Dementliue discontinuity

[Rock of the Fraternity]

Sadly, I don't have the time right now.
But I would love to hear how it went.

[TheArcaneWeirdo]

Sadly, I don't have the time right now.
But I would love to hear how it went.

Okay. It's gonna be my first time writing an adventure, so if anyone else wanna help or advise I'd be very grateful.
I think I'll open a thread for brainstorming about it.

[Mephisto of the FoS]

I love that movie. Sir Percy slays me.

What a buffoon!

Well this movie is exactly how the rivalry between the and Dominic should be.

Also Dominic could be perceived as a fop, such as Sir Percy, to the public eye.

Here is the whole movie

[A G Thing]

I ran a combined version of both for my games and it worked well though it required some changes. Placing in the spoiler tags below to save space on the boards.

VIEW CONTENT:

First is that Saidra and Dominic are both Darklords though Saidra is only powerful in the city of Chateaufaux itself though she is viewed as infuriatingly as it is like a sort of queen like figure in that she is a high ranked noble who people still cow to for power and influence. Dominic is thus still in place but he actively needs to maintain the fiction that this woman is his kin as the fiction is useful for them both.

Saidra has in this instance gained the ability to appear human to a degree but there are limits and to maintain it she must maintain the illusion but also to feed it in a way by removing other pretenders who she believes leech her own power and humanity. The secret of her true identity is a bane to her and she must hide it and bury it but it never remains hidden forever. Further when people question her being worthy of respect or matching the name and title she has it pains and can affect her so she must appear the part. If she drains the city dry due to her extravagance then people might revolt so she is forced to balance her wants to keep the facade and stop herself being revealed as a monster. So while she wants to live lavishly and just enjoy her noble status and fame she must actively keep power and hunt for those who would weaken her reign. On nights where her control is high and a party in her palace occurs she has the power to even choose to expose to those on the grounds her monstrous undead form and use her full power and people will just believe some fiction of what occurred and might even simply dismiss or forget the horrors she inflicts there. While she doesn't always do so she often invites enemies or those she wishes to remove on those nights of her high power and then removes them only for the Dementliue citizens and those sworn to her nobility to just forget her unnatural form and actions. Those who swear to her are loyal to the point that while Dominic can still take control over them he cannot force them to act in a way that would harm or to their knowledge actively betray her and if they find they do so they become overwhelmed with guilt and seek to do what they can to fix the situation or find who misled them. This let her gain a measure of political power as a whole party has formed that seeks to keep the noble interests and hers aligned but since she does not have full control of them only loyalty beyond reason and they often conflate their own desires and greed with hers it is a party that may do things that she might be annoyed by or might actively harm her objectives though if she speaks on something the party tends to bow to her whims. This causes upheaval in the political system but allows her to keep trying to push for noble and thus her own financial luxury and power in the lands. While she cannot close the boarders of the city she can control the weather and blanket it in fog that works to give her the ability to traverse and scry upon it as a whole and nudge those loyal to her to hunt towards those she views as threats though this is not telepathy directly but more just hunches and feelings towards locations and people those she influences are meant to seek out. Thus if a threat remains hidden she cannot easily root it out but if she has any idea of the threats identity then she can start to push soldiers and nobles and those loyal to her to find them if they remain in the city at all.

Dominic is much the same though his power is hedged slightly due to having to share portion of his domain with the fake kin that now has power over the main city of it. He can close the outer borders of the domain and still has vast political power though he must now contend with the fact that Saidra's own faction exists and his control over them does not allow him to force them to betray her directly. The thing is their interests to a degree align and Dominic finds them a new but only seldom bothersome opponent to his own plans and political manipulations as his own control is absolute over others but the fact is that this situation forces him to give Saidra through her party power that comes with her being seen as some regal blood noble figure while he doesn't get the same level of prestige as if he was lower in line. Further Dominic's power lets him hold the common folk and their movements as a way of keeping Saidra's party and interests in line as if the common folk unite against her it would be too much for the nobles to truly resist without risking their fortunes and potential revolt. The balance though is that the military that once was under his firm control now has a nationalistic streak in its ranks and loyal leaders and even common soldiers loyal to Saidra might force results against him and those who don't hold such a nationalistic pride should the military be used. Dominic and his bloodline are immune to Saidra's abilities in total but as is she immune to his abilities herself this leaves them in point of fact grudgingly forced to endure each others company. Oddly enough Saidra is not subject to Dominic's curse because while he pretends to like her he despises her and Saidra while wary and untrusting of Dominic finds the fact that she cannot simply remove him and that he is useful despite being foul to her sight without any other influence a barely tolerable annoyance to her. Dominic thus cultivates a public image of he and Saidra being close and uses this to force her to bend but he also hates that to do this he must not anger her and thus her unnaturally loyal supporters too much or risk throwing his own manipulations into chaos. Still perhaps his ultimate ability he can hold over Saidra is that he might know she is in some way like him but she doesn't seem to have learned that he is darklord of the wider lands and Dominic thus alone controls the borders of the land and should he need to he can close them.

This means that should civil war erupt, Dominic can force the nobles and thus Saidra to bow by simply starving the domain of trade while they fight it out. But likely as well Saidra would remain in power enough due to how powerful the nobles and the society at large support her as a distant but sponsored bloodline ruler. Dominic remains in the background with plenty of power and influence, and yet Saidra is the public face and her illusion and lies have taken on enough reality that the people cannot without drastic proof believe she is more than an extravagant queenly figure and epitome of their noble culture. And both of them know enough of their own powers and limits that they would work together to remove a threat to one of them or both as it is better the devil you know. But that does not mean they don't test to see if the other is ripe for a fall that they can help subtly occur.

Another issue I have given them both is that Saidra is constantly having to ward off the proposals of marriage and producing an heir as her line while supported is one that the nobles want to join and continue and many would prefer her to Dominic who many have an unnatural dislike of despite still obeying when it does not contradict Saidra's interests. Saidra if she gets close to a rare suitor she would consider chancing further relations with, finds that they usually vanish or die before she can risk it.

Meanwhile Dominic who has been able to produce heirs has found that many of his own children and kin get caught in Saidra's orbit thus becoming her pawns. Talk of joining his blood by marriage of one of his children to hers is such that it is sponsored publicly by many and the fact that his own son has considered it further disturbs him. He also fears that a new line of Dehonares that is from this fakes blood might cause untold trouble both in political and noble circles but also his own unnatural existence.

The fact that Saidra despite her own undead nature may be able to produce and heir with anyone, especially Dominics child is the issue that affects them both.

Saidra does not want someone to replace her and knows that any child she produces might solidify her as a true noble but fears that in doing so her child would hold her power and thus leave her vulnerable to being discovered as just married into nobility. She also worries that she cannot produce a child at all and thus she will be ousted entirely should someone discover her secret and reveal it fully or that she will be found out as a monster for living so long without an heir. Lastly while she would love to tie her blood to Dominics Dehonare blood to remove any doubt of her line being true she knows she cannot affect him with her powers.

Dominic knows he cannot control Saidra and fears her bloodline whether tied to his or not would lead to his power being unable to control any such line going forward. He knows his children and kin of his blood are immune to her powers but he also knows that they seem to see her as kin and believe her to be a Dehonare. He cannot spread the truth to those of his blood as this is strangely dismissed as just his bitter grapes or more disturbingly to him strange counter evidence is produced seemingly from nowhere to invalidate his past efforts.

[TheArcaneWeirdo]

It's been months and now I'm a lot more updated on the lore, and it just occured to me that if we accept 5e DL as the 'future' of 3e DL, it means Port-A-Lucine has been seperated from the rest of the domain & The Core.

The same thing basically happened to Paridon during the Great Conjunction - creators decided that the only interesting thing about a domain was its capital city, so everything else in-world just... Dissolved into mist?

The thing is, in Paridon, the removal of all farmlands resulted in mass starvation to the point of people resorting to eating their pets.
Dementlieu didn't have to many farmlands to begin with, I think - its economy largely depended on trade with other domains. But with The Core dissolving into a score of Islands of Terror, trade has become way harder. So until they learn to use Mist Talismans or something, the port stands empty and basically 80% of the domain's economy is gone.

And this explains a ton!
It's not like every citizen is echanted to compulsively lie about being a noble - the OG nobles are still around, it's just that
A. Most of them lost their lands when the domain shrinked.
B. The crisis is so bad that even the richest ones can't afford to maintain the same standard of living as beforehand.
And they're desperately trying to pretend nothing has changed, hoping this disaster would be over soon.

[The Dark]

if we accept 5e DL as the 'future' of 3e DL, it means Port-A-Lucine has been seperated from the rest of the domain & The Core.

At the risk of sounding overly grognardly, I think assuming continuity of the timeline is an unwarranted assumption, since Curse of Strahd and Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft both say the current year is 735. That's the year of the Black Box, with the Red Box in 740, Domains of Dread in 751, and the 3e Gaz series starting in 756. I feel it works better as an alternate version, since fitting it anywhere in the timeline is a job for Easan the Mad.