Lamordia, Frankensteinland. With the assistance of half a bottle of bargain bin shiraz after a rough week....
Another vastly-majority human domain, where nonhumans are viewed with disdain at best. Another domain where the listed population numbers are utter dribble in context of the background material in the text.
Not a real pleasant place to be. Do not holiday here. Frigid, rocky and moutainous, hugging the mouth of the stinking Musarde River which dumps an entire continent worth of rubbish and filth in the sea. A handful of forbiddingly bleak and icy islands offshore.
Dr Mordenheim casts a long shadow over the place. S talks of him as the likely Darklord before even arriving, the locals assume that the various twisted man-things that consitute the domain's monster population to be his work. Public records of the guy (even allowing for Ravenloft's ... unreliable ... historical record) stretch back around a century, and nobody particularly comments on this (according to my maths, it's been roughly 70 years since the night Adam crippled Elise Mordenheim and became the Darklord). I suspect the only reason he hasn't been burnt at a stake yet is due to some sort of influence over the populace by the Dark Powers. There's a suggestion that it's his 'reason-based' outlook that defines the place - religion is dismissed as merest superstition, arcane magic and casters are seen as deluded or dangerous, and magic sometimes just seems to randomly not function. This is a theme we've seen many times in the Gazetteers so far - the only domains we've looked at so far where arcane spellcasters are not actively unwelcomed are Darkon and Hazlan (and this is only a relatively recent development in the latter), although bards do ok in Kartakass. Yet again the writers are trying to enforce a Gothic-literature sensibility and aesthetic on a high-fantasy ruleset. We haven't seen the last of it, either.
Lamordia is written as neat, law-abiding, orderly, civilized, hard-working, and a bit prim. The clear model that's been used is Switzerland, although there's a little bit of New England puritan in there too (the atheist version of such, at least - no Lovecrafts need apply). It's also the centre of technological advancement in the Core. Even the level 1 NPC guards here have a musket and pistol, the bordermen carry blunderbusses, none of them bother with anything so barbarously medieval as armour, and the country exports firearms in quantity to Darkon - because of the common enemy in Falkovnia. There's guilds and gentlemen's societies and 'fishing magnates' and anti-pirate defenses bearing gunpowerder artillery, and all sorts of advanced manufacturing and trades (in a 900-population town...?) and a sort of limited male-landowners-only democracy. The place is nominally ruled by the aristocratic von Aubrecker family (elderly bedbound Baron and increasingly his untried daughter) but it's the local assemblies and prominent men who seem to hold most of the power. But that power isn't wielded very much. Lamordia is run like clockwork - government is about keeping it wound and ticking correctly, rather than major reform.
Offshore, things get a bit wilder. There's mention of a lucrative fur-trapping, fishing, and whaling industry (obviously run by the 3600 people in the domain in their copious free time between being sturdy republican farmers, cutting-edge scientists, musket-toting guardmen, industrious tradesmen, wealthy tycoons, aristocratic hangers-on, sages, clockmakers, city councilmen, philosophers, gunsmiths, shopkeepers, publishers, or factory workers) which seems very Cape-Cod-like. In the islands of the Nocturnal Sea to the north-west lives Adam, the quasi-mythical boogeyman of the domain, and a village of piratical seawolves, in the Sleeping Beast mountains of the south-east there's a small colony of dwarven miners (viewed as subhuman abnomalities by the human population) and a monastery full of independent electricity-worshipping flesh golems who guard (knowingly or unknowingly) an immensely powerful sleeping marilith. The flesh golems are, paradoxically enough, LN in alignment (i believe this is because they have their origin in the Adam's Wrath module, which came out before Van Richten's Guide to the Created established how Ravenloft golems worked) which is something that really should have been retconned, but the Kargatane either were contractually bound to respect all previous canon slavishly, or chose to. I don't know much more detail about this whole rather thematically jarring area, not owning the module myself.
Adam is the nominal Darklord, though he's so intertwined with Mordenheim that they're co-Darklords in basically every way that matters (the even feel each other's wounds). The story of how they got here varies according to the teller. Mordenheim was the brilliant young doctor whose marriage was infertile, and sought to make himself a child through science. The creature he created was called Adam, and was repulsive but, for a time, innocent. Things came to a head after the Mordenheims adopted a street waif. Adam adored the child (or was jealous of her), and Elise Mordenheim became frightened of his jealousy (or wanted the grotesque monster out of her house now she had a better and less hideous human child to love) and tensions rose (or Adam plotted) and one night Adam decided to flee the dysfunctional feuding Mordenheim house and raise the child himself (or dispose of her so he might be his 'parents' favourite again) and things ended up with the child falling from a window never to be seen again, Elise attacking Adam and being mortally wounded in response, and Adam disappearing into the night. Mordenheim has devoted all his time since then in increasingly horrifying mad science attempts to recover Elise from the inexorably deteriorating life-supported begging-for-death husk she's become, while Adam tries to prevent this happening and make Mordenheim's life even more miserable in the process. But end of the day, word of canon is that Adam alone is the Darklord, so I assume we can take his side of the story with a grain of salt.
Lamordia has the feel of an adventure locale that's been artificially shoehorned into nationhood by the 'Core' model. As presented in the Gazetteer, it's a relatively small place but quite a politically relevant technologically leading nation, but in doing this they neglected to add the actual cities or industry or population that would be necessary for any of this to be true, so it's a case of there is no 'there' there. Which is a shame, as it's potentially an interesting part of the world.
As a weekend-in-hell site, obviously you'd be sticking the PCs between Mordenheim and Adam, which unfortunately is a little difficult to do in a particularly tense way as they're a very long way and a risky sea voyage apart. I believe this is what Ada's Wrath does, though the framing device there is not one I'd routinely recommend - as far as i can tell, the module kills the whole PC party off in a rigged unwinnable fight early on, then their bits get sold to Mordenheim who sticks them in flesh golem bodies. What IS is with Ravenloft modules and railroading PCs into dying at the start of the adventure, anyway? Requiem did it, I believe, and one of the Grand Conjunction adventures had the PCs reduced to floating heads in jars...
What does seem odd is how little the Adam/Mordenheim thing seems to affect or interest the wider populace. General attitude towards Mordenheim seems to be a collective shrug and vague resignation that you can't actually DO anything about him occassionally churning out monstrosities and fresh graves being emptied, so they just don't seem to think about him very much. It's quite odd. Barovia, Kartakass, Hazlan etc revolve around their Darklords. Mordenheim is just kinda off to one side a bit, largely ignored while the citizens attend to small matters of commerce or local government or the like. Is he even responsible for the rationalist and anti-magical culture that pervades the place, or is he just a reflection of just this very culture, the one that made him? Chicken or egg? Regardless, it does seem like the Mordenheim/Adam bits of Lamordia that were written for the weekend-in-hell adventure very rarely cross over or interact with the bits of Lamordia that were written as a setting for native-PCs-travelling-around-the-Core Ravenloft campaigns. Lamorida is merely backdrop scenery for the Mordenheim/Adam plot, and Mordenheim and Adam are background recluses who will only be encountered if specifically sought out by the sort of PCs who are deeply involved in Core politics or the Falkovnian invasions metaplot or whatever.
You could do genuinely interesting things with a campaign where the PCs are the crew of a Lamordian fishing boat, trading coaster, or whaler, though.
Random class generator gave us barbarian this time around, which presents a few problems in a domain as civilised and straight-laced as Lamordia. But I do like the idea of Lamordian seafarers forming this rough-and-tumble society outside society, gathering in their own taverns sneered at by and sneering at the waistcoated stalwarts of mainstream Lamordian town life. So this guy is a berserker barbarian with more emphasis on the 'berserker' bit, a sullen brawny brawling whaler who's very very good at his job but whose violent temper and liking for a bottle gets him in trouble and makes people wary. His weapons are the tools of his trade, and his clothing is a cold-water sailor's outfit - warm layers of woollen pullovers and waterproofs. And no, unfortunately Heroforge didn't have either a harpoon or an oilskin sou' wester.
As a sidenote, according the the 'The Lamordian Hero' sidebar, locals are pretty much only ever fighters, rogues or rangers - and even
rangers are shunned if they appear to be taking the whole spellcasting side of things too seriously. This place is really, really, really not intended to be the home base of a typical D&D party with an elf, a halfling, a wizard, and a cleric. Especially under 3/3.5, when this book was written, when having at least one genuine healer in the party was an absolute necessity, much more than in 5e. You either made a party of foreigners (probably Darkonians) or made a party of shunned outcasts, or resigned yourselves to an early TPK due to not having all your niches covered. Lamordia is written as a place to be visited, not to be from. 5e is arguably more suited to a place like this than 3e was - subclasses at early levels mean you can have a wider variety of PCs quite quickly even if you're choosing from a smaller palette of classes, and recovery is faster, plus the various non-spellcasting methods of recovering hp or getting temporary hp makes a cleric less mandatory. None of which is going to make Lamordian society look any more kindly on you when, for instance, your Phantom rogue gets caught stuffing people's souls in his pockets or your Eldritch Knight starts chucking fireballs about. Spellcaster vs non-spellcaster lines are a fair bit more blurred than they used to be.
Next: one of 3e's Designated Bad Guys in a setting full of bad guys - Falkovnia.
