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Message: <blockquote data-quote="humble minion" data-source="post: 8261415" data-attributes="member: 5948">Castle IslandWas this even a domain pre-3e?  I know it existed as a side-trip in the Servants of Darkness module, but i don't remember it being a self-contained domain.  I remember the Lady of the Lake as a significantly powerful monster in the context of the module, but not much more than that.Castle Island in situated in Lake Kronov, a large, deep, monster-ridden and storm-prone freshwater lake in the middle of Tepest.  It's a tiny domain, basically just the island and a small amount of the surrounding lake.  The island is really just a craggy rock spur topped with the shattered ruins of a castle.  The sole inhabitant is the darklord.  One thing I really like about this domain is the Lady's means of closing the borders.  Specifically, she can't literally stop people leaving, but anyone crossing the borders while they're 'closed' is afflicted with suicidal madness until they return (as if via a standard failed Madness check).  That's creepy, atmospheric, and rich in plot hooks, and I'd love to have seen similar less black-and-white border closing mechanisms used for more domains, especially the smaller pocket domains or the ones like Falkovnia where the darklord didn't have conscious control of the borders.  There's a reasonable Tepestani population in the villages etc that ring the lake, they're all aware of the place but steer clear in terror.  Even the Inquisition and Wyan don't get close, though there's no real in-character explanation as to why.  Surely Finn and the rest would be itching to clear the place out?Our darklord is a sirene, once the guardian of the lake, who fell in love with a mortal hermit.  When she was pregnant with their child, he fell foul of a powerful fey and was turned into a monster that haunted the lake, although he retained his mind in the beast's shape.  Eventually the hermit was slain in beast-form by a paladin who mistook him for a real monster.  The Lady of the Lake then devoted herself to vengeance in a very extreme, fey-like way - her daughter grew to adulthood and then seduced the paladin to ruin his marriage, the Lady charmed and drowned his wife as she fled, and then later, the caliban child of that union mortally wounded the paladin, dying in the process.  The Lady intended to keep the paladin barely alive to suffer indefinitely, but was whisked off by the mists before that could happen.  Now she's trapped with the ruins of the paladin's keep as her domain, deprived of the revenge that she sacrificed her daughter and grandson for.  And the Dark Powers have replaced her beast-shaped lover with a genuine monster in the same form, so she is reminded all the time of what she lost.Obviously there's not really enough going on here to spin a full campaign out of.  It's a mini-domain after all (not strictly a pocket domain, but similar in size to most of them).  I do like the backstory, it's very fey-like in both the characterisation of the Lady and of the fey who cursed her lover in the first place, and the paladin's mistaken slaying of the avanc-hermit is classic medieval tragedy.  But the Lady's modern attitude is just one of angry omnicidal psycho unfortunately, and there's not really any obvious way to bring all of the interesting backstory to the fore in an actual game.  Perhaps via a familial legacy, PC descended from the paladin etc?  The hook presented is that if anyone slays the avanc, another man becomes the new avanc, and so seeking out and slaying the Lady is the only way to get your party member or relative or whatever back.  But again, that skips over a lot of the interest in the story.  Perhaps a ghost in the Castle, the paladin's wife maybe?  Or maybe the Lady's daughter is another victim, she might have had a family and life of her own before being thrown away in search of her mother's vengeance.  She could possibly be a Fathomless warlock patron, now i think of it.  Or even Ione the paladin himself - the Lady never saw him actually die, could he be roaming the Mists somewhere, having more children, training up squires intent on his own revenge in turn?  Has he realised that his hasty sword bears some responsibility for everything that happened?  There needs to be a hook in here, to get the PCs involved in the backstory.  At the moment, you just go kick down the door and kill the siren and go home, counting your XP.I'm in two minds about how well this odd but flavourful domain fits in Tepest.  The fey themes suit nicely, but there's a sort of quasi-medieval and near-Arthurian vibe about it as well, and maybe it'd fit better somewhere more chivalric?  Mind you, the core is short of those.  Sithicus could work, or Mordent at a stretch if you're willing to have all this seminal tragedy happen further in the past (canonically, it's only 14 years since the paladin Ione died).  Or the Shadowborn cluser somewhere?  Though actually, Forlorn could be a really good option.  The tech level is about right, as is the cultural match if you date all these events before the fall of Tristan and the transition of the place into Ravenloft, and the Forlorn lake monster doesn't really do much of anything interesting.  The Lady's avanc could be a good substitution for Aggie.  Or hell, it could be a pocket domain in any sea you care to name, really.No PC pic for this domain.  Other than the darklord, the domain literally has a population of zero!  I wonder in fact, if this was going to be a preview of how the small and pocket domains were going to be treated in future Gazetteer books.  The Core is made of large domains on the whole, but once you get outside the Core, there's a lot of little ones.  Even in the Sea of Sorrows, how much can you really write about Ghastria or Blaustein, which are basically one building on an island each?  Or going forward, Scaena, Leederick's Tower, The Endless Road, Shadowborn Manor?  There's really not a lot of territory to write about in these domains, were they going to be covered, like Castle Island, as asides from bigger domains?  The House of Lament was merely mentioned in passing in Gaz IV as being situated in Borca, and S didn't visit it or cover it in detail at all, and unlike Castle Island its darklord didn't even get a back-of-the-book writeup.  But especially for Gaz VI and VII, covering the seas east and west of the core, if you're not writing about tiny domains, there's not much to write about at all...Next up, Keening.</blockquote>

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