Café de Nuit

I plan to have my D&D group from the Lands of Blamakar (found here http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/index.php? ... Setting%29) end up in Ravenloft and then leave. Two reasons, first I want to tweak their RP style to halp them notice the darkness that is everywhere in their own world and second if would be quite handy if 30 years could pass without them aging or knowing it. I intended entering to go somthing like this:

The city they are now wardens of (very small and new, 30 years later big and a BIG hassle) is experiancing some odd time related problems. A wizard is suposed to know about this sort of thing. They go to see him. Truth is he steals time from others (ageing them and gaining life). He isn't there however as he recenly (their world time) got yanked by the mists through his mighty clock, the device that lets him steal the time. He becomes a Dark Lord obsessed with Time and efficeincy as he has a device that will return him home, when it reaches 90% capacity, he adds fuel and cuts down waste, capacity goes up, more waste, less cpacity (you can see where this is going can't you?) Current capacity, 89%.

The party (hopfully) are dumb enough to walk through the door of the giant clock and because it's counterpart in Ravenloft hasn't been used for nearly 100 years (herby setting the freaky time precident) they think they have traveled in time.

He says he can get them out but as he ahs been at it for nearly 100 years and has never got higher than 89%, and to get 90% would need to build a perpetual motion device, I hope they will look for another way back. I intend for them to find one, in the shape of a deiaty from their own world. A member of the death (chaotic) pathelion he is CE and called Ol' man swamp. Legend has it that he is an overdeiaty that slew his brothers shortly after the universe was finished and so they banished him to the deepest prison in existnace (aka ______, well you can guess). Such was his power however that he was able to influance the new gods, turn them aginst each other and bring about an armagedon. Rinse and repeat. He currently (and for the first time) has his own followers as a deiaty again. Two problems, one, why hasn't he overthrown darklords ect and two why doesn't he escape himslef. Answers, one, don't know, blame the dark powers, ( a presidant might be usfull though) and two, he is part of the delecate matix of powers (including the Tome of Magic Vestiges) that constantly brings the lands back to their natural state every so often, that is to say a horrific global war that consumes the heavens and the gods save the children of the sun and moon who live on to reforge the new world and (unkowingly) set it up for its next armageddon. Presumably sending the PCs back helps this. Actually seing as when they do go back one of them will find that his lover married the prince (now king) after mounring for him for ten years. If they handle it badly they could tear down a nation that acts as a buffer and leason between two other nations who would otherwise war and soon (well.... you get the idea...)

So, would it work? Does it sound like a good idea? I can imadgine the Dark Powers might not mind Ol' Man Swamp as his armagedons are likely to provide plenty of people who would be Dark Lord material...

Given how the last evil deity whom the Dark Powers crossed (Vecna) openly threatened to rip Ravenloft apart, if they ever even thought about messing with him again, I'd be very surprised if they'd let a deity with so much sheer destructive potential anywhere near their pet project. Heck, that's how come they left Gwydion trapped behind the Obsidian Gate rather than bringing him fully into his domain, IMO.

If you want the party to find another way out, you should probably find something more typical of Ravenloft, such as a quest for a portal or doing a BIG favor for the Zarovan Vistani. If you've got deities popping in and out of the Land of Mists whenever they felt like it, the game-setting would be a very, very different place IYC than it's portrayed as, in the published products, where many natives aren't even certain if gods are real or, indeed, ever were real.

The majour differance between Ol' man swamp and Vecna though is that Vecna wanted out. Ol' man swamp doesn't, caus out means the world the is contantly getting turned into a fireball. Also Ol' man swamp isn't worshiped in Ravenloft, for the most part he just watches from there. Who knows what his connection to the Dark powers is. Maybe he is in fact a manifestation of the mists designed to create the cyrcumstances that can bring people to Ravenloft. Maybe he is the reason Ravenloft is. I severaly doubt the last one but the whole point would be that he doesnt want to/could never possibly leave.

How this could work:
If the deity is neutral (in attitude not alignment) and uninterested in escaping it could work fine, especially if he was unwilling to destroy the world in doing so. It's one thing to destroy the world because its your cyclic duty to do so to set up for the next creation, it's another to destroy a world utterly preventing new creation. It goes against his purpose and very nature.

Why he is unwilling to kill darklords? Because he's smart enough to know he'd just take their place, or at least suspects he would. And if he's a darklord he will be tormented and cursed. He'd still be able to escape but that whole destroy-the-world thing stops him. He's trapped there but at least at the moment he's free to roam and not cursed.

So instead he's content to sit and watch. However, if a different escape method presented itself...

Okay, that's a little more viable. You'd probably want to come up with some explanation for why the Dark Powers haven't let any other deities use their little playground as a bolthole, though: given the level of conflict and backstabbing in some mythic pantheons, you'd think that if one deity can think of using Ravenloft as a convenient way to avoid contact with the wider cosmos, other fugitive deities would, too.

It's also assuming the Dark Powers would trust an evil deity not to turn on them, which is dubious IMO. Vecna did have his reasons to be peeved at the DPs, but last I looked, most evil creatures don't need actual (legitimate) justification to attack other beings; the Dark Powers make a hobby of collecting the proof of this, after all. Would they really trust this guy not to, say, decide that he likes his "bolthole" so much, he might as well take it over for himself and boot them out?

YMMV, but I just don't see how it would work, and still reflect the fact that your Old Man Swamp is evil-aligned, and that the DPs (whatever you think their alignment is) know so much about Evil's chronic proclivity for treachery, malice, vengefulness, ambition, etc.

Rotipher wrote:Okay, that's a little more viable. You'd probably want to come up with some explanation for why the Dark Powers haven't let any other deities use their little playground as a bolthole, though: given the level of conflict and backstabbing in some mythic pantheons, you'd think that if one deity can think of using Ravenloft as a convenient way to avoid contact with the wider cosmos, other fugitive deities would, too.

Who's to say there isn't? Heck, maybe that's what Ezra is.

The Dark Powers aren't likely to be trapping new deities any time soon but that doesn't mean they can stop ones from entering under their own power.