ewancummins wrote:If one is using the higher magic/more guns/more demihumans version of the setting presented in 3E...
Falkovnian witches
Clerics of Hala dragooned into service as healers.
Falkovnian storm-mages
Wizards who specialize in elemental magics. They developed the shower cantrip and cloudburst 1st level spell. Great for damping gunpowder!
Gonne-rats
A monsters borrowed from Iron Kingdoms, renamed and reworked. These aren't my original creation.
Basically rodents that gobble gunpowder like candy.
Hitting them or setting them on fire can cause a small explosion!
In Ravenloft, these might have been bred by Drakov's Ministry of Science as a way of screwing up powder supply for enemy nations.
Here is MY take on Vlad/ my understanding of his character.
There's a famous saying... that goes roughly like this...
"Amateurs study tactics. Veterans study strategy. Professionals study logistics." Or "Amateurs talk about tactics, but professionals study logistics." Because that version I can find sourced to - Gen. Robert H. Barrow, USMC (Commandant of the Marine Corps) noted in 1980
Vlad Darkov used to be the leader of a band of mercenaries.
Despite all his pretensions of being a king and a great ruler of men, deep down he's still that same leader of a band of mercenaries. He's never moved beyond the "tactics" phase of that particular saying, because small unit tactics were what mattered most to him as a mercenary leader.
He doesn't have the right mindset to be a king or a general and it shows, oh but it shows in what he does to Falkovnia.
All that stuff you came out with about ways to take away the enemies ability to use gunpowder, that's a great idea, but I'm not sure it would ever occur to Vlad, or that he'd be willing to do it, because to do so would be to admit that guns are tactically useful and if they're tactically useful he should be using them but he isn't so he'd be an idiot, and he can't be an idiot because he as a hardened soldier has to know more about warfare than the dandies, fops, wizards, and women who are in command of those kingdoms that border him, because he's a real fighting man whose spent his entire life fighting!
Vlad Darkov is the Dunning–Kruger effect slamming headfirst into the Peter Principle, much like John Bell Hood he might have been competent as a unit commander, but he's a hot mess as a leader of nations or armies.
He's got such a narrow view of the world that he doesn't realize he already has most of the Four Towers nations over a barrel economically when it comes to the grain he exports, because he has tunnel vision about how to take control of others, and you do that by seizing their land at sword point, not by careful trade negotiation!
So, why doesn't he like firearms but is okay with Lamordian war machines?
My theory goes like this.
In real life, anyone can use a gun, and use it relatively effectively.
People spent a fair portion of their lives training to be English Longbowmen to the point that their skeletons looked different than normal people's because their shoulder's had to bear the weight of the draw. Anyone can grab a gun spend a few weeks/months shooting at paper targets and be ready to go to war.
I think Vlad HATES this. Because it takes all the skill, it takes all the effort, it takes all the "glory" out of war. That's why he hates having actual combat mages, war is supposed to be about getting face to face with the enemy crossing blades, seeing who is superior, letting discipline and moral, where countless hours of time spent training with your weapon mean the difference between life and death! It's not supposed to be about some guy in a dress waving his hands and then lighting countless people on fire just because he was born lucky enough to have magic!
The Lamordian war machines however are probably so specialized that the people who built them also have to be the people who command them/drive them, or at least they have to spend a lot of time training them. They're not a pick up and use weapon which is the kind of weapon that Vlad hates, hates, hates, HATES!
I probably need to re-read the Black Box stuff on Vlad again because at the moment honestly I feel like the Krynn stuff does not to do much to inform his character since I can't recall what time period he came from, or where on an actual map from Krynn he came from, it's like he came from Krynn, but not any part of Krynn or at any particular time frame from Krynn that we're especially familiar with. Vlad came from Krynn, but Soth was a character while he was on Krynn before he came to Ravenloft.
I will be all to ready to eat my words if I review the Black Box stuff and there is Interesting Dragonlance crossover stuff with Vlad's past there.