Café de Nuit

my idea is a darklord is the only real person in the domain, all other natives are illusions/psychic constricts coming from the darklords mind.
the horror comes from asking what is real or not, and being unable to control your mind. lost loves show up, your fears and doubts are spoken to you, so on.

edised wrote:my idea is a darklord is the only real person in the domain, all other natives are illusions/psychic constricts coming from the darklords mind.
the horror comes from asking what is real or not, and being unable to control your mind. lost loves show up, your fears and doubts are spoken to you, so on.

This sounds like a great idea for a wandering town that moves around. It suddenly appears on the local maps, the real people living nearby half-remember it was there all along. Anyone who crosses the borders finds it normal at first, but then gets progressively weird as it unmoors from reality. Maybe the Darklord is lonely, but loses control of the domain because outsider minds can control it too. The Darklord hates the changes, and then has to get rid of the outsider minds, and so becomes lonely again.

It would also work really well as an asylum for the mentally disturbed. There is only one patient, lying unconscious and only able to interact via phantasm, and everyone else in the asylum is a mental construct. Bonus points if this asylum in the middle of a large town or city, making it that much harder to figure out who is real and who isn't.

What did the darklord do to deserve such a curse? Every domain is a reflection of its darklord, after all.

Sounds a bit like Sceana and Lemot Sediam Juste.

This sort of solipsism theme is difficult to port into a D&D context because D&D is usually a group activity. With a D&D setup, the horror is more likely to come in the form of the entire group being fabrications of somebody else's imaginations. Or, if one of the PCs is the apparent dreamer, the horror could come from facing responsibility/blame for the sorry state of the world.

High Priest Mikhal wrote:What did the darklord do to deserve such a curse? Every domain is a reflection of its darklord, after all.

i was thinking a betrayer, manipulator, selfish fellow. using others
i think the last thing he said "i don't need you or anyone!" befor the mists came.

i think alot of the horror comes from (to a outsider) is trying to keep a grip on realty. the figment people are both to real/not real. and anyone who comes to the doman starts to make them, but only the darklord can control the figments, so alot of outsiders get killed the monster in the closet or something

edised wrote:

High Priest Mikhal wrote:What did the darklord do to deserve such a curse? Every domain is a reflection of its darklord, after all.

i was thinking a betrayer, manipulator, selfish fellow. using others
i think the last thing he said "i don't need you or anyone!" befor the mists came.

i think alot of the horror comes from (to a outsider) is trying to keep a grip on realty. the figment people are both to real/not real. and anyone who comes to the doman starts to make them, but only the darklord can control the figments, so alot of outsiders get killed the monster in the closet or something

Yeah, I agree this sounds more like Juste the more you describe it.

Another spin you could take on this would be to base it on Edward Hale's The Man Without a Country. The character Philip Nolan basically says in court that he wishes he'd never heard of the United States, and is sentenced to life as a prisoner on a series of naval vessels, never setting foot on land and never allowed to hear anything about his homeland. In Ravenloft such a declaration wouldn't need such creativity to make it come true.

Still, I'm of the mind that this is a good enough fit for Juste to not need to invent another DL. I think the solipsistic effect on his psychology is a very interesting take, and I look forward to exploring it when I bring him into my campaign.