Café de Nuit

What was the first Encounter you threw at your players as a Ravenloft GM?

Come on, no need to be ashamed. We all were new to Ravenloft once. There's no need to be embarrassed if your first monster was something COMPLETELY out of whack. Like a Necromancer Lizardman hanging in a dungeon underneath Mordentshire. Or a Half fiend kobold riding a direbat over the skies of Pont-a-Museau.

I'll describe mine, and then you'll see that yours probably wasn't that bad.

So my players were dropped into Ravenloft off the coast of Mordent. Previously I had been looking through the Denizens of Dread, when I noticed the Sea Stalker Lycanthrope. Now, I knew off the bat that the way this monster was currently, I would never get around to using it. However, I was determined that because it was in an official book it should, at some point, be used in my campaign (:?).

At the time, I had been doing a whole Alice in Wonderland theme in my campaign, making my players enter Ravenloft through a mirror. Hoping to kill two birds with one stone, I decided to adapt the Sea Stalker to the side story, The Walrus and the Carpenter. I figured that if I change the type of marine mammal the Sea Stalker turned into, I could make it fit better into the campaign.

Yes, you read correctly: the first monster I ever used as a Ravenloft GM was a Were-Walrus



And my players ran from it like pansies. Screaming pansies that couldn't figure out why silver wouldn't do damage to it. It took my players three sessions to make weapons about of Whale bones and sea sponge in order to kill it.

Needless to say, my players have never let me down for it.

Now your turn .

Given it was a few weeks after the first box came out my memories a bit on the fuzzy side but I think it was Gremishka.

I got RL along with Night of the Walking Death, so first monster was "undead-little-girl-from-the coffin". PC openned cascet carried to cementary and met it's undead inahbittant. Later the took on Zombie Lord with a help of handy battering ram

I first used a Ravenloft monster in a Forgotten Realms game, it was a Gremishka.

Later on, when I started my Ravenloft Campaign, the first encounter I threw at my players was a pack of wolves in Verbrek. But the first villain in my games was a Midnight Cat. My players still talk about him, specially because he got away.

impworks wrote:I think it was Gremishka.

Same here. I forget the plot. Something very simple, like: miller's son found dead in town. "help us, hero!" Track grimishka to lair and slay. the end.

I used a carnivorous ape!

I sent a band of Strahd Skeletons against them. I wasn't a very atmospheric DM at the time and so it was just a standard hack and slash. They were quite surprised by how resilient these skeletons were, though, so it accomplished the main goal.

In a Ravenloft game? I think a beholder.

When I playtested Feast of Goblyns at GenCon, the year Ravenloft debuted as a setting, the DM (Bill Connors! ) dumped my PC in a pit with some giant centipedes. Of course, he described them in terms that made them sound like something out of an Alien-movie ripoff, so he scared the bejeebers out of me.

In honor of the module's title -- and the fact he'd thoroughly freaked me out with one of the wimpiest monsters in AD&D -- I then proceded to scare the bejeebers out of my own players with a goblin. Not a goblyn, a goblin ... described in terms that made it sound like something out of a The Hills Have Eyes-movie ripoff.

I think I used a restless dead with it's armor melted to its bones.

Chardath Spulzeer. Seriously.

No, this was WAAYY before TFT and Chardath getting officially pulled into RL. I read about him in a Dragon magazine, thought he'd make a good DL. Knew nothing about his background, so I threw some random powers together and sicced the party on him.

Come to think of it, the really egregious violation of RL rules in that original game was not Chardath (whose later appearance in official rules was an eerie vindication of my idea) but Parthan Leskovich, the party's patron who sent them on their mission. I had decided that a group of neutral gods elsewhere in the multiverse had decided that RL was far too unbalanced, so they imbued Parthan with their boons and forced the DP's to accept him as the token good-aligned DL. The party hung out with him in his island domain between quests, and he gave them leads, cured their ailments, and basically gave them a safe place to recover.

It was the Raging Tears, actually. (They were 9th level outlanders, not first level RL natives. It was one of those "start the adventure with a shipwreck" scenarios so beloved of DMs.)

A vampire.

A moose.

My friend, who played solo the first couple of times we played, saw a quote: "massive, horned creature in the dark shadows of the forest, watching him".

He fired his bow at it and it killed him in a charge.

...ehehehe...heh...

I was a very unforgiving DM back then...

( A character on the same party also got killed by a charging moose as a matter of fact. Hmmm....)

Were they knights searching for the Holy Grail perchance? Had they already encountered the bunny?