Ravenloft: Fun? Scary? Questions for my game.

[InVinoVeritas]

I love DMing Ravenloft. The world just asks for so much emotion, you can have a whole lot of fun.

One of the campaigns I ran (and kept notes for, just in case I want to run it again) is A Matter of Taste, in which the PCs end up stuck in the middle of a political and economic fight between Borca and Ghastria. In one adventure, half the party ended up together under the protection of Ivana Boritsi, and the other half under Ivan Dilisnya's. The two nobles hate each other, and they're known poisoners. They arrived at the opera on the same night. The script wrote itself.

The trick is, don't make a Ravenloft campaign just "a horde of vampires and/or werewolves attack." Make it personal. Make it count. Losing one's life is a great fear, but losing one's soul is even worse. One of the PCs in the above campaign became a very close friend of Ivana. Another was killed by her.

Tempt the PCs. Scare them. Make them want something, and make them fear that want. Find out what they're truly made of. That is what I think Ravenloft does best.

 

[Terwox]

Tempt the PCs. Scare them. Make them want something, and make them fear that want. Find out what they're truly made of. That is what I think Ravenloft does best.

Hmm. Currently the party is on a quest to redeem the sword of an older paladin (if you follow Warcraft at all, it's named Ashbringer -- Mograine's sword that he was slain with by his son, although, the son does not have the sword in my world, the party recovered it from a church vault in an overrun city...) The sword itself is warped and corrupted, though it is still a powerful weapon against the undead (currently, undead struck Fort DC 20 or be disintigrated if struck.)

Although it's a dirty GM trick that's kinda cheap, I figure I might have Strahd lure them to Barovia with the idea to capture Ashbringer instead of the Sunsword, and corrupt the sword fully to where he could use it against the living. Could stack the fortune teller's deck, I suppose!

So, I could have Ashbringer either not function, get stolen, or best yet simply cause corruption (True20, remember) when it is used to destroy undead in Strahd's domain...

Edena, it would be neat to bring orcs to Strahd's domain... I think I will play up that he is a dark elf -- elves are immortal in my world, and have been gone for a couple thousand years ala Tolkien's elves leaving while the world was in peril. Dark elves are simply elves who gave in to the corruption of evil magic, which warps their appearance. But, if the party gets lured there and then stuck there, it would be hard to politic that way (EDIT: by bringing orcs in)... and, well, they're more headstrong.

They're also currently travelling with some gypsies... Gypsies are (very briefly) elven-descended werecrows. I may simply have this be the Vistani (whose motives I don't quite understand) who may lead them to Barovia to test the wielder of Ashbringer, or as a component of purifying the sword (defeating a powerful vampire has to go a few miles in redemption terms, yeah? ) Of course, being inscrutable gypsies, you can't just come out and say this. Or maybe they don't know details, they just know where the characters need to go...

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

I'd say once you hit the higher level and removed one or two darklords, I think it's time to move the campaign to a different topic:

Namely, the Why of Ravenloft. Why does Ravenloft exist? Who created it? What are the Dark Powers? Is it possible to destroy Ravenloft - and if so, would that be a good thing?

At the culmination of the campaign, the players should, at least for a brief moment, have the fate of Ravenloft in their hands - and whether it gets destroyed or continues to exist, whatever choice they might make will have horrible consequences, just different ones.

Afterwards, any PCs who have not succumbed to evil are removed from Ravenloft, where they can try to create new lives for themselves, knowing that they have to live with the consequences of their choices. If any of the PCs are evil, then they will become new darklords - seeds of a new Ravenloft, if neccessary.

 

[billd91]

I'm running I6-Ravenloft right now (well not right-right now, but during our regularly scheduled games) for 4 10th level characters. I kitted Strahd out as a CR 16 vampire (necromancer 10/fighter 4) to incorporate his martial past as well as his current wizardry. I plan on using him to harass the daylights out of the PCs, who have plenty of weapons at their disposal. One of them is armed with a pair of magical silver sickles, so once Strahd notices that, he'll try to deal with him from a distance. They also have a variation of the "sunsword" in I6 - a paladin's holy weapon at partial power, that can be completed by relics found within Ravenloft itself.

I've set Barovia in the Bandit Kingdoms area, pre-Greyhawk wars. It sits in the crux of the Fellreev forest, just north of Freehold. Strahd was an officer leading the Great Kingdom's conquest and pacification of the region. But it was his younger brother Sergei, a Knight Protoector of the Great Kingdom, who was awarded the fief as a reward... thus setting up the bitterness that grew around the love triangle and Strahd's ultimate deal with evil.

When it comes to nasty confrontations with Strahd, I think recruiting the dragon statues and the gargoyles is getting a bit nasty. Those creatures are there mainly to harass characters trying to leave, and I'll leave them like that.