Café de Nuit

Galeros wrote:

ewancummins wrote:We should decide what motivated him to retire (mostly) from the adventuring life. A brush with death? Got married? Courting a girl?

I think the reason could be he simply got tired of risking his life all of the time. A brush with death may be a good reason for this. He may have simply had a desire to settle down. He may have been looking for someone to marry, but was in not hurry to find anyone.

A harrowing experience may have conviced him that the adventuring life was a sure road to death or worse. That would explain why he tried to discourage his younger sister from following in his footsteps.

ewancummins wrote:What about making Blood's DL a native of Krynn? The world has a well-established history that includes long periods in which divine magic (healing) was pretty much non-existent for mortals. That lack of healing magic would tend to encourage medical experiments, IMO.

This could work, I admit I am trying to have there be more native Darklords than Outlander ones though. Still, your idea is a good one. I would say this DL could have been alive during the Pre-War of the Lance time period and like you said, was trying to figure out a way to heal their friend. Their friend could have some sort of blood infection. So, they decide that putting fresh blood in their friend should help. They then create some crude medical apparatus for this process and lure people under false pretense of being a healer, and then drain their blood.

ewancummins wrote:

Galeros wrote:

ewancummins wrote:We should decide what motivated him to retire (mostly) from the adventuring life. A brush with death? Got married? Courting a girl?

I think the reason could be he simply got tired of risking his life all of the time. A brush with death may be a good reason for this. He may have simply had a desire to settle down. He may have been looking for someone to marry, but was in not hurry to find anyone.

A harrowing experience may have conviced him that the adventuring life was a sure road to death or worse. That would explain why he tried to discourage his younger sister from following in his footsteps.

Good idea. We can definitely use that as the reason for his retiring and over protectiveness.

Galeros wrote:This could work, I admit I am trying to have there be more native Darklords than Outlander ones though. Still, your idea is a good one. I would say this DL could have been alive during the Pre-War of the Lance time period and like you said, was trying to figure out a way to heal their friend. Their friend could have some sort of blood infection. So, they decide that putting fresh blood in their friend should help. They then create some crude medical apparatus for this process and lure people under false pretense of being a healer, and then drain their blood.

I am all for including more native lords, but sometimes an outlander works better for a specific concept.

The darklord of Graves should be a native of the demiplane, IMO.

I agree that having the darklord of Blood originate on Krynn in the period before the War of the Lance would work well.

Hehe, I need to come up with some names for the Darklords of Grave and Blood, seeing as those two are the ones we have managed to flesh out the most thus far. Tindertwig can be the Darklord for the Pyre Domain. The only Darklords we have not come up with yet are the ones for Mist, Positive Energy, and Negative Energy, at least not many details. I know it was suggested to have the Darklord of the Positive Energy Domain be am evil Deathless, and for the Darklord of the Negative Energy Domain to be a sort of Anti-Heroic Necromancer. We still have nothing for Mists though.

But, first things first, I think we should focus on the Darklords of Grave and Blood first. The Darklord for Grave is pretty much done, he just needs a name and a domain to have originally come from. Well, and stats, I am only familiar with 3.X/Pathfinder though.

What about an influential and prestigious physician from the Gothic earth setting... a very academic physician who has a hypothesis about blood letting as the cure for an epidemic disease (cholera?) and pushes his hypothesis to his medical students, dispite their protestations that it doesn't work. When he sees evidence his hypothesis is false he deliberately tries to supress the information - smearing doctors to speak out against his hypothesis, burning and discrediting papers, hounding critics - despite the fact that doing so puts the medical field back by decades and thousands of people die. In an ironic twist, he contracts the disease and whilst in teh early stages realizes that blood letting would be a death sentence, but to not do so would expose him. To escape his dilemma, he gets his servants to put him on a boat and to take him accross the channel to one of the doctors that he hounded and ruined, but who possibly holds the cure. However a fog bank envelopes the ship, taking the physician, his servants and the ship's crew to the quasi elemental plane of blood.
He now exists as some sort of vrykolaka vampire (perhaps with the ability to transform into/summon swarms of leeches or a giant leech), tansferring disease with his touch. Although he is in the plane of blood, he cannot fdrink, because only blood tainted with disease will nourish him.
Perhaps he has turned his servants and the remaining ship's crew into some sort of blood factory, trying to keep their diseased bodies alive as long as he can, to harvest their blood.

But, first things first, I think we should focus on the Darklords of Grave and Blood first. The Darklord for Grave is pretty much done, he just needs a name and a domain to have originally come from. Well, and stats, I am only familiar with 3.X/Pathfinder though

.

As a corpse snatcher/grave robber, might Lamordia be a possible domain? He supplies bodies for scientists/anatomists, and loots their corpses as a 'perk' of the job. But sometimes is not to concerned as to whether the bodies are dead first... (like Burke and Hare)
as for names - Robert Marley? Joseph Black? Olaf Donner? Shaun E. Bean?
For the darklord of blood, Louis Jenner?

doctor-evil wrote:

But, first things first, I think we should focus on the Darklords of Grave and Blood first. The Darklord for Grave is pretty much done, he just needs a name and a domain to have originally come from. Well, and stats, I am only familiar with 3.X/Pathfinder though

.

As a corpse snatcher/grave robber, might Lamordia be a possible domain? He supplies bodies for scientists/anatomists, and loots their corpses as a 'perk' of the job. But sometimes is not to concerned as to whether the bodies are dead first... (like Burke and Hare)
as for names - Robert Marley? Joseph Black? Olaf Donner? Shaun E. Bean?
For the darklord of blood, Louis Jenner?

Consider this- D&D adventurers are tomb-robbers, pretty often. Instead of a body snatcher, the guy was a classic D&D type tomb-robbing, dungeon crawling, loot and scoot adventurer. That fits with what Galeros has going, I think.

I definitely like Dr Evil's idea of the darklord for blood being a physician whose eccentric ideas were opposed by other physicians.

I also like Galeros' idea of a man desperately experimenting with transfusions to save a loved one.

I think we need to avoid the whole '19th Century mad scientist' thing. We want him to be quite distinct from Dr Mordenheim. That's why I suggest not using Lamorida or Gothic Earth.

YMMV, of course. I'm just giving feedback and ideas,

ewancummins wrote:Consider this- D&D adventurers are tomb-robbers, pretty often. Instead of a body snatcher, the guy was a classic D&D type tomb-robbing, dungeon crawling, loot and scoot adventurer. That fits with what Galeros has going, I think.

Pretty much.

ewancummins wrote:I definitely like Dr Evil's idea of the darklord for blood being a physician whose eccentric ideas were opposed by other physicians.

I also like Galeros' idea of a man desperately experimenting with trasnfusions to save a loved one.

I think we need to avoid the whole '19th Century mad scientist' thing. We want him to be quite distinct from Dr Mordenheim. That's why I suggest not using Lamorida or Gothic Earth.

Well, when he was on Krynn, he could have suggested the idea of blood transfusions as a cure to other people, but he could have been told that that was a bad idea. He nonetheless goes through with the transfusions, which appear to work at first, but he never finds out if they really do because he is taken by the Mists before he can see if it really does fully cure his friend.

Burke and Hare are good Ravenloft grist,and have been adapted before. I don't see them as prime darklord material, though. They are nasty thugs, not fully realized gothic master villains.

Now, it could be that there are such nasty body snatchers trapped in the Grave domain. These guys might be minions or perhaps enemies of the darklord.

I like the elements of pride and desperation in Doctor Evil's idea for Blood.

I'm just not keen on vampirism or Gothic Earth. I feel like those have been used a lot already .

ewancummins wrote:I like the elements of pride and desperation in Doctor Evil's idea for Blood.

I'm just not keen on vampirism or Gothic Earth. I feel like those have been used a lot already .

Yeah, they are not bad ideas, but I want to stay away from Vampirism for this Darklord.

ewancummins wrote:Now, it could be that there are such nasty body snatchers trapped in the Grave domain. These guys might be minions or perhaps enemies of the darklord.

Perhaps people who get trapped in the domain are forced to scavenge what they can from the corpses rotting in their graves (Where these corpses come from is a mystery known to no one). Due to his practice they eventually become Ghouls under the command of the Darklord.