Recent content by Remathilis

Sound stages create an aura of claustrophobia that helps set the mood and I feel domains being isolated (even if that's not physically isolated) help to do the same thing. You are in a place where the locals take whatever weird things the domain is known for in stride and escape is difficult but...

Really, there are two answers to the design of Ravenloft; dial back the absurdity to create a living world OR embrace the absurdity and create a dream world. Neither is wrong, but I feel it makes Ravenloft require a lot more vision from the DM as far as the threshold for BS they are willing to...

That's my point. Nobody questions how Strahd the third looks, acts and sounds like Strahd the second, or when or where he was born, or how he came into possession of the Castle. It's just another surreal aspect they shrug and accept while drinking from a tavern literally called Blood on the...

Removed. Better explained below.

The thing was, I too once expected Ravenloft to adhere to the concept of "normal" as a default to allow the horror to be the unnatural and it drove me to a place where I could not stand Ravenloft after a while. The Mists, the landmass, the inherent contradictions of geography and politics, it...

The trick is, the absurd IS normal to them. It's the equivalent of whistling past the graveyard. They will go see a play about a vampire because that's what they know. But they still freak out when rumors of a real vampire start to spread. The trappings of horror never leave, so they do what...

It's exhausting to keep up an atmosphere of tension and dread at all times. Which is why good horror uses humor as catharsis, but never at the cost of the horror. The monster is never the joke, but the stuff around them can be.

One of the things I've played up in my Ravenloft game is that the general population has been so surrounded by death and horror that it's likewise a part of the culture. Bards sings songs about death and ghosts. Art is macabre, surreal or both. The group once stayed in a Bed and Breakfast in...

Ranger is a half caster like paladin and artificer.

Enough of them had a sad about sorcerers not having an inferior spell list to wizards that WotC tossed the whole three spell list idea in the garbage. Imagine the uproar that would happen if their spell power was nerfed significantly.

Just to add a little more nuance, I'd prefer a supernatural explanation for why and how the outlandish thing happens. For example, the monk taps into inner energy to do amazing things. The barbarian's rage is fueled by Primal energy. The blood hunter uses alchemy and dark rituals to fuel his...

Red: This is in reference to the notion that at some arbitrary high level, the "mundane" hero no longer is confined to doing mundane things, but he is still not considered "magical". For example, the hero upon reaching 11th level can now jump miles at a time, throw things multiple times their...

That misses the memo. Dracula is more than a match for any of the six hunters in the novel, but all six are able to stop him and his minions with only one fatality. Ravenloft is supposed to be about overcoming the odds. Otherwise, you move out of gothic horror and moved into slasher horror.

Depends on the metrics being used. The Monster Manual has NPC stat blocks for a variety of generic people in the world who are far better than a level 1 PC, let alone a commoner, but still feel mundane. A gladiator, by the numbers, is a beast but his abilities (mostly different forms of weapon...

I'm fine with that definition. The issue becomes how much should the fighter/warlord/rogue/etc go past that line. Do we hard cap them at the line permanently (what D&D does now), do we let them break that line when a sufficient number of orcs have been slaughtered, or do we let them consider the...