Jan Mattys
2010-06-04, 05:33 AM
I'm playing a short campaign very loosely based on Expedition to Castle Ravenloft.
The Long story short:
- The villain (the Count) has been banished to this personal demiplane of nightmare due to horrible sins done in his past life.
- He found out the lady he loved was in love with his younger brother instead, so he killed his brother. The lady, mad with grief, decided to kill herself.
- The Count went mad and made a pact with demonic forces. They gave him knowledge of the dark arts, and with them he was able to defeat death, becoming immortal and forever young.
- To bring his love back to life, he ripped his own heart and put it in her chest. She woke up, but this act sealed the Count's fate: the Gods couldn't bear such a disrespect for love, life, and all that was good, so they punished him.
- He is now cursed. He lives in a demiplane which is both his domain and his cage. He rules over desperate peasants, venomous mists and rotten land.
- Once every one hundred years, ad 6 am in the morning in the village appears a lady who doesn't remember anything about her past. She's his original love reincarnated.
- The Count cannot leave the Castle during daylight, so in "that day", he sends troops out of the castle at 6 am with the task of finding the lady and bringing her to him. In case they don't succeed, he can personally go after her after 6 pm, but in that case he has already wasted 12 hours of the 24 he has at his disposal.
- The Count is doomed to always search for her, take her to the Castle, and spend a whole day with his love, trying desperately every time to make her fall in love with him again. He longs for that single day, he waits 100 years for it.
- Every time, as the time passes and she spends time with the Count, she begins to remember things... places... faces. Every century, she slowly regains consciousness of her past, and every century, at dawn, after 24 hours with the Count, after a terrible night, she kills herself, or the she tries to escape and the Count kills her in fit of rage, or something equally bad happens.
- Basically, his doom is to wait 100 years for his love, then spend 1 day with it, and at the end of the day he's always forced to lose it again, often experiencing the excruciating pain of seeing extreme disgust, extreme hate or extreme grief on his love's last look.
- The Count is immortal as long as his heart is alive. To kill the Count they PCs have to stab the girl in the heart, effectively freeing her from the Count's spell and at the same making the Count mortal again.
Now, my heroes found a way to this demiplane, and they seek to destroy the Count.
They are about to enter his castle. I need to make the experience as gloomy and dark as possible. Everything that adds to the atmosphere is golden to me.
Things I have planned so far:
1- The Castle is a place of anguish and grief. They meet various manifestations of previous ghosts of the lady, everytime seeing her dying in different ways. For example, they meet a pale lady looking at the horizon from the castle walls. She's crying. As they approach her, she casts herself of the walls. If the PCs try to grab her, they grab only the air. No corpse can be found at the bottom of the castle walls.
2- Various pieces of the diary of the Count are scattered around the castle, making the PCs able to undersand what happened in the past.
3- Various pieces of information written / left ages ago by the servants of the Count, who slowly saw their master fading into undeath, stopping to drink and eat, and becoming less and less active during daytime.
4- The castle is the cage and the punishment of the Count. It constantly shifts back in time to make him live again the worst moments of his tragedy (not much differently than the nightmarish scene every night in Lord Soth's castle, for those who read Dragonlance). So if the PCs storm the castle they might be caught in these ghostly retellings of the tragedy. For example the moment when the Count killed his brother, or when he performed the ritual of undeath, or when he put the heart in the chest of his dead love).
Now, I can put an arbitrary amount of these tricks in the castle, and I really want to. Everything is ok, from pure fluff to scenes leading to a cool fight for the PCs. What is important, is that the atmosphere can be kept gloomy and desperate.
Traps are fine too, especially if they are tematically appropriate.
Feel free to take ideas from Alone in the Dark or anything else appropriate to help me keep he tension up.
Give me your best, playgrounders! I need your help to make my nightmare castle truly memorable!
The Long story short:
- The villain (the Count) has been banished to this personal demiplane of nightmare due to horrible sins done in his past life.
- He found out the lady he loved was in love with his younger brother instead, so he killed his brother. The lady, mad with grief, decided to kill herself.
- The Count went mad and made a pact with demonic forces. They gave him knowledge of the dark arts, and with them he was able to defeat death, becoming immortal and forever young.
- To bring his love back to life, he ripped his own heart and put it in her chest. She woke up, but this act sealed the Count's fate: the Gods couldn't bear such a disrespect for love, life, and all that was good, so they punished him.
- He is now cursed. He lives in a demiplane which is both his domain and his cage. He rules over desperate peasants, venomous mists and rotten land.
- Once every one hundred years, ad 6 am in the morning in the village appears a lady who doesn't remember anything about her past. She's his original love reincarnated.
- The Count cannot leave the Castle during daylight, so in "that day", he sends troops out of the castle at 6 am with the task of finding the lady and bringing her to him. In case they don't succeed, he can personally go after her after 6 pm, but in that case he has already wasted 12 hours of the 24 he has at his disposal.
- The Count is doomed to always search for her, take her to the Castle, and spend a whole day with his love, trying desperately every time to make her fall in love with him again. He longs for that single day, he waits 100 years for it.
- Every time, as the time passes and she spends time with the Count, she begins to remember things... places... faces. Every century, she slowly regains consciousness of her past, and every century, at dawn, after 24 hours with the Count, after a terrible night, she kills herself, or the she tries to escape and the Count kills her in fit of rage, or something equally bad happens.
- Basically, his doom is to wait 100 years for his love, then spend 1 day with it, and at the end of the day he's always forced to lose it again, often experiencing the excruciating pain of seeing extreme disgust, extreme hate or extreme grief on his love's last look.
- The Count is immortal as long as his heart is alive. To kill the Count they PCs have to stab the girl in the heart, effectively freeing her from the Count's spell and at the same making the Count mortal again.
Now, my heroes found a way to this demiplane, and they seek to destroy the Count.
They are about to enter his castle. I need to make the experience as gloomy and dark as possible. Everything that adds to the atmosphere is golden to me.
Things I have planned so far:
1- The Castle is a place of anguish and grief. They meet various manifestations of previous ghosts of the lady, everytime seeing her dying in different ways. For example, they meet a pale lady looking at the horizon from the castle walls. She's crying. As they approach her, she casts herself of the walls. If the PCs try to grab her, they grab only the air. No corpse can be found at the bottom of the castle walls.
2- Various pieces of the diary of the Count are scattered around the castle, making the PCs able to undersand what happened in the past.
3- Various pieces of information written / left ages ago by the servants of the Count, who slowly saw their master fading into undeath, stopping to drink and eat, and becoming less and less active during daytime.
4- The castle is the cage and the punishment of the Count. It constantly shifts back in time to make him live again the worst moments of his tragedy (not much differently than the nightmarish scene every night in Lord Soth's castle, for those who read Dragonlance). So if the PCs storm the castle they might be caught in these ghostly retellings of the tragedy. For example the moment when the Count killed his brother, or when he performed the ritual of undeath, or when he put the heart in the chest of his dead love).
Now, I can put an arbitrary amount of these tricks in the castle, and I really want to. Everything is ok, from pure fluff to scenes leading to a cool fight for the PCs. What is important, is that the atmosphere can be kept gloomy and desperate.
Traps are fine too, especially if they are tematically appropriate.
Feel free to take ideas from Alone in the Dark or anything else appropriate to help me keep he tension up.
Give me your best, playgrounders! I need your help to make my nightmare castle truly memorable!