D&D General Ravenloft: Monsters vs Darklords

[Bedrockgames]

The analogy that comes to mind for me for the 5e CoS soulless is finding out you are a human in the Matrix, there are a few other humans there as well but most people you see are just Matrix AI.

My issue with this is it just makes the setting feel small and meaningless to me. It makes everything about the player characters and the domain lords if you do this

 

[Bedrockgames]

They were pretty central to the "Horror's Harvest" adventure in Dungeon #38, as I recall.

I think too, as the line evolved it just became a bit natural to bring in other flavors of horror on occasion. Like I said, the Guide to the Created actually did a very good job of bringing slasher into it in a workable way. I think part of it is doing it in a way that fits the setting. I wasn't a fan of the multi-horror genre approach they took with the new book, but that doesn't mean you have to be locked into all pure gothic influences either

 

[Voadam]

They were pretty central to the "Horror's Harvest" adventure in Dungeon #38, as I recall.

Could be, I completely left Dungeon for a friend to be his source of adventures for our group in the 2e era when he DMd and did not see any of them myself, sticking to Greyhawk and Ravenloft modules.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Ravenloft has had a little room for this since the first Monstrous Compendium appendix.

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A lot of people though feel that a fantasy Invasion of the Body Snatchers does not quite fit the traditional gothic horror Ravenloft vibe and I never saw one in a Ravenloft product outside of the monster compendiums.

Just another thought on this subject. I never saw this used at a table either, and never ran it myself. I didn't have a problem with he flavor of it but I don't remember ever finding a way to use it in my own campaigns. There were a lot of monsters in the monstrous compendium . I had I-III and some of the entries I found useful but I often found standard monsters modified using the Van Richten books to be more useful. I don't think that was due to the flavor. I think it was due to some of the entries in these monster books maybe not having enough time to germinate before publication. They did come up with some cool posters for the line though.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Could be, I completely left Dungeon for a friend to be his source of adventures for our group in the 2e era when he DMd and did not see any of them myself, sticking to Greyhawk and Ravenloft modules.

The only Dungeon adventure for Ravenloft I remember playing was one set in Valachan (which I found useful for setting material info more than the adventure itself)

 

[Micah Sweet]

The analogy that comes to mind for me for the 5e CoS soulless is finding out you are a human in the Matrix, there are a few other humans there as well but most people you see are just Matrix AI.

Except in the Matrix, nearly everyone was human.

 

[Shardstone]

Except in the Matrix, nearly everyone was human.

Its an analogy man cmon, u got the point

 

[Micah Sweet]

Its an analogy man cmon, u got the point

Ok, soulless is quite different from that to me, so the analogy doesn't really work. In any case, the most reasonable (to me) way to take that analogy is to see it as a call for PC specialness, which doesn't really work for me either.

 

[Remathilis]

Ok, soulless is quite different from that to me, so the analogy doesn't really work. In any case, the most reasonable (to me) way to take that analogy is to see it as a call for PC specialness, which doesn't really work for me either.

It's not just PCs though. All major heroes (like Van Ricten) and villains (including Darklords) have souls. It's the common farmers, craftsmen, and merchants that have a chance of not having a soul.

 

[Voadam]

It's the common farmers, craftsmen, and merchants that have a chance of not having a soul.

True, just a 90% chance of not having a soul.

"Barovians are made of flesh and blood. They are born, they live, they age, and they die. But not all of them-only about one in every ten-have souls."