Café de Nuit

I’m looking for some recommendations with a three part adventure that includes the Living Brain behind the scenes. The three adventures would be spaced through time and have an undercurrent that eventually reveals the existence of the Living Brain.

General Campaign Notes

The adventures will not be from Ravenloft. They will be pulled into Ravenloft through a temporal two-way mistway (triggered by a planetary conjunction on their home world) in the area of Mordentshire. The general plan is to have the PC’s based out of the van Richten’s old herbalist shop. They will work alongside the Weathermay-Foxgrove twins, traveling around Ravenloft to gather information, explore, and battle evil. Ultimately, they want to find a way home but that’s not terribly important here.

I struggled for a few months with how to mechanically move the PCs around Ravenloft. I’m not a fan of running games where we play every minute of time or come up with unrealistic transitions between adventures. I found my solution in the Middle-earth 5E role playing game. That system has a few mechanics that I think will work exceptionally well in Ravenloft: Travelling phase, Fellowship phase, and Sanctuaries.

Sanctuaries are places that the group has to discover that are safe (generally speaking) for them to live their day-to-day lives. The group can only take long rests and perform Fellowship phase activities in a Sanctuary. Time in the Sanctuary is played in a slightly different way, the PCs will have weeks or even months to heal up and work on learning new skills, learning new languages, or forging new equipment. The first Sanctuary that the PCs unlock will be Mordentshire.

The Travel phase abstracts travel from a Sanctuary to the adventure destination or another Sanctuary. Travel isn’t eventless but rather the events happen in travel time rather than combat rounds. This provides a mechanic to explore the flora, fauna, landscapes, and denizens of Ravenloft in a more interactively narrative way rather than through random encounter charts and daily travel logs.

The Fellowship phase will allow players to develop and pursue some of their own goals (research, experimentation, love interests, healing, self improvement, etc). In other words it’s a wrapper for D&D downtime activities.

Really loose adventure idea

Part One - PCs are hunting a serial killer in Port-a-Lucine. The serial killer gets sloppy and the PCs catch him/her. The serial killer will fight ferociously and the battle will be desperate for the young heroes, but ultimately the PCs will be victorious. However, they will not have any idea as to the motive of the murderer.

Part Two - The murders in Port-a-Lucine have started again. However there is no immediately noticeable connection - murderer had no relatives that could be the obvious culprits, it hasn’t been a ritually significant length of time. The serial killer gets sloppy again, some things happen the same way but not everything. This time though, the PCs uncover a clue that some greater game is afoot.

Part Three - ?


My very general idea is that the Living Brain was using the serial killer to eliminate d’Honaire’s Obedient. Once the high priority targets were eliminated then the serial killer became expendable.


Obviously the idea needs a lot of work. I’ve never written an adventure with the Living Brain before, so I was just hoping for some general tips. Of course, I’ll always welcome any advice.

If the PCs are wandering monster hunters alongside the Weathermay Twins and/or outlanders seeking escape, they may need some special motivation to settle down in a particular place for any length of time. The evidence might suggest a supernatural nature to the killings. Or perhaps the murders threaten the status quo needed for their investigations (think like the gang wars caused by Holiday's murders in Batman: the Long Halloween). A specific link from Mordent-> Dementlieu exists in the Mousels (see Legacy of the Blood) or other distant Mordentish D'Honaire branches that could be targets for kidnapping or assassination by either agents of the Brain or D'Honaire (remember either mastermind could have agents working outside of Dementlieu for proxies on their behalf). The Mousels have a history of being the targets of the Dementlieuse D'honaires' wrath and could represent a point of interest for either Dominic or the Brain.

Since this is intrigue and mystery Dementlieuse style, the adventure could be structured like an onion, as in layers. Beyond the immediate identity of the killer, intrigue could be found in determining how the killer destroyed his victims (for example, a rare poison or magic device, which would then involve an investigation into the supply chain) and surface motive (an ideological cause or hired by another party, which could suggest follow up investigations). You might consider making the serial killer plural conspirators or even an organization, such that if the seeming big bad goes down easy there's more to follow.

Phase Three might be the culmination of what has been learned in the previous two acts. The players are now likely familiar with both the Brain and Dominic D'Honaire, but the situation may have decayed to the point that all hell breaks loose. This could be widespread social unrest or clashes between the Brain and Dominic D'Honaire's forces (even class warfare). Or perhaps there's a more covert war of daggers; the PCs might now be the ones targeted for assassination, perhaps from multiple angles directions.

Thanks for the tips! I’ll have to check out the Legacy of Blood stuff. I don’t expect the PCs to stay in Dementlieu in between adventures, I loosely plan to have them return to the domain for each adventure.

The only advice I can offer is NARF!

Check Quoth the Raven #18
https://www.fraternityofshadows.com/Library.html

Feasting with the Falcons definitely will be helpful in my planning! Thanks!

The new Pinky and the Brain episodes may have had something to do with my adventure choice....

Pacal of Palenque wrote:Feasting with the Falcons definitely will be helpful in my planning! Thanks!

Cool! Glad to be helpful. If you're interested in how things went down when I originally ran it in my campaign, my journals are here: themistway.com
Feasting with the Falcons was sessions 9 and 10.
Also of note, I revisited Port-a-lucine in sessions 23 - 28, some of which became a sequel of sorts to FwtF, including a few more brief "appearances" by The Brain at another fancy party in session 25.

I do regret that I didn't do more with The Brain. As presented in FwtF, he's kind of an afterthought. But if whatever's there helps you use him, or just helps set the scene in Port-a-Lucine, (probably my favorite place in Ravenloft) I'm glad to help...

Gonzoron of the FoS wrote:

Pacal of Palenque wrote:Feasting with the Falcons definitely will be helpful in my planning! Thanks!

Cool! Glad to be helpful. If you're interested in how things went down when I originally ran it in my campaign, my journals are here: themistway.com
Feasting with the Falcons was sessions 9 and 10.
Also of note, I revisited Port-a-lucine in sessions 23 - 28, some of which became a sequel of sorts to FwtF, including a few more brief "appearances" by The Brain at another fancy party in session 25.

I do regret that I didn't do more with The Brain. As presented in FwtF, he's kind of an afterthought. But if whatever's there helps you use him, or just helps set the scene in Port-a-Lucine, (probably my favorite place in Ravenloft) I'm glad to help...

If it makes you feel any better I ran a heavy modified version (mainly just NPCs and the connection to my player) your FwtF last year as an opener for my solo campaign and The Brain ended up becoming another major player. Although my player never ended up meeting him, just someone he thought was him. Then it never went any further because he fled Dementlieu once he pieced together that Dominic was the Darklord (and mind you my player loved it! Watching all the puzzle pieces line up on his face is exactly what made me keep DMing lol).

Also in QtR#27 on the article about the opera's, I 've written a dread possibility (page 126) involving the Brain if you are interested.

Epically wrote:If it makes you feel any better I ran a heavy modified version (mainly just NPCs and the connection to my player) your FwtF last year as an opener for my solo campaign and The Brain ended up becoming another major player.

Cool! glad you had fun with it!

I once had a very big campaign in Port-a-Lucine, throwing in many small adventures from several sources (like CotN:Werebeast which features an opera-adventure). So they had this big cast of NPCs from various sources, which did bewilder them a lot, but also gave them that Dementlieu-feel, with intriges, assassinations and mysteries.
One of my PCs - Jacques de Almoy - played a big role in this, see the Book of Sacrifices for his character. Perhaps you can use him as a NPC.