15th Anniversary of the Book of Souls Netbook!

[Mangrum]

Okay, here's some bullet points on how I'd tackle Ravenloft these days, as a designer. Last time around, I was very much about maintaining tradition and supporting internal cohesion; as if the timeline that helped get my foot in the door weren't enough of a hint, I was all about shaping Ravenloft into single, coherent vision. Having now done that, I'd come at it with a much looser attitude.

I was going to try and be cute by organizing this into 13 bullet points, but it turns out that was a stretch, so I'll present everything in eight points.

It doesn't count as a point to say that I'd design it using Pathfinder, which has become my sweet spot to run and play. I've discovered (from various angles) that I'm a great fan of flexible, if potentially overly fiddly, rules systems. I gave 4E an honest try and it just never clicked for me.

So, first, I'd... oh, wait a minute. Half a dozen pumpkins just came through the door, asking to be carved. I'll have to get back to this later tonight.

[Andrew Cermak]

I've discovered (from various angles) that I'm a great fan of flexible, if potentially overly fiddly, rules systems.

...ever try the Hero System?

[Matthew L. Martin]

I've discovered (from various angles) that I'm a great fan of flexible, if potentially overly fiddly, rules systems.

...ever try the Hero System?

You took the words right out of my mouth, Cermak. HERO is probably a bit too much system for me nowadays--I find myself skewing more rules-medium, a la Star Wars Saga Edition, Mutants & Masterminds, and Savage Worlds, at least in reading and thinking. But it could certainly handle Ravenloft well.

Of course, I got my start with both published material and the Kargatane by adapting Ravenloft to a medium/light system--the SAGA Rules System used for Dragonlance: Fifth Age. I threw the Appendix for it together at the last minute because I wanted to have something in the Book of Souls--that article was cobbled together in a couple of days just before deadline, since I'd only received my copy of Domains of Dread on October 13th.

I'm afraid I didn't contribute much in the subsequent years, due to some soul-searching about fantasy in general and Ravenloft in particular, the end of my bachelor's degree and starting my short-lived career as a computer programmer, and wasting a lot of creative energy on Dragonlance. I did manage to get an article into the Book of Sacrifices, though--a backstory for the Illithid God-Brain. I've never stopped pestering John and the others about Ravenloft, though.

[Nathan of the FoS]

There was one in-joke I threw in that I don't think ever quite got figured out. Most of our Kargatane alter egos had names that were anagrams, or close anagrams, of our own names. Mynilar Sannom's, however, was an anagram of someone else's name, and the character writeup reflected that.

So, why Marilyn Manson?

[Joël of the FoS]

Removed the Igor costume (nobody wanted to give me their brain for my experiments, pitty), it's 8 oclock here and Halloween trafic is now dead.

Thanks Nathan, I was still trying to figure this out

[Zilfer]

wow.... that was pretty good. xD

[alhoon]

And here's one for nostalgia -

VIEW CONTENT:

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Oh oh!
Good one there Gotten! And... -23- messages? Were you a minister of public relations or something?

So many names I recognise. A couple keep visiting, a few drop by once a while, some are just fond memories by now... Oh... the nostalgia.

But worry not, FoS is our new home. I can't say I have any regrets.

But back to the Kargatane. Even if I registered around 1999, so I missed the start of it, I have a lot of extremely good memories from the place...

1999... I think I registered that year too. It was like a couple of months after I picked up by curiosity Domains of Dread. That led me to look more about Ravenloft in the net aaaaand... to SotK.
I registered like 1-2 days before the weird forums with the chain-posts were replaced with the more traditional forums like the one in Gotten's post.
I still remember my first post as a reply to a post of Bob the ??? (before the change of forums, Bob the Efreti used to change his nickname).

[Joël of the FoS]

Good one there Gotten! And... -23- messages? Were you a minister of public relations or something?

No usually my account then was to keep it it near zero messages, but that was a farewell night... and also the night of the announcement of the founding of the FoS, so there was a lot to discuss!

I have no idea to whom or about what, but there were 23 messages

Joël

[alhoon]

Since then, our group has played ..., d20 Wheel of Time, ...
Stu

Seriously?
I'm not the only one? I even thought once to throw a domain from back there with Semirhage as darklord.

Looking back, I think one of the best things we did was offer a respectable creative forum that helped some very talented people step up into the careers they deserved.

You guys also helped me and hundreds of other DMs and players improve their Ravenloft time. And as most of you know, D&D takes many, many hours. So, you've basically improved like years of my life.
And SotK started the whole thing that keeps goings with the FoS that improves my Ravenloft experience to this day.

So IMO, the Kargatane's greatest achievement is bringing Ravenloft to a lot of people and help us enjoy it more. Some became authors, some made the FoS site (that rocks and has produced countless community netbooks too) and many of us just became better Ravenloft DMs and players.

[Gonzoron of the FoS]

Yeah, I for one take inspiration from the K every time I DM. Whether it be NetBook material, Arthaus books, or tips from the rest of the site, or just memories of reading Stu's campaign and learning for the first time how cohesive a campaign could be. (before that, I thought you just strung modules together and called it a day.) Thanks for that.

A selfish question: any tips or philosophy to share on making a great fansite, community, and/or NetBooks?

[Mangrum]

...ever try the Hero System?

I have, and I like it, but I've settled back into a comfortable truth: Where goes Paizo's adventure paths, there go I.

[Joël of the FoS]

I'm also a fan of Paizo's, and their adventures often rocks. If not used in their entirety, I salvage a lot for my RL game.

What do you think of Carrion Crown?

Joël

[Ryan Naylor]

I love it. I'm running it now, set in Darkon. We're up to the Wake of the Watcher.

For my mind, the Haunting of Harrowstone is one of the best-on paper adventures I've ever seen. I keep meaning to write a campaign journal for it one day, but never get around to it.

[Mangrum]

Okay, so, how I'd approach Ravenloft these days in eight beats.

1. Format: I rely heavily on published adventures as a GM, and I was always a bit sad that our reign coincided with the shunning of modules as a concept. I could not be happier that Paizo's kept the adventure path concept going strong, and so, as a GM, that's the route I would follow. After the basic setting sourcebooks, the focus would be on delivering information through adventure paths (linked adventures, aka prepackaged campaigns), with additional sourcebooks acting to supplement the adventures.

2. Timeline Agnostic: This is something the Kargatane were playing with when we were pondering making our own setting books just for our own use, following the Great Falling Out. I would lay out a history for the setting, but not necessarily declare that any particular point in the timeline is "now." Any of it could be "now," or at the very least, narrow "now" down to a single generation--say, 735 to 755 BC. Different adventure paths might bounce around in time. This isn't something I'd do with many settings, but Ravenloft is inherently static, in a fashion, because it's built so heavily on its characters. As the timeline advances, the "Graying of Ravenloft" inevitably rears its ugly head.

Think of it as a way to feature both Van Richten and the Weathermay-Foxgrove twins.

3. Ravenloft is Artificial: Ravenloft is not a natural world. It's an artificial construct woven in its every detail by the Dark Powers; a laboratory for their inscrutable experiments in mortals, morality, and mortality. I'd get a little crunchier when it came to presenting domains--for example, some like Verbrek and Kartakass might have "fecund" ecologies, where it's actually next to impossible to eliminate the wilderness. New wildlife just keeps popping up to replenish beasts lost to hunting or predation. No more worrying about how a domain of X size can support Y large predators -- the Dark Powers keep adding more food to the fishbowl. Other domains, meanwhile, like Keening or Bluetspur, might have "blasted" ecologies, where not only is wildlife scarce, but fertility in general is lessened. Spells like plant growth might not work well there.

I might add other domain-wide attributes as well, like all enchantment magic being more powerful in Dementlieu, for example. Crafting poison might just be physically easier in Borca. Alterations to the planar fabric to enhance the themes the Dark Powers are exploring in that particular domain.

This would even extend to its mortal denizens. Natives of a domain just don't seem to be able to quite grasp the existence of the "glass walls" marking their existence. For example, there have been times when, woken suddenly from a deep sleep, I couldn't tell time for a few minutes. I could look at a clock, and I could tell that the numbers read "six-one-two," but I could not for the life of me put those numbers together to form "6:12." The same might apply in Lamordia--ask a villager for the year. "735 BC, naturally." How old is Dr. Mordenheim? "Oh, about 34, I think?" And when did he move into Schloss Mordenheim. "673 BC! 'Bout the time he got married, I think." So Dr. Mordenheim is 34... "Yes..." and he's been living up in that castle, a married man the whole time, for 42 years? "Yes? What are you trying to say?"

Which I suppose raises the question: Are the natives of Ravenloft real? Well, to all extents that one can measure, yes. And who's to say that those who claim to come from other worlds are real?

4. Ravenloft is Real: Once the Dark Powers create a domain, they keep it. The Demiplane of Dread slowly grows over the centuries, as the Dark Powers weave an entire world for themselves. Like the mortals the Dark Powers seemingly create, domains are effectively permanent fixtures, though they can change. If a darklord is slain, their domain never dissolves back into the mists. Killing a darklord, in other words, never ever means the end of the world for the denizens of that domain. Instead, the land is freed from its curse, for the time being. In the absence of a darklord, however, the unclaimed land becomes a yawning absence of power, just waiting to respond to the next damned soul to enter it. When the land does accept a new lord, it slowly and subtly changes to suit the new themes its darklord exemplifies--and the common folk can't quite remember that the natural world used to work slightly differently back in the day.

5. Heroes and Darklords are Enlightened: The defining nature of PCs in Ravenloft is that, for whatever reason, something has awoken them to the unnaturalness of the world. They are the handful of enlightened souls who can see past the limitations of their circumstances. Potential darklords are drawn from this same pool--they, too, are free to act as they wish, not at they must. Most NPCs, while fully fledged individuals, are ultimately trapped in the roles they were born to play.

6. Lighten Up: I'd abandon the pretense of Ravenloft being a particularly magic-poor world. It's not, and in practice it never really was. I'm not talking about adding magic item shops here; just an acknowledgement that yes, there's a fair amount of spellcasters running around, and and adventures in Ravenloft will include as much loot as they would in any other world. In addition, I'd pull way, way back on modifying class abilities, spells, and so forth. Admittedly, this goes against bullet point 3 to an extent, so we're looking for a balance. I'd reduce Ravenloft's alterations to magic to a few basics (can't detect alignments, undead are resistant to necromancy, etc.) plus the basic additions of individual domains. Alterations to spells worked fine in 2E, when the spell pool was fairly limited, but in 3E we had to try to tackle the issue with a broad framework that just produced endless grief for poor ol' Ask Azalin. It's impossible to keep up with every intricate detail of the ever-expanding 3E/Pathfinder ruleset, so stop trying to fight the tide. It's Gothic Adventure! Go out there and stake some vampires, fall in love, and have some fun!

And, y'know, this would be as challenging as any other suggestion in this list, but I'd like to build romance into the setting as well. Sure, it's easy to say love conquers all, but let's throw some rules behind that!

7. Classic Monsters, New Approach: In 3E, we tried to keep the Van Richten guides as canonical as possible. This time around, I wouldn't really be at all concerned with what was said before -- this would be a fresh approach. I would present werebeasts, vampires, ghosts, and probably revenants too right off the bat as prestige classes, and encourage monstrous PCs fighting their inner darkness as a play style. I would drop reality wrinkles entirely, not because I necessarily dislike the idea itself, but because I don't feel that years of increasingly fine-grained explanations about how they work ever stemmed the tide of confused gamers. And as for the Vistani, while I accept them as a Gothic trope and don't feel any personal need to toss out the concept, so long as it's handled with a certain sense of cultural awareness and delicacy, real-world society's changed and there's a very vocal component of gamers out there who consider any form of "fantasy Roma" to be pure racism. I'm a little tired of fighting the fight on that one, so I'd probably follow WotC's lead of re-imagining the Vistani to make them more of a chosen culture rather than an ethnicity.

8. Codify Darklords and Sinkholes: Without getting into every last detail, I would insist on finally, fully codifying powers checks as a rule system, meaning that failed powers checks would apply to NPCs in exactly the same way as PCs. This might, and in some cases inevitably would, require rebuilding some darklords from scratch. This is a big change, but one that's intended to not just standardize power checks, but also, finally, introduce a built-in way to bring the rich history of the darklords to the gaming table. (No more three-page character histories that PCs can and will never learn.) I'll break this down into smaller nuggets.

A. Sinkholes of evil aren't just places where the GM gets to make life extra-rough for the PCs. Each and every sinkhole of evil comes into existence when a character fails a powers check. That act of evil taints the world, and the corruption seeps into the planar fabric. While, yes, sinkholes would still bolster the powers of evil in general, each sinkhole contains within it an echo of the act that created it. Let's take a villain like Godefroy, who killed his family in an fit of rage. When he commits the murders, he creates a sinkhole, in which that fit of murderous rage lives on, a canker the world cannot forget or forgive because justice has never been done. Let's say that sinkhole forms around the house where the murder took place. That house might be haunted by the slain family members, and newcomers who move in might find themselves slowly infused with rage, the original act of evil seeking to play itself out over and over.

B. Becoming a darklord requires failing six powers checks. (Acts of ultimate evil might count as more than one.) Each failed powers check increases the darklord's power and strengthens their curse, naturally. This means that any given darklord has six aspects to their curse (six positive and six negative). If a villain isn't a darklord, then they might leave a trail of sinkholes across the demiplane, but when a darklord gains their domain, the Dark Powers rearrange the stage, placing all of their sinkholes in their domain with them. At least one of these sinkholes is certain to lie within the darklord's lair, but others are likely scattered across the domain. Their location is not at all random, however -- each sinkhole represents a step in the darklord's descent into darkness and manifests in a location appropriate to that act.

C. Sinkholes are the result of lingering evils and justice undone. They cannot be permanently dispelled until the evil that caused them meets its just desserts, be it atonement or righteous retribution. However, it is possibly to temporarily disperse a sinkhole by resolving the "echo" playing out within it. In other words, PCs might go to a house with a foul reputation, battle the evil spirits lingering there, and seemingly "cleanse" the location. When PCs "cleanse" a sinkhole, the trapped cycle of evil is temporarily freed. PCs present when this happens experience a phantasmal, dreamlike replay of the original event that created the sinkhole--a direct look into the villain's past. If the same evildoer created other sinkholes, then those present when the current sinkhole is "cleansed" also get a glimpse into where those sinkholes might be found.

D. "Cleansing" a sinkhole temporarily severs the flow of corruption coming from it. In the immediate sense, the sinkhole seems to dissipate, losing its negative properties. This also severs the sinkhole as a source of power for the villain/darklord who created it. Cleansing a sinkhole slightly lessens the darklord's curse, but also removes a component of their power. Cleanse all six sinkholes before you take on a darklord and a) you'll greatly weaken them, b) you'll learn a great deal of their tormented history. However, the darklord instantly senses the loss of power, and as each sinkhole is cleansed, they gain a clearer view of who's responsible.

E. Because sinkholes cannot be permanently cleansed while the villain who created them goes unredeemed/unpunished, they inevitably will reform (perhaps somewhere else within the domain). Once you clean a sinkhole, you have until the next new moon (or at least one full month, whichever takes longer) to defeat the darklord or the sinkhole reforms.

[Mangrum]

What do you think of Carrion Crown?

It's not Ravenloft, but it's not trying to be. I actually think it's one of the "lighter" APs they've done; the early ones in particular had some pure horror content that CC doesn't even try to recapture. I think the highly episodic approach is interesting as well. I'd definitely be interested in running it some day. (Though, really, Second Darkness is the only AP that I'd be reluctant to commit to.)

About the time CC was announced, I was idly pondering a Gothic Adventure AP, modeled on the Paizo approach, in which each of the PCs is a scion of an old, cursed family. As the AP went on, they'd delve into the dark, hidden histories of each of their houses, potentially unleashing and/or resolving the curses on each. Of course, each house would have a strong theme--lycanthropy, vampirism, etc. (The idea was that centuries ago, the leaders of these families had sworn pacts with fiendish forces to fend off some immediate threat like an invading army, at the cost of inviting these more insidious evils into their lands.)

Anyway, all I really knew is that I wanted to start the AP with a funeral and a seance. Then, like, within a month I read the first synopses of CC and thought, "Well, no need to work on this any more!"