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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mouseferatu" data-source="post: 2211504" data-attributes="member: 1288">This one's context-specific. If you don't know Ravenloft, it won't mean a thing to you.I was running a Ravenloft mini-campaign, with characters native to Barovia. The plot of the campaign had them pitted against Strahd--not in a "find the villain and beat him up" way, because that doesn't work in Ravenloft with the Dark Lords (and it breaks the mood, anyway), but in a "He's got the person we're trying to save, what the hell do we do about it?" way.Now, half the players in the group knew Ravenloft very well, but they were being very good about sticking with in-character knowledge.So they're having a discussion about this with an NPC, and it comes up that King Azalin of Darkon is a major adversary of Strahd's.Out of character, everyone knows that Azalin is a lich, evil to the core, and--if anything--worse than Strahd himself.In character, they know only that he's a powerful king and wizard.So what do they decide? "Hmm. If he's Strahd's enemy, maybe we can make him an ally. Let's go visit Azalin."My jaw did, indeed, drop. In my entire DMing career, there have only been two incidents that were so completely outside my realm of expectation that I had to stop the game early and do extra planning for the next session, because I truly had no clue where to go. This was one of them.It turned out great, and they loved my presentation of Azalin the next week. But for that week, I was well and truly stumped. And you can bet they got a boatload of extra XP for it, too. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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