Your opinion on undying soul?

[Scarycount]

Personally, I think undying soul is just a stupid trowback to the days of the unversal monsters when no matter how many times dracula is exposed to sunlight, or how many times the wolf man is killed, they always come back. Now as far as RL goes, I say what is the point of giving stats to a darklord that is practically impossible to kill. IT doesn't even have to be undying soul, just look at Azalin, how can anyone realisticly expect to defeat him. Now I don't mind this with Strahd and Godefroy, or Tristen ApBlanc for example. They all have ways to kill them if the heroes are clever enough. I mean, which do you think is harder, finding Strahds secret hiding spot, or killing every single dire wolf in Kartakass? Tearing down the house on Gryphon Hill, or killing mordenheim and adam at the exact same time? I just think there isn't much point in putting these characters in a game, where people can reasonably expect to oppose them at some point, and if they can't, why are they there? I'm sorry if this sounds like a rant, I just think that undying soul is about the worst idea ever. Now i'd like to know what you think.

[Ivana_Boritsi]

I pretty much agree.

I don't think that Darklords should be totally impossible to kill. In fact, I think that's why turns many people off from the setting in the first place.

If you have an NPC that is impossible to kill, you have no hope of defeating that NPC. Without any hope, there is no horror.

[DeepShadow of FoS]

Funny, I really like undying soul, but I kill off DL's with it on a regular basis.

IMO undying soul is not a throwback to the recurring villains of horror, but a heavy-handed way to deal with munchkin players who refused to do their homework. Ravenloft villains have to be brought to a point of closure, rather than just killed.

Those of you who dislike undying soul, how do you feel about the ghost's rejuvenation power? If you kill a spirit without laying it to rest, should it come back?

[Scarycount]

As I said, I love the rejuevenation power of a ghost, and I love specific weaknesses that must be exploited, it get's annoying only when taken to extremes. For example, tearing down godefroy's house is doable, especially since you have a few days to get it done before he comes back. It fit's with his curse, and is a satisfying thing to discover. On the other hand, if you wan't to get rid of Harkon Lukas, you have to hunt down and kill every dire wolf in Kartakass. So I think the ability of darklords to only be killed in highly specific ways is fine, as long as there is a reasonable chance of actually exploiting this weakness once discovered.

[DeepShadow of FoS]

As I said, I love the rejuevenation power of a ghost, and I love specific weaknesses that must be exploited, it get's annoying only when taken to extremes. For example, tearing down godefroy's house is doable, especially since you have a few days to get it done before he comes back. It fit's with his curse, and is a satisfying thing to discover. On the other hand, if you wan't to get rid of Harkon Lukas, you have to hunt down and kill every dire wolf in Kartakass. So I think the ability of darklords to only be killed in highly specific ways is fine, as long as there is a reasonable chance of actually exploiting this weakness once discovered.

I don't think that tearing down the House on Gryphon Hill should end Godefroy's undying soul. Where's the catharsis? We need closure on his story, not merely a creative way to hurt someone.

Same with Strahd's hiding places. Strategy is not the same thing as closure.

[Undead Cabbage]

*rolls in from a local cesspool. Bounces up and down, getting juices all over the debaters*

Sweet, came just in time!

I just think that undying soul is about the worst idea ever

You mean next to Malus Schlerus, right?

IMO undying soul is not a throwback to the recurring villains of horror, but a heavy-handed way to deal with munchkin players who refused to do their homework. Ravenloft villains have to be brought to a point of closure, rather than just killed.

Totally agree with you here, DP *high five*. It's natural for a lot of beginning RL players to try and gleefully witch-hunt the Dark Lords like a fat-guy at a rib fest. Not only does undying soul force the players to actually think before they act, but it also deepens the story behind the Dark Lords.

Those of you who dislike undying soul, how do you feel about the ghost's rejuvenation power? If you kill a spirit without laying it to rest, should it come back?

Let alone the other fail-safes some of the other RL monsters have, and I quote (pp 123 Denizens of Dread):

"Kizoku do not suffer normal damage from any attack forms. A Kizoku can only be permanently killed through a specific process. A foe who truly loved one of the kizoku's victimes must find their willow among the grove by making a DC 20 wisdom check. If that foe wields a weapon crafted from the heartwood from the heartwood of his beloved's tree, it deals normal damage to the kizoku. If that foe strikes the fatal blow, it's soul is permanently destroyed and the souls it had stolen return to their owners in the grove"

Frankly, I'd rather kill the Direwolves.

Now, the Kizoku is a strange and abnormal case that any right minded GM would only ever consider using if he really REALLY wanted to TKO his players in one session. But nevertheless, my point is that a lot of Ravenloft relies of it being such a bugger for players to take out a villain.

Don't get me wrong though, I think players eventually should be able to take out a Darklord. And by eventually, it should take the players a good couple of sessions just to get an idea of how to bring the DL down (lest you're campaign be reduced to DL-mania whack-a-mole). But yes, in the end, it should be possible (although at times not seeming so from the player's prospective).

So perhaps Harkon Lucas' version of undying soul is a tad bit extreme (unless you could convince all of the direwolves in Kartakass to just leave the realm all at once-now THAT would be ironic). But I wouldn't say that Undying soul itself is a bad idea. It works perfectly in the case of Godefroy.

That being said, Ivana and Scary do have a point. It's hard to use a DL that is impossible to kill (as seen in one of the more under-used darklords out there, Gwydion).

[DeepShadow of FoS]

I think the real question is, under what conditions would you call an end to an undying soul? To me, it would have to be under conditions that trumped the conditions of the domain.

This is why I think bulldozing the HoGH shouldn't be the way to end Godefroy: he gets torn limb from limb every night by his family. In what way is evicting him going to make him suffer more than that?

That's why I had my PC's put him on trial IMC. The indignity of being put on trial for murder--and being found guilty--was the ultimate spiritual torture. All his self-righteous preening and nobility was useless. There was nowhere to hide. The system of nobility and law that he had relied on so long had branded him, and it was a matter of public record, dragged out for all the gutter trash to gawk at. Being a darklord couldn't beat that.

[NeoTiamat]

Well, the argument with Godefroy is that to a certain extent, he's not the true Darklord. The House on Gryphon Hill is. It's a primal 'bad place', of which Godefroy is simply a manifestation. An extremely powerful and self-aware manifestation, but a manifestation nonetheless. The House on Gryphon Hill is the root cause of all the trouble, and thus its destruction is necessary.

Myself, I'd prefer an action more like cleansing (Build a church there? Or a monument to all the victims perhaps? I don't know, I'm not being paid to do that much thinking.)

==============================================

Anyway, back on topic. Personally, I think Undying Soul is a decent idea provided there's a way to actually accomplish it. Godefroy and his house places the problem on a doable scale. Sure, demolishing a giant house is by no means *easy*, but its a problem on a level PCs can tackle. And it can be truly cathartic if the PCs are forced to get the entire population of Mordentshire to help take it apart, brick by brick.

How do you tackle getting rid of all the dire wolves in Kartakass? I'm the kind of guy that thinks big, but that would basically require the kind of societal engineering (get the Kartakans to chop down the forests) that is *way* beyond PCs skill levels. What are the alternatives? Massive forest fires? A dire-wolf targeting magical plague? Forced extinction? This is Act of Ultimate Darkness territory, not to mention still virtually undoable. So its a neat idea and dovetails nicely into Lukas' curse, but there should be a way of doing it.... (Hmm.... magical flute? Pied Piper only with Dire Wolves? Theres a Dread Possibility in this)

As for Kizoku.... okay, who thought that was a bright idea?

[cure]

Maybe Harkon gets off a little too easy. Better if he were trapped in wolf form for a year after being killed. So that it is in fact a bother to him.

Further, I have often toyed with the idea of an attempted lupine genocide pursued by an old enemy of his that entered Ravenloft with him and knows his secret. In this particular case the enemy stakes every wolf she can find and becomes a dark legend among the wolfweres and an avenging angel to the humans. My leading candidate for the role is an elven vampire who had been insensed when she overheard Lukas composing a mocking ditty about an elf maid cursed with a plant withering black thumb.

But of course a lupin plague could do the same work only quicker.

Neither is likely to succeed, but they would give Harkon a scare, and he could recruit adventurers to help put down the threat, all the while striving to keep them in the dark as to the true risk to himself.

[Sylaire]

I don't really see the tension between "Undying Soul" and the rejuvenation power of a ghost (or similar creature), honestly. Ghosts, after all, are dead. And unlike corporeal undead such as zombies and vampires, which essentially have their "life force" tying body to soul replaced with necromantic magic, Negative Plane energy, or what have you, they don't have a physical tie to this reality. So it makes sense that just applying overwhelming physical force to them won't kill them permanently--the physical manifestation you're throwing the damage at isn't even real, but merely a projection of its magical power.

(Though if you want to talk about absurd "normal" monsters, I present to you the 2E odem, right out of the Black Box: a literally unkillable monster. Come to think of it, Diambel in "Islands of Terror" had the same issue--there was never any way, not even an absurd, next-to-impossible way, to actually kill him permanently.)

What I don't like are the Draga Salt-Biters and Harkon Lukases of Ravenloft, which are purely corporeal creatures that the Dark Powers give a cheap out essentially just because they're darklords. Godefroy is a ghost, thus you'd expect to have to go to great lengths to lay him to rest. Dominic D'Honaire, on the other hand, is only a man--a man with extraordinary powers, mind you, but still a man. Malus "zero-level" Scleris is similar (of course, D'Honaire doesn't have Undying Soul, and the last I checked, neither did Malus, but I'm using them as illustrations of the concept rather than specific examples).

I do agree with UC and DeepShadow in that a good Undying Soul effect should be domain-specific. A good Undying Soul is tied to the story of the domain and of the darklord (I loved DeepShadow's recital of how his campaign dealt with Godefroy--and NeoTiamat's point is also valid, if you take the point that the HoGH is a more appropriate Darklord (heck, the House got its own name on a module while Godefroy was still aligned CN, for Ezra's sake!)--though I'd make Godefroy more killable if I took that tack, since he's easily replaceable by the "strongest spirit" of the House...).

What gets me is what DeepShadow said about US being a response to munchkin players. Ever notice how the US darklords that get on peoples' cases are the ones where the story and the domain don't make any sense together or are just generally lacking?

Some examples:

Lamordia: Mordenhein and Adam's Undying Soul works perfectly together. In essence, it forces the players to get to the core of the tragedy between the two of them, confronting both halves of the story.

Saragoss: The worst of the offenders, IMHO. Saragoss is a classic example of a strong idea for a domain with a darklord tacked on as an afterthought. Adrift at sea, with the lack of resources and bitter harshness of nature against them at every turn, the folk of the Sargasso Sea are reduced to elemental savagery by their desperation to survive. Draga is a sideshow, a purely physical threat in a setting where the horror comes from the human psychological reactions to the various different threats. It's the Donner Party at sea, and getting eaten by a wereshark is nowhere near the top horror in the domain. Saragoss would work much better if it wasn't a domain, but a phantasmoragia like the House of Lament.

The Wildlands: The Wildlands is another example of a domain in which the concept (nonhuman, sentient-animal perspective, with animals expressing facets, as metaphor, of human personality traits--on one level, walking into the Wildlands is like walking into the inside of a human brain and finding out that the very worst aspects are in charge, as expressed by King Crocodile...) dominates the individual. But you can kill King Crocodile. Instead of him coming back, another crocodile king will eventually develop. Mechanically, it's the same as Draga or Lukas, but it works much better because the domain really is dominant--it's not the individual King Crocodile that's important, but the idea that there always will be a King Crocodile so long as the nature of the Wildlands remains intact.

Kartakass: Lukas is a strong character with a good backstory which is properly expressed in his domain. Here's an example of the worst kind of Undying Soul: it compensates not for the weakness of his story or the weakness of the character, but for the crappiness of base wolfwere statistics. To the average PC, Lukas is a simple enemy: once you've identified him as a target, you lug out the silver and render him down to dogmeat. He can't have a big enough support staff to keep the PCs out of his hair, because if he did he wouldn't be Harkon Lukas (his lack of an effective army/land to rule is part of his curse--in essence, he's the opposite of Vlad Drakov; Drakov has all the resources anyone could want and can't do anything with them, while Lukas is a genuine strategical/political genius and hasn't got any resources to apply that genius with--or anything significant to apply it to), so instead he gets a cheesy Undying Soul to bail him out if the PCs outthink him so they can get close enough with the Big Damage.

[brothersale]

i've always liked the undying soul, as it does serve its purpose in preventing players steamrollering every NPC they come across once they find out that some don't stay down and when they come back, there not exactly best pleased with the PCs.

on a side note i always found Lukas undying feat quite amusing as by his own inclination he would love to drag Kartakass out of its secular rural nature and into something more unified and civilised. And as you can by looking around europe that does 'so well' for large dangerous predators such as wolves and bears. I mean can you imagine if he got what he wanted, he would suddenly find that the vast number of dire wolves he relied on had been reduced to a fraction by his own actions.

[The Giamarga]

I have no problem with Undying soul or unkillable darklords. It is Ravenloft after all. A land cerated from Mists to eternally torment the darklords. If you can stomach a whole country with populations being made on the spot by the DPs, why not rebuilding a destroyed darklord? The whole every NPC ought to be killable by PCs notion is very foreign to me. By that logic the DPs should be killable too.

[Joël of the FoS]

Interesting question. In the Nocturnal Sea Report, one of the darklords will have undying soul. So you understand what I mean next, I'll give you a scoop, it's Mr Batman himself, Monette.

In even a monstrous ecology or biology point of view, the twist to truly defeat Monette isn't exactly very easy (you'll see ), like for example how to kill Lukas once and for all.

As Neotiamat said, this can be the source of very interesting adventure hooks and dread possibilities. I like his suggestions for eliminating all the wolves, there can be a campaign based only on these ideas.

Imagine your boat once arrived on Ile de la Tempête, and you killed Monette (well, maybe). You even tore away the Light house. But after a long period of time, you hear reports that the treacherous light house's beam is active again. And then there's your lover who's boat passing in this area is now two days late ...

My point is, used wisely as a DM tool, it can be fun, for all the reasons above. Do not use this to punish players or abuse them, of course, that would be taken as just silly by the players.

Joël

[Rotipher of the FoS]

(Hmm.... magical flute? Pied Piper only with Dire Wolves? Theres a Dread Possibility in this)

Check the New Magic entries in the DM Appendix of Gaz I. There's your poetic irony right there, that makes Lukas's US ability work just fine for me.

Mr. Monacle's so supremely sure of himself, he's shot himself in the paw....

[DeepShadow of FoS]

(Hmm.... magical flute? Pied Piper only with Dire Wolves? Theres a Dread Possibility in this)

Check the New Magic entries in the DM Appendix of Gaz I. There's your poetic irony right there, that makes Lukas's US ability work just fine for me.

Mr. Monacle's so supremely sure of himself, he's shot himself in the paw....

Oh, that's delicious! I had thought of something vaguely like that, but never put it together. Really, when you get down to it, it's even thematically appropriate, to have Lukas's own beloved songs destroy him.