Café de Nuit

We have the Domain of Mordent and the city of Mordentshire; shouldn't it, logically , be the opposed? Usually, the shire is the county around the city, and not viceversa.

Mistmaster wrote:We have the Domain of Mordent and the city of Mordentshire; shouldn't it, logically , be the opposed? Usually, the shire is the county around the city, and not viceversa.

Probably, but place names aren't always logical.


1: It could be named after another place, like Cheshire, CT.

2: Maybe Mordentshire is both the town and the district.
Possibility=
The town's proper name is Mordentshire-on-the-Sea and it was only incorporated and granted a mayor by the local lord ( an ancestral Weathermay) long after the shire was established. The district didn't lose its legal name when the town was formally recognized as a town.

3: Shire and county aren't always the same thing. Sometimes the suffix refers to an even smaller division, like a hundred.

4 Another possibility:

It was all Mordentshire, and legally it still is.
But with the long separation from its parent realm and contact with foreign lands like Richemulot and Lamordia, the habit of just calling the country 'Mordent' has developed.
The educated and old-fashioned people still use the proper terminology, remembering their roots.

Ravenloft has a long history of mis-using foreign words for place names. Why not mis-use English too?

Indeed. I did invert the two names in my mistworld project, thought, and I hope no one get confused when I'll write My take on Mordentshire.

Mistmaster wrote:Indeed. I did invert the two names in my mistworld project, thought, and I hope no one get confused when I'll write My take on Mordentshire.

In that case, is Lord Weatherway also the Earl of Mordentshire?

Earl is the English equivalent of count.


To be clear:
I mean that he's normally addressed as Lord Weathermay, and he holds the title of Earl of Mordentshire as part if his estate.
Even in the module, which is set a good chunk of time before the Black Box, the Weathermays have passed off most functions of running the town to appointed mayors.

Apropos of nothing, might one suggest making Lord Weathermay a viscount, rather than a full-blown Earl? (as an homage to Lord Godalming from DRACULA, which seems appropriate given Mordent's origin as a pastiche of the non-Transylvania bits of that page-turner); one tends to think making the Weathermays higher in rank than that makes them a touch TOO grand for a setting as contentedly provincial as Mordent.

Viscount works!

Really, I like it better than an earldom for the local lord.

So in present day Mordensthire there's a viscount whose hereditary (it seems to have been hereditary for at least a couple of centuries) title no longer carries more than a ceremonial attachment to governance of the county/shire.
The Mayor of Mordent is still technically appointed by the Viscount but really selected by a group of all the notable proprietors, including the Viscount.

Something like that?

Mordent is not so provincial in my projects, I do like the title of Earl. Earl of Mordentshire, and Lord of Mordent.

As "primary landholders and business leaders" who divided rulership "as per the edict of a distant and now forgotten king" (Gaz III), and if I really wanted to define them, I would read the nobility of Mordent as lords of the manor (a mixture of nobles and freemen) moreso than any rank above baron, the top tier that I would give any of Mordent's elite families (one that is/was constantly on the verge of dying out due to that disconnect from the Crown. Stress and neuroticism are/were inevitable by-products of that family tree!). Yet another reason why Dementlieuse have historically patronised and pitied them...

But that's just me.

Something like that?

Quite so - one imagines that, given the Weathermay's are mostly the only show in Mordent so far as home-grown noblesse d'epee are concerned the Viscount is mostly just "The Lord" these days and it amuses me to imagine visitors from a grander polity (perhaps from Darkon, which has a full-blown KING) being alternately amused and outraged to realise the ruler of Mordent is only slightly more exalted than a mere Baron.

Mordent is not so provincial in my projects, I do like the title of Earl. Earl of Mordentshire, and Lord of Mordent.

One must admit that I prefer to set Ravenloft on a more parochial scale, simply because there are plenty of DnD Settings tailor-made for EPIC Adventures but far fewer tailor-made for those who prefer Mystery and the challenge of winning hearts & minds to conquering yet ANOTHER Kingdom; really, my mental image of the Demiplane of Dread is that it's a place where Adventurers are challenged to save a soul more often than they are destined to Save the World.

I also really like the idea that, instead of the "retro classic" Middle Ages-influenced or "modern classic" *-punk settings (or even the Victoriana so tightly bound-up with the idea of Gothic Horror in the imagination), the Demiplane of Dread hews more closely to the Age of Discovery (think Elizabethan or Jacobean), when the Medieval period was very much in the past but often closer than was comfortable to contemplate - when gunpowder was more a tool than a wonder but matchlocks were more common than wheel locks and artillery was only just coming to the end of its infancy - when the Map kept redrawing itself and voyages of discovery made the world bigger, yet not more closely knit - where new mysteries and old certainties grappled with each other, then pulled knives when such tussles grew a little too heated far more often than was comfortable.

Hence my preference for a less "Feudal" and more gentrified title than Earl - which has more of an Arthurian feel than one feels would suit Mordent, at least as heard in the Theatre of my Mind's Eye!

*Insert "Clock" "Cyber" "Steam" or any other variety of "Punk" here.


Having said that, there are of course MANY Ravenlofts, so there can hardly be one right answer and one inarguably Perfect vision of the Demiplane of Dread.

Circa AD 1600 Europe gives you pretty much the full range of D&D weaponry and armor plus various firearms and cannon.

(If you treat 'smokepowder' as thing only spellcasters can make, then I'd guess guns would be rare and crossbows and bows quite common)

I'd imagine that the limitations of early firearms (in rate of fire and ease of re-usability when it comes to their missiles*) would also help keep bows competitive against smoke-poles!

*If nothing else it's much easier to find and re-use an arrow than it is to re-use spent shot!

Rogold Gildenman wrote:I'd imagine that the limitations of early firearms (in rate of fire and ease of re-usability when it comes to their missiles*) would also help keep bows competitive against smoke-poles!

*If nothing else it's much easier to find and re-use an arrow than it is to re-use spent shot!

It's really about training times and costs.

Guns are easy to learn how to use. It takes a several weeks to train a man to be a proficient musketeer.

Bows are not easy. It takes a lot of practice to become a good archer, and if one is expected to handle a longbow with a heavy draw weight, then we're talking years and years of training.


Guns win.

But this is assuming one needs to outfit a lot of soldiers and that gunpowder isn't that hard to make. If there are few large forces, not many wars, and gunpowder is a special chemical concoction that can't be mass-produced, the logic of equipping many men with firearms changes.

If rifling hasn't been developed, then all guns are smooth-bore. That diminishes accuracy.

Crossbows might remain in use as a weapon for sharpshooters and of course as a hunting weapon.

If you have a low population Ravenloft, I suggest that the infrastructure of powder mills,foundries for cannon, etc that would fully support the use and proliferation of Early Modern gunpowder weaponry may simply not exist.

This would be true for other industries, too.