Café de Nuit

I pretty much started off as a DM in 1991 for my middle school friends, on a homegrown world ("The Enixine"). When we got to high school, they fought against a powerful lich, so I saw Van Richten's Guide to the Lich and bought it. That opened up a whole can of worms, I can tell you! Halfwa...

Liam Neeson as Strahd von Zarovich http://www.trojanhorseantiques.com/PhotoLiamNeeson.jpg Christopher Walken as Azalin Rex/Firan Zal'Honan http://213.133.111.165/~gabriela/textbilder/potd_12_04_05a.gif David Prowse as Lord Soth (or anybody else who walks around in black armor) http://www.swindoneven...

In my campaign, I have it down that guns ignore the first X number of AC points given by a type of armor. They can also (depending on their function) ignore the first X number of Dex bonus AC points. This can vary by firearm. For example, a blunderbuss fires a large collection of projectiles to cove...

I regretted the changes to Il Aluk and the formation of Necropolis. Death is a fairly interesting character, but Necropolis is of limited interest to anybody not playing an undead character. Rather than say it never happened, I am trying to think up of a grand plot where Azalin and his numerically s...

I also did not like the changes to Il Aluk and the formation of Necropolis. It ranks much higher than the formation of the Shadow Rift on my personal scale of Undesirable Blots on the Landscape. Death is a faintly interesting character but Necropolis is either very brief or very boring for non undea...

The original I, Strahd, was a very good read. The author, P. N. Elrod, just walks the fine line between a sympathetic good character and a ravening evil one - there's just enough humanity left in Strahd to make the reader identify with him.

A good book to help understand what makes a darklord tick.

Another thing I thought of. The function of the Book of Names in Avernus doesn't stop just because you may rediscover your past life. Eventually, the quill will go back to your name and start re-writing over the previous entries, causing you to lose your memories all over again until you leave Darko...

One aspect of the original Black Box setting (which has endured through today) is the memory loss that affects all newcomers. Not even Azalin himself was immune to this - he had to locate the Book of Names before he realized what was going on. His own experience is interesting too. While searching f...

I thought all five members of the family (plus the additional human who arrives later) were perfectly done. I agree the monster bosses were sometimes overly supernatural, but for the most part, they were brilliantly introduced. The Undying King itself (the big thing at the end) was faintly ridiculou...

In my mind, the Dark Powers are at their most gleeful when they play cat and mouse with a victim fully aware of their intervention. If you have a Drakov who just never learns from his mistakes, then the sole mover in that scenario is a stubborn, hubristic military leader. While I'm not arguing that ...

There's a fantastic Gothic PC game called "Clive Barker's Undying", which features a family living on an island off the coast of Ireland. Strange things are happening with the family, and their estate is haunted by misshapen beasts and twisted flora. But the most dangerous of all are the f...

In my campaign, I'm trying to re-jig the Grand Conjunction hexad of adventures so they're more coherent - Azalin has a hand in bringing all of them to pass, not just the fifth and sixth adventures. He sends Kargatane to try to get characters to do his bidding, which mostly consists of spiriting mino...

Most of your comments have focussed on the time traveling spell, which I agree is beyond the ken of most PCs. But the other two spells strike me as valuable additions to the Necromantic school, especially since necromancers compare so poorly against Death sphere priests. Given that wizards have so l...

Edit: Now that this thread has also expanded to include Azalin's spell tactics in combat, you can click here to go to that section. Hello all. Just getting back into Ravenloft after a long silence... (I have pretty much every 2nd ed. product for RL ever made, and I'm wrestling with 3rd ed. rules). I...