Getting rid of Necropolis...

[norms29]

3) The Mists reform a dead, empty duplicate of Il Aluk. This is likely the version I'll go with... What can I do to give the place some dreadful feel to it, without being cliché, however? I don't just want to dump a bunch of ghosts and such hqve the typical haunted city. Maybe the place has some
sentience, But I want it to inspire dread, but not enough to prevent the place from being (eventually) resettled.

Ideas, anyone?

Make it a ruined city with a twisted mind of its own, that can change its layout at will and that has illusionary people running around, so that it can feel like a real city again . Turn it into the craziest maze Ravenloft ever saw, and get your players lost in it

This would of course come to Azalins attention, so the players may encounter several Darkonese exploring parties who are trying to find out who's an illusion and who's not

So, in otherwords, we redo Carcosa. It's a good start, but I'd need som twist to tie it in to the whole Requiem/negative energy wave/spontanous undead angle.

[Wiccy of the Fraternity]

If you prefer not to have NBecropolis as it is in your games, simply have it so that the explosion of negative energy that swept over the city did not seperate it from the rest of the domain of Darkon, instead the city has become shunned by the living inhabitants of the land and is seen as an omen of ill tidings and much superstition. This way you can keep all of the stories about the city, but get rid of the domain as it is along with the undead, Death, the Shroud, etc.

I have the domain but have altered the Shroud so that it slowly kills those who enter it, slowly draining the life out those who pass into it.

[DeepShadow of FoS]

FWIW, in one of my campaigns, the end result of one adventure was that Necropolis was weakened, so that the Shrould only appeared at sundown and remained until sunrise. This allowed for living PC's to go hunting in the Dead City, but they were fighting the clock as well as the hordes of Slain.....

[cure]

Azalin most of all wants Necropolis gone. It has severed communications in his land. It has put a Darklord, beyond his reach, at the heart of Darkon. And he, of all the people living or dead in Ravenloft, is the most capable of figuring out how this might be done.

So Azalin works out the metaphysics of this and takes one of two courses: either he sends off adventurers to do the dirty work, probably with some sort of cover story concealing the (whole) truth from them; or he puts the actual means into the hands of Necropolis' Darklord or a jealous Necroploitain rival, and does so in such a way that the ritual is mistakenly believed to afford ultimate power.

Adventurers might be enlisted, as I think someone already suggested, in the creation, at the heart of Necropolis, of a gate to the positive material plane, although they might not realise, thanks to the masterful manipulations of Azalin, that this has long been the purpose they have been working towards. More poetic, a party could be charged with recovering and resurrecting the remains of some great paladin buried in the cemetery at the heart of the city who would be, ironically, Azalin's champion. More poetic still, destroy Death with life. Might not the birth of a single mortal child in the land of Death be its undoing? The mission would be to recover and resurrect the remains of a mother with child or simply take an adequately protected mother with child into the city. Keeping her alive and bringing the newborn baby into the presence of Death should not be easy however.

Alternatively, it can be Death, through his minions, who engage the adventurers in the dirty work of bringing together the elements necessary for the ritual. Or the adventurers might catch wind of the fact that Death is preparing some unimaginable ritual and they act against it, which will amuse neither Death nor Azalin. As to the ritual itself, it should not involve Necropolis slipping off into the Negative material plane. That would be to escape Ravenloft. Better a focusing of the existing negative energy, supposedly with the intent of condensing it and infusing it into the body of Death, but with the true effect of draining off the Death Shroud by using its negative energy, and even that of already existing incorporeal undead, to destroy everything corporeal within Necropolis. Dust and shadows of corporeal undead, to haunt the dreams of any subsequent living inhabitants, would be all that remains.

[sabbattack]

Have you played Clive Barker's Undying?

My idea is that the whole Necropolis would be sucked into the near-ethereal, so while it seems empty and habitable, a small venture into the near ethereal shows otherwise... (kinda like when you used Scry in Undying).

[Nathan of the FoS]

I would get rid of Necropolis by exploding a Doomsday Device in the middle of it...

Oh. Well, never mind, then.

I've never liked Necropolis either; it's too much of a good thing, really, and there was already the dead city in Keening, which I liked much better (ancient and isolated, instead of new and in the middle of the Core's biggest domain).

I'm not quite sure what I would do with it, though. For one thing, I would like to have Il Aluk remain as a living city--or at least a habitable one--without saying "It just never happened IMC". I'm glad to see y'all's ideas--maybe it'll spark something for me.