u/OctopusMacbeth

Hey Jammers (and anyone else interested)!

Since it's time to move to Leederik's Tower, I'm setting Farelle aside for now, but someone in the comments to my Brain Baskets adventure asked if I'd share my Domain and Darklord write-up. It ends prior to Lair Features and the final Adventures in Farelle section. Also, only placeholder art for now, but hopefully folks get the gist of what I was after. Hope it can be of help to someone!

So with a foreboding sense that my definition of the term will take over the comment section rather than the intended question, it's my belief that a Darklord is:

An individual (sometimes a closely knit pair of individuals) who willingly chooses to commit an act of tremendous evil (generally violating a major cultural taboo in the process), gains the attention of the Dark Powers, and is mystically trapped to rule over a Domain that is both a twisted mirror of their own great evil and a perpetual torment, generally a deeply ironic one in which the thing they most desire is always just out of reach as a result of their own natures.

I'm curious what the intelligent hyper-focused folks in this community think are particularly effective (s-Tier) Darklord/Torment combos, IN ANY EDITION, and if there are particularly bad (d- or f-Tier) ones that maybe don't "feel Ravenloft," what tweaks have you given them at your table?

Strahd's doomed obsession with Tatyana seems, to me, like a good example of the gold standard in torment/curse design. A fair number of the curses though seem to basically boil down to "sucks to be trapped in Ravenloft," which, no duh, but doesn't feel juicy and satisfying in a gothic, Twilight Zone-y way.

For instance, in the original Har'Akir, Ankhtepot "now rules over a small mud village in the middle of a barren wasteland. It is a bitter end for a man who once ruled a great nation..." Meh. So he's not king anymore. Compare that to the new motivation and curse: a man who spent fortunes and countless lives in the selfish pursuit of immortality, and now that he has it, turns out being a mummy blows, but he's CURSED WITH THE VERY IMMORTALITY HE COMMITTED HIS CRIMES FOR. Good s#!t

Similarly, (and I don't wanna sound like a shill for WotC; I generally prefer the lore as laid out by S in 3e) the main improvement I saw to Tepest in the new edition was going from 3 teenaged sister Darklords doomed to eternal cannibalistic ugliness just for murdering a f*^#boi (yeah yeah, and six other dudes), to this twisted lonely Mother who betrayed Maiden and Crone and would devour the world entire to have a child, yet only creates abominations that soon die tragically. SO much more juicy.

Off the top of my head, others that confuse me are Tristan ApBlanc (what? WHAT?!!), the "inheriting" Darklords (Inza, Chakuna, to a lesser extent Gabrielle: how did what they DO change their domain, and how does it make them SUFFER?), and the super inhuman Darklords (The Hive Queen - what the heck did she do that was so bad? ;)... The God Brain - although I ADORE what the Quoth the Raven guys did there... Gwydion the Sorcerer-Fiend I always imagine is a Dark Power who pissed off the others).

How bout y'all?

So I was just thinking, as many in this subdomain have been, about the Domain of Farelle, and how at its primal root it’s about the fear a new parent feels at a dog approaching their baby. It was theorized smartly by Doc Bowers in his PhDnD vid that indeed the reason Farelle was so quickly dropped by the developers is that it would be too objectionable for too many players to have this place in the gaming space all about hurting children, even if that fear is a deep rooted one for most. And indeed, those who just wrote adventures there were divided in how they dealt with harm to kids (I kinda tried to wriggle my way out of it by calling them young adults or youths in the Ancient Greek sense), prolly for these reasons.

And I know part of the deal with Ravenloft is that it’s primarily human-centric the better to serve as foil against the horror elements.

But what if Farelle was primarily, like 90%, a halfling domain? It might give the excess fertility an unintentional comical (or darkly colonialistic) quality you don’t want, and I’m not sure that it works but I wanted to put it out to the subreddit while some of you know what the heck Farelle even is; would it scratch that conceptual itch to see halflings torn apart by jackals? Would it be a scary movie if Cujo stumbled into the Shire after meeting that bat?

Hey folks! I think I just missed the deadline, but I really just wanted to share more than compete anyhow. I do have a full Darklord/Domain write-up for my conception of "Hungry" Jack Karn, the vegetarian jackalwere, if folks like the adventure and want to read more.

Hope you enjoy!

Hail once more and grimly met, fellow remnants of the Circle.

So it seems to me that running sessions in “Waking” (mostly sleeping) I’Cath is somewhat straightforward. The jiangshi, though they can get repetitive if you don’t mix them up, work very well atmospherically and mechanically as the enforcers of the Domain, and between the terrifying but kindhearted/lost daughters, the desperate search for food/fighting Exhaustion, and the machinations of the handful of NPCs who keep themselves awake/are regularly executed awake, there’s a panoply of hooks.

But in Dreaming I’Cath, just who is it that enforces Tsien Chiang’s Mandate? Does she have terracotta soldiers doing her executions? Fellow dreamers? Shades of the murdered gold dragon? Or is she just 20th-level wizarding anyone to death who uses the wrong color lacquer on the shells of the snails in the garden?

Furthermore, how are my fellow DMs actually building playable sessions in Dream I’Cath; what do your players DO apart from endless toil? I foresee a potential of the Velkynvelve or “Wormwood Mutiny” dilemma: many players find it less than pleasurable to RP being forced into drudgery since they’ve just come from, y’know, life. Someone mentioned a never ending fetch quest rather than polishing doorknobs or whatever, since you could at least give a variety of inane and increasingly surreal, dreamlike demands. Any other ideas, or stories from how your table dealt with Dream I’Cath?

Thanks so much in advance to all contributors: I love both Surrealism and daytime horror so I’m particularly eager to nail this one.

Sometimes when one is hitting multiple Domains in a single campaign, it’s nice to have a thread to move you between them and to return to again and again with new perspectives. With that in mind, I’m curious if anyone has made a list of “transportive” (“portative?”) Domains that could convey PCs through the Mists to other Domains?

The Carnival, or Cyre 1313 (The Mourning Rail) as Wandering Domains, would be excellent literal examples of moving PCs through/around/twixt the Mists, but surely there are more.

I’Cath, or The Nightmare Lands, could be examples of more psychological ways to convey our victims, er, heroes, from one horrorscape to the next.

Does anyone else in the community have answers or ideas, even if they’re a reach? (“The Darklord Gwydion is a demoted Dark Power so he can allow movement via the Shadow Rift?”)

Hail and grimly met, survivors of the Circle. With such a large and active real-world gaming community in Australia, New Zealand, and thereabouts, I was wondering either into which extant Domain y'all transplant your own folk horror and Indigenous/"Dreamtime" mythos OR if there's been a successful fan-created Domain of Dread that I don't know about yet with bunyips, drop bears, et cetera? I'm imagining a blend of survival horror with folk horror (Wolf Creek meets Picnic at Hanging Rock), but my own view as an outsider is only so valuable, hence the crowd-sourcing.

Thanks so much in advance for any thoughts!

Hey folx; with only our rogue having acquired a silver dagger, the party swiftly beat feet from the wererat gang in Mountain’s Toe but plan to return once they’re silvered up.

With its history of sack by Uthgardt barbarian werewolves I thought maybe some defender of Conyberry had stashed away (but not gotten to in time alas) a silver weapon of some kind, perhaps with a Rare level magical effect, perhaps not. Ideally, it’ll be something my Way of the Shadows monk would want to use.

Any ideas as to what to plant down there and its story?

Obviously there are many ways to think of this question, the TABI cat company, et cetera. That said, I could see a case being made for

- Dementlieu
Careful what you wish for. Frozen smiles/fake love/violent spasms of retribution.

- Novo Vaasa
“Nice guy” actually deadly to the women he loves. Blood cat.

Any others snap to mind?