Café de Nuit

I don't have any of the 2nd Edition material on-hand, so I was wondering: How did Soth seal the borders of Sithicus when he so desired?

IIRC when he was singing anyone who approached the borders was overwhealmed by strong emotion. I believe it was guilt or grief but I'm not entirely sure.

It was guilt. Only true innocents were excempt from this, like angels.

Soth closed the borders by singing his song of damnation. If you got to close, you felt the effects of the song and started singing your own sins. If you tried to continue crossing you had to make a madness check or go insane.

In Spectre, Soth's song and the songs of all in the domain actually caused a wall of black roses to appear at the border.

In Domains and Denziens from the 2nd edition, it says:

<< On Krynn the death knight was compelled to remember his sins each night in song. In Ravenloft he can seal his borders by repeating this dismal ballad. As he sings, he is joined by the voices of other sinners. The sound, rising from the borders, is so horrid that no mortal can withstand it. All must return to Sithicus or fall hopelessly mad.>>

If you have any other question about 2nd edition setting or about Soth don't hesitate, I'm a big fan of Soth.

Hopelessly devoted to you, My Lord

Cyrus Sunscale
Knight of the Rose
At your service

Sunscale wrote:In Domains and Denziens from the 2nd edition, it says:

<< On Krynn the death knight was compelled to remember his sins each night in song. In Ravenloft he can seal his borders by repeating this dismal ballad. As he sings, he is joined by the voices of other sinners. The sound, rising from the borders, is so horrid that no mortal can withstand it. All must return to Sithicus or fall hopelessly mad.>>

If you have any other question about 2nd edition setting or about Soth don't hesitate, I'm a big fan of Soth.

Hopelessly devoted to you, My Lord

Cyrus Sunscale
Knight of the Rose
At your service

I've got one. What were his class levels...? I'm fasinated by this Soth chatacter... I;ve read as much as I can about him...online, for I have never laid a finger on second ed books.

Hallow wrote:
I've got one. What were his class levels...? I'm fasinated by this Soth chatacter... I;ve read as much as I can about him...online, for I have never laid a finger on second ed books.

If memory serves, he had no class levels - he was a straight-up Death Knight.

Remember, in 2E most monsters didn't have character levels. Jackie R. was just a generic wererat, Alfred Timothy was a regular werewolf, etc.

Strahd was unique when he was first created because he was a vampire who also had levels in Wizard.

Garudos Celestar wrote:Strahd was unique when he was first created because he was a vampire who also had levels in Wizard.

Actually, vampires in AD&D were one of the few monsters that were allowed to have spellcasting abilities, in addition to their creature-type powers, even in 1E. (There was a drow vampire in the old D-series modules who was a spellcaster IIRC, though I don't recall if he had a name or not.) Strahd wasn't unique; he was just the first such NPC to have an entire adventure built around him.

I thought Strahd didn't become a spell-caster until after Azalin tutored him in it.....I thought that before that he was merely a warrior.....

As for Lord Soth, wouldn't it be redundant for him to be a death knight and have levels in blackgaurd or similar?

Sothwannabe

No, I think its mandaory for such a character. He was a noble knight, who turned to evil and fell from grace, now hates everything noble and good and serves darkest evil. It would be a real streatch to make him anything but a blackgaurd.

The Wannabe wrote:I thought Strahd didn't become a spell-caster until after Azalin tutored him in it.....

Well, remember that Strahd predates Azalin in the realworld books. I6 Ravenloft has Strahd with wizard levels, but no Azalin at all. I10 The House On Gryphon Hill, which comes after, is the first appearance of Azalin, and he's only a lackey. Later canon would define that Azalin taught Strahd, but that wasn't what they were talking about above.

As for Soth having Blackguard levels, I agree with his having them. In the 3E system, taking on a template like Death Knight doesn't cause you to lose your class levels. And since Soth had levels in Paladin before his death, it makes sense to trade those in for Blackguard levels. Why should he lose them?

Hallow wrote:I've got one. What were his class levels...?

In 2nd Ed, as mentioned above, he didn't have any as you lost class levels upon becoming something like a Death Knight.

But in 3rd Ed, as per GazIV, "The Black Rose" is ex-Pal9 / Blk6. Note the trade-in rules under the Blackguard PrC in the DMG for all of the special abilities Soth gains due to keeping those 9 Paladin levels, even though he doesn't get the normal Paladin abilities from it due to his alignment switch.

The Wannabe wrote:I thought Strahd didn't become a spell-caster until after Azalin tutored him in it.....I thought that before that he was merely a warrior.....

The novel 'I, Strahd' has Strahd searching for magical texts before the 351 wedding...

The 2E products make it clear that Strahd was a wizard (though not yet a necromancer) in life, and was roughly 5th level at the time he became a vampire. His darklordship made him a necromancy-specialist and greatly increased his level, probably to 10th or thereabouts; in any case, he plainly knew how to cast Animate Dead by 475, when he first met Jander Sunstar, as his castle was guarded by skeletons in VotM. Azalin's subsequent tutoring vastly increased the Count's repertoire of spells, and he continued to advance in levels afterward, all the way up to the present era (a fact he noted himself in "Caretaker", when one of his own Delayed Blast Fireball spells proved stronger than he'd expected! ).

While the 2E products couldn't plausibly attribute fighter-levels to Strahd -- not without invoking the old "dual-classing" rules for humans, which were unwieldy at best and wouldn't have affected his game-stats anyway: for physical melee, 2E Strahd was still treated as a "standard" vampire of his age category -- this posed no obstacle in the multiclassing-friendly 3E game system. Therefore, the Arthaus books finally made Strahd an NPC with both fighter and necromancer levels, which is what he really should have been from the beginning.

Another source (DragonLance War of the Lance 3.5e) for Lord Soth stats says:
Male death knight human fighter 7/rogue knight 10
Rogue knight is a class in DragonLance setting for fallen knight

Hopelessly devoted to you