u/Carnagan

So, I'm currently running my group through the House of Lament and am planning the next steps of the campaign.

Once they are out and have had some time to decompress, they will be contacted by Ivana Boritsi. She wants to grow a Gulthias Tree for her garden (and the various reagents she can harvest from it), and had made arrangements to get her hands on a true vampire's skeleton complete with stake through the heart. Unfortunately, Ivan's petulant nature got in the way and he arranged for the shipment to be waylaid and the skeleton sold off. So now Ivana wants to hire the players to get the skeleton back for her.

What she doesn't tell the players is that the skeleton is that of the former Darklord, Duke Gundar.

Once on the trail, the players will be run through an updated version of the Missing Bones adventure from 2e's Children of the Night: Werebeasts. A main part of this adventure, is meeting a flim-flam man calling himself Professor Arcanus. The exhibits from the book include:

- The Skeleton of Duke Gundar (which he doesn't realize is real, and leads to trouble in the adventure)
- The Phylactery of Lord Azalin (not real but bought off a darkling recently)
- The Spellbook of Ar-Shickanus (just a bunch of notes about spellcasting, but looks impressive)
- The Brain of Rudolph Van Richten (used to be The Murderer's Brain, but the title change works better)
- The Hand of Vecna (a crawling claw in a glass case)
- The Book of the Dead (forgery of a Har'Akir/Sebuan book, but he doesn't really know or care if it is real)
- A collection of Lycanthrope Blood in vials (listing the name and crimes of who it came from, all of which with dubious provenence)
- The Soul Blade (a soul trapping dagger which is actually the domain of Aggarath - He has no clue it's real.)

I'm looking to expand the exhibits a bit and figured it would be fun to open it up to community to see if anyone had suggestions for weird exhibits that could be in Professor Arcanus' tent.

So everyone love the horrifying monstrosity that is Toben the Many, right?

For those not in the know, Toben is a NPC/monster from 3e's Van Richten's Guide to the Walking Dead. His past is not fully defined, and we don't know quite what he is, but when he appears he does so as a hive mind for a large group of zombies, each with madly grinning, wild eyed faces, all of which is simply a part of his hive mind.

Worse, if you spend too much time around his zombies then you may catch the Grinning Sickness, and it becomes only a matter of time before you are subsumed by Toben and join his horde. So even if you destroy the horde attacking you, if there is just a single zombie he kept tucked away you're sure to see him again.

Toben is one of those enemies you can use as a reoccurring villain with players encountering him at low levels (in groups of one or two scouts) up to an epic final battle against his horde. Or even as a one off monster of the week.

For 5e, you can break him up into various levels of zombies. Most of them would be plague zombies, but after thinking about a zombie clot that is able to approach a battle intelligently, all while talking to the players out of the mouths of EVERY zombie making up the clot.

For anyone curious, his mental stats in 3e were 16 Int, 12 Wis, and 14 Cha.

So, in addition to revisiting Verbrek and Farelle, I decided I wanted to play around with some VERY OLD DnD lore.

Waaaaay back in the halcyon days of 1990, the Mystara's Hollow World subsetting introduced a group known as the Blacklore Elves. Without going into several rabbit holes, they were the descendants of survivors of a high tech civilization that had been nuked to oblivion on the planets surface about 3,400 years ago. An immortal dinosaur named Ka the Preserver (again, not going down the rabbit hole here) transported the survivors to a valley inside the planet, where they were culturally frozen at the time they would have been destroyed.

Their valley was far away from anyone else, keeping them, and their high technology level, very very isolated. Ka and the other immortals that watched over the Hollow World also altered their technology so that it would only work within the valley, and over time the elves forgot how their tech worked, only that it did.

The elves live in a perfectly maintained world. Automatons take care of everything for them. They have all the food they want, whatever clothes they want in whatever style ("currently in a VERY 80's style), whatever entertainment they want on demand, answer their every question. They have perfectly maintained buildings and lawns, and cybernetic parts should they need or want them. They basically only need to find ways of spending their time in frivolity.

So basically Logan's Run meets the Eloi (sans Morlocks) from The Time Machine. And since the Meredoth (darklord of the Noctural Sea) is from Mystara, the Blacklore elves are in the same multiverse.

I think this could make for an interesting domain. For the Darklord, I'll borrow the one Blacklore elf NPC in the book.

As described, Deithryl Steelheart's history focuses on her mother, Meidrys. Meidrys had an artificial heart because her original one had been faulty. When Deithryl was an adult, her mother went mad with boredom and desperation. Even though she knew her heart would not operate outside of the valley, she climbed out into the snowfield and passed away trying to leave everything behind.

In the book, Deithryl realizes how her people no longer have any knowledge of their science, and is bored. She's scared of leaving the machines that care for her but is driven to escape the eternal boredom of existence in the valley. She becomes the closest thing her people have to a scholar, and is also an accomplished face-painter and tattoo artist.

For the darklord version of her, we pick up a few years later. Tired of the the pointlessness of existence in the valley, she comes up with a plan to force her people to leave. Even though she knows that shutting down the mainframe will cause cybernetics within the valley to cease working, she was willing to make those sacrifices if it meant the survivors would move on and stop relying on the gilded cage they were trapped in.

What she didn't realize was that, while she was locked away planning, getting cybernetic organs had become a fad to make sports competitions more interesting. So when she shut down the mainframe, she was horrified by the mass deaths that followed.

Domain: Blacklore Valley
Horror Type: Psychological Horror, Body Horror
Inspirations: Logan's Run, The Time Machine, Dark City

Blacklore Valley is a temperate valley that remains locked in an eternal twilight, as if the sun refuses to finish rising or setting. Smooth, metallic buildings, covered with bright, many coloured lights and images rise above beautiful green spaces. Closer up, it is possible to see the signs of rust and neglect on the structures, lights and signs that have been permanently damaged, and how the gardens are becoming wild and uncontrolled.

The people of the valley are seemingly unaware of the decay creeping in around them, instead spending their days on parties, childish pranks, and other leisure activities to fill their time. Meeting outsiders are a big deal, as the newcomers become instant celebrities who find their personal styles and mannerisms quickly becoming fads. Some of the populace can become unhinged about this, and react violently.

However, spending any time with the people of the valley makes it clear that something is wrong. They seem oblivious to issues that crop up, and never actually eat or drink anything. That is because the entire population, save one, is a solid illusion (hardlight construct). The mainframe that creates them is barely working though, and sometimes individuals change personalities and memories abruptly or even disappear completely. Worse, the automatons that serve these constructs are unstable and sometimes attack outsiders on sight - which the elves never notice.

The sole exception is Deithryl Steelheart. Unwashed and half mad, she scours the buildings over and over, looking for material and equipment to try and repair the city's mainframe. She knows the world it has created is not real so she doesn't interact with the people, but she cannot bear to face the deaths she caused and be trapped alone forever in a rotting silent city so she works to keep the simulation running. The best she can do is forestall the central core's final collapse, even as she watches the images of the people she used to know warp and disappear forever.

Since arriving in Ravenloft, she has used the automatons to receive artificial parts, including ones that let her control them from a distance. She often watches newcomers from a distance, looking for any inkling of scientific understanding, or materials she could use, often sending automatons to act on her behalf.

Should the Central Core be shut down, Deithryl becomes extremely violent, sending out her automatons to bring any intruders to her to force them to help her get it started again. On the other hand, if they help her in her futile quest, she is willing to help them use some of the technological miracles that can be found around the city.

When she closes the domain, the Mists around the valley become filled with radiant lights, which cause radiant damage to anyone that enters them. This damage ignore resistances and immunities.

Edit: After getting a great suggestion from Either-Skirt6031, I would also say there are descendants of a few survivors of the Shut Down who lurk outside the city in the valley. They creep in to steal parts for cybernetics, food, and other supplies, making them a threat to any urban exploration the party or the darklord may do. They see Deithryl as the Great Betrayer, and want to get rid of her. However, she has become aware that she comes back from the dead and knows that the city will fail if these survivors take over. She also sees them as ingrates and wants to drive them from the valley to make lives for themselves elsewhere as they and their ancestors were supposed to. If they stay, it means that everything she did was for nothing.

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Thoughts? Opinions? It would basically be bringing an Expedition to the Barrier Peaks sort of setting to Ravenloft.

Working through NG+, and adding some sword skills to my sorceress.

I'm currently working on a Moirax to work as an allied unit for my Sisters army. As part of it, rather than use the normal heads in the kit, I'm planning on using a "pilot" from one of the Sister's mortifiers/penitent engines.

I've done a dry fit by hand, and it looks pretty good without actually touching the tabbard on the legs. The images above are with blue tack so I could get a wider view.

One thing I'm considering it taking the post from the armiger head that was included in the kit and try to glue it to the Mortifier pilot so they can be removed and replaced with a normal knight head if desired. I'm just not sure if that would work or how to go about making sure it is strong enough. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

I'm working on making a knight for my Sister's army, and I'm considering a special "head" for it. The idea is that it was a Knight Moirax that has been converted into a specialized penitent engine by my custom sisterhood.

I was initially planning on just giving it a normal knight head, with maaaaybe chaining an anchorite coffin to the back like some kind of luggage. But I realized that, with the risers that come with the Penitent Engine/Mortifier kits, the smaller penitent model and the anchorite coffin can easily be posed as a good angel that makes them visible, but not hanging straight down .

I've got anafantasia, which makes picturing how it could look finished very difficult. I've attached some very rough images of how it looks. Any thoughts or comments on if it may be worth exploring further?