Café de Nuit

All of HP Lovecraft's works are in public domain at this point. You can read them all online for free.

The professor that I'm working for is writing a book on HP Lovecraft. I'll let you all know when it's finished, etc., and post a link to it (assuming it's for sale on amazon, etc.).

Slerm

Hmm. Perhaps mixing the ideas of the Boyar election and the hereditary ruler is the thing to do. I.e. The boyars *do* get to "vote," but by Strahd's time, it was largely ceremonial--thus, he was a count of his own region until such time as the "vote" occurred. However, in the cas...

While we're on the subject--Strahd's farther is King...but...rather than Prince Strahd, we have Count Strahd? Is that ever explained anywhere?

Slerm

Interesting. I'll have to find this article I have on ritual killing of kings/rulers and post it for the interested. At what point did the term "Borjia" get introduced? Was that 3e or 2e, or from whence does it come? Also, it would be biting off more than I could chew, (would require a reg...

Also, I was thinking about having them play out some of the intrigue in the Borjian court (also as suggested in this thread). Ideas for that? First, you should decide in what year you'll be starting off the campaign. It will make a big difference if, for example, it begins before 347, when Barov an...

Turks =/= Tergs. Do whatever you want with the Tergs. You're quite right. Sadly, I'm ashamed to admit that I realized I was sort of thinking of them as wolf-riding mongols, not too unlike the orcs in The Hobbit. :oops: I figure that, while there really isn't anything original these days, perhaps th...

All right. I've done some research on the Turks, etc., the real Vlad the Impaler, and so forth. It's interesting to see how the Ravenloft designers pulled the good from the character of the real life Vlad to make Strahd, and pulled the bad to make Vlad Drakov. Anyway, after reading about the Turks, ...

Thanks for the ideas! As of this moment, I think I'm going to start the "regular" campaign with the eventual "From the Shadows" characters, and alternate between that and the soldiers campaign. We are looking to do something a little bit different, so we were thinking of having a...

Mangrum wrote:All living von Zaroviches are descended from Sturm, who was not present at the wedding.

Both prime material *and* RL von Zaroviches? Oh...I see. Sturm's children already sired on the outside, and whatever Sturm got up to within RL, yes?

Slerm

Basically, I suppose what I'm curious about is where the Prime Material King Barov comes from--if that is the descendant of Sturm or what? Oh! Another thing I could use some help with! Military adventure ideas! Thus far I have: Cut off supply lines (aka attack the caravan) Defend the town Rescue the...

Good ideas/comments, thanks! Re: Orcs--I didn't want the Tergs to be non-humans in a flavorful sense; however, I was thinking of statting them (with the players never seeing the stats) as half-orcs or some such in order to give them a sort of "unstoppable" feel. I.e. I was thinking of usin...

All right then. I've had another idea for a campaign--hopefully this one will go over a little better. When I pitched the "modern characters" one to my potential players, half said, "yes!" and the other half said, "blecch!" Unfortunately, I don't think the ones who woul...

For my game back in the day, I used to be infatuated with the nightmare court, so my DP theory was that Ravenloft was their creation out of the fabric of the dreams of Tharizdun (the dark god trapped in the demi-plane of imprisonment). Another interesting take on it is from the Oathbound campaign se...

Nice! Back in the day I was planning on trying some sort of campaign where the PCs get involved in Drakov's son and/or grandson's attempts to depose him, but that is truly excellent!

Well done!

Slerm

As a staunch proponent of outworlder games (i.e. not what you mean by "weekend in hell" but not native characters either), I found that most of the time the "killer Ravenloft GM" was really one who didn't understand the theme. For example, in our games, we played with our favorit...