So, with the ability of the Mists to penetrate potentially anywhere and snatch up potentially anyone, have any of you used Ravenloft for an opportunity for bizarre crossovers? Brought in an NPC from somewhere else that normally has nothing to do with D&D? Other game systems, or even other franchises entirely?
One of my PCs is secretly a werewolf, and slowly growing to dig his new role, which has caused me a few problems. In my more sadistic moments, I've thought about having the ghost of Samuel Haight show up to do him dirty. Usually I mix a drink and the urge passes, but it got me wondering if other people have brought in NPCs from the far reaches of the creative universe.
The normal Ravenloft way would be to make a pastiche Samuel Haight wouldn't it? Maybe mix in a bit of Van Helsing(movie version), or Shadowruns DeVries. Of course we already have George Weathermay & Ivan Dragonov.
Edit: reading up a bit on Haight he's especially fitting for the crossover topic being a crossover himself. You could always just have someone hit the PC with an ashtray from hell ...
I've I've had pc's come across ww1 trenches lost in the mists before. There were a few surviving Germans for a little while. Then the "hounds" returned and most of the Germans died or had run off into the fog and were torn down. Eventually the pcs escaped with a several gas masks and some memorable firepower.
Otherwise I've brought in several of Brian Lumbleys Våmpÿřęs. Along with necroscopes in general.
I've got a couple crossover NPCs, but nothing my PCs know about. They had some extended contact with a mimic who originated in a Deadlands-esque Civil War era earth. (He mentioned getting caught up in the mists after his home was burned down following the battle of Sharpsburg, but none of my players were up enough on Civil War history to get the reference.) Mostly their crossover origins are something that only I know about. They're an inside joke just for me.
For a while I have wanted to contact five different gamer friends in the following manner:
"Hey Joe, I'm running an Aces & Eights alternate history Wild West RPG. Here is the rulebook. Want to roll up a character? We start the campaign on Saturday."
"Hey Mary, I'm running a Star Trek RPG. Here is the rulebook. Want to roll up a character? We start the campaign on Saturday."
"Hey Bob, I'm running a Star Wars RPG. Here is the rulebook. Want to roll up a character? We start the campaign on Saturday."
"Hey Megan, I'm running a Band of Brothers-style RPG set during WWII. Here is the rulebook. Want to roll up a character? We start the campaign on Saturday."
"Hey Kevin, I'm running a Call of Cthulu game set in the present day. Here is the rulebook. Want to roll up a character? We start the campaign on Saturday."
"Joe, Mary, Bob, Megan, and Kevin, we're starting our new campaign on Saturday. Please email me your character sheets and character concepts by Wednesday. Do not discuss your character concepts or the campaign with the other players before the campaign starts!"
And then when they showed up on Saturday, five individual intro scenes would show how these five oddball outlanders all got sucked into the Mists, and we'd take it from there. I'd probably have converted each character to a new rules system that could somehow accommodate all of them (something cinematic like Dogs in the Vineyard, perhaps). This idea always sings to me, although I feel like it might become corny fast and might only be fun for a couple sessions. Also, finding five players who would all go along with it when they found out the surprise would be challenging. Maybe I will do this someday, although it is hard for me to prioritize ahead of more serious campaigns that have more potential to run for a long time.
In a campaign in the 1990's, I once added a few Lovecraft to my Ravenloft. Not the BBEG gods of course, but weird/mad/evil/raving/foaming cultist that wanted to summon these gods, and a few Lovecraftian monsters (ze good ole Shoggoth, and perhaps a fish man or two). The goal was to prevent the summoning of course. It was cool
Joël
"A full set of (game) rules is so massively complicated that the only time they were all bound together in a single volume, they underwent gravitational collapse and became a black hole" (Adams)
BTW, no one has mentioned the crossovers that already exist: The entire Masque of the Red Death Setting. (Dracula, Frankenstein, Sherlock Holmes, etc... all exist in "Ravenloft" if you consider Gothic Earth as part of Ravenloft)
Also, the Gentlemen and der Kinderstodt from Buffy are mentioned in DT&DL. (and of course there's our "own" Drusilla who we appropriated from the same source...)
"We're realistic heroes. We're not here to save the world, just nudge the world into a better place."
I always thought ravenloft would be perfect for an army of darkness style game. You know the gist. Pull a crew from d20 modern or even a world at war era and pitch them into the core. Give them a broken down car, some guns with limited ammunition and a few modern luxuries(like bic lighter and a trunk full of random).
I can picture the hilarity of a pair of headlights slowly coming down the road towards Nartok.
I have a random encounter table with twenty pre-generated travel encounters on it. (That way the group still gets the fun of random encounters, but I get to have them still advance the story.)
One of the encounters that they still haven't hit yet is a crossover NPC, who is essentially an alternate universe Elam (Hell on Wheels) if he had been from the Deadlands cosmology.
Cam, that should totally happen! That would be awesome. I'd miss seeing Deadlands in there, but that's just incredibly biased personal preference.
Thanks all! Jim, Deadlands could totally make it. The five settings I put up there are just starting points. I think I would tailor the actual settings chosen to the tastes of my players, limited only by what I am somewhat familiar with. Deadlands could easily fit the Wild West niche.
Closest I've come was one player brought in a Chirugeon named Richard Kimble, who was looking for a one-armed troll that had killed his wife. He thought it was clever.
Player showed up thru the mists, and after a couple sessions, found that people were following and spying on him, and eventually tried to kidnap him. Suddenly he didn't want the character anymore.
Incredibly random... I write a lot of fanfic for a murder mystery series called Castle, many of which are crossovers with horror or fantasy fandoms. While I was running my Ravenloft game a few months back, my wires got kind of crossed, and I started to formulate a fic about the characters from Castle being snatched by the Mists for a Weekend in Hell.
The fic never did get written, but I was moved to make this manip:
VIEW CONTENT:
Deranged Comics Fan
Strife-monger
Daughter of a Troll
That is probably the only premise I have ever heard for a fanfic that would make me break me "I'm-never-reading-fanfiction-not-even-if-the-only-other-choice-is-tongue-bathing-Wilford-Brimley" rule.
There's no possible way that Richard Castle hasn't played I6. (Shoot, he probably knows about the secret passageway that leads to the room with the vorpal sword. Y'know, the one that Tracy Hickman cut from the final draft, that Castle only knows about because of that one time in Reno when they stayed up all night shooting mescal? ) That would be hi-larious.
Of course, it would still be fanfiction. And a good fanfic is like a good Nazi. Theoretical at best. (J/k Hazgarn! )
Usually I mix a drink and the urge passes, but it got me wondering if other people have brought in NPCs from the far reaches of the creative universe.
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