Café de Nuit

Ravenloft was the first campaign world I ever played. Which was over 20 years ago. Now that I am running my final campaign in Ravenloft I find it is time to run the Time of Unparalleled Darkness. I like Charles Phipps take on it. By something struck me as odd. The ending was too black and white. Ravenloft is a very grey place and things never go well in the end. Survival becomes it's own reward. It's a place where a mass murderer is a celebrated hero of the people (Van Ritchen)

So this got me thinking and was should a Ravenloft ending be?
To get to that I had to answer some fundamental questions about Raevloft. Who are the dark powers and what do they want?

To find that ok, I do what I always do, work backwards. When I did that other mysteries of the dread realm revealed themselves. Here are my three ending options for ToUD.

1. Everything stays the same
2. Everything collapses
3. The Demi-plane of Dread becomes the Plane of Horror

Option 1 just lets you keep playing and prophecy is meaningless. Not an option for me and does not answer any question.

Option 2 is interesting the linchpin is removed and all of Ravenloft reverts to pre-Barovia.

Option 3 is the real goal of the Dark Powers. If they control a full Plane than they are elovated to full gods and stand equals in the halls of sigil.

Option 2 and 3 leading me to asking another question. What if this is not the first time they tried? That made me thinking of what a collapse of a demi-plane would look like. It would likely be similar to all the other apocalyptic movie and novel. People running for there live, killing each other, mob mentality. In Ravenloft people would try to escape anyway they can. They do the last thing they would ever want to do. They would run into the mists. Which answered a mystery of Ravenloft, lost in the mist suriving how ever they can. The Vistani are survivors of a past collapse.

I than had to ask, what about the darklord of past cycles did any survive? Then it hit me, yes answer is yes and I know who they are. The Nightmare Court. The Nightmare Man is the oldest survivor, somehow he figured out how to harvest nightmares to create an oasis, with cycles coming and going, other darklords added to an alliance.

Which then made me think what are they mists? The dark powes us it for many purposes. It's the last of true creation in the multiverse. It why the dark power have so much pull and onw of the main reasons why the higher being leave them be. It would be the celestial equivalent to nuclear power now. So why don't the higher beings try to stop the dark powers. What if they don't care what the dark powers are doing or more that they are so confident that the dark powers are going to fail time and again that they don't care? Why do they think the dark powers while fail?

The prophecies of Hyskosa are rituals not divination. In order for the dark powers to ascend they need free willing people to complete the rituals for them. With each failure the dark powes get closer to the full ritual. When a new cycle starts the ritual with modifications are given to the next generation. And it all starts with one man willing to bind his soul, betrayal his family, his friends, his country, and his mortality.

So my players will have 2 options stop the ritual and have the demiplane reset for the next cycle, killing millions. Or creating the plane of Horror, were the all the terrors of the multiverse are created and released with new god(s) ascending to Sigil.

Welcome to Ravenloft there are no good endings only survival.

I like what you've set up, though personally, I'd like to see some option of victory, even if it's a Pyrrhic one. The missing option is "break the cycle" without creating a realm of horror in doing so. If your view of RL is that there can be no victory, OK, that's valid. But most horror stories end with some sort of victory over the horrors, even at great cost. I guess that's sort of implicit in your "reset" option, but if this has all happened before and will again, it's only stalling the inevitable, not stopping it. So is this THE ToUD where it all comes to a head, or only one of many "ToUD"'s that end each cycle?

(I can't help but think of The Wheel of Time series here... (and to a lesser extent, the Matrix sequels))

The previous versions of Ravenloft have always reminded me of the Matrix too, in fact IIRC, wasn't one of the previous iterations of the Matrix full of ghosts, vampires and werewolves (some of whom ended up working for the Merovingian)

That might be an idea for a "victory" scenario, like a "reset" but with a more "normal" world being the result

I seem to recall that if Vecna had taken Sigil in Die Vecna Die, he would have reshaped all of the Multiverse, not just created his own plane. So if the DPs wanted to take Sigil, they would have much higher goals than merely making their won plane. An aversion or failure might be their dispersal hither and yon, they are no longer as concentrated (thus much more weaker) but they could potentially have a much wider reach to interfere and meddle.

As an aside, you might consider the Lady of Pain as an "alumni" of Ravenloft.

It's not that the DP want to take over Sigil, more of prove they are worthy of being equals by using mortals to evaluate them up and create a new plane. Higher being politics are more planescape but should be taken into account for the DP. Plus I played a lot of Kindred of the East and the concept of cyclical time and ages makes sense to me. For me in order to break the cycle you would need all of the multiverse to each a state of enlightenment where there is noone left willing to become the next linchpin.

An alternate consequence partial/Pyrrhic victory condition might be the dispersal of the dark powers, such that they were blown so far apart that they don't have the strength or even awareness they used to have. OTOH, the trade off that where the depth of their reach may have decreased, the breadth of their reach may have increased. (Being able to touch places they weren't able to touch before, but not being able to affect it nearly as much.) Perhaps something akin to what happened with Azalin during the Shrouded Years/after the Requiem?

Like, you could have a bunch of different mini-Masques hit certain places on the Prime Material Plane

Another ideas comes from my version of RL. In my games RL is a full fledged plane with the core being but one of an infinite number of cores. It just happens to be the core that most games actually take place on. Now in that case you can blow up that core by sending the various lands and dark lords back from whence they came. Some of the inhabitants including the PCs are sent to a new core. This core is just starting out and consists of one domain like Bavoria did for a long time. Over time more domains follow on one by one.

Gonzoron of the FoS wrote:I like what you've set up, though personally, I'd like to see some option of victory, even if it's a Pyrrhic one. The missing option is "break the cycle" without creating a realm of horror in doing so. If your view of RL is that there can be no victory, OK, that's valid. But most horror stories end with some sort of victory over the horrors, even at great cost. I guess that's sort of implicit in your "reset" option, but if this has all happened before and will again, it's only stalling the inevitable, not stopping it. So is this THE ToUD where it all comes to a head, or only one of many "ToUD"'s that end each cycle?

(I can't help but think of The Wheel of Time series here... (and to a lesser extent, the Matrix sequels))

We did this IMC, where the PC's arrange to nullify the pacts with the DPs in such a way that RL ceased to be a demiplane and became a normal prime plane (although still a patchwork) and the DP's got a new prison without any of their playthings.