Café de Nuit

Wow, the theological/philospohical questions keep coming.

Okay, this whole concept hasn't happened in Ravenloft before, but the whole idea has been swimming in my head for a long time now.

Take this situation: what if one night Strahd wakes up and decides, "I've had it, I'm never gonna get Tatyana, might as well look for another person!"

What if Darklords quit their obssessions, going cold turkey? Would the DP's lozenge them out of RL, or would they attack and reconfigure their psyches to perpetuate their obssessions?

Give up? Like Soth? He ended up getting shipped out of the Demiplane, if I recall correctly.

But only because he was already subject to a stronger curse, placed upon him by gods and uncounted dead people alike (and within this reality: because Soth's inventors and uncounted Dragonlance fans didn't like him being in Ravenloft in the first place).

If a Darklord loses interest in his domain/obsession, like Soth did in "When Black Roses bloom", and the Dark Powers cannot reinvigorate his/her interesst, the domain apparently slowly falls apart. If soth would've returend to Krynn at this point (highly possible because of before mentioned curse), or if the darklord would have found himself wandering the Ethereal plane is unknown .

I seem to remember that Nathan Timothy, after giving up Arkandale, started to travel around some of the Core's rivers (though he's still stuck on his boat due to a pre-darklord curse).

ETA: and note now that the Gazetteers seem to each have an NPC or two who would be very likely to inherit the domain...

I was under the impression that being tied to his boat was Nathan's Darklord curse. He never cared about Arkandale and the curse, so when he sailed out of the domain during the Grand Conjunction the Dark Powers let him go.

Dominari is another Dark Lord who "gave up". He wanted to be free of Gundar and to rule Gundarak, but spent all of his time working in his asylum afterwards.

It seems if a Darklord isn't being properly effected by his curse the Dark Powers keep going until they have real reason to restructure the domain, or someone better comes along.

Or they might just withdraw any "Undying Soul" trait which an inadequate darklord possesses, allowing another contender to pick the failure off. It could well be that Bakholis and Gundar ultimately fell, less because their successors were particularly suitable (Heinforth wasn't), but because the DPs judged them to be a waste of darklordship.

Indeed, whether a darklord has an "Undying Soul" could actually be a decent indicator of how 'worthy' of his or her status the DPs consider a given lord to be. Just a thought....

Rotipher wrote: Indeed, whether a darklord has an "Undying Soul" could actually be a decent indicator of how 'worthy' of his or her status the DPs consider a given lord to be. Just a thought....

I don't know if I would go that far. After all, neither Strahd or Azalin have "Undying Soul" as a special ability

Strahd or Azalin don't really need the Undying soul special quality.

The Undying soul trait is most likely given to Darklords who suffer a chance of being killed (such as Harkon Lukas), but are an asset to the DPs.

Yes, undying Soul always struck me as being something for favored Darklords who lacked either the ability or inclination to set up the kind of complecated contingoncies Strahd and Azalin employ regularly.

Not a bad theory.
The weak are allowed to be destroyed, but the willfull are rpeserved.
Of course, it might be more an issue of mind over matter, rather than darklord abilities.
Given the connection between a darklord and his/her domain, a willful darklord may be trully immortal within that domain. If destroyed, he or she remains inprinted on the land, and may thus recreate him/herself by force of will alone.
For example, Azalin was destroyed utterly by the Dooms Day Device, but he was able to pull himself back together.

Unwillful darklords, however, may not be able to accomplish this feat. Having less of an imprint on their land, they have nothing to which they may bind their existance.

Come to think of it, one could even argue that some favored darklords start out with the Undying Soul trait, but the DPs dispense with it once they become powerful enough to fend for themselves. IIRC, Strahd was saved from the HSoR at the end of VotM, because he was spontaneously teleported to the safety of a lightless cave just in the nick of time ... but back then, he wasn't skilled enough to have placed a Contingency on himself! He'd not yet been tutored in powerful magics by Azalin when Jander Sunstar first visited his castle, and his stats would've only been on par with the original I6 module: not experienced enough to cast Contingency, IIRC.

Tobias Blackburn wrote:I was under the impression that being tied to his boat was Nathan's Darklord curse.

Perhaps it is, but in the module The Evil Eye he's still subject to it even though he let Alfie take over as darklord and is capable of ferrying people into Invidia.

I don't want to be mean, but considering all the cases of lords that "gave it up", there's one thing that has got to be asked first:
- was is a conscious plot turn by the developers to make the lord change his mind, and then the developers had to think in-character for teh Darkpowers to decided whatever happened to that lord ?

or

- was it a predetermined decision by the designers taht this and that lord had to go and now they just had to come up with a reasonable explanation for it?

Although these seem the same, tehre is a difference: in the second, the change is forced and the explanation is probably rushed and may tehrefore be a bit incoherent. In the first, that change should occur because of an inevitable character development, something that, if well-studied, was foreshadowed long before the developers even understood it. They simply had to write it in the most consistent manner possible.

I may be being nit-picky, but I feel most fell on the second category and so there is not a genuine case-study for us to hang on.

On the other hand, it is late, I'm sleepy and haven't put much thought on this.

Ail

Ail wrote: - was it a predetermined decision by the designers taht this and that lord had to go and now they just had to come up with a reasonable explanation for it?

From what I've heard, Soth only gave up because Weis and Hickman don't know how to share.

Spiteful Crow wrote:

Ail wrote: - was it a predetermined decision by the designers taht this and that lord had to go and now they just had to come up with a reasonable explanation for it?

From what I've heard, Soth only gave up because Weis and Hickman don't know how to share.

Pretty much...

Anyway, in regards to Gundar: he was never truly destroyed, his staked corpse was simply left where it fell. Staking a vampire doesn't really destroy it, it just renders it inert and thus vulnerable to the traditional vampire weaknesses.

So Heinfroth never gained darklordship over Gundarak, since the inert Gundar was never truly destroyed. When the Grand Conjunction occurred and the demiplane was "reset," Gundar's inert form was passed over, and with the state of the demiplane in flux, Strahd and Gabrielle were able to snatch up his domain. He was revived years later in Professor Arcanus's carnival, no longer a darklord, but still trapped.