Café de Nuit

Ever have one of those moments where you've been cheerfully running a campaign, and then found out halfway through that you got some fact about Ravenloft wrong and it took too much effort to retcon? This thread is devoted to those moments. It doesn't have to be a major fact that made your entire campaign ridiculous, just something that made your face turn bright red upon rereading the campaign setting or gazetteer and finding out that there'd been something that you'd been missing all along.

For me, it's the date of the Falkovnian invasion of Dementlieu. I don't know why, but I've had it in my head for years that it only happened ten years ago. Last year, my players ran into a thirteen-year-old Dementlieuse girl who had been mutilated by Falkovnians as a child. They also had several dealings with Josephine Chantreux, who I had described and played as a young woman--after all, she'd only been a child when the Falkovnians invaded! I finally found out my mistake during character creation for my next campaign, after greenlighting a player to make a Falkovnian ex-soldier who had defected during the invasion of Dementlieu . . . and was now in his early thirties! The campaign hasn't started yet, but I ended up deciding to keep the invasion at the more recent date because that was the way I'd always run it, so that was what my players knew.

Anybody else make a Ravenloft faux pas?

During my first campaign, I somehow misremembered the population breakdown of Valachan, and instead of gnomes being the second most populous race after humans, I thought it was halflings. Don't remember why, and it really didn't have that big an effect on the game, but it was the first mistake that jumped to mind.

Without a decent map, I set Il-Aluk on Darkon's eastern shore...

Just realized this one last night. It's minor, but it bugs me. (I don't mind changing things on purpose, I just hate doing it by accident.)

TSR JAM 1999 was one of the last RL products I added to my collection. When running Seepage from CotN:C, I looked in the RL catalogue to find info on the Mordentshire Guardians and found Sister Eleyna and Brother Greggory. I assumed that the old male guardian in CotN:C was Greggory, and added in Eleyna as his apprentice. But I finally got TSR JAM and looked them up, and I found that Eleyna was in charge, and Greggory was a young man. Also, I somehow switched his name to Griggory.

Won't matter at all unless I run the adventure from TSR JAM, and I can just change the name of the young apprentice, but it bugs me.

I once forgot the name of a key villain in one of my games when I had forgotten to take some of my notes along, to it changed from Ivan Dilisnya to Ivana Bortsi, which really confused the players when they had been employed by the latter and all the evidence pointed to Ivan being the cuplrite of poisoning members of Ivana's court. Some nifty thinking on my feet managed to save the day and the player ended up running form pillar to post for hours with alot of impromptu roleplaying and storylining, as the heroes slowly trued to work out who the real bad guy was. They wound up quiting their position when they decided that both Ivana and Ivan were as bad as eachother and should fight their own battles.

I narrowly escpaed sheer embarrassment that time.

However, during another marvellous laps in brain function, I accidentally referred to the Midnight Slasher as a him after they had unmasked her. I did not escape that one so easily and had the players thinking they had caught some poor patsy and were ready to go out on the hunt again, lol.

Yes, even the best of us made these mistakes.

Oh, and then there was the instant in me playing (not running) Dark of the Mon where i managed to pull an iron door out of a robe of many pockets (to bar the broken down entrance to a building they were hiding in) and then using a scroll from another pocket to cast Leomund's Secure Shelter to save the pc's from certain death and ruining the DM's plans to have them captured. This caused him to overhaul a portion of the adventure. Thankfully, when I ran the adventure, I had been careful not to let the magic item fall into the hands of the player during previous adventures.