Lamest Dark Lord, and Possible Fixes...

[Cole Deschain]

Actually, there are some old Dungeon Magazine adventures set on a "dark continent" that can tweak toward the Ravenloft end of things pretty handily...

Stereotypical as all hell, and I can't think of a clear darklord, but hey....

[Snake]

IMO Drakov is by far the lamest Darklord as many. He would be cooler if he just stopped attacking Azalin lol, and didn't brand people like they are USDA certified meat. I agree though that if he was able to leave his domain to some extent he would be a lot cooler; he could fight Azalin himself, and die; I hope.

[Drinnik Shoehorn]

Y'know, I can't see what the problem with Drakov is. He's lame because that's his curse.

Any change to that, and you might as well use a different NPC. His ignorance of his position, his continued wars against Darkon, his obsession with his military, it's all because he's unlucky when it comes to battle. Remember, he is a great military genius, his problems come from when he attacks things just go wrong, people get sick, orders are confused. It's never his fault and he can't see why. That's his curse.

[Rotipher of the FoS]

A good point, Drinnik. Drakov can't really be called lame because his military ambitions keep going down in flames, any more than Strahd can be called lame because he still can't get the girl.

Drakov can, OTOH, be called lame because he's a woefully underdeveloped character. Personally I'm not sure if turning him into an abuse-victim is the best solution -- it's realistic as hell, but dramatically it kind of nerfs his nastiness -- but that's just my opinion.

[Cole Deschain]

Drakov works just fine for me.

I had a bunch of PCs meet him once (they were an embassy sent by... Mordent, I think).

Yeah, he's portrayed as an irredeemable cretin who can;t accept defeat... But I also had him show some of the party a good time. They went falconing, he talked shop with the fighter (and gave him some pointers on his technique)

Yeah, things got a mite strained at dinnertime, but the point is, Drakov is HUMAN... and there ARE things that he respects.

That, and his domain's position as "breadbasket" makes for some VERY amusing diplomatic song and dance routines... Yes, he's a bloodthirsty maniac who can;t be trusted farther than I could throw a house... but Falkovnia's granaries mean he cannot simply be ignored.

As has been stated repeatedly, he HAS the respectful fear of SOME of his neighbors- just not the ones he WANTS to impress.

[WolfKook]

Actually, there are some old Dungeon Magazine adventures set on a "dark continent" that can tweak toward the Ravenloft end of things pretty handily...
Stereotypical as all hell, and I can't think of a clear darklord, but hey....

Well, IMC, the Darklord of the Wildlands is Mamalima, a fey creature similar to a nymph or a dryad, but older, wiser and much more powerful. She is the protector of the wildlands, and used to be very sympathetic to humans, until she was betrayed by them (Much longer history, but you get the idea), and her precious land was defiled to the point of extintion. She put all her remaining power in animating the entire forest and imbuing it with her hatred for the humans. The massacre was so terrible that the land was taken by the mists, with Mamalima as the darklord. She still strives to preserve her sacred land untouched by the defiling hands of the humans, and will go to extremes to prevent them from spoiling her realm.

I certainly prefer her to King Croc.

[cpt_machine]

I think you guys are missing a massive pain in my side in terms of darklords, the eternal couch potato that is Ankhtepot star of the worse RL adventure ever written. The lazy so-and-so sits in his tomb all day and doesnt nothing where is the horror in that.

As for the worse adventure thing I have to hold up Touch of Death, a lovley story with lots of backstory, shame theres no way the group can learn it as no one whos willing to talk to them actually knows it. Basically there no hint or snippet of the backstory to stubble across.

I personally give the desert realms a wide bearth as there not scarey and there darklords more so. I may turn my attension to it one day but for now I'll just not bother.

[HuManBing]

The main use I've found for Har'akir is to tie it in more closely to the Grand Conjunction. Azalin wants something from Ankhtepot's tomb - a piece of parchment that once formed the remnants of a Scroll of Return, for example.

Azalin being Azalin, he doesn't ask the PCs to get it directly. No, he gets the Kargat to influence a baron to grant a bank permission to finance a merchant trip to "liberate" various lost treasures from the Amber Wastes cluster. The PCs are working for somebody who's working for somebody who's working for somebody who's working for Azalin, but don't even know it. They have a Vistani guide who will lead their ship through the Mists to harbor near the Amber Wastes. (This guide replaces the character Dulcimae.)

Treated this way, Har'akir's faults as a somewhat unbelievable domain (because of its lack of water supporting its population, etc.) and Ankhtepot's limitations (because, as you say, he doesn't do anything and sits in his tomb, boringly) suddenly become less acute. Also, if you intend to reuse Dulcimae, have her character stand a chance of survival (the adventure is heavy handed and unnecessarily mean-spirited because it abuses her emotionally and then kills her with no chance of saving her). She should be able to reveal pieces of Ankhtepot's past. Or just build in a "talk to the locals" bit of the adventure.

But otherwise, yes, I agree. Har'akir suffers from the same treatment that any non-European domain suffers from, namely - it illustrates a very limited facet of an exotic culture, which is nice... but it doesn't do so well in passing muster for a full society that lives and breathes. (Q.v. I'Cath especially. Population: four trees.)

[WolfKook]

Well... I have to say that I remember ToD as one of the best adventures I ever played. Perhaps it was the work of my old DM, who was a genius at tweaking adventures and making them better than they originally were. I even remember going to see "The Mummy" with my group and comparing it with our experience with ToD (Which we had played one year before).

Also, by the time we were playing ToD, our very jealuos characters had kept all the information they had on the Hyskosa Hexad hidden from each other, and that after a star-reading we had, we started to put our hidden cards over the table, and to put them together... That was a memorable moment! (Along with a scene where Isu convinced my character -an atheistic necormancer -that the path of Osiris was the right path, and another scene which was spent in complete darkness)

I agree that Ankthepot does nothing in the adventure, but for me it was the dread of his awakening what caused all the tension.

[Big Bad Jack]

I've never had any trouble with Drakov, honestly -- though I'm loving some of the suggestions we've been seeing.

As it stands, I've been (sparsely ) introducing a bud to Ravenloft, explaining a few core bits of note, and helping him come to understand a Native's mindset. The usual caveats (in by sundown in Barovia, don't go to FOrlorn, stay out of Verbrek, etc.) were given, but when we got to Falkovnia, something occurred to me, as Tindal put it best: "Men are already the very worst sort of monsters, George"; Falkovnia is the most squalid, horrible hellhole in the Core that isn't a no-man's land (ala Keening, Necropolis, Forlorn, etc.) . Sure Vladimir is there causing misery, but he's a symptom of the disease, not the disease itself. More violations of basic (demi)human dignity and rights (rape, slavery, murder, torture, jackbooted oppression -- hells, the man brands his people, marking them not as individuals but property to his mind). He doesn;t do it because of some curse, or because he's lashing out in vengeance for his own previous abuse suffered. He does it because he is a twisted, petty sadist and a wretched human being. In the midst of all these monsters, arguably the most inhumane of all of them is a simple man. No demonic possessions, no undead status, no slavering curse of lycanthropy. Drakov is not overly complex, but he doesn't need to be, because he works just fine as what he is: a testament of the inhumanity of the human creature, of man's inhumanity to man.

[Rotipher of the FoS]

Which, when you think about it, is probably why the designers of the setting included Drakov in the first place: to prove you don't have to be an undead or a wizard or otherwise supernatural to be a true darklord-caliber S.O.B.

[HuManBing]

That's one of the things I like about Falkovnia. There you have a thoroughly mundane and non-magical nation that is still far more miserable to live in than arguably any other in Ravenloft. It drives home the lesson that sometimes the most evil creature is one's fellow man.

[Sylaire]

Which, when you think about it, is probably why the designers of the setting included Drakov in the first place: to prove you don't have to be an undead or a wizard or otherwise supernatural to be a true darklord-caliber S.O.B.

Probably, if I really thought about it, why I don't like him very much. He's too real. Particularly when the designers changed him from "Vlad the Impaler knockoff" to "What if Hitler had a Dracula Fetish." He crosses over from the intimacy of Gothic horror into the malevolence of high-grade human evil--it's no coincidence, I suspect, that Falkovnia is the second-most popular domain.

Yeah, Drakov's military failures are pretty "lame," but we don't measure Hitler and Stalin's evil by what they achieved or failed to achieve in the field, but by the oppression and unspeakable brutality their regimes inflicted on the populations within their own dominions. It goes a long way when you stop and think, "Which domain would I like to live in, if Ravenloft was real life and I was not a fantasy hero but, well, me" and you realize that you'd much rather be ruled by Strahd, or Azalin, or Harkon Lukas, or D'Honaire, or Lord Godefroy, evil as they may be, than by Drakov.

On the other hand, I suspect Drakov would fit perfectly into Warhammer.

[HuManBing]

[Edit: What the heck. It wasn't that important anyway.]

[The Giamarga]

Actually, that gives me a way-out idea to take that notion even further: what if, as a totally non-canon alternative, Drakov wasn't the true (or perhaps not the only) darklord in Falkovnia? What if he were actually a figurehead, and the real Falkovnian darklord was somebody else who happened to have arrived from Krynn along with him?

If so, Vlad Drakov's temperament and behavior could be reinterpreted as somebody else's curse. He'd be a proxy -- one specifically chosen because he's such an utter incompetent -- put in place by the DPs, so the true darklord would be left seething in the background, powerless to stop Vlad's bungling. Not unlike the Rokushiman darklord's situation, except that there's just one bad ruler to blame instead of a bunch of sons, and the true darklord could still be alive to watch it all happening.

It's not a way I'd personally care to go IMC, but as long as we're reinventing lame darklords, it would be a sly way to deal with Drakov.

How about Vladimir Ludzig, the Vampyre-Prince of Vladantilan an outlander vampyre from a world where his race rules supreme over the human cattle. He's in Lekar and pretty much rules the place from behind the scenes. If you go with the Gaz2 sidebar he's an epic level character, with a whole society of vampyres for followers.

Though according to Gaz2 he only arrived in Falkovnia in 746, so he's a late arrival.