Café de Nuit

I always thought RL is too cramped. I like big stories and to me big stories need a big area. My core is about as large as the US, which is considerably larger than the canon version IIRC.

My Core is about the size of Europe.

I use the canon version and it works well.

Joël of the FoS wrote:I use the canon version and it works well.

Which is how big? Smaller than the US IIRC. In any case I hate cramped areas. The stakes are too small for one thing.

20 miles (30 km) per inch on the inside cover map of RL players book.

About the size of Kansas if I figured it right. Pretty small for so many domains.

Yes, I agree; way too small. More or less that is the size of my Barovia.

13 Colonies , roughly.

But I might go smaller if I ran a different, new continuity/campaign.

You can see it the other way : danger is never far away from you.

And you have no place far away to hide. Kind of cool too.

What’s the point of such a large area ?

Joël of the FoS wrote:You can see it the other way : danger is never far away from you.

And you have no place far away to hide. Kind of cool too.

What’s the point of such a large area ?

I too keep the Core small. Too big and it would lose its claustrophobic feeling.

Joël of the FoS wrote:You can see it the other way : danger is never far away from you.

And you have no place far away to hide. Kind of cool too.

Claustrophobia is a good theme...

I've never had any real issues with the size of Ravenloft other than I'm a sucker for urban adventure and there's not much by way of urban sprawl in Ravenloft. Il Aluk got levelled (I understand that I could just as easily put it back), and Paridon is out of the way (and population-wise doesn't do justice to the Victorian London thing it's seemingly modelled after).

If I were to go back in time or kick off a new campaign I'd probably put Paridon where the Shadow Rift is (and increase it's population up to about 100,000; focusing on the human evil above outshining the alien evil below), and put the Shadow Rift in Tepest, as gateways/portals. .

Galeros wrote:

Joël of the FoS wrote:You can see it the other way : danger is never far away from you.

And you have no place far away to hide. Kind of cool too.

What’s the point of such a large area ?

I too keep the Core small. Too big and it would lose its claustrophobic feeling.

I never had claustrophobia or anything like it so that feeling is meaningless to me. Close, tight spaces never upset me in my life.

Five wrote:

Joël of the FoS wrote:You can see it the other way : danger is never far away from you.

And you have no place far away to hide. Kind of cool too.

Claustrophobia is a good theme...

I've never had any real issues with the size of Ravenloft other than I'm a sucker for urban adventure and there's not much by way of urban sprawl in Ravenloft. Il Aluk got levelled (I understand that I could just as easily put it back), and Paridon is out of the way (and population-wise doesn't do justice to the Victorian London thing it's seemingly modelled after).

If I were to go back in time or kick off a new campaign I'd probably put Paridon where the Shadow Rift is (and increase it's population up to about 100,000; focusing on the human evil above outshining the alien evil below), and put the Shadow Rift in Tepest, as gateways/portals. .

Yeah, that is another problem I have with cramped domains. A lot of my adventures are in big cities. Big cities require a lot of room to support them, particularly with relatively primitive technology.

brilliantlight wrote:

Galeros wrote:

Joël of the FoS wrote:You can see it the other way : danger is never far away from you.

And you have no place far away to hide. Kind of cool too.

What’s the point of such a large area ?

I too keep the Core small. Too big and it would lose its claustrophobic feeling.

I never had claustrophobia or anything like it so that feeling is meaningless to me. Close, tight spaces never upset me in my life.

A large part of the appeal of Ravenloft for me is that it is this tiny world, secluded from the rest of the multiverse. So, I love to imagine the Core as being a small landmass.

For many years I thought that the core is indeed too small, but eventually I figured that without cars, trains and planes, the original size is quite enough for everything you want to put in, and the characters won't have to travel for months just to get from one domain to another. Looking at my country, it's so small that on most global maps there's no space to write its name on it, and yet we have here room for everything... Why, I haven't even been everywhere in my small town!

More important than the size of the domains is the population, which must be at least 10 factors greater than the original, if not 100, or else you'll have more predators than prey...