Bedrockgames
Legend
Flesh golems and other types of created are a nice customizable threat in terms of challenge that can be in any number of domains, and pretty well suited to Dementlieu
D&D General Reading Ravenloft the setting
Bedrockgames
Legend
It also informs details on the ground. A lot of times I would start with the dark lord to see what sorts of npcs and potential villains who might exist, even the dark it’d has zero interest in the PCs (focusing on Amazon lower level official for example). Again Dementlieu never resonated with me personally, so I never really explored it but used Borca and Dorvinia all the time
Faolyn
(she/her)
But only if they're really artistically made. None of those mish-mashed, poorly-sewn together lumps of flesh.
I can definitely see statue-like stone golems and stained glass golems as being among the more common types.
I've long had an idea involving Victorian-style golem taxidermy grotesques; I just haven't had the opportunity to use it yet.
Bedrockgames
Legend
Definitely. The Guide to the Created (probably my favorite Van Richten book) certainly gives enough tools for that, and I think something like the Olimpia character in the gothic short story Sandman (the automata) would be a good fit. Once I did a porcelain golem which might also have the right kind of look.
LuisCarlos17f
Legend
A mind-controller foe can be a serious menace. There are some examples from the fiction, I mentioned the movie "the village of the dammed" but also we can remember "the pusher" from X-Files, the purple man from Marvel comics or the serial killer Oliver Knox from the teleserie "the 4400".
4400.fandom.com
If Dementlieu is a dread domain with a potential for psionic or telepathic powers, then a future conflict with Kalidnay and Bluetspur could happen. Yes, the illithid could create spies to be sent to other domains.
Oliver Knox
Oliver Knox was a 4400 returnee who disappeared August 22nd, 1983, from Friday Harbor, Washington. He was, and is, a serial killer. After returning, Knox began using his ability to make random people kill his victims for him, but NTAC eventually found out it was him and imprisoned Knox...
4400.fandom.com
If Dementlieu is a dread domain with a potential for psionic or telepathic powers, then a future conflict with Kalidnay and Bluetspur could happen. Yes, the illithid could create spies to be sent to other domains.
humble minion
Legend
Mordent.
First of all, I have to say i absolutely love the atmosphere and aesthetic that gets painted here. Very Wuthering Heights, Hound of the Baskervilles, and all sorts of Eng lish ghost stories. Lonely manor houses, misty fens and desolate moors, cold grey seas hammering storm-driven against white cliffs, carriages getting lost on the muddy roads and losing a wheel in the rain, a mile or two down from Briarfell Hall which the old shepherd tells you, shaking his head sadly, has been abandoned since that terrible business with the old master's son 20 years ago this very night...
This section takes up over 50 pages, which is more than any other domain so far except Darkon which is 20 times the size with 20 times the population. Apparently the development of this didn't go entirely smoothly. Borca was meant to be a fourth domain in this book but wasn't ready by deadline, and I suspect Mordent got padded out to meet wordcount. There was a few oblique references from the Kargatane that they weren't really happy with this section, and Azalin does make a few 'why are you bothering me with this irrelevent trivia?' margin notes, which I can't help but interpret as quasi-editorial comment. But also, Mordent is one of the heartland domains of the '1800s' north-west Core, which the 3e line in particular emphasised as the default assumption of the setting, vs the more medieval domains like Nova Vaasa, Hazlan, or even Barovia. Perhaps the high word count was an artefact of that attitude and emphasis.
We have another overwhelmingly human, low population, gunpowder-era domain which is suspicious of magic. I get that this is the gothic aesthetic, but jeez, I kinda wish they'd poop or get off the pot. If you want a demihumanless, low-magic setting, then knuckle down and roll out actual restrictions, rather than this passive-aggressive stuff. Or else knuckle down in the opposite direction, and put in the work and be creative enough to work dwarves etc into the Mordent aesthetic, rather than stuffing it all in the too-hard basket. C'mon, there's a whole genre of era-appropriate Welsh and Cornish coal mine ghost stories, if you can't adapt those to Mordent dwarves, then you're just not trying.
History here is vague, and the vagueness is rooted in the real-life publishing origin of the place. Mordent first appeared in House on Gryphon Hill, the second ever Ravenloft module (i believe), and one that came out before the foundations of what became the wider setting - domains, darklords etc - were established. So in that module we've got both Strahd and Azalin wandering around the place, as well as a possible alternate origin for Strahd, which obviously presents ... problems ... for anyone trying to reconcile it with what Ravenloft became. Anyway Wilfred Godefroy was a ghost whose haunted house featured in the module, and when Ravenloft actually got written up as a unified setting later, it seems to me he was anointed Darklord almost by default, being the most powerful bad guy left in the place. But more on him later.
Culturally, this is the genteel English countryside. Conservative, hardworking, prim, practical, insular, pious, mostly goodhearted. I do like that the writers have portrayed the culture as a mixed bag - you can find pluses or minuses to the place, NPCs can be allies or enemies and still fit perfectly into the milieu, and it's all pretty internally consistent. It has the weaknesses of its strengths. You've got a noble class and a commoner class, though there's the remnants of a 'high' noble class who've basically all died out now (except the Weathermays, and the ghosts of the Godefroys) and while the nobility is class-conscious there's not the sort of vast gap between rich and poor and blatant decadence that we see in Dementlieu. Of questionable relevance, there are pages upon pages detailing the histories and fates of the many now-defunct other high noble families, which could provide some plot hooks if you felt like mining them, but honestly feels a lot like filler and page count that could have better been used on one of the other, much larger, domains in the book. You've got the local branch of the church of Ezra whose anchorites basically take the role of the village vicars. You've got a trading town at the south of the domain which all the locals believe is shockingly scandalous and libertine, but is honestly pretty staid in the context of Dementlieu, Richemulot, Borca etc. All this does make playing in Mordent easy, Most people have at least a passing familiarity with Jane Austen, the Brontes, Thomas Hardy, Georgette Heyer etc, and that's the world and manners that Mordent is trying to evoke. Pick a Pride and Prejudice character and stick them in Ravenloft and you've got a perfectly good Mordent PC.
I do like the portrayal of Mordent as close to the Mists. Ezra is closely associated with the Mists, and this is one of her church's strongholds. Godefroy closes the borders by means of disorienting Mists that turn travellers around to where they came, and there's all sorts of mist-related monsters here - mist ferrymen etc. If you're running a game in Mordent, this gives you lots of opportunities to divert unsuspecting PCs into other domains as they travel - Ghastria, the Endless Road, Dominiaria, Forlorn, Shadowborn Manor would all be great and thematic options, and I'm sure there's others.
It gets my pedantic teeth on edge that the domain is called 'Mordent' but the town is called 'Mordentshire', that's not how shires work, aaargh.
Godefroy is a mixed bag as a darklord. The House on Gryphon Hill is a great centrepiece for the domain, the image of this lightless frowning old manor looming over the town while everyone tries to go about their daily business and not to look at it is a great one. It casts a long physical and metaphorical shadow, and I like that. However, Godefroy. As a ghost haunting a house, he's fine. He's a vicious, domineering, awful old tyrant who murdered his wife and daughter in a rage because he wanted a son, and then was driven to suicide by their ghosts. Nowadays he's a monstrously powerful spirit, but his curse dictates that he's still helpless before them.
But Mordent is an entire domain, not a house. He's been able to roam all throughout the domain since at least Domains of Dread, but this book has him actually starting to use this routinely to spy on notable personages, and expands his powers to include binding the spirits of anyone who dies in Mordentshire into servitude in the House on Gryphon Hill. I'm not sure I'm a fan of this. Ghosts are the ultimate obsessives, fixated on their deaths or their resentments or whatever, trapped static in a damnation loop forever. They're not just incorporeal bad people. But Godefroy is written here as having ambitions, plans, strategies. I get why they did it, they wanted to bring him a bit more into the action and give him more agency, otherwise Mordent is a domain where the darklord is basically irrelevant and just lurks in one building waiting for adventurers to come along, but it does seem ... unghostly. And I think the writers knew it, because they conspicuously don't really given any concrete examples of what Godefroy's ambitions or plans actually are. They talk about him wanting to get revenge on the Weathermay family (his wife was a Weathermay) but that doesn't really seem a major focus. He needs an obsession, a burning motivation, and he just doesn't have one.
From a gameplay point of view - Mordent is one of my favourite domains. If you want a weekend-in-hell, then there's some great stuff here, especially with the way the Weathermay family is described here. Jules is a stunning character, the elderly but still sharp quasi-ruler of the place, he's devoted his life to governing, but can see ghosts after a brush with death a few years back and is starting to suspect a lot about Godefroy and the House. But he's got a case of noblesse oblige, and his descendents are all more interested in monster hunting rather than duty to Mordent, and one of them is probably a werewolf, and his son-in-law is being blackmailed by Godefroy. There's a really great story to be told here, the last cathartic crusade of Lord Jules as the career politician takes up the sword again, and the next generation of Weathermays having all their secrets come out and deciding what their destiny is, and a climatic expedition to the House on Gryphon Hill to face Godefroy.
As a setting for a longer campaign, it works very well too. It's not as darklord-centric as many domains so even low-level PCs have stuff to do, there's plot hooks all over the place, and the nature of the place means that PCs will likely be meeting the same NPCs a lot, which gives you time and scope to build and flesh them out. The sort of Mordent campaign I'd run would be very local - again, drawing from Austen a lot, fleshing out all the local families, the PCs neighbours and servants etc, and having social interaction, etiquette, reputation, the marriage market etc be major story aspects. If Mordent seems to small for this, well, there's lots of room to expand it. As well as the sidetrips to pocket domains or Cornish dwarf-ghosts mentioned above, you could 100% put primeval stone circles, and secret druidic sects dead or living, and mound-tombs of the iron-age ancient dead, bog mummies, spectral black hounds, and dark fey here, without compromising the feel of the place at all. And Mordenheim is just across the border too.
What the place does lack is an urban area. In Regency literature there tends to be the far-off big city (London) that acts as a source of scandal, excitement, desire, and occasionally wickedness that contrasts the whole rustic gossipy neigbourliness of the small town where the actual books takes place. I'll never understand why nobody writing the Ravenloft line during its various reconfigurations and conjunctions etc saw fit to plonk Paridon down at one end of Mordent to fill that role, it's a perfect fit, but it never happened, and Dementlieu is a long way away and culturally very different. I'd be sorely tempted to have a fairly reliable mistway running from Mordent to Paridon if I ever ran the place, but whatever.
Random class generator gave us sorcerer again. It does strike me how few of the existing 5e sorcerous origins fit well with Ravenloft. Shadow sorcerers and aberrant mind sorcerers are fine if you don't mind your PCs being on a downward spiral to damnation from day 1, and wild magic sorcerers could come from Vechor. But draconic sorcerers? Even divine soul sorcerers seem marginal in a setting where the gods seem to be a lot further away and more abstract than somewhere like FR. Religion in ravenloft is much more a matter of faith, you don't get avatars etc running around. You're either going to change the nature of the place fairly fundamentally, or accept that 2/3 of the people you meet are going to treat your sorcerer PC as a dangerous outcast. Anyway, today's PC is a clockwork soul sorcerer, a middle-aged gentlewoman who married and raised children, but who felt her health failing as she approached her 50s. With her children grown and starting to marry off, she had more time to pursue her own interests, and these focused around a book she found in the family library describing some of the scientific breakthroughs made by Dr Mordenheim over the border in Lamordia. With knowledge from the book, she was able to replace her own ailing heart with one of arcane clockwork, and once this was done, she found herself viewing the world in a new, more clinical and mechanical way, which revealed to her abilities she'd never had before. Now that she is largely freed of child-rearing duties, she is finding herself deriving considerable satisfaction from honing these skills, much to the concern and consternation of her family.
Next, Richemulot.
First of all, I have to say i absolutely love the atmosphere and aesthetic that gets painted here. Very Wuthering Heights, Hound of the Baskervilles, and all sorts of Eng lish ghost stories. Lonely manor houses, misty fens and desolate moors, cold grey seas hammering storm-driven against white cliffs, carriages getting lost on the muddy roads and losing a wheel in the rain, a mile or two down from Briarfell Hall which the old shepherd tells you, shaking his head sadly, has been abandoned since that terrible business with the old master's son 20 years ago this very night...
This section takes up over 50 pages, which is more than any other domain so far except Darkon which is 20 times the size with 20 times the population. Apparently the development of this didn't go entirely smoothly. Borca was meant to be a fourth domain in this book but wasn't ready by deadline, and I suspect Mordent got padded out to meet wordcount. There was a few oblique references from the Kargatane that they weren't really happy with this section, and Azalin does make a few 'why are you bothering me with this irrelevent trivia?' margin notes, which I can't help but interpret as quasi-editorial comment. But also, Mordent is one of the heartland domains of the '1800s' north-west Core, which the 3e line in particular emphasised as the default assumption of the setting, vs the more medieval domains like Nova Vaasa, Hazlan, or even Barovia. Perhaps the high word count was an artefact of that attitude and emphasis.
We have another overwhelmingly human, low population, gunpowder-era domain which is suspicious of magic. I get that this is the gothic aesthetic, but jeez, I kinda wish they'd poop or get off the pot. If you want a demihumanless, low-magic setting, then knuckle down and roll out actual restrictions, rather than this passive-aggressive stuff. Or else knuckle down in the opposite direction, and put in the work and be creative enough to work dwarves etc into the Mordent aesthetic, rather than stuffing it all in the too-hard basket. C'mon, there's a whole genre of era-appropriate Welsh and Cornish coal mine ghost stories, if you can't adapt those to Mordent dwarves, then you're just not trying.
History here is vague, and the vagueness is rooted in the real-life publishing origin of the place. Mordent first appeared in House on Gryphon Hill, the second ever Ravenloft module (i believe), and one that came out before the foundations of what became the wider setting - domains, darklords etc - were established. So in that module we've got both Strahd and Azalin wandering around the place, as well as a possible alternate origin for Strahd, which obviously presents ... problems ... for anyone trying to reconcile it with what Ravenloft became. Anyway Wilfred Godefroy was a ghost whose haunted house featured in the module, and when Ravenloft actually got written up as a unified setting later, it seems to me he was anointed Darklord almost by default, being the most powerful bad guy left in the place. But more on him later.
Culturally, this is the genteel English countryside. Conservative, hardworking, prim, practical, insular, pious, mostly goodhearted. I do like that the writers have portrayed the culture as a mixed bag - you can find pluses or minuses to the place, NPCs can be allies or enemies and still fit perfectly into the milieu, and it's all pretty internally consistent. It has the weaknesses of its strengths. You've got a noble class and a commoner class, though there's the remnants of a 'high' noble class who've basically all died out now (except the Weathermays, and the ghosts of the Godefroys) and while the nobility is class-conscious there's not the sort of vast gap between rich and poor and blatant decadence that we see in Dementlieu. Of questionable relevance, there are pages upon pages detailing the histories and fates of the many now-defunct other high noble families, which could provide some plot hooks if you felt like mining them, but honestly feels a lot like filler and page count that could have better been used on one of the other, much larger, domains in the book. You've got the local branch of the church of Ezra whose anchorites basically take the role of the village vicars. You've got a trading town at the south of the domain which all the locals believe is shockingly scandalous and libertine, but is honestly pretty staid in the context of Dementlieu, Richemulot, Borca etc. All this does make playing in Mordent easy, Most people have at least a passing familiarity with Jane Austen, the Brontes, Thomas Hardy, Georgette Heyer etc, and that's the world and manners that Mordent is trying to evoke. Pick a Pride and Prejudice character and stick them in Ravenloft and you've got a perfectly good Mordent PC.
I do like the portrayal of Mordent as close to the Mists. Ezra is closely associated with the Mists, and this is one of her church's strongholds. Godefroy closes the borders by means of disorienting Mists that turn travellers around to where they came, and there's all sorts of mist-related monsters here - mist ferrymen etc. If you're running a game in Mordent, this gives you lots of opportunities to divert unsuspecting PCs into other domains as they travel - Ghastria, the Endless Road, Dominiaria, Forlorn, Shadowborn Manor would all be great and thematic options, and I'm sure there's others.
It gets my pedantic teeth on edge that the domain is called 'Mordent' but the town is called 'Mordentshire', that's not how shires work, aaargh.
Godefroy is a mixed bag as a darklord. The House on Gryphon Hill is a great centrepiece for the domain, the image of this lightless frowning old manor looming over the town while everyone tries to go about their daily business and not to look at it is a great one. It casts a long physical and metaphorical shadow, and I like that. However, Godefroy. As a ghost haunting a house, he's fine. He's a vicious, domineering, awful old tyrant who murdered his wife and daughter in a rage because he wanted a son, and then was driven to suicide by their ghosts. Nowadays he's a monstrously powerful spirit, but his curse dictates that he's still helpless before them.
But Mordent is an entire domain, not a house. He's been able to roam all throughout the domain since at least Domains of Dread, but this book has him actually starting to use this routinely to spy on notable personages, and expands his powers to include binding the spirits of anyone who dies in Mordentshire into servitude in the House on Gryphon Hill. I'm not sure I'm a fan of this. Ghosts are the ultimate obsessives, fixated on their deaths or their resentments or whatever, trapped static in a damnation loop forever. They're not just incorporeal bad people. But Godefroy is written here as having ambitions, plans, strategies. I get why they did it, they wanted to bring him a bit more into the action and give him more agency, otherwise Mordent is a domain where the darklord is basically irrelevant and just lurks in one building waiting for adventurers to come along, but it does seem ... unghostly. And I think the writers knew it, because they conspicuously don't really given any concrete examples of what Godefroy's ambitions or plans actually are. They talk about him wanting to get revenge on the Weathermay family (his wife was a Weathermay) but that doesn't really seem a major focus. He needs an obsession, a burning motivation, and he just doesn't have one.
From a gameplay point of view - Mordent is one of my favourite domains. If you want a weekend-in-hell, then there's some great stuff here, especially with the way the Weathermay family is described here. Jules is a stunning character, the elderly but still sharp quasi-ruler of the place, he's devoted his life to governing, but can see ghosts after a brush with death a few years back and is starting to suspect a lot about Godefroy and the House. But he's got a case of noblesse oblige, and his descendents are all more interested in monster hunting rather than duty to Mordent, and one of them is probably a werewolf, and his son-in-law is being blackmailed by Godefroy. There's a really great story to be told here, the last cathartic crusade of Lord Jules as the career politician takes up the sword again, and the next generation of Weathermays having all their secrets come out and deciding what their destiny is, and a climatic expedition to the House on Gryphon Hill to face Godefroy.
As a setting for a longer campaign, it works very well too. It's not as darklord-centric as many domains so even low-level PCs have stuff to do, there's plot hooks all over the place, and the nature of the place means that PCs will likely be meeting the same NPCs a lot, which gives you time and scope to build and flesh them out. The sort of Mordent campaign I'd run would be very local - again, drawing from Austen a lot, fleshing out all the local families, the PCs neighbours and servants etc, and having social interaction, etiquette, reputation, the marriage market etc be major story aspects. If Mordent seems to small for this, well, there's lots of room to expand it. As well as the sidetrips to pocket domains or Cornish dwarf-ghosts mentioned above, you could 100% put primeval stone circles, and secret druidic sects dead or living, and mound-tombs of the iron-age ancient dead, bog mummies, spectral black hounds, and dark fey here, without compromising the feel of the place at all. And Mordenheim is just across the border too.
What the place does lack is an urban area. In Regency literature there tends to be the far-off big city (London) that acts as a source of scandal, excitement, desire, and occasionally wickedness that contrasts the whole rustic gossipy neigbourliness of the small town where the actual books takes place. I'll never understand why nobody writing the Ravenloft line during its various reconfigurations and conjunctions etc saw fit to plonk Paridon down at one end of Mordent to fill that role, it's a perfect fit, but it never happened, and Dementlieu is a long way away and culturally very different. I'd be sorely tempted to have a fairly reliable mistway running from Mordent to Paridon if I ever ran the place, but whatever.
Random class generator gave us sorcerer again. It does strike me how few of the existing 5e sorcerous origins fit well with Ravenloft. Shadow sorcerers and aberrant mind sorcerers are fine if you don't mind your PCs being on a downward spiral to damnation from day 1, and wild magic sorcerers could come from Vechor. But draconic sorcerers? Even divine soul sorcerers seem marginal in a setting where the gods seem to be a lot further away and more abstract than somewhere like FR. Religion in ravenloft is much more a matter of faith, you don't get avatars etc running around. You're either going to change the nature of the place fairly fundamentally, or accept that 2/3 of the people you meet are going to treat your sorcerer PC as a dangerous outcast. Anyway, today's PC is a clockwork soul sorcerer, a middle-aged gentlewoman who married and raised children, but who felt her health failing as she approached her 50s. With her children grown and starting to marry off, she had more time to pursue her own interests, and these focused around a book she found in the family library describing some of the scientific breakthroughs made by Dr Mordenheim over the border in Lamordia. With knowledge from the book, she was able to replace her own ailing heart with one of arcane clockwork, and once this was done, she found herself viewing the world in a new, more clinical and mechanical way, which revealed to her abilities she'd never had before. Now that she is largely freed of child-rearing duties, she is finding herself deriving considerable satisfaction from honing these skills, much to the concern and consternation of her family.
Next, Richemulot.
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Paul Farquhar
Legend
It was referred to as Mordentshire in HoGH. I wonder why the changed it?
Dracula actually has scenes in London, although that's a little later.
humble minion
Legend
So do many Heyer novels, although they're later still. The narrative role of London is to be the thrilling, glittering, but somewhat dangerous centre of the world (which is why Dracula wants to set up shop there), in contrast with the staid (and it is often implied, more wholesome) countryside. There are variations, Austen substitutes Bath for London as her hotbed of social excitement and peril in Persuasion, and Brighton (off-screen) does the job in in Pride and Prejudice, but the theme remains the same. Even Dracula is set heavily in Whitby and surrounds (do we ever find out where Seward's asylum is located, or Lucy Westenra's house?), rather than in the big city.
Mordent definitely leans towards the countryside or small-town half of these stories. But it does suffer from not having a London to contrast.
Paul Farquhar
Legend
Yes, there is a clue in the original name. It's gothic Buckinghamshire. Which makes it a pseudo-London satellite. The setting would have been better if it had been much bigger and included a city, even if most of the action was in the shires.
Trivia: The current population of Whitby is 13,000.
TheSword
Legend
I think Dominic takes on a whole new life for me after watching Killgrave (Purple Man) in Jessica Jones.
He doesn’t send conditioned innocents to attack the party. He commands them to kill themselves if the party attack him.
He is careful, cunning and patient but enraged and enthralled by defiance in a land where everyone complies.
I think the consent issues can be mollified if the sexuality is written out of it.
In those circumstances a character with that kind of power becomes fascinating and an excellent NPC whether a Darklord or not.
He doesn’t send conditioned innocents to attack the party. He commands them to kill themselves if the party attack him.
He is careful, cunning and patient but enraged and enthralled by defiance in a land where everyone complies.
I think the consent issues can be mollified if the sexuality is written out of it.
In those circumstances a character with that kind of power becomes fascinating and an excellent NPC whether a Darklord or not.
