RLR: Domains looking for a Darklord 1: Mordent

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Who should be the darklord of Reanimated Mordent?

Keep Godefroy as is, with no change
8
29%
Keep Godefroy with a serious retcon to increase his appeal
11
39%
Use another (existing) mordentish character (Please explain)
6
21%
Create a new darklord to fit the domain
3
11%
 
Total votes: 28

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A G Thing
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Post by A G Thing »

I had a similar idea to Sorti's... A little different though!

So the house perhaps was a massive undertaking and cost a lot of money... Perhaps to much money... In the end slave labor, or other disposable workers were used and when they died they were buried as filler to the house to cover respective butts... Their lack of proper burial and the destruction of the truth left them with a want for revenge...

Now at first these spirits of the deceased workers were upset and decided that if they could not live on in memory except as ghosts in the house... Then none would 'live' in the house except them... This combined with the possible sinkhole and other spirits of the suggested army may have empowered them to drive others from the house...

Now with this they had little trouble till the time of the Alchemist and the two future Dark Lords Strahd and Azalin... They could do little against these arrogent and dismissive noble types that ignored or forcefully prevented them from their vengence... Then either due to the destruction of the Apparatus or just it's presence the spirits of these poor but vengeful workers bonded into one disjointed mind... Weakend in mind but increased in power the houses orignal tenants became almost like a feral force for a time... But it was still intelligent and while mad it was trying to act... The Dark Powers took notice...

Godfrey arrives and while the houses spirits attempt to punish him and drive the family from the house, they failed the unstable man killed his wife and daughter and so on... This increased the evil in the house and the damaged bits of soul that failed to bond with the new ghosts began to join with the fused beings conciousness. It began to discover it could while empowered with evil acts, pull the energy to begin to heal it's shattered mind for its purpose... Still it was filled with rage as it was dependant upon a "nobel" just like the ones who had caused its deaths and its bonded suffering state... Through the time that Godfrey was in the house as its "undead Dark Lord" he slowly began to unintentionally gather power for it... He commits all sorts of evil acts that power the house and, the fragments of "Charisma" are the more violent and malevolent thoughts beaten out of the souls in residence in the house... The torture of Godfrey is a mystery to the house but it gains power from that as well. For the time Godfrey was the sole Dark Lord and by the Dark Powers will he commanded the houses powers as an extention of his own, maddening them further... Seldom unexplained events of the houses will were brushed off by Godfrey when it acted out of turn...



In truth the spirits had become more independant... They find some of their goals similar to Godfreys but they are begining to subvert those that do not agree with their own. The fused spirits in the house are close enough to the power needed to be completely free willed but it uses this power to control or torment all inside it... Except Godfrey... He is the fuel, and the house is the engine... Should he not manipulate and cause evil the house would fall silent, but should the house not use its new land based influence and manipulate him he would become listless and dull once more, and with fewer new souls to beat he would provide less power...

The houses desire is somewhat warped by madness as it is blind to its limits of walls and such... The desires of vengence and solitude are overwhelming but it also wants recognition of its independance of any sort of control, and it seems to only tolerate the souls it collects for the power they provide. The spirit of the house would destroy or banish outright any creature other than its self, if it could but it must conserve power or be ignored and powerless once more... It must rely on its loathed "Ghost servents" especially Godfrey to keep that power up... It creates odd occurances and ill fortune to manipulate events in Mordent but it does not reveal it's self to Godfrey in fear that it may have to battle it's servent for control... It unlike him has limited power and it cannot stand the idea of failing when the goal is so close... Unbeknownst to it... It will never acheve it's goal without somesort of massive occurance... It is gaining power, but for every soul it holds, for every bit of land its influence grows to touch it must use more power... The dark powers have given it a near impossible goal, and right at the cusp the energy use will slip the other way to where it will begin to lose power more then gain... It will have to preform a balancing act to try and reach an exact point for all eternity... The hiding of it's self is also both benifitial and tormenting... Godfrey gets all the credit of those knowledgeable enough to know of such things being connected... This protects it somewhat from adventurers but it longs to be recognised and then left be in the peace of the grave it has claimed... Since it is dependant on others however this seems unlikely!

As for powers, well I assume that it would be a Co Darklord of a sort... I would perhaps make it able to challenge Godfrey on his powers over the domain such as closing the boarders... Other powers could be developed by people on this thread because I don't just want to unleash a long list of common powers... I don't have access to most of the Ravenloft material that others have so I do not know if this story is unintentionally similar to another haunted house in the game, or if it has any listed powers already that can be adapted!
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Post by WolfKook »

Sorti wrote:A proposal for the history behind the HoGH (sorry for the bad English, still polishing):
WOW!!! I like it. A lot. Still, there are questions to be asked, and things to be polished in the story.
...One month later, Samuel was awaken in the middle of the night by some weird lights in the dig; taking a brick with him, he approached the dig under the cover of darkness, but he was not prepared for what he saw: his own son Stephan was in an intimate embrace with one of his workers, a low-class boy!
I have to ask here, just in case I misunderstood it: Was Stephan having a same-sex relationship, or was he with a low-class girl? I just want to establish if Samuel's actions were motivated by social discrimination, or homophobia (Or both). (The later would not seem at place in Mordent, or would it?)
Enraged he came out of the shadows screaming, and tragedy struck: Stephan took some steps back dazed and scared and hit a support of the dig. The wooden beam fell, and the architect's son was buried under two hundred kilograms of stones. Samuel's grief was so deep he could barely think; in a fit of rage he hit the son's lover in the head with his brick, again and again, until he stopped moving.
I can almost hear him scream: "Because of you my son is dead!", and then "You killed him!"
Then he thought, who could be to blame if his son had grown up like that? Surely his mother, always permissive with him, allowed him to ignore the right path! Surely not him, as he was so busy building his son's future that he barely spoke with him. So he went back to his small house and awoke Lucy, telling her Stephan had an accident and needed her help at the dig; when they were there he murdered her as well and buried all three corpses deep under the basement of would have become the Northern Tower.
A little over-the-top. I would only think that possible if Samuel was drunk (It would be an interesting twist to establish him earlier as a drunkard, frustrated at the impossibility to get the life he thought he deserved). OTOH, you could rule that Lucy woke up at Samuel's screams, found his husband as he was about to kill his son's lover, and tried to stop him, getting murdered in the process. That would make Samuel's story even more tragic, and could even explain why he lost his grip on Sanity and started to delve in such obscure forces as he did afterwards.
If he could not give his son a mansion and servants, at least he would have given him the most beautiful tomb in the world! He began studying tomes regarding tombs all over the world, and incorporating them in the project: many gargoyles and other strange quirks were added in this phase. In this period the project was changed almost every week, and this led to many weird things like useless stairs ending against the wall, crooked corridors, and hidden passages.
This sounds like the "secret project" in a Extreme Makeover: House Edition episode. Perhaps it became so secret that everyone working on it ended up dead, and that would tie directly into A G Thing's idea.
One day he read a book by a famous archeologist and esotericist, dr. Knutsen, about the ziggurat of an ancient king in a distant land; in the book dr. Knutsen described many symbols that, according to him, were supposed to bind eternally the souls of the king's servants to his will. In some way, it was exactly was he had in mind for Stephan, right? He hired dr. Knutsen himself, promising him a huge amount of money to reveal him the secrets of those symbols and add them to his project. Dr. Knutsen explained him all the complicated discoveries he made in that distant tomb, and that on the kings' sarcophagus he found a spiral symbol, that he thought was the key to gathering the spirits and making them obedient to their regent.
Again, it would be interesting to establish Samuel's interest in the occult earlier in the story. Furthermore, I would guess Samuel would have a deadline, and unless Dr. Knutsen was already in Mordentshire, he would be out-of-reach to be get in time. It would be cool if Samuel tried to do it all by himself, following dr. Knutsen indications as written in his books, thus making the house into his own "Golem of Obsession".
Samuel asked dr. Knutsen to write the symbol on the floor of the Northern Tower, and paid him enough to quell any question; after the archeologist finished his work, his payment was a hit on the back on the head and a quick grave under the floor of the Library. Now that the spell was in place, the architect just wanted some more spirits to serve his son, so he began to sabotage a stair here and a wooden beam there, to cause some accidents... Workers died, but Renier was rich and influent enough that the works were not stopped.
Perhaps it was more innocent than that. Someone discovered the secret tomb, and was overwhelmed by the foul magicks at work there. To quiet him, Samuel commited another murder, and all hell broke loose. With people involved in the project starting to disappear, the workers became restless, and Samuel had to kill them one by one.
After some time he understood that he didn't even need to cause accidents anymore; they just happened anyway, as if the House was already able to nourish itself...

After many years and many lives, the House was finally ready and Samuel took Renier for a tour; sadly, just when he was showing him the top of the Northern Tower he slipped and fell down, his head cracking on the spiral symbol on the ground floor. Renier moved in the House anyway, but the presence inside led him to flee after a few months; and the rest is history...
I don't like him dying like that. The house deserves a payback time! :twisted:

Still, with this story, Samuel should be the House's Master, and thus the darklord, with the rest of the spirit forming some kind of powerful Caller in the Darkness, looking for more souls to steal, and (For some reason) unable to absorb Samuel's.

At death, Samuel would have discovered the extent of his wrongs, and part of him would want to destroy the house and the horrible creature residing in it, but he would have found it too strong to destroy, would realize that destroying it would mean losing his wife and son forever, and would be tempted to have the Mansion and the servants he always wanted.

So, he's bound to the place by his own dark desires, and would be freed if he wanted to simply let go. He would be able to summon and bind any spirit from the Caller in the Darkness as his servant, except for his wife and son, who have proven strangely out-of-reach (Perhaps because the strange mark was put after they were dead, and thus wasn't able to bind them), and his son's lover, who's free from the Caller, and tries to sabotage Samuel's plans.

I don't know how Godefroy would have broken the spell by suiciding, and I don't know how would he fit into the equation here.
A G Thing wrote:Now with this they had little trouble till the time of the Alchemist and the two future Dark Lords Strahd and Azalin... They could do little against these arrogent and dismissive noble types that ignored or forcefully prevented them from their vengence... Then either due to the destruction of the Apparatus or just it's presence the spirits of these poor but vengeful workers bonded into one disjointed mind... Weakend in mind but increased in power the houses orignal tenants became almost like a feral force for a time... But it was still intelligent and while mad it was trying to act... The Dark Powers took notice...
Remember that Godefroy precedes the coming of the Alchemist in the House's history, though I like the idea of the presence of the Apparatus letting the beast go loose.
Godfrey arrives and while the houses spirits attempt to punish him and drive the family from the house, they failed the unstable man killed his wife and daughter and so on... This increased the evil in the house and the damaged bits of soul that failed to bond with the new ghosts began to join with the fused beings conciousness.
Mmmmmm... So, without nurture, the house was dormant for a while, but then the murder of Lady Godefroy and her daughter, and then Lord Godefroy's suicide woke it up. Again, sounds interesting.
The torture of Godfrey is a mystery to the house but it gains power from that as well. For the time Godfrey was the sole Dark Lord and by the Dark Powers will he commanded the houses powers as an extention of his own, maddening them further... Seldom unexplained events of the houses will were brushed off by Godfrey when it acted out of turn...
Hehehehe... Here's a twist: Perhaps Samuel discovered that Godefroy stood free from the Caller, and decided to use him as an agent, showing himself as a powerful creature, "The Master of the House", or something like that. To ensure that Godefroy would be weak, willing to serve him, and unable to discover the truth, or to act against him, he sends the spirits of his wife and daughter, under his control, to taunt him every night, and convinces him that only by serving him he would keep them away.

It would be cool having Godefroy unknowingly serving someone he would otherwise perceive as below him.
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Post by Rotipher of the FoS »

No time to expand on the ideas above, now. Just one additional comment:

There ought to be some connection (even if a minor one) to rats in the House's early history. Otherwise, it'd be hard to account for the Renier family's lycanthropic curse, which dates back to when their ancestor lived on Gryphon Hill. We ought to keep some elements of the Reanimated setting consistent with the published version of Ravenloft, and Richemulot is one of the domains being included, IIRC.

Perhaps some of the laborers who'd been constructing the House ran a rat-baiting pit in the cellar, for entertainment at the end of their shifts. To give their terriers a challenge, they kept the biggest of the captured rats alive, in miserable, cramped cages, in order to breed them for size and aggressiveness. The site supervisors didn't object, as Gryphon Hill was infested with rodents and operating the pit helped clear these vermin from the construction site. During one of the accidents that plagued the construction process, the caged rats could have broken loose, gone wild with rage and fear, and severely bitten several of the workmen before scattering into hiding across the estate.

Later, when Renier moved his family into the House, the malign presence that dwelt there -- whether it's Samuel, the workers, a phantasmagorum born of cumulative tragedy, or a gestalt fusion of all of the above -- used the escaped rats as its proxies to strike out at Renier's children. His kids weren't born as wererats after all, but were infected by the survivors of the rat-baiting pit: the biggest, meanest, fiercest survivors, whose cage-fostered aggression to humans was enhanced, and made contagious, by the House's supernatural energies. Only one of Renier's sons avoided being bitten, becoming the ancestor of the non-lycanthropic Reniers; the rest of them contracted the Dread Disease, and bred true as wererats.
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Post by A G Thing »

Sounds like a good connection for the Lyc's and is fairly feasable to the extent that as I suggested the workers were poor slaves or prison labor they would take what the could get... The malign influence would definitely come into play from the houses power what ever is decided to be behind it...

I think maybe the combination of these three ideas may be in order... The spell is cast as in sortis suggestion! The workers as I said are the strong spirits that perhaps corrupt the spells intent mayhaps, with the sons spirit or such as a destablising influence! And as Roti sort of suggested with their desire for revenge they warped the rats to their command and caused the Reiner families decent into their new blood fued... Then continuing on from there a good mix of the other ideas suggested...

Perhaps since they now have so much power living rats now avoid the house but they command rat phantasms or bone rat swarms on the grounds... Perhaps they can limitedly command them or send them off the grounds as well.
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Post by Sorti »

WolfKook wrote:
Sorti wrote:A proposal for the history behind the HoGH (sorry for the bad English, still polishing):
WOW!!! I like it. A lot. Still, there are questions to be asked, and things to be polished in the story.
I agree, I hoped for the community's support to polish and integrate it :)
...One month later, Samuel was awaken in the middle of the night by some weird lights in the dig; taking a brick with him, he approached the dig under the cover of darkness, but he was not prepared for what he saw: his own son Stephan was in an intimate embrace with one of his workers, a low-class boy!
I have to ask here, just in case I misunderstood it: Was Stephan having a same-sex relationship, or was he with a low-class girl? I just want to establish if Samuel's actions were motivated by social discrimination, or homophobia (Or both). (The later would not seem at place in Mordent, or would it?)
Yeah, Stephan was having a relationship with a lower class boy, which is the reason his father was so enraged. We could expand on how Stephan was the whole future for Samuel, so having him be a homosexual would also have "deprived him of grandsons".
Then he thought, who could be to blame if his son had grown up like that? Surely his mother, always permissive with him, allowed him to ignore the right path! Surely not him, as he was so busy building his son's future that he barely spoke with him. So he went back to his small house and awoke Lucy, telling her Stephan had an accident and needed her help at the dig; when they were there he murdered her as well and buried all three corpses deep under the basement of would have become the Northern Tower.
A little over-the-top. I would only think that possible if Samuel was drunk (It would be an interesting twist to establish him earlier as a drunkard, frustrated at the impossibility to get the life he thought he deserved). OTOH, you could rule that Lucy woke up at Samuel's screams, found his husband as he was about to kill his son's lover, and tried to stop him, getting murdered in the process. That would make Samuel's story even more tragic, and could even explain why he lost his grip on Sanity and started to delve in such obscure forces as he did afterwards.
Also one of my players pointed out that this part is too quick :). He suggested to make only the son disappear, and Samuel finding some excuse with his wife; but day after day she becomes always harder to keep quiet, and Samuel is already shifting towards madness, until a bad evening he REALLY had enough... Of course alcohol could be added to the mix.
One day he read a book by a famous archeologist and esotericist, dr. Knutsen, about the ziggurat of an ancient king in a distant land; in the book dr. Knutsen described many symbols that, according to him, were supposed to bind eternally the souls of the king's servants to his will. In some way, it was exactly was he had in mind for Stephan, right? He hired dr. Knutsen himself, promising him a huge amount of money to reveal him the secrets of those symbols and add them to his project. Dr. Knutsen explained him all the complicated discoveries he made in that distant tomb, and that on the kings' sarcophagus he found a spiral symbol, that he thought was the key to gathering the spirits and making them obedient to their regent.
Again, it would be interesting to establish Samuel's interest in the occult earlier in the story. Furthermore, I would guess Samuel would have a deadline, and unless Dr. Knutsen was already in Mordentshire, he would be out-of-reach to be get in time. It would be cool if Samuel tried to do it all by himself, following dr. Knutsen indications as written in his books, thus making the house into his own "Golem of Obsession".
In the initial draft Samuel was assumed to be a student of every kind of distant and forgotten architecture, so yeah, he should have some esoteric background to begin with. Also one of the initial ideas was to have many thematically-coerent persons buried under certain rooms of the House (the archeologist-occultist under the library, the seer under the observatory...) and eventually to make them "named" ghosts of the House; I later dropped this idea because I wanted the House to be more a sentient phantasmagoria than a sum of spectres. About the deadlines, I suppose building a mansion that size requires some years, and maybe Samuel heard Dr. Knutsen was passing nearby for some reasons. He's not really needed dead, anyway, so we can also remove him from the equation.
Samuel asked dr. Knutsen to write the symbol on the floor of the Northern Tower, and paid him enough to quell any question; after the archeologist finished his work, his payment was a hit on the back on the head and a quick grave under the floor of the Library. Now that the spell was in place, the architect just wanted some more spirits to serve his son, so he began to sabotage a stair here and a wooden beam there, to cause some accidents... Workers died, but Renier was rich and influent enough that the works were not stopped.
Perhaps it was more innocent than that. Someone discovered the secret tomb, and was overwhelmed by the foul magicks at work there. To quiet him, Samuel commited another murder, and all hell broke loose. With people involved in the project starting to disappear, the workers became restless, and Samuel had to kill them one by one.
Yeah, that depends on how innocent and/or obsessed we want him :)
After some time he understood that he didn't even need to cause accidents anymore; they just happened anyway, as if the House was already able to nourish itself...

After many years and many lives, the House was finally ready and Samuel took Renier for a tour; sadly, just when he was showing him the top of the Northern Tower he slipped and fell down, his head cracking on the spiral symbol on the ground floor. Renier moved in the House anyway, but the presence inside led him to flee after a few months; and the rest is history...
I don't like him dying like that. The house deserves a payback time! :twisted:

Still, with this story, Samuel should be the House's Master, and thus the darklord, with the rest of the spirit forming some kind of powerful Caller in the Darkness, looking for more souls to steal, and (For some reason) unable to absorb Samuel's.

At death, Samuel would have discovered the extent of his wrongs, and part of him would want to destroy the house and the horrible creature residing in it, but he would have found it too strong to destroy, would realize that destroying it would mean losing his wife and son forever, and would be tempted to have the Mansion and the servants he always wanted.

So, he's bound to the place by his own dark desires, and would be freed if he wanted to simply let go. He would be able to summon and bind any spirit from the Caller in the Darkness as his servant, except for his wife and son, who have proven strangely out-of-reach (Perhaps because the strange mark was put after they were dead, and thus wasn't able to bind them), and his son's lover, who's free from the Caller, and tries to sabotage Samuel's plans.
So you'd prefer Samuel as a DL? The idea was to have the House an an unified entity, not divided into its generator subspecters; this would differentiate Samuel from Godefroy, or they're just two ghosts who killed their families :).
I don't know how Godefroy would have broken the spell by suiciding, and I don't know how would he fit into the equation here.
Maybe the ancient king's servants were killed to make them servants of the king; since they were servants, nobody cared about what they wished, and were supposed to have no will, so they would have never sacrificed themselves for the honor of serving their king forever. Killing himself Godefroy reaffirmed his individual will, and thus escaped the slavery from the spell; also maybe the fact he did something similar to what Samuel did made something work differently...

The torture of Godfrey is a mystery to the house but it gains power from that as well. For the time Godfrey was the sole Dark Lord and by the Dark Powers will he commanded the houses powers as an extention of his own, maddening them further... Seldom unexplained events of the houses will were brushed off by Godfrey when it acted out of turn...
Hehehehe... Here's a twist: Perhaps Samuel discovered that Godefroy stood free from the Caller, and decided to use him as an agent, showing himself as a powerful creature, "The Master of the House", or something like that. To ensure that Godefroy would be weak, willing to serve him, and unable to discover the truth, or to act against him, he sends the spirits of his wife and daughter, under his control, to taunt him every night, and convinces him that only by serving him he would keep them away.

It would be cool having Godefroy unknowingly serving someone he would otherwise perceive as below him.
Again I think it would be nicer i the House was impersonal instead of "Samuel", so it would be "Godefroy's actions are silently controlled by the evil entity" instead of "Godefroy and Samuel are both ghosts but Samuel's cooler". Also, the presence of Godefroy, robbing the House of its servants that now serve Godefroy and not it, would frustrate the entity, and it would take its revenge by sending Wilfred's family to beat him, so that both are locked into a spiral of hate and suffering, instead of just the House being smarter and more powerful than Goddy.


As for the rat ideas they can of course be integrated. Is HoGH's Renier the same Renier who began the wererat family? It could just have been his cousin... Or is it canon that we want to keep?
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Post by brilliantlight »

Rotipher of the FoS wrote:One place where Gaz III kind of blew it, IMO, was that it didn't take the time to describe the evil of the House on Gryphon Hill effectively. Not Godefroy (whom it salvaged somewhat from lameness), but that older, malignant presence which had cursed Gryphon Manor since it was built. If anything is more "Gothic" than a ghost, it's a cursed estate that dooms all fools who dare to dwell therein. :twisted:

If we want to preserve Mordent's image and style, yet dethrone Godefroy from lordship, I think that the House (or the phantasmagorum that resides in it) should be elevated to darklord. Godefroy can be retained as its lackey and mouthpiece, but the real threat is the supernatural malice which saturates every board, shingle, and nail of the manor.


(Granted, I may only feel this way because I've been watching Estate of Panic on SciFi lately. But hey, what DM wouldn't love to trap PCs in a house that's trying to kill them? :wink: )
Personally I don't like darklords being things. They should be some sort of intelligent animal life.
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