Ravenloft: Masque of the Red Death. Anyone have it?

[qstor]

Hi Sammy,

I used to be in the Kargatane - My 15 Minutes of Fame with that were the Sherlock Holmes MotRD articles in the Kargatane netbooks. I remembered you from the Kargatane message boards mentioning working on your own 3e MotRD when 3e first came out.

Hope all is well with you.

I LOVED those articles and the ones about the war of the worlds Are you involved with the Living Death campaign?

Mike

 

[Achan hiArusa]

Power up in 3.5e MotRD

I think the plethora of talents gives too much of a powerup all around for characters. Things like Savant, Reduce Damage Reduction, and every other talent can seriously change the tone of the game, making it more heroic (those few that are appropriate can be turned into feats like Contact). In the original 9th level spells had a -9 check modifier giving a 45% chance of getting a spell off with an 18 intelligence. Since the spells took 9 rounds to cast such power spells like meteor swarm were impractical. Sure if you want to do the Mummy Returns type game that's fine, its your game. But I think the box set intended a much more planned type game.

In the book, the bookish type Adepts are far, far less powerful than their wizard counterparts. However, the Soldier is just as powerful as his D&D counterpart. Considering that the classes in the PH are supposed to be balanced against each other, this means we have one of the Fox sisters adventuring with Jaret Gax. Having a hypercompetent fighter with less powerful companions again ruins the atmosphere of the original game.

 

[jaerdaph]

I LOVED those articles and the ones about the war of the worlds Are you involved with the Living Death campaign?

Thanks, Mike - I'm glad you liked them.

I was never involved with Living Death or any other RPGA campaigns though. They did have some excellent MotRD material though - especially the articles by Andrew Hauptmann.

 

[jaerdaph]

I think the plethora of talents gives too much of a powerup all around for characters. Things like Savant, Reduce Damage Reduction, and every other talent can seriously change the tone of the game, making it more heroic (those few that are appropriate can be turned into feats like Contact).

Yeah, that's definitely true. I think if I run MotRD ever again, I might go with Mongoose's OGL Horror rules - build from the Modern SRD but a substantial power down from d20 Modern character classes and FX nonetheless - and loot additional equipment, occupations etc. from WotC's upcoming d20 Past.

I'm going to be interested in seeing how d20 Past handles the Victorian era horror campaign material mentioned in the ad copy. And what will that campaign be called? MotRD, MotRD with a new name (ala some of the classic campaign settings renamed in d20 Future), or something more off the wall like For Fairy, Queen and Country?

Guess we'll see in March.

 

[Achan hiArusa]

Equipment

I don't have to loot equipment from any game supplement. I have a full photocopy of Sears's 1893 catalog.

But, sigh, my players just don't like playing normals. Though they enjoyed my last Kult game (I used the new WoD as the engine) they would rather play with "kool powerz."

I did some analysis on guns in MotrD and realized to get the deadliness of guns in that setting a 1d6 gun should have an 18-20/x3 critical, a 2d6 gun should have an 18-20/x4 critical, and a 4d6 gun should have a 17-20/x4 critical. If you really want the analysis I can show you, but it does involve finding convergent sums of a Riemann-Zeta Series.

 

[jaerdaph]

If you really want the analysis I can show you, but it does involve finding convergent sums of a Riemann-Zeta Series.

Maybe next Christmas.

 

[Krieg]

I LOVED those articles and the ones about the war of the worlds

That definitely sounds interesting.

Hmm, any chance the article is still available somewhere? (I didn't see it anywhere on the remaining bits of Kargatane.)

 

[jaerdaph]

That definitely sounds interesting.

Hmm, any chance the article is still available somewhere? (I didn't see it anywhere on the remaining bits of Kargatane.)

Sherlock Holmes and the Red Death Part One is in the Book of Sorrows netbook download, and SH and the RD Part Two is in the Book of Secrets.

All the Book of S___ netbooks have MotRD sections with a lot of great articles, and the Crossroads of the Gothic Earth netbook has a lot of great locations, forbidden lore and adventure ideas.

Hope you enjoy them.

 

[Achan hiArusa]

Netbooks

Get an account on Groups.yahoo.com and find the Masque of the Red Death group and join it. Somebody was kind enough to download several files for use.

 

[Krieg]

Thanks to you both.