How did you get introduced to Ravenloft/become a fan of it?

[Joël of the FoS]

*lol* HB

I loved horror stories when I was young (Poe, Hitchcock, Lovecraft, ...), so when I got into RPG, horror RPG was a logic next step in order to get that messy stuff out of my head

Joël

[A G Thing]

Been playing D&D awhile and kept running into the same horrid formula in the games. Player A controls character B to do action C to gain treasure and plot advancement. It was not that there was not story or plot or even twists but they were more temporary forks in the road. Characters were built to survive not to live in the worlds and felt a little distant. Not satisfied I began to finally run and I saw how it was much easier to see these problems clear source from this side of the game fence.

I tried to avoid these (cliches?) and fell screaming into them some times, yet other times I have had spectacular success in avoiding or obfuscating them from being apparent.

Too much freedom and the players can run wild, sometimes dragging the game to a crawl with the amount of things they wish to do. To little and you railroad them. Too many items and they become unstoppable and yet not enough and they begin to get tired of the slog of combat. Orc's and fantasy monsters that should inspire fear become faceless minions rather than real threats or part of a evil army. Too many twists and the party begins to think in odd lines or in circles or just gets tired of the plot. The boss monster steals the show and then is soundly defeated or thwarted until next time with nary a chance for success. Eventually the villain is always cut down or defeated permanently. Players face moral dilemmas with detachment or a rather cookie cutter sense of justice and good or they are complete hoarder's and or sadists. ect ect ect.

So I examined this and found one simple truth, partly in my love of villains, tragedy, hero's and of course tragic villains but also in the example in the Angel series finale. They fight the good fight and die after thwarting but fully realizing they could never truly stop the Senior Powers of Wolf Ram & Heart. (TV only, not the continuing comics!) A hero is determined by what he or she chooses to do, and actually does. Success and failure do not determine necessarily whether or not he or she has failed. My players and I both wanted I think to see the similar things come to pass in that they wanted their actions to have scope and personal meaning not because they won due to a super magic sword, but because they could win by merit or at least stand as hero's. It is not that they were given a destiny but that they live up to it...

During this time I found Ravenloft in the 3.0/3.5 editions after having heard of the unappealing weekend in hell rep of the past. I read the CS and liking the change I found bought it and began to buy as many of the books as I could. Of course the fact that my bad timing was around when they went out of print and I could only get so many as I had limited resources.

Now I am still on the road of the path of making things simple and hard so that they are enjoyable. Plot still complex, and options still open, but you work with what you got and with little expectation of vast amounts of unearthly power or reward beyond what your character should expect. Sometimes things look hopeless but it is the choice to persevere or give in and which path you ultimately take that should be the main reward. (And if sometimes it is the dark bad path filled with riches and violence then that is fine too! Sometimes!) Running away can be just as enjoyable as staying to fight the beast and it should stay in mind of the character the next time they must choose again!

So yeah I started rather new and by my mostly self determination to find something more... I still run loose games sometimes but really all my work is going into my next Ravenloft game when I run it...

I thank Ravenloft for making me love role-playing again.

[Ail]

Well, D&D and Ravenloft are two circles (of a kind) in my life, that opened relatively early and only came to fruition many years later.

So, the first time I heard of D&D was when I read E.T., when I was about 6 years old. That initial scene when they are playing some game called D&D and Michael is the 'jailer' (lol, that was the meaning of the translation of Dungeon Master to Portuguese) always caught me. I spent years wondering what D&D would be... and I found it when I was 17 in a library where I got hold of a translation the Basic D&D booklet with Larry Elmore's cover. I spent an afternoon copying it to a notebook . That was also when I found D&D CRPGs, namely with Eye of the Beholder. But I only began playing some years later, in 1997, with AD&D 2nd Ed. It was in the back of the core books that I found there was something called Ravenloft. And I just loved the description of the setting... still, no RL play for me.

However, I liked vampires, ghosts and werewolves since I was 9. I had this Reader's Digest book on the fantastic with many such stories and I loved to read and reread them. That's when I learned who Chirstopher Lee was and I began to idolize him even thought I had never seen more than a B&W photograph of him (children do odd things ).

This love of the gothic monsters continued to flourish for years. I drooled at a computer game-to-type in a Spectrum magazine only because it was supposedly gothic and had this cool vampire on the page
(here:
http://microhobby.speccy.cz/mhf/004/MH004_10.jpg ,
http://microhobby.speccy.cz/mhf/004/MH004_11.jpg ).
Oh, and the intro text really got me too: 'dive into the attractive adventure of fear and of the legendary myths that made us quiver in more than one occasion'. Probably stale by now, but I was 13 or so when I read it and it made quite an impression on me.
I never forgot that image nor that game. I typed it all, played it and as usual got a bit disillusioned, but I still used a part of it as inspiration for a scene in my past Ravenloft campaign.

Then during my adolescence I saw lots of vampire films on TV. Now I recognize most of them were Hammer, but also Italian films, and a few about werewolves. It seems that back then, with only two TV channels in here both publicly owned, there was someone particularly fan of those 60-70s movies in the programming department , to my great luck. I remember seeing some older/odder things like Jekyll & Hide, Jess Franco, 1930s' Frankenstein, even Murnau's Nosferatu and some Mel Brooks spoofs, but I was set for the genre. I grew up without having seen the slasher classics like Elm Street, Friday 13th and Halloween though everybody talked of it, and having seen but not really looking forward to repeat it, Alien. So I discovered I liked Gothic horror but not much else that is also called Horror (or perhaps I have a bad stomach for it).

The turning point came in 1999 when I was looking for an album from Loreena McKennitt called 'The Book of Secrets'. Can you guess what happened? I stumbled on a page from The Secrets of the Kargatane instead, I read The Raven and I was mesmerized. I came to know Poe back then (though I knew of him from my earlier readings in that Reader's Digest book). Ravenloft was at last the way to realize all the longing I had for Horror stories that only barely could be satisfied with the films. Although I had seen so many of those I never felt particularly satisfied.

I've been a member of the forum at the Kargatane and then here since then. I learned about the fan books, I wrote for some and planned a campaign since 2000 more or less. I don't remember when it began, perhaps in 2001 and lasted for 6 years... too long, if you ask me, but a great school. I'd do many things differently now, but that's how I got into Ravenloft.
With time and the end of my campaign, my interest in the game has diminished. Now I'm more nostalgic of OD&D-like adventures and a careless-kind of fantasy where the hero easily sleeps in the woods at night. A mixture of classical antiquity with medieval fantasy, if you like it, more light-hearted and epicly heroic. But I can never forget Gothic Horror, and indeed in the last 3 or 4 years I've been collecting some of those old films. I saw a couple these holidays, but the backlist of films to watch is still a lot more than the free time I have.

[Ken of Ghastria]

I know this thread has been quiet for a while, but I just did a lengthy post about my intro to -- and love for -- the Ravenloft setting that seems like a good fit here:

http://ken-of-ghastria.livejournal.com/119773.html

Happy Halloween!

[The Giamarga]

some previous stories on the same subject:
http://fraternityofshadows.com/forum/vi ... php?t=2666

Also
http://fraternityofshadows.com/forum/vi ... php?t=6084

[Hazgarn]

I got into horror in middle school (think it started with Anne Rice). I didn't get into roleplaying until after high school, but I did have a friend who played, and he mentioned Ravenloft once and the name stuck in my head because I remembered seeing some of the novels pop up in the used bookstore I used to shop (and I deeply regret not getting them when I had the chance).

I became a huge fan of P.N. Elrod out of high school, and zipped through all of her novels I could find. I recognized the name again when I found I, Strahd, and then it ended up being one of my favorites of her books.

Then a few years ago, I finally got up the courage to try and run a D&D game for some friends, one of which had a large collection of pdfs he was willing to fork over for use in the game. I hadn't decided what to run yet, but when I saw his Ravenloft stuff, I knew...

[Charlatan]

My story is very simple. I was just starting to branch out from Greyhawk, my first D&D love, saw the Black Box, thought it looked good, bought it, read it, fell in love with it.

[Lovecraftforever]

I have been obsessed with horror films and novels since I was 5.

One day when I was about 13 and had just stated getting into gaming my friend gave me a copy of Knight Of The Black Rose. I had just finished the Dragonlance Chronicles series and was psyched to read about Lord Soth.

Been hooked ever since than.

[Intrepid]

I came to Ravenloft through playing the original I6 adventure. I loved the adventure and one day I was at Waldenbooks shopping for my birthday present (Grandparents gave me money instead of presents in order to make sure I got what I wanted), and I saw the black boxed set. I grabbed it and the very next day was running a Ravenloft game. Since then I have been hooked.

As far as outside sources, I have to blame Stephen King for my love of horror.

[ScS of the Fraternity]

I was introduced at a highschool lunch hour game.

I kept with it because I love horror type stuff, and because it was a great setting.

I always loved the concept of Ravenloft being a nexus of evil from countless worlds. You could find anything and everything in the mists, unless it found you first.

[Don Fernando]

I got into Ravenlof via a friend who was a big fan of Dragonlance. Long story short, I came up to the point where I was wondering what happened to Lord Soth. I did my investigations a voilá, I stumbled with RL. I bought the black box just out of curiosity and the rest is history.

I have been hooked ever since.... come to think of it is almost 17 years now that I play RL.... that is a long time wandering the mists...

[Lovecraftforever]

I got into Ravenlof via a friend who was a big fan of Dragonlance. Long story short, I came up to the point where I was wondering what happened to Lord Soth. I did my investigations a voilá, I stumbled with RL. I bought the black box just out of curiosity and the rest is history.

I have been hooked ever since.... come to think of it is almost 17 years now that I play RL.... that is a long time wandering the mists...

Much like Soth himself, Knight Of The Black Rose lured many Dragonlance fans into the mists of Ravenloft, never to return. Lol

[Abyss]

Well, thanks to my brother, I got into D&D at an early age. We never actually PLAYED, because we lacked the people to do so, but we'd always go to the specialized RPing section of the bookstore in the mall, when in town. Well, he had started reading novels about Drizzt, Bruenor, and co., while our friend Matt was apesh*t about Raistlin, Caramon, and the rest...whilst I really wasn't stimulated enough to read either of the two sagas. Then the Ravenloft campaign seemed to hit full stride, novels were put out, etc...and I chanced upon "Vampire of the Mists", and this Strahd Von Zaravich character. I was captivated, enthralled, to say the least. A total bad*ss vampire, who had a tragic past(bear with me, it's been years since I read them), and a certain Jander Sunstar(if I recall), who's beginnings in vampirism were just as tragic if not more so than Strahd. Either way, I was hooked, bought several of Van Richten's guides(Ghosts, Vampires, and a couple others I believe), and continued buying the novels and devouring them, one by one. And my search to renew this undying love of the undead(and Ravenloft of course) has brought me...here.

[ewancummins]

It's all JMatyr's fault. We've been friends since middle school. He bought the Ravenloft boxed set soon after it first came out. This was, like, freshman year in high school. I had moved back to my hometown after living in TN for a while, and he invited me to play in his brand new Ravenloft game...

[brass]

At 13 I used to flick through random modules that my GM had about before our first mostly planescape game (another setting I still have a great fondness for). His brothers had played a few years previous to that and he was a bit of a pack rat so there was a lot of material to leaf through. I think there were only two Ravenloft modules there one was hour of the knife and that got me a bit hooked.

It was many years before I got to play in a campaign I think I was 21 when my group started a 4 year camapgn set in (oddly) Paridon.