D&D General The goal of your Ravenloft campaign

[Zaukrie]

I love Ravenloft's ideas and themes....but have always used it as a side story of sorts.

How do you (or plan to) use Ravenloft for a long-term campaign? What is the goal, if no one can ever leave or be saved? I'd think a goal of somehow temporarily killing darklords so others could somehow escape would be interesting (though, others will eventually be brought in by the Dark Powers.....). I'm not sure I want to run/play a bleak (how I'd feel about it) if the only goal was survival.

 

[Steampunkette]

2 big ones:

1) As a backdrop to tell my own story.
The Darklords are great and all, but they're far from the only story you can tell in a given realm. Monster hunting campaigns can exist where characters play the likes of Van Richten for themselves, either fighting a variety of dangers in one realm, or traveling realm-to-realm to fight in different locales. Similarly, you could run a good old fashioned D&D campaign in somewhere like Mordent without ever telling the players about Lord Godefrey's machinations and just have them doing a bunch of normal D&D stuff in a spooky and haunted region.

Could even have the Ghost Train or the Carnival come to town for a side-story.

2) Episodic Adventures.
Use each Domain as a stopping off point in a journey with a bunch of quests and interesting encounters before you move on to the next one and enjoy an entirely different type of horror.


Not every story has to have the big climax be "Fix everything" or "Escape". A character born and raised in Ravenloft wouldn't -know- that their world isn't alone. Wouldn't -know- that they're imprisoned in this place of horrors. Even if they found out more about the Dark Powers and whatnot, they still might not realize there are other worlds out there to inhabit, or that those worlds could possibly be -better- than Ravenloft.

After all, if your character learns that Ravenloft is an ever-expanding collection of terrible Darklords each with their own tragic messed up story, wouldn't the worlds they -come- from be similarly terrible? They keep producing Strahds and Godefreys and stuff, so they can't be -that- great.

 

[billd91]

I'm gonna pick up VRGtR to see if I can use some of the horror techniques for later chapters of the Age of Worms campaign I'm running. There's a lot of potential horror to tap into there.
As far as Ravenloft proper goes, I'll consider running the Strahd campaign afterwards. Several of my current players experienced it when I gave it the 3e treatment, so I may need to do it with another table.

 

[Steampunkette]

I'm gonna pick up VRGtR to see if I can use some of the horror techniques for later chapters of the Age of Worms campaign I'm running. There's a lot of potential horror to tap into there.
As far as Ravenloft proper goes, I'll consider running the Strahd campaign afterwards. Several of my current players experienced it when I gave it the 3e treatment, so I may need to do it with another table.

Once you get it, I -beg- of you to look at Darkon. It is, by far, the most drastically reimagined of the Domains of Dread and it is practically -begging- someone to make a Curse of Strahd style "Roll it up and see what happens" campaign.

 

[Voadam]

When I ran a Ravenloft campaign in the 2e era it was a full ongoing sandbox core setting with lots of bad stuff going on actively in different places (lots of 2e modules) that the PCs could get involved in or flee from. The good guy PCs alternated between wow this is bad we should do something violent to stop it, to wow this is bad and beyond our violence pay grade, don't unleash/stir up the massive evil we found.

Being a multi-domain core with actual freedom to go from place to place was pretty key to that. When an actual darklord closed a border it was a significant disruption and might or might not have anything to do with the PCs' activities and was impactful because it was a change from the normal.

Ravenloft always struck me as the place where heroes would be called on the most, there was lots of active bad stuff on many levels to check out and get involved in dealing with.

 

[overgeeked]

I’ll be making a kind of catch all horror domain to run adventures in. With the new book being explicit about the nightmare logic of the setting I can actively ignore long-term continuity as part of the setting to unsettle the players. I play a lot of Call of Cthulhu so I will be porting a lot of things in from there. Scenarios, concepts, monsters, tomes, etc.

I do like the idea of a Carnival-based game. The PCs are all picked up and taken in by the Carnival and that’s the impetus for their movements through the Land of Mists. Mostly an episodic thing with a few leads and clues and missions in a town between performances and they’re off to the next town. Isolde’s rules against killing or bringing harm to the Carnival would be a nice...restraint to put on the PCs to see what kind of gameplay we could have without constant combat and killing.

I’m also really tempted to convert Horror on the Orient Express (an amazing if sprawling CoC adventure path) and use Cyre 1313 as the train. Using different Domains and locations from across various D&D settings as stops along the way. I think that would be fun. If anyone tries to leave the train or let the train leave without them, well, that’s what the Mists are for.

 

[Charlaquin]

I’m also really tempted to convert Horror on the Orient Express (an amazing if sprawling CoC adventure path) and use Cyre 1313 as the train. Using different Domains and locations from across various D&D settings as stops along the way. I think that would be fun. If anyone tries to leave the train or let the train leave without them, well, that’s what the Mists are for.

that’s an awesome idea!

 

[iserith]

The goal is to make as many pop culture references to horror movies per unit of time as possible for however long it takes for it to get old.

"They're here... roll initiative."

 

[Tonguez]

PCs work for Dr Vikta Mordenheim collecting corpses for her experiments, harrassing academic opponent, hunting down rogue golems, quelling peasant uprisings. But then you begin to have memories that are not your own, somebody recognises you but calls you a name you do not know. You discover hidden secrets, that you are not who you think you are, your body is not yours and Dr Viktra Mordenheim is keeping the truth from you.

 

[Tonguez]

I also want to create a Slime Queen Kingdom where the entire Domain is the Darklord. Essentials the whole Domain is a gigantic mimic blob that can manifests buildings, landscapes and NPCs from its slime body. I’m just trying to imagine why a Slime Queen who can absorb PCs into her body would let them have an adventure too ....