Café de Nuit

Hello Everyone,

I was hoping to obtain some constructive feedback related to an idea I had recently. I'm especially curious to know if it would work better as a Pocket Domain or just as a part of the larger domain in which it is found--that being Darkon. The central themes seem to be Long-Standing Feuds, Free Companies, Honor, Ambition (for Title rather than fortune).

The idea started, simply enough, with the words of a curse, "May this battlefield be your prison, its bricks and mortar the bones and blood of those you betrayed today." The curse is uttered by a high priestess who has worked tirelessly to end the fighting between two baronies (highlanders and moorfolk). The feud is prolonged however, by a jealous free company captain (Wistan Thorel) who betrays his employer (Lord Cecil) after being denied his ambition: to marry one of his employer's daughters and secure his place in a noble bloodline. The daughter is, instead*, betrothed to the son of the employer's rival (Lord Vane); a ploy to end years of violence between the two houses.

The free company captain awakens ten generations later. He is a bog mummy, as his body sank into the "Bogs of Blood" that divide the moor-country from the highlands. The two baronies now reside in Ravenloft on the northern slopes of the Mountains of Misery in Darkon (of course no one remembers the transition thanks to the Mists, the Dark Powers, and Darkon's capacity to claim folk for its own). Anyway, the captain now presides over an army of the dead that sing of and wail of his misdeeds and he retreats to the corrupted loch once occupied by the high priestess and her order (they've since moved north to a small oak grove and have been "claimed" by the Witches of Hala.
*A "secret" of his story is that Cecil has several daughters and planned to marry one off to Lord Vane's son and one to his favorite mercenary captain, but Vane's son's bride dies of an illness. Her ghost could easily turn up and claim that any party involved (Vane's family, Cecil's family, or even the Priestess' order) poisoned her, if it fits the story.

So I have a couple of interesting characters, a backstory, and a setting, and my question to anyone interested is: where would you go with this? Is there an adventure to be had here for a party of heroes that blunders into the middle of the latest conflict between the Cecil and Vane families? Are there questions left unanswered in the backstory? Is the moorlands/highlands setting domain-worthy or should it just be part of Darkon?

If you're looking to fit this into Darkon, one possibility would be to make the feuding lords into human inhabitants of Arak, from days before the Scourge. The products tell us virtually nothing about the Arakans' society or origins, so you could develop that region's history and culture in order to give your mummy (who can predate the Scourge of Arak's surface) a suitable backstory.

The feud you describe takes place, the mummy-to-be is killed in battle, the curse is laid. Before he can arise for vengeance, the Scourge strikes, burying his bog and trapping him for centuries. The living survivors of the feud flee over the border and forget their origins, re-settling in Darkon. Much later, when the Mountains of Misery become part of Azalin's domain, the survivors "rediscover" their ties to the highlands, and begin migrating back into a region that's recovered at last from the sandstorm. The dormant bog mummy senses its enemies' return, and begins to dig its way towards the surface, as the Scourge's dead who'd once been sworn to his service bestir themselves at their commander's summons...

What would be interesting about this scenario is that, in seeking information on how to lay the mummy to rest, PCs might stumble upon long-buried evidence of the old feud between the exiled lords' families. Suddenly, two clans that had forgotten the cause of their enmity find all their old grudges resurfacing, to turn them against each other, at the very time when they're both endangered by the mummy's ghostly forces. The challenge for the players would be not only to put down the undead menace, but to keep the blood-feud from breaking out all over again.

Rotipher of the FoS wrote: What would be interesting about this scenario is that, in seeking information on how to lay the mummy to rest, PCs might stumble upon long-buried evidence of the old feud between the exiled lords' families. Suddenly, two clans that had forgotten the cause of their enmity find all their old grudges resurfacing, to turn them against each other, at the very time when they're both endangered by the mummy's ghostly forces. The challenge for the players would be not only to put down the undead menace, but to keep the blood-feud from breaking out all over again.

I like how this ties the characters into the story and it also makes it usable in a larger domain--which is good because I don't want fall into the trap of creating new domains to house each of my storylines. Thanks for the support.