Tell me about your 2E Ravenloft Campaigns

[Guest 85555]

Some of my best gaming sessions were with 2E Ravenloft. For me it was the perfect blend of system and setting. I drew a lot of inspiration from the Van Richten guidebooks (which remain my favorite gaming material to this day) and as a result I tended to run monster hunts and investigations. I am curious about other peoples' experience with 2E Ravenloft. What kinds of adventures did you run? Favorite domains? Domains you avoided?

 

[crazy_monkey1956]

I did the "weekend in Ravenloft" style of adventure, starting with Dark of the Moon, an adventure set in Vorostokov and then moving on to Vecna Reborn.

The PCs were pulled in from the Dragonlance setting, which meant there was a kender PC. Kender in Ravenloft is...interesting to say the least.

The PCs were pursuing an evil clone of the party's thief, created via a Mirror of Opposition. They tracked him down to a black dragon's lair in the middle of a swamp. The clone was attempting to steal something from the dragon's hoard (I don't recall what, anymore), but the PCs arrival woke the dragon up and battle ensued.

The party's wizard cast obscuring mist but, on the spur of the moment, I decided that she had conjured up Ravenloft's Mists (or, better put, got the attention of the Mists).

The party, the dragon, and the party's nemesis were all pulled into Ravenloft, though the dragon and the nemesis wound up in different domains.

They then played through Dark of the Moon. The kender, hearing babies crying out in the viciously cold night, opened the door to the cabin they were staying in and came face to face with a pair of Leucrotta.

"That's not a baby!" Slam!

The elven ranger grabbed her by her shirt collar and scolded, "Never do that again!" Kender nodded fiercely.

After defeating the Lord of Vorostokov (at least long enough for them to get out of that Domain), the mists brought the party to Vecna's domain.

I tweaked Vecna Reborn pretty heavily so it ended up not really resembling the adventure as written at all. The party had the dilemma of one of their own members becoming pregnant with the reincarnated form of Vecna.

I don't recall how that particular episode ended as the campaign fell apart soon after that. I recall that the evil-clone-nemesis person had cut off his hand and put out an eye so he could wield Vecna's artifacts. And that the black dragon showed up again at some point later, attacking the party (minus a few members) while they were sailing through an island chain.

 

[Stormonu]

I've run many "Weekend in Hell (Ravenloft)", mostly using Castle Ravenloft itself. The most memorable one used Castle Ravenloft and House on Griffon Hill - at the same time, with the characters slipping between one place and the other.

I've also run Night of the Walking Dead as the start of a campaign, but the party entered and exited the Dread Realm after the adventure.

Finally, I've tried running Roots of Evil (with the same group from the first adventure mentioned), but that just ended poorly, and we quit in the middle of the adventure.

 

[Niccodaemus]

I played Ravenloft as a player. I DMed Ravenloft II, House on Gryphon Hill.

I started with an evil entity in my game world that was trying to resurrect Vecna. The players managed to find Vecna's "dead" mummified hand. They were staying in an inn, and in the middle of the night, the hand tried to kill one of the characters. He happened to have a javelin of lighting, and struck the hand with it, burning down the inn in the process.

Of course the locals just thought the inn had been struck by lightning. The hand escaped.

Later on, the same character was in a prison cell with a guy who had torn out his own eye, and put Vecna's eye in the socket. A mostly re-assembled Vecna ripped the door off the cell, then tore the guy's eye out, reclaiming it for his own.

They chased Vecna across the sea, and found an entity (Strahd) that was in collusion with him. After destroying Vecna, they chased the entity through a mirror to another dimension... his home. But the entity abducted a woman he was in love with and took her with him.

In this dimension, Strahd is the disembodied evil half of the Alchemist. Like Captain Kirk, the Alchemist is weak because he is missing part of himself. Strahd possesses the corpse of the Alchemist's long dead uncle, and re-animates the body through the sacrifice of a human (sort of like Dracula reconstitutes from the ashes in a couple of the Hammer films). Strahd is now a physical vampire.

Naturally, the uncle and the Alchemist bear an uncanny resemblance (al la Dark Shadows).

The woman has no memory of the other dimension, and they have to figure out who she is in this dimension so they can bring her back with them.

Strahd uses the Apparatus to exchange the souls of villagers with those of demons. This process actually kills the body, so an entire village of intelligent zombies is being created. The demons liked to taunt the characters.

One of the best scenes was when they went to talk to the village priest... he was sitting in the dark.. rocking in his chair... conversing with them.. when he leaned into the light, they could tell he had been dead for over a week.

After finding the vampire lair in the sewers beneath the city and staking all the vampires, and after killing all the zombies, the adventure ended with Strahd and the Alchemist fighting on the cliff. The players destroyed the Apparatus, and in a lighting storm the two were characters fused back into one... and leapt off the cliff.

The characters were able to find their way back to their own dimension at the end.

I know I changed a lot of it, but at this point i don't remember what was actually there, and what I added.

 

[khantroll]

Ah, Ravenloft. My favorite, as a DM and a player. I played through Castle Ravenloft and the House on Gryphon Hill, and later through Adam's Wrath and another Victor Mordenheim adventure.

The Mordenheim adventures stick with me, mainly because I spent the majority hamming it up. Frankenstein is one of my favorite stories, and my character as the Fighter/Mage/Thief wound up in a position to aid the good doctor. I nearly got the party killed by a variety of experiments, and IRL the other players were nearly ready to kill me.

Later on, I got a chance behind the screen. I started with two stories out of the old kargatine netbooks. The first, about a ghost chained to a baby rattle, was great. My player's were unnerved and in danger of death. The second was about being trapped in a small in with ghosts outside and a crawling claw inside. After that, we started Feast of Goblyns and played through the grand conjunction.

I should mention that for this campaign, I decided to enforce controls on divine magic. I had player playing a druid, and she got quite angry that most of her spells simply didn't work. I got her to make a deal with the Dark Powers, becoming tainted and using the rules of defilers from Dark Sun. The straight cleric was even easier.