While I've now spent over ten years running games of Dungeons & Dragons, the vast majority of that tenure has been only running two campaigns. The first, which ran from 2015 to more or less 2018 (with a sputtering bit of attempt to continue it into 2019) was in my homebrew setting and was very much an attempt to figure out how to run the game, its best stretch probably being a chapter in which the party was trapped in the Shadowfell (not the Domains of Dread, but the dark reflection of my world in a region known as Red Scar Plains, which was born from a time my best friend had a dream in which I was bothering him about a non-existent World of Warcraft dungeon by that name). Then, in 2020, literally two weeks before the Covid lockdowns started, I began a campaign set in Ravnica that I'm still running, the throughline of which has been the plot by the Phyrexians to try to take over the plane as a stepping stone to take over the entire Magic multiverse (by this point, the campaign largely takes place on other planes, though the grand finale final boss fight is intended to take place back on Ravnica).
My biggest lesson with the Ravnica campaign is that you'll often be tempted to make campaigns in "cycles," like, for example, dealing with a major villain in each guild. This will stretch your campaign out to insane lengths. While the players are level 18 at this point, it's still a campaign that's been going for over six years (the Wildemount game I'm in has been going nearly as long and we're only level 10.)
I'm probably returning to my homebrew setting for the campaign after the Ravnica one, but I've been fascinated by Ravenloft since first becoming aware of it, and of course, with the new Ravenloft book coming out, it's especially on the mind.
The setting is a very flexible one: it's actually remarkably well-suited to one-shots, where the party might be swept into the Mists and have to escape by the end of the session. It can also briefly jump in and interrupt the ongoing story of an existing campaign.
Likewise, you can do more limited adventures set in a single domain. Everyone knows Curse of Strahd, probably the most popular published adventure in 5E (and while I was able to play through most of it, I'd actually be willing to do so again. We never actually entered Castle Ravenloft, though we were level 8 and inside the Amber Temple by the time it fell apart). Curse of Strahd isn't that limited - it gets you to level 10 - but you could imagine a simpler one (more like the original module, which was more limited in scope and mostly pushed you into a dungeon crawl through the castle) that could be completed in a month or two.
Of course, the grandest, most ambitious type of Ravenloft campaign is a Mist-hopping one. As presented in Van Richten's, the domains are quite separate, but historically, the Darklords have been aware of one another and even contend with one another as rivals. Even if they didn't, the party might need to cross the Mists over the course of a campaign in order to achieve their goals: either to escape or simply protect what little corner of their nightmarish world they come from.
There is one huge question you need to figure out when you begin your campaign - a good thing to ask at session zero, which is: are the characters from Ravenloft, or from elsewhere?
While the place is a series of nightmare prisons, there are real, sentient people living there, and even if it's a bleak and scary world, there's still pockets of sustainable life. The weirdness - the nightmare logic that the place runs on - is something that the local inhabitants grow up with.
If your player characters are from Ravenloft, you have a few other questions to answer: are they from the same domain? How aware of the nature of the Mists are they?
If the PCs are from the Material Plane, are they from the same world? In our Curse of Strahd game, I and one of the other PCs was from my best friend/the DM's homebrew world, while others were from the Forgotten Realms (my Paladin and the party's Cleric were both devoted to Grave gods, but she was a worshipper of Kelemvor while I was a worshipper of Ekeroth, the latter of which I'm sure you haven't heard of because, you know, homebrew).
I do think that it's probably best if you lean a bit toward familiarity - the party need not be all personally acquainted to start, but having a little bit of a shared base of reality could be useful.
If the party is from outside the Mists (they could even be from the Shadowfell, but just not this particularly bad corner of it) the clearest goal for a campaign is that they escape.
For characters that are from the Mists, they might also wish to escape, but they also might have other goals. The key, though, is that the goal is not "saving the world." The Domains of Dread cannot be saved, because their very purpose is to torment their Darklords, and often do so by tormenting the innocents there as well.
A goal might be to take revenge on a Darklord, but this revenge is inherently going to be temporary - the Darklords always come back. I therefore think that the goals are probably better defined by personal stakes: A PC might want to find a missing loved one, to retrieve a lost heirloom, or at best to thwart a particular plot.
Another thing to really bear in mind is that not every villain in Ravenloft need be a Darklord. Consider Baron Rudolph von Aubrecker, who is ostensibly the ruler of Lamordia, even though it's actual Dr. Viktra Mordenheim whose will shapes the domain. You can play a character like this as either an aggrieved victim who might ally with the party, or himself as a deadly monster who might threaten them.
It would be tempting, I think, if you are going to have a Mist-hopping campaign, to try to hit as many of them as you can. But I actually think this can be a trap: trying to visit every featured domain in Van Richten's is going to wind up either making your campaign last several years or you'll be forced to do very limited adventures (not unlike the short adventures I've been pitching lately on this blog).
Instead, I'd say pick two or three domains to really dial in and focus on. This way, you'll have plenty of time to flesh out the relationship between the party and the domain, and to explore its various regions and locations.
Now, there are a few ways to run a campaign. My tendency has been to direct the players toward goals and challenges I've figure out for them, but if you're comfortable with it, having a more free-form campaign where the players set their own goals is also very viable here (though it might fly in the face of my "limit yourself to just a few domains" thing).
In our Wildemount campaign, my best friend/DM had us all provide a backstory, with goals and "prophecies" as described in Explorer's Guide to Wildemount. Essentially, you might come up with a short-term prophecy like "I will find the journal of my long-lost mentor," and the DM then weaves in hints and clues that eventually lead the party to that location, and later you might have "I will take part in the creation of a powerful construct with consequences that I had not anticipated." Such a pair of prophecies (there's usually a third one that describes where your character's journey comes to an end, for good or ill) could mean that your Reanimator Artificer must steal into the libraries of Castle Ravenloft to take the journal of your instructor, in which they had schematics for some powerful construct like a Colossus, and then later on, you might find yourself working alongside Viktra Mordenheim to build that thing, only for her to retain total control of it as it rampages toward Neufurchtenberg.
If all party members have these prophecy goals, you can actually get a lot of mileage in a campaign out of just taking turns (not necessarily in a strict order) helping the rest of the party follow their paths.
The key, though, is finding a satisfying conclusion: either the threads need to all weave together into a single thing or there needs to be something above all of them that connects into them, even if only tangentially. For example, maybe we plan the finale of the campaign should take place in the Amber Temple in Barovia. How does a Colossus rampaging through Neufurchtenberg relate to that? Maybe it unearths something within the city - an amber sarcophagus that must be returned to the temple. Perhaps this is necessary to keep Strahd or some other Darklord from escaping, or perhaps the Dark Power within the sarcophagus promises a path to escape if the party does this task.
Horror stories don't necessarily need to have unhappy endings: while Quincy and Lucy (and the honestly quite innocent Renfield) don't make it out of Dracula alive, it still ends with the vampire hunters successful and Mina saved from becoming a creature of the night. But to borrow an idea from Alan Wake II, for the a horror story to end well, the heroes must make a sacrifice.
I have a couple of pitches for Ravenloft campaigns. I don't think they are totally compatible.
The first actually begins in the real, modern world, or perhaps a little nostalgically in the days of my childhood, which were the 1990s. The players would play as teenagers in an American suburb, only for a slasher-style villain to begin killing off classmates. We might even use a different system like Kids on Bikes for this. Eventually, the players discover that the killer's house holds an Amber Sarcophagus within its basement, and when the killer (or perhaps the killer's evil parent who drove them to their violent ways) crosses some line, the Mists of Ravenloft come and sweep the town away, pulling it into the Domains of Dread. From there, the players are separated and spend years in different domains, developing the skills of D&D classes, and are finally reunited when the borders of the domain that was their hometown open. Still young, but with terrible memories of the experiences in their various domains, the players must fight to escape back to the real world.
The second is a bit more traditional, but is also focused on escaping the Domains of Dread. Here, we hammer heavy a theme of doppelgangers, mirrors, doubles, etc. In their travels, the party will have regular encounters with Firan Zal'honan, the archmage that Van Richten's never explicitly confirms is actually Azalin Rex, the former Darklord of Darkon, though both earlier edition materials and some very clear clues in Van Richten's indicate is the case.
I know that Horrors Within is said to answer the question of where Azalin got to, but in this version of the story, Firan knows that he was able to create a clone of some sort that would essentially be left as Darklord in his place. What he doesn't understand is why he was able to leave Darkon but not the Mists entirely, but in exchange for various dubiously moral tasks, Firan will lead the party to the Amber Temple (yes, I like this as a climactic location) and secure them the same deal: that the Dark Powers will create a copy of them.
The horror-twist, though, is that none of them will know if the copy is the one allowed to escape, or if it's the one left behind. And Firan winds up being our final boss, as he goes mad with the realization that he's the version of himself that is still trapped in the Mists, and that his escape will never come. (I literally know how I'd end the campaign: as the party emerges back into whatever world they came from, I'd ask each player: do you think that you're the original, or the copy?)
No comments:
Post a Comment