u/Tasty_James

Painted this guy up for my friend’s Night Lords army! Probably once of the best characters I’ve ever painted tbh

Painted this guy up for my friend’s Night Lords army! Probably once of the best characters I’ve ever painted tbh

So, we're one month out from the new Ravenloft book, which will (controversially, I'm aware) continue the "Weekend in Hell" theme, and also include statblocks for the 5e Darklords so your players can whack their asses and go home. Before we get formal rules for the Darklords, I thought it would be fun to do a more narratively-focused speculation as to how hard it would be for a band of plot-ignorant murderhobos to murk each of them. After all, it's a universal RPG experience that the GMs spends all this time building up the campaign's archvillain, only for the PCs to either unceremoniously dogpile them to death, or walk into a fight they're woefully unprepared for like a herd of suicidal lemmings. This whole thought experiment started a while ago during my Lamordia game, when I realized that my players were about to hunt down Viktra Mordenheim, a mortal woman with no supernatural abilities whatsoever, who lives alone in a house far from civilization without any kind of bodyguards or security staff.

Obligatory Opener: Yes yes, we all know that many of you don't like using the Darklords in your games. That's fine, no one is saying you have to. This is really just a silly thought experiment about how Murderhobo-proof the Darklords *would* be as campaign villains, and what that can tell us about how best to utilize them so as to keep them alive as long as possible. Let us have our fun.

For the purposes of my experiment, I broke down the Darklords into five tiers, based on how difficult I think it would be for a bunch of adventurers to kill them. We're not really gonna look too much at mechanics so much as what makes sense narratively - after all, under D&D rules, Darklords can have as much health and deal as much damage as the GM wants. This is more meant to focus on what makes sense within the universe, divorced from number-crunching (and as such would maybe still be useful to people who run their Ravenloft games using alternate rulesets).

For this first post, I'll lay out the tiers as I've conceived them. Each tier is intended to consider both the personal power of the Darklord (any magical or supernatural abilities they have, their personal fighting skills, retinues and/or bodyguards, or a lair they just won't leave) as well as their institutional power (how hard it would be for the PCs to actually access the Darklord, considering security, standing armies, availability of help or reinforcements, etc).

The five tiers are as follows:

Tier 1. Burglary Gone Wrong. This tier is for vanilla mortal Darklords who not only lack any supernatural abilities, but also don't hold much institutional power within their own domains (at the very least, they don't possess their own security forces). Killing these Darklords pretty much boils down to little more than breaking into their house and beating them round the head with blunt objects (I should clarify that for the purposes of this thought experiment, the PCs only need to try and kill the Darklord once in order to escape the Domain). By my analysis, these Darklords are really best utilized when starting in a position of leverage over the player characters, because without that they don't actually pose too much of a threat themselves - but that might require a bit of railroading at the outset.

Tier 2. Hitman Target. Most of the "depraved aristocrat" Darklords are gonna fall into this tier. They might not be fighters themselves, but they command personal guard forces and have access to secure lairs. However, due to their institutional responsibilities, they often end up in situations where the players will have opportunities to access them (galas, parties, masquerades, etc). Taking out these Darklords will generally boil down to infiltrating a public event, getting past security without raising alarms, and isolating/eliminating the target (like a Hitman Level!) As with Tier 1, to keep these Darklords alive as long as possible you probably want to give them some sort of leverage over the PCs, but their institutional power means this leverage is much less necessary than with Tier 1.

Tier 3. Videogame Boss Fight. Now we're getting into the Darklords who are meant to pose a combat challenge to the party. These guys how up to taunt and fight the players multiple times in a campaign, either by themselves or with some minions in tow - like a Far Cry villain. Again, much like a Far Cry villain, the Darklord will generally let the PCs move freely through the Domain, popping up to occasionally remind them who's boss - they either don't have the institutional power to hamper the party's movements, or they choose not to deploy it. Point is, the PCs should feel like they're being actively pursued, which will end in either the PCs growing confident in their abilities and taking the fight to the Darklords, or gradually getting weakened down until the final confrontation is a real skin-of-your-teeth bloodbath (depends on how generous the Darklord is with letting them rest and recuperate between encounters). As the GM, you're most likely to deploy some number-fudging when running Darklords of this tier, either to keep the Darklord alive long enough to retreat, or for the sake of your players. Either way, make sure you either have a getaway plan for these guys or set their Darklord Ressurrection Timer to Instant (and if you need to modify their HP values on the fly to keep them from feeling like chumps, do it).

Tier 4. CIA Assassination Plot. These Darklords may or may not be mere mortals, but they command vast institutional power, and have no interest in interacting with player characters or otherwise making themselves easy targets. They're generally gonna be the heads of state and command the according resources, which may or may not include standing armies. Taking out Darklords of this caliber effectively requires the players to either homegrow their own nationwide insurgency force (or ally with one that already exists), infiltrate the state apparatus, or otherwise concoct some sort of insane assassination plot involving poisoned beard oil and explosive cigars. As the GM, you don't actually need to think too hard as to how to "use" these guys, as they're mostly gonna be offscreen until the PCs have either gained their trust or bashed down their fortress walls - the lion's share of work is gonna fall on your players to figure out how to make either of those things happen. And in an actual fight, these Darklords are some of the most dangerous by stint of understanding the dreaded Action Economy - there's practically no scenario where the final confrontation is them alone against the PCs.

Tier 5. Mount Doom Shit. Everything from Tier 4 also applies to Tier 5, with the added difficulty that the Darklord in question commands great supernatural abilities and can only be destroyed under specific arcane circumstances.

So, to get the ball rolling, let's start off with the "exemplars" of each tier:

Tier 5: Azalin. I trust no further elaboration is needed? He's the king of Darkon, with his own secret police force, a dragon living in his castle, and on top of all that, he's a lich. I don't even know how that combines with his Darklord Immortality. Presumably you have to actually destroy his phylactery to get the Mists to go away, in which case his Darklord Immortality brings him back a few months later anyway, as with Strahd?

Tier 4: Vladeska Dravok. Everyone's favorite 5e Darklord, the least controversially-received of the bunch. Commander of mercenary army, and paranoid as hell, Drakov isn't meeting with anyone who hasn't been thoroughly vetted first. And for Drakov, "vetting" probably constitutes "ordering you to torture this entire peasant family to death while I watch, for no reason other than I told you to." The main weaknesses in her state apparatus is her desperation for manpower, but honestly, rising high enough in the Talon command structure to earn her trust would probably require the players to commit truly unspeakable war crimes to prove their loyalty. Their next best bet would be to try and form an alliance with any rebellious peasant factions or traitorous Talon officers, but the former is gonna weak and undersupplied, and identifying the latter would be a hell of a gamble. My own players fled Falkovnia after about twenty sessions because they decided trying to actually kill Drakov was just too much work. If your players are smart, maybe they could knock her down to Videogame Boss Fight by luring her and her soldiers into a vulnerable position during one of the zombie sieges, but it's a tall order.

Tier 3: Strahd von Zarovich. The OG Darklord, and fittingly for a D&D baddie, he's a textbook Videogame Boss Fight. Strahd wants nothing more than to let the players explore the Barovian sandbox while occasionally popping up to wail on them. I believe this is what the children refer to as "mogging," and it comprises a significant element of the structure of the CoS module. While Strahd has plenty of allies throughout Barovia, he doesn't really have the state monopoly on violence that would earn him a place in Tier 4. He's also not very precious about his security - if the PCs want to roll up to Castle Ravenloft at Level 1, Strahd will let them, because he knows they pose no threat to him.

Tier 2: Ivana Boritsi. Mistress of the most powerful noble house in Borca, and founder of the Depraved Aristocrat Ladies' Book Club, you all knew she was gonna end up as a Hitman Target. Ivana's a waifish teenager whose best shot at defending herself from an adventuring party is to rely on her household guards - or luring the PCs into her greenhouse. In that very specific latter circumstance, I think we can justify bumping her up to the very bottom of Videogame Boss Fight, but only then. Really, the only difficulty Agent 47 would have in eliminating Ivana would be her poison immunity.

Tier 1: Viktra Mordenheim. She may have shouldered Azalin out the door as Ravenloft's second face, but she's still the prototypical Burglary Gone Wrong victim. She might technically be a member of the Depraved Aristocrat Ladies' Book Club by stint of her upbringing, but she's too much of a misanthrope to make any use of the privileges that brings (much to the Dark Powers' amusement). She lives alone on an island within rowboating distance of the mainland, with little to no security staff because her instinctive response to the sound of a human voice is to reach for a bottle of chloroform and a syringe of horse tranquilizer. At the very most, I can envision her with a few servants to cook and clean, as I don't imagine Viktra's hyperfixation would allow her to stop working for something as banal as calorie intake. I suppose you could stock her castle dungeons with flesh golems and other monstrous test subjects, but I don't think she's the type to let those things go wandering around freely. She's not some Resident Evil dipshit - any experiment that didn't come out exactly the way she wants is getting the pokey end of a cattle gun. Honestly, the most dangerous thing I can imagine Viktra doing to defend herself is hiding a firearm in every room, the lethality of which will very much depend on what ruleset you're using.

Hope y'all enjoyed this post! I'm curious to see where you all would rank the other Darklords. Next post, I'll post my own full ranking of everyone in Tiers 1 and 2, which may or may not be informed by your comments.

The Red Death is visiting you tonight.