Shadow Fey vesus the Nightmare Bad Guys

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Carcer
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Joined: Thu Dec 02, 2004 8:54 pm

Shadow Fey vesus the Nightmare Bad Guys

Post by Carcer »

For atmospheric reasons my gaming group prefers to play Ravenloft using the Saga rules and the tarroka deck so as you can probably guess we're not typical Ravenloft gamers. Furthermore we don't use darklords because all too often they're nothing more than carbon copies of villains which already exist within well-known gothic horror texts and in that sense are too familiar for my gaming group and because it tends to focus each adventure in a domain to the evil of one nefarious character rather than the various evils of each domains many nefarious characters.

With the above in mind I would like to speak about an idea I had and maybe get some feedback.

My idea is perhaps a little unorthodox, but I hope not so unorthodox as to be unworkable. I want to do a Ravenloft campaign in which the player characters are Shadow Fey who have to enter the Nightmare Lands.

In my version of Ravenloft the Shadow Fey are angelic beings which refused to choose a side when the rift between the falling demonic powers and the heavenly angelic powers occured. Because of this refusal the Shadow Fey were punished to forever remain in a twilight realm that does not know the passage of time and where each fey is bound to the very land itself.

On occasion such a winter solstices or spring equinox the Shadow Fey were able to leave the Land of Eternal twilight and venture into the world of mortals. While there the Shadow Fey used their powers and their immortality to gain worship and service from what they considered to be the lesser mortals and the mortals took to treating the fey as though they were gods.

This could have gone on forever if the mortal races had not learnt of the true gods and the means to craft items of made of purest iron.

Driven back to the Land of Eternal Twilight the Shadow Fey hungered to return to the mortal lands and be worshipped as they had been worshipped so many years before. Then one day as if by chance they discovered a way to reach the mortal lands. They could exist within the dreaming minds of mortals. It is within these dreams that the Shadow Fey tried to emulate the real gods and answer prayers, but all too often they did not truly understand or even care to understand the true desires of dreaming mortals. All too often dreaming mortals would awake to find that they had become a soulless changelings or the contact with a mind that was free of the constraints of time would send the mortal dreamers into incurable insanity.

But the dreams of mortals are not entirely free from other intruders. For millenia the creatures of the Nightmare Land have invaded the dreams of sleeping mortals to feed upon their fear, dread, anxiety, loathing, and regrets. Then other minds were noticed, minds that would not grow old and perish. Minds that could know fear, dread, anxiety, regret, and loathing for all of eternity... fey minds.

The land of eternal twilight is a place trapped between the real and the unreal. It both exists and doesn't exist and as such the boundary between the Nightmare Land and the Land of Eternal Twilight is very weak. This has meant that Nightmare Lands have at various locations bledthrough into the Land of Eternal Twilight. In these locations the land and the fey within have become twisted versions of their former self and nightmares have become manifest.

In the campaign I want to set up the players will run Shadow Fey characters who have to venture into the Nightmare Lands to save their own people.

Any feedback or suggestions?
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