woman wrote:

Malus Scleris

Given his background and his association with industry and disease, I'd expand his domain a little bit more to a larger-scale 1800s Industrial Revolution nightmarish scenario. I'd downplay the druidic element and play up the laissez-faire-gone-wrong aspect of the domain. Very young children working in mines, some killed and revived as zombies to serve their masters, women working in weaving houses until their fingers literally fall off, rotting disease of the lungs as a result of working in coal mines - that sort of thing. Machines created in Nosos are useful and inventive... but always with a horrifying consequence when misused.

A touch of Edgar Allen Poe, a touch of DH Lawrence, a touch of Charles Dicken all incorporated into the domain background and I think we can salvage Nosos and its darklord for some Gothic steampunk adventure in Ravenloft.

Dark satanic mills!


This is much better, IMO, than the way Malus was originally portrayed. As written, he's pretty much a cheesy villain straight out of Captain Planet or [even worse!] the Werewolf : the Apocalypse. Hating trees is the sign of very, very lame villian.

ewancummins wrote:Hating trees is the sign of very, very lame villian.

I dunno-- Karras in Thief: The Metal Age seemed to have a distaste for plants, and he's one creepy SOB.

Brandi wrote:Sorry guys-- the board gave me an error message making me think my post never went through.

I deleted the excess post for you, Brandi.

If anyone else would like that done for them, just edit the repeated post to request its deletion, and one of us will take care of it.

Brandi wrote:

ewancummins wrote:Hating trees is the sign of very, very lame villian.

I dunno-- Karras in Thief: The Metal Age seemed to have a distaste for plants, and he's one creepy SOB.

Never played the game, so I wouldn't know.

I really hate Malus as written, but I like Nosos as a domain. That's why i respond well to the proposed changes.

I sort of, kind of reworked the origins of Malus here.

Though I never did much with it IMC, I had an idea a while back for how to salvage King Crocodile as a darklord. Basically, I figured that the best way to give him the necessary "human element" was to do for him what that BoS article did for the God-Brain: make him an evil human's mind, albeit in a monstrous body.

In this version, the backstory from Islands of Terror is actually just a hairless-ape storyteller's parable of what happened. Rather, the man who became King Crocodile IMC had been the leader of a beast-cult on an outlander world, similar to Ravenloft's Ata-Bestaal or the historical (apocryphal?) Leopard Society of West Africa. He instituted a campaign of terrorism and violence, with fanatical minions who dressed in crocodile skins, drowning their victims and then ripping the corpses to pieces in the manner of real crocodiles. Even the nominal king of his nation lived in fear of the cult's assassins, powerless to fight back against the shadowy Crocodile Men.

When the self-proclaimed "Crocodile King" of the cult contracted sleeping sickness, he tried to appease the spirit of disease by sacrificing innocents in his stead, but to no avail. Coercing the local healers (who worshipped a benign python-spirit) to aid him didn't help either, so he exterminated them from the land. Eventually, knowing that he was beyond help, he had his crocodile-skinned thugs spread the sleeping sickness throughout the kingdom, ensuring that no one would outlive him or taint the memory of his greatness with posthumous lies.

Of course, that final act of spite didn't pass unnoticed by the Dark Powers.

As he'd bidden his minions reduce themselves to feral, bloodthirsty animals, so he found himself darklord of a realm of beasts. As he'd killed the python-spirit's benevolent followers, so the python's serpent children are unknown in his realm. As he'd sought to share his sleeping sickness with the multitude, so he must suffer the disease over and over, hiding his weakness while he lives, and feeling the fly's bite over and over even as he is reborn in a new, scaly body.

And no one but he, not one creature alive, even remembers that he was ever anything more than a big, lumbering brute of a crocodile.