"Skyrim-Ravenloft"

[Thalmagrus]

An interesting thought came to me in my sleep a while back, what would happen if someone created a 3d ravenloft video game, and I've been obsessed with the concept ever since. I played the Stone Prophet, and Strahds Possession computer game when I was in middle school. I played a little of the never winter nights persistent world for ravenloft, and still something was missing for me.

Then I got Skyrim for Christmas last year, and fell in love with it. It is a beautiful game. Just walking around and going for hikes makes you stop and enjoy the view every once in a while. Thats when it occured to me that The Demi plane of Dread needs to be given the attention to detail that has been given to Skyrim. I know that sometimes the monster in the closet loses a little bit of horror when you know its face. So the Idea of detailing Ravenloft in a 3d world might seem like I wish to lift the skirt of the boogyman and see if its a boy or girl, but I really just want to be able to give something back to the Ravenloft community thats opened its arms to me and enveloped me in cold darkness and mist.

With the pc game of Skyrim, I played through it for a while, and unfortunatly fell victim to the urge to create something of my own. Then I discovered console commands and the world was opened up to me. I was cheating left and right as so many others do but rarely admit. When I opened up the dawnstar Sanctuary ( the Dark brotherhood assassin home for you in the game) I added some things that it was missing like a forge, some new rooms and more people to populate it with.

I had fun with it until I heard that they were going to be releasing a creation kit with the next patch at the end of this month sometime, and my attentions suddenly became that of creating Ravenloft in Skyrim. I have no ambition to create the entire demiplane, just the Domain of Barovia, since I believe that the Game of Skyrim would lend well to the creation of that type of climate and terrain, with the building structures and style that I think would make a truly awesome Barovia (being my favorite domain and all).

So tell me what you guys think. I dont know what the creation kit will be able to do, but from what I heard its going to take a while to learn. (which will not deter me in the least) Any ideas are definently welcome.

[HuManBing]

Quoted in part from an old post where we discussed the sort of video game that Ravenloft could lend itself to:

Perhaps a "caught-in-the-middle" type of campaign could work. One example of this could be a Darkon/Falkovnia/Lamordia plotline:

On the border between these three unfriendly nations is a collection of hillside villages. Your character starts off as a 0th-level commoner, faced with a few mundane tasks to acquaint the player with the control system. (Your uncle shot a few grouse in the woods - go collect them and bring them back, etc.) Then the interweaving plotlines turn up, at times mutually exclusive.

Lamordia has a few nervous bordermen assembling with their untested firearms, worried that Falkovnia's troop movements may be a threat. Falkovnia, in contrast, has started "recruiting" footmen from the hillside, promising preferential treatment to enlistees over those who are later conscipted. Meanwhile, a mysterious foreign woman from Darkon's Kargat police is in the area and is looking for locals whom she can entrust with various reporting and espionage tasks.

The game thus can place the gamer as a firearms soldier (Lamordia), a melee and fantasy missile arms soldier (Falkovnia), or a fledgling wizard (Darkon). The Falkovnian campaign is to secure a valuable seam of ores in the hillside, and the campaign progresses from driving off the Lamordian border watch to a sudden shift when hordes of undead pour out of Darkon to unseat them.

The Lamordian campaign is much more focused on distance sniping, use of mechanical means, and in the end a "gunpowder plot" where the Falkovnian fort under construction is dramatically destroyed. Certain features like primitive artillery (trebuchets flinging gunpowder payloads) could be incorporated, with the character playing a look-out role and rangefinder role. Lamordia's final goal is to assassinate the Falkovnian Falkfuhrer in charge of this assault force, to decapitate the regional army's ability to wage war and to buy a few years' peace.

The Darkonian campaign would be a much more go-it-alone type of campaign, with combat as a last-ditch measure. The player is a spellcaster whose powers are subtle and not well suited to straight-out combat, with misdirection and stealth much better suited. Darkon's campaign involves the Kargat wizard in small acts of sabotage here and there, with various secondary targets that all add up through the levels and have a profound effect in later missions. Darkon's campaign essentially strives to maintain a balance of power between Lamordia and Falkovnia, so that at the very end of the campaign, the two military forces are evenly matched when the final battle occurs. This ensures the largest number of corpses on the battlefield, which serves the dark purpose of the Kargat operative and her shadowy liege in Avernus.

The player progresses through chapters, at each point with some limited ability to switch sides if he wants to (and this may become quite compelling, especially if they sided with the relatively amoral Darkon or Falkovnian sides to begin with). In some campaigns, past actions - especially the completion of secondary mission goals - will come to have a serious effect on later missions.

Lamordian missions could have a primary goal of sabotaging the mine entrances with gunpowder, halting the Falkovnian extraction of ore. But if the player is canny enough to rig similar traps on the oxcarts and wagons, that will result in further logistical problems for the Falkovnian side, leading perhaps to reduced numbers of Falkovnian soldiers, or perhaps Falkovnian soldiers wearing inferior armor or with fewer hit points (because of inadequate food supplies).

Each side (except perhaps the Lamordians) could also have a "betrayal plot" involved somehow. These would be deeply hidden and may not even be encountered by the player on the first playthrough. But a player who follows up every clue or does a lot of exploration, or even is in the right place at the right time, may open up secret levels of very brief encounters that serve to question their allegiance to that side.

[HuManBing]

And from the same post, a summary of a possible "subversion" mission for the player who chooses the Darkonian side:

A sample such betrayal plot for the Darkonians might be:

1. In the main mission, the Darkonian's goal is to kill a certain Darkonian soldier who defected to Falkovnia. The Darkonian wizard can do this through stealth and then escape back. However, if he decides to capture the Darkonian soldier and bring him back to base, a new mini area is opened up in the Kargat officer's tent later on, showing interrogation confessions, signed warrants of execution, and even such things as dissection results and "redistributions" relating to the soldier's family and children.

2. Later on in the main mission, the Darkonian's goal is to deliver a bribe to some Lamordian miners who can attest to the quality of the Falkovnian ore. Once the player delivers the miners to a forest clearing not far from the Kargat's tent, the Kargat agent sends the player out on another mission. If the agent completes the mission, there is an official "exit" far from the Kargat's tent. But if the agent returns to the Kargat's tent, he finds the miners all there, sleeping in cots, except for one. If the agent returns to the forest clearing, he finds some bloody clothes and empty boots which once belonged to the missing miner. The Kargat herself is nowhere to be found.

3. The final betrayal mission occurs after the Lamordians bring in a priest to aid their soldiers in healing. The Kargat operative is under orders to capture the priest and bring him back to Avernus. The player is given a map of a mountain church and the Kargat officer will wait in ambush near the altar. The player is ordered to attack the priest's convoy to lure them into the altar chamber, where the Kargat will strike and capture the priest.

The player can choose instead to alert the priest about the Kargat officer's plans. The priest can either flee or join the player in fighting the Kargat officer. One important note is that the Kargat officer's map is missing a secret passage that leads to a balcony overlooking the altar. The priest gives clues about it and the player can then use the secret passage to get an advantage against the Kargat officer.

The battle against the Kargat officer should be not be primarily based on "lower her hit points and kill her". That's just boring. A far more interesting feature would be to have her turn invisible (as all Asian vampires can) and then attack the player and any allies while invisible. Tactics for defeating her include:

1. Casting see invisible, which shows her movements even if it doesn't allow the allies to hit her.
2. Keeping everybody in a group so if she attacks one, they can all come to the rescue. (She has no ranged weapons.)
3. When invisible, she climbs on the ceiling using wall banners and drapes. If the player is quick-witted, he can cut down the banners and drapes, preventing her from climbing on them.
4. If the player is REALLY quick-witted, he can wait till the Kargat officer is on the floor and then cut the drapes to collapse on top of her. That immediately gives away her location, invisible or not.
5. The Kargat vampire tries her best to kill the priest and then kill the player but if the battle goes very badly for her, she will be willing to jump out through a window and flee. She will return in the final level to terrorize the player again and make his game a lot more difficult.
6. If the vampire is defeated in physical combat, and the priest is around, he will take custody of the body and lay her to rest. She will not return.
7. If the vampire is defeated but the priest is not around, she will return and give the PC the same difficulty as in 5. above, although the priest may make an appearance to counteract her.

Once the Kargat is killed or driven away, the player is placed back at the central mission level, except that the Kargat's tent is empty and cannot be selected. Going to the Falkovnians or the Lamordians to change allegiances is his only hope now.

That's a very quick-and-dirty summary of the sort of game I think Ravenloft would lend itself well to. Moral grey areas, flexibility of allegiance, and a genuine "repercussions of your actions" all are important here.

[Thalmagrus]

very cool, thank you. Do you thingk a game set in Barovia would be workable. as a stand alone, closed domain boarder kind of thing?

[HuManBing]

Absolutely. The main limiting factor for anybody doing a mod, that I can see, would be the time commitment. To merely populate a landscape, then craft buildings and locations and items, without even trying to script the mission/conversation logic, would take a team of programmers a term of months or years. The more "possibility branches" there are, the more complex it becomes.

A short, linear (or at least, simple) mission may be the best bet. You can get great mileage out of a single castle - break out of the dungeons of Ravenloft, for example. Or put down two or three locations that the PCs can travel between, and each time they come back, different things are apparent in each.

A few games that might be good to play for inspiration are:

• Fallout 3 (specifically the Point Lookout add-on, which is like a Southern Gothic mod - wide-open sandbox)
• Blood (featured enclosed missions and plenty of gore-and-gunplay in a pseudo-Lovecraftian setting)
• Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth (excellent "hapless hero" style of gaming - you don't even get a weapon until a third of the way through the game, and combat is deadly and to be avoided if at all possible)
• Clive Barker's Undying (great supernatural horror, with amazing aesthetics for mausoleum, Gothic mansion, and two dark-magic realms)
• System Shock 2 (excellent survivalist horror game, set in far future - also good for watching how they introduced three "paths" for character progression: shooter, hacker, and psi). Bioshock is a spiritual successor but more linear and more aesthetically polished.
• Nosferatu: Wrath of Malachai (surprisingly good randomized castle escape plot - has a fatigue mechanic and an interesting melee system, in addition to the various weapons. Most interesting of all: the final confrontation varies in difficulty depending on whom you are able to save during the course of the game)

[HuManBing]

For Barovia, a simple plot could be: "Arrive in Barovia, lose your female companion, go to Castle Ravenloft, rescue her and escape Strahd".

A barebones outline could be:

• coach ride to Village of Barovia with colleagues Snežana and Dmitri - conversations in the coach about legal documents for Barovian leadership
• arrival in Village, their contact Vasili von Holtz is nowhere to be seen
• townspeople scared, clearly terrified of the dark and unable to perform apparently basic functions. PCs asked to do apparently trivial things in the dusk, like closing the outer gate or lighting the border torches. If they do this, the townsfolk like them more and provide them with healing etc.
• Vasili von Holtz appears, conversation about legal affairs with the PCs - distracted by Snežana, leaves in some confusion
• burgomeister approaches the lead PC to go speak with the Vistani. They've asked for the foreigners specifically
• in the Vardo, the Vistani woman reads the PC's fortune (roll up a character through tarokka readings). PC can choose sword (warrior), mask (rogue), or rune (wizard).
• after the reading, PC begins to hallucinate. Screams and sounds of a struggle fill the air. He awakens outside, with blurry vision and shadowy beings chasing and mauling people around him. At the edge of the field are three bright figures - a warrior, a rogue, and a wizard. The PC's choice will determine his powers for the game
• The Village of Barovia is fending off a rampage of wolves - the PC can learn how to use combat, stealth, and magic here
• Snežana is gone! The Villagers report that she was last seen at the inn. The witness trail eventually reveals that Holtz's carriage turned up at the inn just as the fighting started, and Snežana was seen walking into it as in a trance
• ...and thus to the Castle to save her...

[Thalmagrus]

I like that allot. your very helpful. And your definitely right. the creation of the domain will be time consuming as hell. I'm having trouble figuring out the best way to build the domain, should I work from the domain border and work my way in, or start with Castle Ravenloft and work out?
I will worry about the questing stuff later after I build some locations, plus I don't even know how Skyrim's Creation kit will really work yet. I'm getting my plan together first so my task Isn't so huge.
I've been compiling a huge list of cannon material for a long time on Barovia for use in my table top Ravenloft games. Mostly just detailed information about geographical locations.

[HuManBing]

In that case, maybe just build the castle. The entire mission could just focus on the Castle and breaking out of it.

Simply doing a few rooms of the castle will give you a good idea of how much time the project would take. If it's manageable for one person, then make the whole castle. Start small, that way you're more likely to see the project through to completion.

[alhoon]

Bringing Ravenloft to Skyrim is possible actually. Not easy, but possible. People have created a world for ES:IV from scratch, and it took them years. However their mod is like a new game with like 30 hours gametime.

[Thalmagrus]

sweet. I'll start with Castle Ravenloft to get the feel for the system. I'll take pics for you guys too, Can i post them here? or is there somewhere else I should do that.

[HuManBing]

I think you can upload pictures to Fraternity of Shadows posts now, look at the bottom of the posting window and it has an attachment console.

[Thalmagrus]

I have run into an interesting situation in planning my new "Skyrim Ravenloft Barovia". I have looked at allot of maps for barovia and comparing them to real life maps of Romania and Transylvania to get a good figure for how large the domain is. More Specifically how many miles it is across and tall, and how many days it should take to travel from one end to the other considering both the factors of using the old svalich road and going it across country with a guide (cuz no sane person would want to do it without one). This will help me figure a good size for the domain when building it in Skyrim, considering that Skyrim has "Time" in the form of a rising and setting sun, and the average walking speed of an average human being 3.5 miles per hour on a road.
Romania and Transylvania are both about the same size being around 400 - 450 miles across, and around 200-250 miles tall, and they both resemble the domain of barovia in approximate shape I thought that I might make the domain about there size for travel purposes.
I would like some help in this area from the ravenloft community in figuring out my "Skyrim - Barovia" size issue.

Thanks allot.

[Gonzoron of the FoS]

Well, you've stumbled on one of the "great debates" of Ravenloft fandom. Depending on the edition, Ravenloft's maps have had completely different scales or none at all. We've been discussing it recently here:
http://fraternityofshadows.com/forum/vi ... f=1&t=8052

[Thalmagrus]

So, its finally official, the creation kit for Skyrim will be coming out for download on the 7th of this month. I have had some experience with using creation kits in the past for other elder scrolls games and IM very excited to see how the project will unfold. I will be starting with Castle Ravenloft, and I'll be working my way out from that point of Barovia.

[alhoon]

Yeap, to address it there have been canon rulings that the distance is fluid.