MNblockhead
A Title Much Cooler Than Anything on the Old Site
Confirmed. It is taken directly from the 1e I6 module.
Curse of Strahd: What is Straud von Zarovich's Title? [SPOILERS ALERT]
Confirmed. It is taken directly from the 1e I6 module.
MNblockhead
A Title Much Cooler Than Anything on the Old Site
Interesting. I never played any of the Ravenloft setting stuff. I played I6 back in the 80s and that was it until 5e CoS. I read up on some of the 2e-4e canon and it wasn't my thing, it all detracted from the simple but powerful story of I6 and CoS, IMO.
If I look only at the 5e material, however, I come to a similar conclusion without the two Barovias (PM v Demiplane). His family lost their kingdom and their king. Strahd exacted revenge and set up home in a new land, but never go around to consolidating his power into a Kingdom (or served another King who backed Strahd's campaigns against some joint enemy).
So, he was a Count/Duke. But most Barovians reject his rule and just see him as "the Devil Strahd," a monstrous Tyrant. He sees himself as not only the legitimate ruler of the land (Count), of "of the land." But also, I believe that he does still have the desire to escape Barovia and conquer again. Reclaim his birthright and become a great king. It provides another motivation for him to find one worthy to replace him.
ccs
41st lv DM
Even more likely that it was Hickman & Hickman (husband & wife) as this stuff is straight out of the original module - wich was an adaptation of a home game of theirs.
Agreed - though the dirty secret is that AD&D adventures were pretty much all like this, it's just that nobody remembers the really crappy modules. (The Forest Oracle, anyone?)
To my mind, though, the best part of the Ravenloft Campaign Setting were the sourcebooks -- they invoked the mood of the setting and gave great ideas for you to put together your own stories in the domain, which is really the point of a setting, right?
Here is my recommended reading list for the Ravenloft Campaign Setting:
Carnival - Inspired by a documentary film about a carnival freakshow, it does a really interesting job of explaining through characterization how different people come to view deviance and variance from the 'normal', and ultimately gets the reader asking the all-important question, "Just what is normal, anyway?" This is especially relevant in a world built by evil to be a prison of evil. The novel "Carnival of Fear" is a prequel of sorts to the situation in this adventure -- some of the characters in the sourcebook appear in the novel, but the sourcebook itself is set after the events of the novel have already occurred.
Van Richten's Guide to the Vistani - The Van Richten's Guide are generally very solid sourcebooks, with a good deal of storytelling included -- there's a reason Van Richten is such an iconic character in the setting! -- but this one is in my opinion the best, as well as one of the best sourcebooks ever written for AD&D. It's also a great antidote to the common conception of 'anything done beyond I6 was a corruption of the concept of Ravenloft' -- the Hickmans really didn't do much with the Vistani other than setting them up as Strahd's lackeys and as stereotypical mooks, and Madame Eva is pretty much just a glorified exposition generator in the module. It's the setting that really fleshes out the Vistani and makes them an interesting culture.
The Ravenloft Gazetteers - These third edition sourcebooks were published by an imprint of White Wolf and written by a group of authors known as 'the Kargatane'; a group of freelance designers who had been involved with the Ravenloft setting for some time. (One of them, John W. Mangrum, was a co-author of Carnival, above.) Far from 'outliers', the Kargatane were, for all practical purposes, the keepers of canon lore for the Ravenloft campaign setting, and the Gazetteers do an admirable job of both trying to incorporate all the disparate lore of the setting as contained in various AD&D era adventures, sourcebooks, and other sources, as well as provide more mundane setting details (what are the common plants of Barovia?, for example). They also incorporate an interesting story of their own, as the books are written from the point of view of a chronicler hired by a mysterious patron to travel the Dread Realms and catalog them, and in that process, it is revealed that the patron has a much deeper plan in mind, and the chronicler herself is much more than even she knows. Really good stuff.
As an honorable mention, I have to call out Thoughts of Darkness, the 'cosmic horror' adventure set in the faux-Lovecraftian domain of Bluetspur. Not because the adventure is good -- if it is 'good', it's 'good' in the same sense that Tomb of Horrors is 'good'. The adventure explicitly tells you to screw with your players, including rules that PCs can't get restorative rest in the domain and how their abilities degrade as they stagger through restless night after restless night fighting unavoidable battles against their greatest enemies in their dreams, to treat the domain lord as a psionicist with unlimited psionic points and a -10 to all saving throws against his psionic powers, and repeated requests to have one or more players attempt a 50/50 roll, with failure resulting in you the DM simply saying "Never mind." (My personal favorite is the assertion -- in the Introduction, not the module proper -- that once the party reaches the place they are headed, simply being knocked unconscious results in being teleported to a prison area, revived, and made into a psychic thrall of the mind flayers running the complex. Now that's old-school!) The Introduction to the module -- the first page in particular -- is itself a masterwork in how to run an 'old school' AD&D game, and precisely the sort of thing that 5e and other modern RPGs have abandoned as 'unfun' for most current players. So maybe don't convert this one!
--
Pauper
MNblockhead
A Title Much Cooler Than Anything on the Old Site
Okay, I'll check them out. Do you have any specific ones I should start with?
MNblockhead
A Title Much Cooler Than Anything on the Old Site
[MENTION=17607]Pauper[/MENTION] Thanks. I've bought Carnival and VR's Guide to the Vistani. I don't think I'll ever run a general Demiplanes of Dread campaign, but I'm happy to cherry pick some good adventures to run as stand-alone adventures or place in other campaigns.
The Van Richten guide may be helpful for my CoS campaign though. Though there is so much going on already, that I really don't need any extra plot hoots or detail. But could be a fun read and may help inform how I play the Vistani in their continued interactions with the characters.
The Van Richten guide may be helpful for my CoS campaign though. Though there is so much going on already, that I really don't need any extra plot hoots or detail. But could be a fun read and may help inform how I play the Vistani in their continued interactions with the characters.
I think that’s fairly common. I’ve not yet met a group who doesn’t!
