Season 4 Curse of Strahd and Adventurers League

[psiconauta_retro]

My only concern is whether the Hardcover includes an exit from the Demiplane. If it doesn't, and the adventure concludes with the players still trapped in Ravenloft (unlikely but possible), we may need to create another exit from the Demiplane for AL characters.

I feel that at the current state of the game there is no way that WoTC would publish this without a way for the players to escape Ravenloft but, as you say, if they do it would be on our hands to find a way out...

 

[skerritthegreen]

But it will be with a specific throw-away character made just for it

Hopefully not to throw away, since much of the season 5 plot is informed by the success or failure of what the season 4 PCs do, you might actually get some significant use out of being one of the survivors of Barovia.

 

[skerritthegreen]

Given a whole year of Season 4 stuck in the mists theme, any chance of having some sporadic standard mods through out?
Maybe following up on the previous seasons' stories....

The Epic which we are distributing to even more cons this season (seasons are 6 months, not a year) is directly tied to the Phlan story. As for random extra adventures I won't say no, but there is currently no budget for it. Season 4 is an odd situation (the authors were already paid out of the previous budget, and any money they get out of the DMsguild is gravy for them), since we did not allocate any layout/editing/etc... resources for additional adventures, but now there's this new DMsguild thing. We'll have to see what happens, but I wouldn't count on it.

 

[Tyranthraxus]

This is a bit of me tongue in Cheek,

But Id like to see the option in the last or semi final last scenario for Season 4, to have an option for a character on the table to become a Darklord and be removed from the campaign forever. Now I cant really fathom a reason how this would happen... perhaps a character has to kill a lot of innocents to convince the Dark Powers to let the others get out but I think it would be awesome.

 

[Pauper]

For which you have to hunt down a group that just so happens to have a regular missing just at this point just when you have time.

If you and your group played the Season 4 adventures out of order, wouldn't you, by definition, have a group that would be highly motivated to play the remainder of the hard-back adventure?

Or, if you're the only one who played the adventures out of order, you clearly already are well-aware of the groups in your area and what adventures they're running on a regular basis.

This seems like a self-correcting problem, as described.

--
Pauper

 

[kalani]

This is a bit of me tongue in Cheek,

But Id like to see the option in the last or semi final last scenario for Season 4, to have an option for a character on the table to become a Darklord and be removed from the campaign forever. Now I cant really fathom a reason how this would happen... perhaps a character has to kill a lot of innocents to convince the Dark Powers to let the others get out but I think it would be awesome.

In earlier editions, characters could be tempted by the "Dark Embrace", which enticed characters to commit ever increasing acts of evil in order to receive a blessing or boon. Stage 1 was extremely easy to succumb to, only requiring a minor act of evil (lying, cheating, deceit, etc), while the last stages (stages 4 and stages 5) required heinous acts in order to draw the attention of the Dark Powers. Each stage was accompanied by a saving throw (similar to a madness save) representing whether the Dark Powers took notice of the act and granted you a boon.

By Stage 3, characters would start showing physical manifestations of their Embrace, misshapen limbs, bulging/cat-like/different colored eyes, scales, fur, etc. Each stage also granted increasingly more powerful boons. Upon accepting Stage 4 of the embrace, the character becomes a villainous NPC under the control of the DM, forever bound to the demiplane (but free to travel to different domains within). They usually undergo a dramatic transformation at this point while the Dark Powers cloak them in protective magics that make it difficult for their true nature to be revealed.

At stage 5, the next time the character enters the mists, they part to reveal a new domain (which can be as small as a single room or structure, or as large as a country), and the character becomes a Darklord of that domain. Stage 5 was always subject to DM fiat, as the character had already become an NPC at stage 4.

I personally would love to see the Dark Embrace return, however it should be known that (assuming the stages remain the same), characters would be forcibly retired upon reaching Stage 4 (or equivalent). In fact, it is entirely possible they might be forced to retire prior to that (esp. if alignment shifts to NE or CE occur at Stage 3).

 

[Mirtek]

If you and your group played the Season 4 adventures out of order, wouldn't you, by definition, have a group that would be highly motivated to play the remainder of the hard-back adventure?

Or, if you're the only one who played the adventures out of order, you clearly already are well-aware of the groups in your area and what adventures they're running on a regular basis.

This seems like a self-correcting problem, as described.

--
Pauper

I don't have a group, I only play in the online Region whenever i happens to be able to snipe a spot at a CET friendly (rare and quickly signed up for twice over) time or sometimes feel like playing at 3am on the weekends (and can get a spot before it's signed over)

S4 severely limits the chances to just sign up when theres a suitable spot by making most spots firbidden

There are only two groups running through published adventures, they're session are always signed up like 15 players for the 6 spots and they give preference to those playing since session 1. And neither is in CET friendly time and honestly I have no interest in playing the published adventures anywax

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

I had one Ravenloft campaign wherein a PC followed the path of the Dark Embrace. It ended up with everyone else in the group dead, and the PC a Darklord of a small domain. It could’ve been epic and awesome, but at the time we were a little too young to handle those themes and events maturely.

In earlier editions, characters could be tempted by the "Dark Embrace", which enticed characters to commit ever increasing acts of evil in order to receive a blessing or boon.

 

[kalani]

Yeah, Ravenloft requires a great deal of maturity even if playing the good guys - just to create the right atmosphere of gothic lovecraftian horror. Go overboard, and it just becomes modern gore/suspense; too little maturity, and you end up with murder with little motive (the Dark Powers want to give people rope and want to see into the psyche of their "guests").... Being a psychopathic murderer is boring. Characters in Ravenloft should be multi-faceted, and all have a tragic element to their stories.

 

[Pauper]

If I may put on my pedant hat for a moment, 'gothic' and 'Lovecraftian' horror are not really the same thing, and there isn't a better source for the distinctions that Lovecraft himself, in his essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature".

For Lovecraft, the origins of gothic horror can be traced well into humanity's past, from Roman poetry to Scandinavian eddas and even Beowulf, but identifies the beginning of the gothic tradition with Henry Walpole's "The Castle of Otranto". Gothic romances thrives through the end of the 18th and into the 19th centuries, but a different strain of what Lovecraft calls 'weird fiction' begins to branch off from the Gothic romance tradition with the stories of Edgar Allen Poe. Lovecraft himself was solidly in the 'weird fiction' tradition, where the terrors were mainly human and of human origin rather than exotic -- in this, Lovecraft's glowing praise for Mary Shelley and her work "Frankenstein" make perfect sense.

/pedant

--
Pauper