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Has anyone ever created domains based upon video games? If so what are the domains like & what are the various domain dark lords?

Whether or not it's been done, there's actually a rule here that we're not aloud to post about it due to copyright infringements. In detail that is.

Technically, explicitely there is no such rule, Publishing it on the netbooks now that would be a whole other matter, thought.

adapting a video game to Ravenloft is totally fair game, either here on the forum or in a netbook.

For copyright purposes, we worry more about posting direct excerpts of published material. Any usage of copyrighted characters is basically fanfic, and in a legal gray area that we couldn't really exist without living in.

Bottom line:
If we can risk using Strahd, we can risk using Mario.

On the old Alanik Ray website, there was a writeup of Hijikal, a floating pocket domain lifted from the video game the 7th Guest. You can find it in the Alanik Ray archives in the FoS library. In addition, while not a separate domain/darklord, the article "Brotherhood of Mortis" in the Book of Sorrows lifts a lot from the Playstation 1 Video Game Nightmare Creatures by Activision/Kalisto. The Brotherhood is active in Paridon, but could be put into its own domain.

I feel Like Resident Evil IV & VII work well with VII's dark lord being the final boss. Cliche as it is, Silent Hill could work as a sort of breeding ground for those deserving punishment who aren't ever going to be powerful enough to be Darklords. Fatal Frame has a good set up but I think so far it and RE would be more at home as adventures in preset domains (Souragne for RE7, Mordent for FF) I do have a reality folding session going on based on the box from Clive Barker's Jerico. If you were adapting it into a domain just use The First Born.

Portal is about as Ravenlofty as you can get. You are trapped with a darklord. It committed an act of ultimate darkness - mass poisoning murder. It can't leave. The darklord has near absolute control of the domain and its layout and stops you from escaping. The darklord is cursed and compelled to do something it hates: test people - the robot hates people. The robot is also cursed to never be satisfied with its testing so it has gone crazy. It wants to kill you. You just want out.

Any thoughts on a domain based upon Super Mario brothers?

My thoughts are "BOING! BOING! BOING!"

Bowsette is the darklord's daughter. She has no dog in her dad's feud with the plumbers' guild. She just wants to escape the domain.

jules wrote: Fri Apr 07, 2023 11:35 pm Any thoughts on a domain based upon Super Mario brothers?

The Mushroom Kingdom would make a good "Alice in Wonderland" type of adventure. I imagine it as a sort of twisted garden where PCs get shrunk down and pulled into the strange politics of the land. I mean, we have mushroom people and turtle people fighting for control of a land full of deserts, ice, and lava with all sorts of trippy imagery baked-in... dudes riding clouds tossing enemies at you, turtles in helmets tossing hammers, ghosts that only chase you when you aren't looking at them, giant fish that want to swallow you whole, birds that shoot eggs out of there mouth... the list goes on and on!

If that doesn't sound like a bad acid trip, I don't know what does!

jules wrote: Fri Apr 07, 2023 11:35 pm Any thoughts on a domain based upon Super Mario brothers?

There’s Luigi’s Mansion wherein Luigi and his trusty, err, vacuum cleaner battle ghosts in a haunted mansion.

You’d need to change things (a lot), but the original Halo has an interesting idea. Humans are being wiped out by some alien (monster) race. In fleeing from their home island after it is sacked by the monsters, a human warship discovers a mysterious magical structure which they discover the monsters are also very interested in. In the course of exploration the monsters accidentally release zombies imprisoned in the structure. Meanwhile a construct makes our PCs aware that the structure can be used to defeat not only the zombies but also the monsters while being unaware (at least at first) that the structure works by killing all nearby intelligent life. Now to put a further moral quandary the PCs need to be aware that the zombies could spread to other domains if left unchecked.

The makers of Halo made a previous game that could work as well. Basically, the Tunguska event was caused by a gigantic being/spaceship (I don’t remember) fighting in a space war being defeated and crashing into earth. Fast forward to the 1990s, and a message from space explaining this is sent to the UN. The other side in the war warns them that this being will have recovered enough to wake up soon which would be very bad for earth, but if the humans could just sent off a large nuclear bomb near the thing’s head that would knock it out for a few more decades by which time the other side in the war would have time to show up and take it away. Probably even more changes needed than from Halo to make that one work though.

Now those are both going to lend themselves to heavy hack n slash by their nature of starting out as FPS. I’ll try to think of some more in the next post. I’m also trying to intentionally avoid any RPGs because those seem like they’d be pretty obvious targets.

I've used Thief (1-3) it never progressed far as the campaign ended before too much details were done but i was going to use the hag Gamall as the darklord.

ive also toyed with using the Legacy of Kain setting as a domain, with Kain being the false darklord in the "Present"" but the true darklord being Moebius in the past, thus keeping the timetravel element from the games.

I posted it in the Dark Beyond's video game thread but this game is very Ravenloft and also fey and folklore inspired.

Bramble: The Mountain King

The main story leads to a villain that is basically a Darklord and I won't spoil but I do recommend at least this game as influence.