Dragon Heist as a prologue for Ravenloft?

[Paul Farquhar]

I think if you are reducing Ravenloft to trying to frighten your players with a purely physical threat to their character's survival, you are selling the setting far short*. You need to get inside your players heads and under their skin, make them sympathetic for the monsters, and mistrustful of themselves.



*Yes, I know a lot of Horror Movies do this. That is why they suck.

 

[jayoungr]

My only question about using Dragon Heist as a lead-in to Ravenloft is, "Wouldn't that kind of cause tonal whiplash?"

 

[MockingBird]

Probably but it could work with a little work.

 

[GlassJaw]

I think if you are reducing Ravenloft to trying to frighten your players with a purely physical threat to their character's survival, you are selling the setting far short*. You need to get inside your players heads and under their skin, make them sympathetic for the monsters, and mistrustful of themselves.

SMH

What part of anything I posted indicated that was what I was advocating? Quite the opposite actually. The "physical" threat (survival) is the catalyst to get "under their skin". The setting gets the players out of their comfort zone, thus forces them to think differently about how to survive. They can't simply hack and slash their way out of it. They have to think. They have to form alliances. They have to make hard decisions.

That is the essence of Ravenloft.

If the players know they can simply walk away at any time, there is no buy-in.

 

[jayoungr]

Probably but it could work with a little work.

Then if you know how to make it work for your table, I don't see any reason not to do it.

If the players know they can simply walk away at any time, there is no buy-in.

Ravenloft exists as a physical location in the world I DM in. (This wasn't my decision; the players decided this decades ago, before I joined the group.) It creates no problems. In fact, there are entire families of vampire-hunters in the setting.

 

[practicalm]

I would not recommend Dragon Heist unless you shifted away from giving the players the inn which would make them believe they were going to use Waterdeep as a base of operations for a time.

You might consider the Adventurers League modules set in Waterdeep for this adventure. Those are more go some place, have an encounter find the next place that might be a better fit for what you are eventually going to do.

Having the players sent to Ravenloft because the villain of Dragon Heist was bothered by their involvement works thematically but then if players are focused on getting back to Waterdeep to solve that mystery I think you might be setting them up for disappointment.

The low level stuff in Storm Kings Thunder might be better as you can reframe it away from the giants breaking the Ordering and as well giants being giants.