D&D General Reading Ravenloft the setting
Voadam
Legend
As I kind of view Verbrek as an extension of his dad's Mississippi River Riverboat land New England accents would be a bit jarring for me as the native dialect.
Paul Farquhar
Legend
I got the impression "The Wolf God" was actually an aspect of Timothy's subconscious. He invented it, so now he is it.
Ravenloft is basically the demiplane of neuroses.
Remathilis
Legend
Nearly every religion in Ravenloft can be described similarly. Even the "good" ones.
Faolyn
(she/her)
Even if they're islands, you can still have two domains always connect to each other by roads or waterways like the Musarde. This would provide the structure you want (and allow for mercantile traffic). But these wouldn't always be literal roads. They could be kind of like portals, so you're traveling for a few hours in Mordentish back country and when you pass between those two rocks, bam, you're in Paridon, guaranteed.
Or they could be demi-domains or oubliettes from the Guide to Mists. ("Take this road and it'll get you to Levkarest in two, three days max. Just don't step off the path, no matter what you hear or see in the woods. Oh, and put a coin on every roadside shrine you see, no matter what its dedicated to, but never give any money to any beggars you come across. Trust me on this.")
It's just that, unless you take those special paths, you don't always go where you want to go.
humble minion
Legend
Next, Valachan.
Metaplot first. S wakes up in a relatively comfortable bed in Valachan, many miles away from where she found herself in difficulties in Verbrek. There are no werewolves. There is no sign of anyone, in fact, except for a small bloodstain in the middle of the floor. Mysterious...
Geographically, we have a near-complete lack of imagination here. Valachan is a long, think domain running north-south, with one major road and one river, also running north-south. The same heavy-forest-dotted-with-hamlets terrain that we saw in Verbrek also predominates here, though the Valachan wilds are, while not exactly safe, considerably less actively hostile than those in Verbrek. The hamlets are similarly larger and more secure, and there's several sizeable towns. Valachan's population is actually significant, comparable to that of somewhere like Dementlieu if the statistics here are to be believed (editorial note: they are not to be, as we've already established). Fauna is similar to Verbrek and Kartakass in that it's of the real-world-but-bigger ouevre, with a considerable emphasis on all sort of predatory cats up to and including the 3e dire tigers that grew to the size of a t-rex. One thing though - we have no West coast here. Mordent, directly north, has a coastline on the Sea of Sorrows along its entire length, but Valachan's western border consists only of the Mists. I can't help but feel this is a missed opportunity. Valachan is a bit one-note as written, some sort of interaction by sea might have added an extra dimension to the place.
Again, a domain that is overwhelmingly human. This is quite annoying actually, since over the course of the Ravenloft line the best-known Valachan resident other than Urik was actually a gnome - Perseyus the illusionist, the associate of van Richten. This would have given the writers perfect licence to write up Valachan as a domain with a meaningful gnome population (they've got to come from SOMEWHERE!), but instead they decided to shuffle her off into obscurity, listing the gnome population of the domain as about 2% of 19000, and to add insult to injury, when S tries to find her to speak to her, Perseyus is nowhere to be found. At this point, I'm beginning to wonder whether the scarcity of demihumans in Ravenloft is due to inbreeding, there's hardly enough of them here to perpetuate themselves...
History seems to be another bemused scratch of the head at contradictory canon. Apparently Valachan was once noted as having being invaded by the Vaasi at some point in history, but a quick look at the map of the Core shows that Nova Vaasa is on the other side of the world, so it's hard to see how this would have taken place. Anyway, modern-day Valachan is a mingling of the dark-skinned native Valachani people (which are written up here as your classic hunter-gatherer noble savage as one with nature cliche, which is more than a bit smelly to modern sensibilities for the only dark-skinned human ethnic group in the Core...) with the pale-skinned 'Vaasi' invaders (not a mingling that took place over time naturally, but a miraculous one that happened overnight by act of the Valachani god Yutow). This mingling is cultural as well, Valachan society (and Yutow himself) is a blending of the native Valachani druidic ethos with more than a few echoes of the iron-fisted autocratic attitudes and faith of the Lawgiver from Nova Vaasa.
Socially there's a lot of Verbrek here. Self-rellance is almost fetishised, the crafts of hunting, farming, woodsmanship etc are the only honourable professions. No use for your fancy-pants book-learnin' here in these parts! The place is very insular, customs are very rigid, and it'd be extremely easy to give offence. It's really striking how these people are written to be really, really easy to dislike, and I wonder if that's intentional. This is another domain that is extremely hostile to arcane spellcasters - and we're not just talking shunning here, we're talking mobs, violence, and arrest by the baron's werepanther enforcers. Even divine magic is looked down on - despite Valachani being extremely religious, the attitude is that you can't be trekking through the wilds being an honourable and resourceful manly man if you're wasting effort praying all the time. Which is a bit barmy, but anyway. Mind you, priests who get too powerful tend to disappear here, or get eaten by panthers, presumably so they can't pose a danger to the Baron, so the locals probably don't have much notion of what high-level clerical magic can do.
The Baron, yeah. He's a bit of the Tristan apBlanc breed, really, an extremely convoluted backstory to justify a weird combination of powers and abate some of the regular weaknesses he'd have. Urik was a panther who was polymorphed into a human by a wizard who wanted the 'human' to be taken as a lover by his ex, at which time he reversed the polymorph and the panther killed her. But Urik retained the ability to turn human, and then got taken by the Mists and found himself in Darkon, where he was inducted into Azalin's secret police and turned into a nosferatu-variant vampire. After 20 years, he escaped, and for no apparent reason, became a Darklord. It's hard to read this as anything other than a quasi-Gygaxian Screw You villain. All this minions are werepanthers and when his panther form bites someone that person contracts panther lycanthropy, but SURPRISE, if your PCs prepared to face a lycanthrope you're stuffed because he's actually a vampire! And by the way if you work out that he's a vampire and prepare with sunlight, garlic, etc, or assume that he can't enter houses uninvited etc, then SURPRISE, he's actually a nosferatu vampire who has none of the usual weaknesses. Yuk. None of this adds anything narratively, this is just a killer DM being a jerk.
Oh, and as a consequence of being a nosferatu werepanther (or were-human panther, possibly) he can charm anyone by sight and see through the eyes of any feline in the domain, and modify the memory of anyone he feeds on, and his charmed minions and nosferatu spawn are all over the place. There's an endemic condition called 'white fever' that is basically anemia combined with punture wounds over major blood vessels, and it's very widely known and inevitably contracted by anyone who works in the castle, which on the upside at least gives PCs a clue that they're dealing with something more complicated than a werepanther, but on the downside, makes the populace look like utter morons for not putting the pieces together. I mean it's not like the people LIKE Urik, he's an iron-fisted tyrant who's crused several rebellions with the aid of his werepanther guards, and he's got an annual lottery for which Valachani woman gets to marry him, because he inevitably loses control and drinks the previous one dry (it's then put about that she tragically succumbed to White Fever...) But surely any of them who were even aware of the existence of vampires would have worked it out by now?
Also, Urik really doesn't seem to have much in the way of motivation other than paranoia and viciousness. He won't plot, he'll just react. There's a couple of lines about how his elf-vampire sidekick has frequently travelled to Sithicus and that maybe she's planning to overthrow Azrael and take over, but in the context of everything else in the chapter, it seems bizarre. Valachani are inward-looking rather than expansionistic, there's not really even a standing military, and there's nothing in Urik's writeup or history to explain why conquest would be on his mind. Just seems a bit random.
In game - in the context of a long-running campaign I honestly wonder why Valachan is part of the Core at all. It really adds nothing, it's an insular domain with little cultural impact on the rest of the Core, and there's little reason to come here. Socially, the 'self-reliant woodman' trope is already all over Kartakass and Verbrek, so it doesn't add anything new or novel in terms of possible PC origins etc either (except as a source of dark-skinned PCs, and jeez, can't we do better than that?). There isn't really even any interesting side-quests or plot hooks here, everything is centred around the Baron. It's is a lot like Forlorn in that way, again, a domain designed for a single adventure. It'd be better as an island in the mists, to be honest. You could do a one-off weekend-in-hell type adventure here, using the (interesting) Felkovic's Cat artifact and trying to kill the baron, and being trapped here could actually be genuinely creepy and hard to survive given the Baron's myriad methods of spying (cats, nosferatu slaves, and the entire priesthood of Yutow is basically his spy network too). But that's kinda the only story that the place is good for, as written. The extra space in the Core (and pager count!) could have been much better used on different domain - Paridon would have been my choice, but Markovia, or relocating G'Henna somewhere to the desolate south-east of Hazlan, or something competely new like an underground dwarf domain would have added something new and unique to the Core, which Valachan just doesn't. If there's any Valachan enthusiasts out there who love the place, please let me know why I'm wrong.
Random PC generator gave me fighter, which is at least plausible. This guy is fresh back from escorting a lucrative trading caravan to Mordent, jewellery in copper and gold, and bright-dyed trim to ones clothing, are a sign of wealth and success. He's back in Valachan with a big pouch of gold and is feeling cocky and confident about life. It probably won't last - Urik's elven vampire offsider Adeline has a taste for attractive young men. And Urik might also have his eye on him as a candiate for conversion into a werepanther - except it also occurs to me that Valachan's writeup has that trope which always annoys me where the bad guy's evil guards seem to come from nowhere, have no family or ties in the community, etc etc. Where DOES Urik get his werepanthers from? They're all written as slavishly loyal sadists even in human form, are they all native lycanthropes? Urik's infectious bite argues against it, but he has no ability to control werepanthers that I can see - why are they loyal to him? Infected lycanthopes might not even know they're lycanthropes, but the Black Talons patrol in human form most of the time. He can Charm them like he can charm anyone, but charm doesn't change you into a sadist or make your forget your roots. Where do they come from? Who ARE they?
Next up is Sothicus ahem, Sithicus...
Metaplot first. S wakes up in a relatively comfortable bed in Valachan, many miles away from where she found herself in difficulties in Verbrek. There are no werewolves. There is no sign of anyone, in fact, except for a small bloodstain in the middle of the floor. Mysterious...
Geographically, we have a near-complete lack of imagination here. Valachan is a long, think domain running north-south, with one major road and one river, also running north-south. The same heavy-forest-dotted-with-hamlets terrain that we saw in Verbrek also predominates here, though the Valachan wilds are, while not exactly safe, considerably less actively hostile than those in Verbrek. The hamlets are similarly larger and more secure, and there's several sizeable towns. Valachan's population is actually significant, comparable to that of somewhere like Dementlieu if the statistics here are to be believed (editorial note: they are not to be, as we've already established). Fauna is similar to Verbrek and Kartakass in that it's of the real-world-but-bigger ouevre, with a considerable emphasis on all sort of predatory cats up to and including the 3e dire tigers that grew to the size of a t-rex. One thing though - we have no West coast here. Mordent, directly north, has a coastline on the Sea of Sorrows along its entire length, but Valachan's western border consists only of the Mists. I can't help but feel this is a missed opportunity. Valachan is a bit one-note as written, some sort of interaction by sea might have added an extra dimension to the place.
Again, a domain that is overwhelmingly human. This is quite annoying actually, since over the course of the Ravenloft line the best-known Valachan resident other than Urik was actually a gnome - Perseyus the illusionist, the associate of van Richten. This would have given the writers perfect licence to write up Valachan as a domain with a meaningful gnome population (they've got to come from SOMEWHERE!), but instead they decided to shuffle her off into obscurity, listing the gnome population of the domain as about 2% of 19000, and to add insult to injury, when S tries to find her to speak to her, Perseyus is nowhere to be found. At this point, I'm beginning to wonder whether the scarcity of demihumans in Ravenloft is due to inbreeding, there's hardly enough of them here to perpetuate themselves...
History seems to be another bemused scratch of the head at contradictory canon. Apparently Valachan was once noted as having being invaded by the Vaasi at some point in history, but a quick look at the map of the Core shows that Nova Vaasa is on the other side of the world, so it's hard to see how this would have taken place. Anyway, modern-day Valachan is a mingling of the dark-skinned native Valachani people (which are written up here as your classic hunter-gatherer noble savage as one with nature cliche, which is more than a bit smelly to modern sensibilities for the only dark-skinned human ethnic group in the Core...) with the pale-skinned 'Vaasi' invaders (not a mingling that took place over time naturally, but a miraculous one that happened overnight by act of the Valachani god Yutow). This mingling is cultural as well, Valachan society (and Yutow himself) is a blending of the native Valachani druidic ethos with more than a few echoes of the iron-fisted autocratic attitudes and faith of the Lawgiver from Nova Vaasa.
Socially there's a lot of Verbrek here. Self-rellance is almost fetishised, the crafts of hunting, farming, woodsmanship etc are the only honourable professions. No use for your fancy-pants book-learnin' here in these parts! The place is very insular, customs are very rigid, and it'd be extremely easy to give offence. It's really striking how these people are written to be really, really easy to dislike, and I wonder if that's intentional. This is another domain that is extremely hostile to arcane spellcasters - and we're not just talking shunning here, we're talking mobs, violence, and arrest by the baron's werepanther enforcers. Even divine magic is looked down on - despite Valachani being extremely religious, the attitude is that you can't be trekking through the wilds being an honourable and resourceful manly man if you're wasting effort praying all the time. Which is a bit barmy, but anyway. Mind you, priests who get too powerful tend to disappear here, or get eaten by panthers, presumably so they can't pose a danger to the Baron, so the locals probably don't have much notion of what high-level clerical magic can do.
The Baron, yeah. He's a bit of the Tristan apBlanc breed, really, an extremely convoluted backstory to justify a weird combination of powers and abate some of the regular weaknesses he'd have. Urik was a panther who was polymorphed into a human by a wizard who wanted the 'human' to be taken as a lover by his ex, at which time he reversed the polymorph and the panther killed her. But Urik retained the ability to turn human, and then got taken by the Mists and found himself in Darkon, where he was inducted into Azalin's secret police and turned into a nosferatu-variant vampire. After 20 years, he escaped, and for no apparent reason, became a Darklord. It's hard to read this as anything other than a quasi-Gygaxian Screw You villain. All this minions are werepanthers and when his panther form bites someone that person contracts panther lycanthropy, but SURPRISE, if your PCs prepared to face a lycanthrope you're stuffed because he's actually a vampire! And by the way if you work out that he's a vampire and prepare with sunlight, garlic, etc, or assume that he can't enter houses uninvited etc, then SURPRISE, he's actually a nosferatu vampire who has none of the usual weaknesses. Yuk. None of this adds anything narratively, this is just a killer DM being a jerk.
Oh, and as a consequence of being a nosferatu werepanther (or were-human panther, possibly) he can charm anyone by sight and see through the eyes of any feline in the domain, and modify the memory of anyone he feeds on, and his charmed minions and nosferatu spawn are all over the place. There's an endemic condition called 'white fever' that is basically anemia combined with punture wounds over major blood vessels, and it's very widely known and inevitably contracted by anyone who works in the castle, which on the upside at least gives PCs a clue that they're dealing with something more complicated than a werepanther, but on the downside, makes the populace look like utter morons for not putting the pieces together. I mean it's not like the people LIKE Urik, he's an iron-fisted tyrant who's crused several rebellions with the aid of his werepanther guards, and he's got an annual lottery for which Valachani woman gets to marry him, because he inevitably loses control and drinks the previous one dry (it's then put about that she tragically succumbed to White Fever...) But surely any of them who were even aware of the existence of vampires would have worked it out by now?
Also, Urik really doesn't seem to have much in the way of motivation other than paranoia and viciousness. He won't plot, he'll just react. There's a couple of lines about how his elf-vampire sidekick has frequently travelled to Sithicus and that maybe she's planning to overthrow Azrael and take over, but in the context of everything else in the chapter, it seems bizarre. Valachani are inward-looking rather than expansionistic, there's not really even a standing military, and there's nothing in Urik's writeup or history to explain why conquest would be on his mind. Just seems a bit random.
In game - in the context of a long-running campaign I honestly wonder why Valachan is part of the Core at all. It really adds nothing, it's an insular domain with little cultural impact on the rest of the Core, and there's little reason to come here. Socially, the 'self-reliant woodman' trope is already all over Kartakass and Verbrek, so it doesn't add anything new or novel in terms of possible PC origins etc either (except as a source of dark-skinned PCs, and jeez, can't we do better than that?). There isn't really even any interesting side-quests or plot hooks here, everything is centred around the Baron. It's is a lot like Forlorn in that way, again, a domain designed for a single adventure. It'd be better as an island in the mists, to be honest. You could do a one-off weekend-in-hell type adventure here, using the (interesting) Felkovic's Cat artifact and trying to kill the baron, and being trapped here could actually be genuinely creepy and hard to survive given the Baron's myriad methods of spying (cats, nosferatu slaves, and the entire priesthood of Yutow is basically his spy network too). But that's kinda the only story that the place is good for, as written. The extra space in the Core (and pager count!) could have been much better used on different domain - Paridon would have been my choice, but Markovia, or relocating G'Henna somewhere to the desolate south-east of Hazlan, or something competely new like an underground dwarf domain would have added something new and unique to the Core, which Valachan just doesn't. If there's any Valachan enthusiasts out there who love the place, please let me know why I'm wrong.
Random PC generator gave me fighter, which is at least plausible. This guy is fresh back from escorting a lucrative trading caravan to Mordent, jewellery in copper and gold, and bright-dyed trim to ones clothing, are a sign of wealth and success. He's back in Valachan with a big pouch of gold and is feeling cocky and confident about life. It probably won't last - Urik's elven vampire offsider Adeline has a taste for attractive young men. And Urik might also have his eye on him as a candiate for conversion into a werepanther - except it also occurs to me that Valachan's writeup has that trope which always annoys me where the bad guy's evil guards seem to come from nowhere, have no family or ties in the community, etc etc. Where DOES Urik get his werepanthers from? They're all written as slavishly loyal sadists even in human form, are they all native lycanthropes? Urik's infectious bite argues against it, but he has no ability to control werepanthers that I can see - why are they loyal to him? Infected lycanthopes might not even know they're lycanthropes, but the Black Talons patrol in human form most of the time. He can Charm them like he can charm anyone, but charm doesn't change you into a sadist or make your forget your roots. Where do they come from? Who ARE they?
Next up is Sothicus ahem, Sithicus...
Paul Farquhar
Legend
I suppose Cat People is the influence here.
I assumed (possibly uncharitably) that Blacula was the main inspiration for von Kharkov. Not simply because von Kharkov is a Black vampire, but because there are also similar "unwillingly turned into a monster by a worse bad guy" elements in his backstory.
Could be some Cat People in there as well, though.
Bedrockgames
Legend
Definitely you could do that. I suppose for me this just somehow falls flat. It is subjective, but it just doesn't quite get the kind of world that resonates (I imagine if Ravenloft were originally presented this way, I would have found it a bit too wonky for my tastes). That said I definitely wouldn't mind more exploration of portals between domains, so you could have hidden 'roads' between Mordent and Paridon (I just like having something like the core we got in old Ravenloft)
