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Leliel
2008-10-13, 06:24 PM
By the time a party reaches level 20 in a game, you can pretty much see that they would be able to destroy most darklords without losing so much as a healing surge.

Naturally, this is not conducive of the atmosphere of dread that one hopes to evoke in Ravenloft, so I was wondering:

How would you run an epic 4e Ravenloft game?

Being fascinated with the Nightmare Court, I have always liked them as the main antagonists of a campaign-You can't fight a dream very easily, you know.

By the time the PCs reach level 20, the NC has finally started viewing them as a serious threat. As a result, they try a more direct approach, sending night terrors to torment their friends and allies in an attempt to scare them off. When that doesn't work, and the PCs tharwt a scheme to gain power in the waking world, the NC go berserk, sending dream spawn after dream spawn in a final attempt to destroy this problem once and for all. This turns out to be a mistake, as the weakening of their powers to send the spawn into the world allows an opening for the PCs to strike at their core, trapping a member of the Court and engaging them in an epic battle of courage versus fear (I was thinking Mullonga, but I was keeping the Rainbow Serpent in mind).

fireinthedust
2008-10-13, 07:00 PM
I think the issue is what you're trying to accomplish with the game.

Ravenloft is a prison plane, but the game is to create a sense of scare for the party. Like a horror game. Story has to be primary for it to work, otherwise it's just a strange setting for a dungeon crawl.

Epic-wise I'd point you to Vecna as a darklord. He was trapped before 3e, and he and Kas had linked domains perpetually at war. The PCs were caught up in his attempt to escape (which, I suppose, he eventually did).

Likewise Azalin had an apotheosis and became an epic-level threat. We don't even really know where he is right now (or I havn't a clue, anyways).

I'd say work with what scares the party. Go gods-level darklords. I'm sure they're in there, with a domain ripped from the astral sea or the Elemental Chaos. Maybe even a planet-sized domain so the PCs (while still trapped) aren't limited. Think Dark Sun or Ravnica from M:tg, a planet that is cut off from the multiverse.

Otherwise, go horror rather than "ravenloft".

TMZ_Cinoros
2008-10-13, 09:53 PM
Excuse me, but WHY are you trying to do Ravenloft in 4th edition?

4th edition has a very pulp/comic book feel to it. In 4th edition, at level 1 you are assumed to already be heros. You already have amazing powers that place you far above the average person. Heck, even NPCs have different rules than players, making them inferior unless they are given a template or made into solos/elites.

Playing Ravenloft in 4th edition is like trying to put a square peg into a round hole. The feel and the flavor do not work at all. The entire point of Ravenloft is that it is a dark, lonesome world. The save mechanics are set up so that you cannot win. If you have a huge wisdom bonus, you will have a very low madness save. You are not supposed to win in Ravenloft. You either die, go insane, or turn evil and become a dark lord (these options are not mutually exclusive).

In order to make 4th edition work for Ravenloft, you would have to DRASTICALLY change the entire system. You are much better sticking with 3.5 rules on Ravenloft. Yes, 3.5 is incredibly broken. But Ravenloft has many mitigating effects, such as the low magic areas that prevent casting of high level magic. If that isn't enough, you put a ban on wizards, druids, and other shenanigans. Power gamers will be pissed, but Ravenloft isn't designed for power gamers. Death needs to be swift and danger constantly present in order to have a Gothic atmosphere. In fact, I don't even think that 10th level or higher in 3.5 works well in Ravenloft. Better yet, I think 2nd edition is better for Ravenloft. At low levels, you are just an average joe who can die at any second.

So, in response to the question, How would you see it working? I don't. 4th edition is about high fantasy and being a super hero. Ravenloft is about horror and barely surviving. The paradigms are mutually exclusive.

chiasaur11
2008-10-13, 10:14 PM
Excuse me, but WHY are you trying to do Ravenloft in 4th edition?

4th edition has a very pulp/comic book feel to it. In 4th edition, at level 1 you are assumed to already be heros. You already have amazing powers that place you far above the average person. Heck, even NPCs have different rules than players, making them inferior unless they are given a template or made into solos/elites.

Playing Ravenloft in 4th edition is like trying to put a square peg into a round hole. The feel and the flavor do not work at all. The entire point of Ravenloft is that it is a dark, lonesome world. The save mechanics are set up so that you cannot win. If you have a huge wisdom bonus, you will have a very low madness save. You are not supposed to win in Ravenloft. You either die, go insane, or turn evil and become a dark lord (these options are not mutually exclusive).

In order to make 4th edition work for Ravenloft, you would have to DRASTICALLY change the entire system. You are much better sticking with 3.5 rules on Ravenloft. Yes, 3.5 is incredibly broken. But Ravenloft has many mitigating effects, such as the low magic areas that prevent casting of high level magic. If that isn't enough, you put a ban on wizards, druids, and other shenanigans. Power gamers will be pissed, but Ravenloft isn't designed for power gamers. Death needs to be swift and danger constantly present in order to have a Gothic atmosphere. In fact, I don't even think that 10th level or higher in 3.5 works well in Ravenloft. Better yet, I think 2nd edition is better for Ravenloft. At low levels, you are just an average joe who can die at any second.

So, in response to the question, How would you see it working? I don't. 4th edition is about high fantasy and being a super hero. Ravenloft is about horror and barely surviving. The paradigms are mutually exclusive.

Either that or he's going for a "Did you just punch out Cthulhu?" vibe.

Pronounceable
2008-10-13, 10:18 PM
^^That's exactly what I was gonna say.

I don't. QFT

Moreover, epic PCs would've attracted the attention of Dark Powers themselves ten levels ago. Which NEVER ends well (unless you're a copyrighted character from another setting whose original creators decided you weren't ever there in the first place).

EDIT:

Either that or he's going for a "Did you just punch out Cthulhu?" vibe.

It doesn't look like it from the op. Which still doesn't work in RL. Could be done, but the result wouldn't be RL.

The New Bruceski
2008-10-13, 10:18 PM
It could also be in anticipation of an upcoming Dragon article.

This month also features the return of the Domains of Dread, with a remnant of the lost tiefling empire of Bael Turath, cursed to forever remain lost in the Shadowfell.

quillbreaker
2008-10-13, 10:39 PM
Excuse me, but WHY are you trying to do Ravenloft in 4th edition?


It would be harder to do epic 3rd ed Ravenloft than epic 4th ed Ravenloft, as epic 4th edition characters can't destroy the universe in the same way epic 3rd edition characters can.

Tough_Tonka
2008-10-13, 10:48 PM
Excuse me, but WHY are you trying to do Ravenloft in 4th edition?

4th edition has a very pulp/comic book feel to it. In 4th edition, at level 1 you are assumed to already be heros. You already have amazing powers that place you far above the average person. Heck, even NPCs have different rules than players, making them inferior unless they are given a template or made into solos/elites.

Playing Ravenloft in 4th edition is like trying to put a square peg into a round hole. The feel and the flavor do not work at all. The entire point of Ravenloft is that it is a dark, lonesome world. The save mechanics are set up so that you cannot win. If you have a huge wisdom bonus, you will have a very low madness save. You are not supposed to win in Ravenloft. You either die, go insane, or turn evil and become a dark lord (these options are not mutually exclusive).

In order to make 4th edition work for Ravenloft, you would have to DRASTICALLY change the entire system. You are much better sticking with 3.5 rules on Ravenloft. Yes, 3.5 is incredibly broken. But Ravenloft has many mitigating effects, such as the low magic areas that prevent casting of high level magic. If that isn't enough, you put a ban on wizards, druids, and other shenanigans. Power gamers will be pissed, but Ravenloft isn't designed for power gamers. Death needs to be swift and danger constantly present in order to have a Gothic atmosphere. In fact, I don't even think that 10th level or higher in 3.5 works well in Ravenloft. Better yet, I think 2nd edition is better for Ravenloft. At low levels, you are just an average joe who can die at any second.

So, in response to the question, How would you see it working? I don't. 4th edition is about high fantasy and being a super hero. Ravenloft is about horror and barely surviving. The paradigms are mutually exclusive.

Someone never read to many pulp comics in the sixties and seventies. There's plenty of room for horror in the 4e setting if your willing to think.

So the heroes are stronger than everyone else, who says whatever nastiness the PCs encounter is going after them. The horrors of Ravenloft could be very well enjoying a noisy meal out of the merchant in the room next to the heroes.

Rules for lasting conditions should be defenitely considered. You might consider homebrew affects that don't allow the PCs to use healing surges in certain cursed areas to put them on their toes.

Consider ways of solving problems that aren't simply solved by killing things. The PCs might become the target of a curse that causes the dead to rise each full moon and attack them and until the do something to lift this they'll have to worry about hordes coming after them once a month, and if you're dealing with munchkins said hordes don't offer any XP.

Tsotha-lanti
2008-10-13, 10:52 PM
AD&D and D&D 3.X were barely, hardly capable of handling Ravenloft (d20 Modern would probably do a better job). I don't see any way to play a horror game with 4E's mechanics. Disempowerment and lack of agency are such crucial elements to horror, and they're directly contrary to the design principles of 4E.

The New Bruceski
2008-10-14, 01:08 AM
AD&D and D&D 3.X were barely, hardly capable of handling Ravenloft (d20 Modern would probably do a better job). I don't see any way to play a horror game with 4E's mechanics. Disempowerment and lack of agency are such crucial elements to horror, and they're directly contrary to the design principles of 4E.

I dunno, our DM's managed to frighten us in a normal campaign. Also, breaking the tie between PCs and monsters/NPCs lets you give them powers that the players don't get. I think a lot more depends on how the game is played, what is said and unsaid, than the underlying system.

potatocubed
2008-10-14, 01:45 AM
I'm kind of with Tsotha-lanti here. You're going to have to bend or break some of the rules of the game to get the right feel and get the players properly scared for their characters. Some suggestions off the top of my head:

Limit healing surges in some way. I'd be tempted to say that it's a condition of the Domains of Dread that healing surges don't recover - your supply is limited to what you take in, so to speak. By restricting your characters' survivability you emphasise the 'real danger of death'. I think there should be ways to recover healing surges within the setting as a) this lets you pace things to your own needs and b) you can attach a terrible price to them. Sure, if you need that one more healing surge the power's there... but do you know where that unnatural vitality is coming from? Or what it's doing to you?
Make sure the bad guy is somebody the characters can't just kill. I mean, a lot of the darklords are immortal anyway, but smacking them around is too easy, especially for epic-level 4e characters. One option is too keep the villain off-stage as much as possible, since the PCs can't kill who they never meet. An example might be one who only appears as a frenzied chewing sound and a horrible scream somewhere just out of sight, leaving only gory bits to be found.
Just because the PCs are invincible, their friends and family aren't. The Mists fight dirty. Maybe people in Ravenloft just look like the PCs' loved ones. Maybe they really are them. Maybe a monster is just using their appearance to get close to the characters. How sure do you have to be that your mother isn't your mother before you stab her?

Tsotha-lanti
2008-10-14, 02:54 AM
Oh, quite apart from the nitty-gritty details of the system, I can't see epic (or even high-level) play working at all in Ravenloft. How would a party of 18th-level characters be challenged by most realms in AD&D? Defeating Strahd or Azalin would be trivial. This is even more true for D&D 3.X characters. 4E characters don't have similarly huge powers (specifically, ther'es no geometrically increasing spellcasting power), but I can't see how you'd get the epic feel. It's gothic horror, which is pretty much entirely incompatible with epic fantasy.

d20 Modern with D&D 3.X magic (for PCs, anyway), using the great Sword & Sorcery Ravenloft books for 3.X, is probably the best way to do Ravenloft. In a pinch, D&D 3.X that keeps low-level and uses some cruel house-rules (like a 20 to 30 point massive damage treshold) and optional rules (more so than fluff material; HoH has nothing to do with gothic horror) from Heroes of Horror would work.


I'm such a horror elitist.


Edit: The massive damage cap really is necessary, and the DC needs to be ramped up for a game that - for some bizarre reason, since it doesn't fit thematically at all - uses standard amounts of magic items. Instantaneous death when attacked by a dangerous enough opponent should be a possibility.

Kurald Galain
2008-10-14, 03:41 AM
Excuse me, but WHY are you trying to do Ravenloft in 4th edition?

4th edition is about high fantasy and being a super hero. Ravenloft is about horror and barely surviving. The paradigms are mutually exclusive.

Precisely. Sure, you can adapt any system to any role if you push it hard enough, but 4E is really a very poor fit for horror games in general, and Ravenloft in particular.

Among others, because
* 4E is heavily combat-based; combat and horror do not mix well, because in a combat-heavy game you're expected to win a lot (or it won't last long) and in a horror game you tend to die rapidly in combat.
* 4E doesn't do lasting conditions, by design; by the rules, it is next to impossible to inflict the PCs with anything that lasts longer than five minutes. Horror is partially about suffering.
* 4E is about the heroes being powerful and special people who will Save The World; horror is about being a joe nobody in a situation he can't control, who might barely be able to save himself.
* Few things kill an atmospherical room description faster than drawing it out on a square grid, or having to explain that "this dragon skeleton on the printed floor tiles is really a cobweb".

For that matter, "epic" and "Ravenloft" aren't that good a mix either. I'd strongly suggest sticking with 2E, or low-level 3E; or instead grabbing a system that was actually designed for handling horror, such as Call of Ctulhu, or World of Darkness.

Tsotha-lanti
2008-10-14, 04:04 AM
For that matter, "epic" and "Ravenloft" aren't that good a mix either. I'd strongly suggest sticking with 2E, or low-level 3E; or instead grabbing a system that was actually designed for handling horror, such as Call of Ctulhu, or World of Darkness.

Ravenloft is a wicked cool (if really, really cheesy - Dr. Moreau, Victor Frankenstein, and so on as Darklords) setting, though.

Good catch about the mapping, too. I can't see 4E combat working without a grid, even to the extent that 3.X did. (I.e. sufficient.) Grid maps don't go with horror, though - it distracts from the visceral, the immediate, and the gripping, and plops you right down in tactical and empowered.

hamlet
2008-10-14, 08:32 AM
I'm going to go with the general statement that Ravenloft is not very kosher with 4th edition. Or 3rd edition for that matter. They just don't mesh well or easily. At the same time, "epic" levels are inherently antithical to Ravenloft really.

However, if you're set on doing it . . .

The first and key thing to remember is that Ravenloft isn't really a "Horror" setting. Not really. It's much more about the people fighting a battle that they've already lost, and they know it.

Nobody escapes the Mists. NOBODY. The most powerful evil beings going (short of gods) are utterly incapable of escaping from the prison plane. Even if somebody does manage to "get out," they will not leave unscathed or whole.

Also, remember that the Dark Lords (Strahd, Vecna, the Nightmare Court) are piddling nothings compared to the real powers of Ravenloft: The Dark Powers. By "Epic Levels," the PC's should be confronting one of the Dread Lords (Strahd, Azalin, any of the lords of the Core as opposed to the outer clusters or Isles), but the real action should be happening behind the scenes as the Dark Powers take a vested interest in the PC's. It's unlikely that, even if the PC's manage to "kill" one of the dread lords, that the lord would stay dead, so any big changes they might be able to affect would be minimal. You'll have to be creative here.

Moreover, this is the point where the PC's are forced to confront not the BBEG (stupid phrase that), but themselves. If they have not been utterly faithful to a Lawful Good alignment, they will find their past mistakes haunting them. Ghosts of failed missions cropping up all of the sudden to tarnish the heroes' images.

While the PC's go out to slay the dark lord, their home base, full of innocents, comes under attack by dark forces that emerge from the shadows to take advantage. What do the players do when they're confronted with multiple "bad" options?

If they consistently comprimise their ideals, or consistently perform questionable or evil deeds, they should start to change as they come into the grips of the Dark Powers.

My best recommendation is to pick up a copy of Domains of Dread from the TSR days. It's a book from the 2e days that contains a great deal of what's in the campaign setting, but adds a lot of extra material that can help you to deal with what's going to happen.

Above all remember that Ravenloft is not about going out to kill the monster, it's about the players being alone and helpless in the darkness.

Tsotha-lanti
2008-10-14, 09:17 AM
Nobody escapes the Mists. NOBODY.

Except, you know, PCs. The setting started as, and remained in part for the entire duration of its AD&D life, one where PCs from other worlds would get plopped for a "horror weekend." You go in, you experience terror, you come out. The excellent 3.X books made a huge effort to make it into a consistent, self-contained setting for entire campaigns, though.

hamlet
2008-10-14, 09:36 AM
Except, you know, PCs. The setting started as, and remained in part for the entire duration of its AD&D life, one where PCs from other worlds would get plopped for a "horror weekend." You go in, you experience terror, you come out. The excellent 3.X books made a huge effort to make it into a consistent, self-contained setting for entire campaigns, though.

Even PC's who only dropped in for a "horror weekend" were unlikely to get out whole and unscathed. At least not if you play it "right."

And I object to pretty much all the material from 3.x. It mostly rubbed me the wrong way and, for the most part, started adding changes that weren't needed.

Then again, I object to the "campaign setting" idea of Ravenloft as a whole and instead tend to think Ravenloft works best as a concept applied to a campaign and as a toolkit instead of a whole world.

Person_Man
2008-10-14, 09:42 AM
Conspiracies within conspiracies, plans within plans.

The PCs start trapped in a room with a large number of NPCs - innocent children, townsfolk, etc. No equipment. Watch all of the Saw movies until you think of a Catch 22 that you like. If the PCs survive and escape, they realize that they're really trapped in an elaborate dungeon. If they escape the dungeon, they find out they're really trapped in a huge building. If they escape the mansion, they find that they're really trapped in a temple complex. And so forth. At each juncture, the PCs must make horrific choices. Who do they sacrifice? Who do they protect? Why should they even trust each other. The PCs are repeatedly presented with no-win solutions which require that they bend or break their alignments.

Eventually they fight some more powerful Evil boss, who apparently was their tormentor. But in reality one of the NPCs was another Evil boss, who had just been putting a large number of potential tools through "training" in order to take out one of his rivals. He thanks the PCs and then dumps them back into a room like the one they started in.

Learnedguy
2008-10-14, 09:56 AM
I second (or third or whatever) the suggestion that you should limit the healing surges.

Otherwise, leave it as it is. Don't harden the encounters or anything. Let them breeze through it at first. But once the healing surges starts to dwindle...

Yes, they will fear. They will scream. And they will beg for mercy:smallcool:

Also, another smart thing would be to make them suffer from insomnia. Yes, insomnia. They can't sleep unless you let them (there's something about that place that makes youunable to sleep. You just can't:smalleek:)

chiasaur11
2008-10-14, 10:32 AM
Conspiracies within conspiracies, plans within plans.

The PCs start trapped in a room with a large number of NPCs - innocent children, townsfolk, etc. No equipment. Watch all of the Saw movies until you think of a Catch 22 that you like. If the PCs survive and escape, they realize that they're really trapped in an elaborate dungeon. If they escape the dungeon, they find out they're really trapped in a huge building. If they escape the mansion, they find that they're really trapped in a temple complex. And so forth. At each juncture, the PCs must make horrific choices. Who do they sacrifice? Who do they protect? Why should they even trust each other. The PCs are repeatedly presented with no-win solutions which require that they bend or break their alignments.

Eventually they fight some more powerful Evil boss, who apparently was their tormentor. But in reality one of the NPCs was another Evil boss, who had just been putting a large number of potential tools through "training" in order to take out one of his rivals. He thanks the PCs and then dumps them back into a room like the one they started in.

I'd start a player revolt by the third layer.

I mean, there's wheels within wheels, and then there's, well, being batted around helpless by the DM.

If I could figure out the tiniest loophole to allow it, that's the sort of campaign where I'd start playing Pun-Pun.

NephandiMan
2008-10-14, 12:53 PM
So, talking about how important it is for the rules to be compatible with the tone of the campaign...has anyone tried running Ravenloft in D20 Modern or Call of Cthulhu?

Kurald Galain
2008-10-14, 01:11 PM
So, talking about how important it is for the rules to be compatible with the tone of the campaign...has anyone tried running Ravenloft in D20 Modern or Call of Cthulhu?

Depends. Do you mean an African or a European swallow regular Ctulhu or d20 Ctulhu?

hamishspence
2008-10-14, 01:15 PM
I've read regular, but not got. Do have D20cthulhu, but might need work to upgrade to 3.5.

Leliel
2008-10-14, 01:19 PM
For all those who say combat and gothic horror don't mix:

System Shock.

Bioshock.

Dead Space.

Play them.

Kurald Galain
2008-10-14, 01:28 PM
I've read regular, but not got. Do have D20cthulhu, but might need work to upgrade to 3.5.

I don't think there's much of a difference between d20 Ctulhu 3.0 and 3.5. Nevertheless, for something like Ravenloft, I would suggest the original Ctulhu. Seems to me that the d20 variation is too much focused on actually defeating the monsters in combat, which isn't really the point of Ctulhu, or of gothic horror in general.

hamishspence
2008-10-14, 01:33 PM
I didn't know there was a 3.5, I thought they stopped publishing D20 Cthulhu stuff not long after campaign setting came out.

Tsotha-lanti
2008-10-14, 03:03 PM
I don't think there's much of a difference between d20 Ctulhu 3.0 and 3.5. Nevertheless, for something like Ravenloft, I would suggest the original Ctulhu. Seems to me that the d20 variation is too much focused on actually defeating the monsters in combat, which isn't really the point of Ctulhu, or of gothic horror in general.

I don't think there's separate 3.0 and 3.5 versions.

And d20 Cthulhu really is nothing like D&D. Defeating monsters is impossible. 20th-level characters armed to the teeth are completely impotent against anything more dangerous than a dimensional shambler. A dark young would kill a 20th-level party of investigators in one round, since all its attacks will break the 10 HP massive damage limit, and the investigators' Fort saves will be +6 to +15 or so. (And the DC isn't a flat 15, as I recall.)

Defeating the monsters is just as impossible as it is in CoC BRP. d20 Modern is much easier to modify for proper Ravenlofting than d20 CoC, though.


Leliel: System Shock and Bioshock are not even remotely gothic. What do they have to do with stories like The Castle of Otranto ? They're just horror. (Scifi horror, at that.)

hamishspence
2008-10-14, 03:07 PM
Main reason I picked it up was for dropping monsters into D&D games, and for ideas to give D&D games a hint of Cthulhu flavour.

Lords of Madness also works well for this.

Tsotha-lanti
2008-10-14, 11:00 PM
A lot of the monsters are in D&D already. Deep ones, ghouls, dholes/cthonians, the Son of Yog-Sothoth ( = moonbeast; the most blatant direct port, with the invisibility and all)...

I'm wondering if the D&D stats for the Great Old Ones at the end of the book get people confused about the whole "fighting them" issue? They're actually only D&D stats (the book states as much, and the art has Tordrek, Mialee, etc. fighting Cthulhu), rather than CoC d20 stats (which differ in several obvious aspects).

fireinthedust
2008-10-15, 09:57 PM
My question: how are these responses helping the OP?

Like, he wants to know *how* to do it, not *if*.


It can be done, especially considering who the PCs have to deal with at Epic Levels.
Exarchs gone mad, forgotten deities (mystra, etc.) who've revived through undeath, are examples of great darklords. Likewise, a minion character who has no powers but can't be destroyed can be a great darklord (like Adam and the Dr. Frankenstein character from Lamordia (I think it was)).

The Dungeon scenario was good. Keep in mind that Epic PCs should have epic locations. Try a planet-sized domain that they can't leave with plane-hopping: Dark Sun comes to mind, also Ravnica from Magic: the gathering. There should be landmarks they can visit, and each one can be part of the clue to their escape, but they still can't get "back home".
So the ginormous desert, the floating island in the sky with the haunted temple, the underground lake... each of them is a "room" in the traditional dungeon-structure of the adventure.

What'll scare them is the unfamiliar, and things that arn't affected by their combat powers. Unlike 3.5, epic PCs are great at blowing stuff up and that's it, or, with preparation, casting rituals. Also: no polymorph.
So if they're in a fight, sure, but outside of that consider what they have the ability to do. Design the adventure around that.

In the above example: On a massive world covered in shifting sands, the PCs are trapped and cannot leave. The sun is huge, and shines bright light on the PCs. There are sand-storms, which uncover portions of lost cities for hours at a time before the sands shift again and cover them up. When not in the ruins, Bullettes or purple worms harass them; the ruins are only broken walls on level stone, with no lower levels to hide in, so they can't stay there either. The Sun never sets.
Anyway, the setting is exotic, right? Ravenloft needs the exotic. As well, they're stuck without a town to buy goods in, or treasure to find, etc. It's miserable. It's a dead world, with a strange civilization that used to live here.

From here, you can do the "pitch Black" routine: if the sun is blocked by an eclipse (mentioned in writing on the wall) horrible monsters come out. They need to find a portal to the Dark Moon blocking it, where they fight an epic-level threat; if they win, they can leave.

Or: they discover that the bullettes and worms are the original inhabitants of the planet, and if they stay much longer they'll turn into mindless monsters themselves. While they can get cool AC bonuses or senses (tremorsense) they have a great reason to leave.

Anyway, despite being epic, they need to figure out how to get out of there. The monster-changing thing is also scary: they see tattoos on the creatures that are like the ones on ancient walls. Sympathy for monsters? fear for themselves?

The darklord: a mad NPC wandering around the portal to the Dark Moon. Having unleashed the Dark Moon curse, or the Eternal Sun curse, or whatever, for his own gain (immortality) he didn't realize he'd doom the world and himself to live forever in a crappy plane of existence.
Whenever he dies, he revives.

EvilElitest
2008-10-17, 03:33 PM
Yeah the design just isn't suited to this, 4E is just way to much hack and slash combat heavy with too much PC special stuff for Ravenloft's "you are barely alive feel". I mean minions in Ravenloft?
from
EE

The New Bruceski
2008-10-18, 03:29 AM
I mean minions in Ravenloft?
from
EE

What's wrong with hordes of zombies? Seems like minions were made for this kind of thing, where you can take them out easily but they just keep coming. In previous editions in order to achieve the vulnerability the monsters' level would need to be so low that the players can shrug off attacks.

EvilElitest
2008-10-18, 09:15 PM
What's wrong with hordes of zombies? Seems like minions were made for this kind of thing, where you can take them out easily but they just keep coming. In previous editions in order to achieve the vulnerability the monsters' level would need to be so low that the players can shrug off attacks.

hoards of zombies don't have to be minions, more challenging that way....but i digress
The thing is, what about minions in terms of people? Zombies aren't the only threat in the game
from
EE

The New Bruceski
2008-10-18, 09:58 PM
hoards of zombies don't have to be minions, more challenging that way....but i digress
The thing is, what about minions in terms of people? Zombies aren't the only threat in the game
from
EE

Minions aren't the only type of enemy in the game either. Why is it a problem to have an extra tool in the toolbox?

EvilElitest
2008-10-18, 10:03 PM
Minions aren't the only type of enemy in the game either. Why is it a problem to have an extra tool in the toolbox?

1) Personally i think it is an awful mechanic but that isn't the point
2) it goes against the horror theme of Ravenloft, it makes it more like a combat game where the point of raven loft is the player has little control
from
EE

Asbestos
2008-10-18, 10:35 PM
By the time a party reaches level 20 in a game, you can pretty much see that they would be able to destroy most darklords without losing so much as a healing surge.

Naturally, this is not conducive of the atmosphere of dread that one hopes to evoke in Ravenloft, so I was wondering:

How would you run an epic 4e Ravenloft game?

Being fascinated with the Nightmare Court, I have always liked them as the main antagonists of a campaign-You can't fight a dream very easily, you know.

By the time the PCs reach level 20, the NC has finally started viewing them as a serious threat. As a result, they try a more direct approach, sending night terrors to torment their friends and allies in an attempt to scare them off. When that doesn't work, and the PCs tharwt a scheme to gain power in the waking world, the NC go berserk, sending dream spawn after dream spawn in a final attempt to destroy this problem once and for all. This turns out to be a mistake, as the weakening of their powers to send the spawn into the world allows an opening for the PCs to strike at their core, trapping a member of the Court and engaging them in an epic battle of courage versus fear (I was thinking Mullonga, but I was keeping the Rainbow Serpent in mind).


Hmm, well, it looks like you have nothing against the PCs winning here, but you certainly don't want it to be easy.

I'd bust out Heroes of Horror (yes, its 3.x, but bear with me here) and use all the little flavor bits in there to help out, if you don't have HoH I can give some examples. HoH is great for freaking players the heck out if you use it right. Then I'd crush the PC's healing surges, either reduce how much they heal or how many they have. And, as someone else said, don't let them rest. Once daily powers start turning into every-other-day-lies or weeklies even epic PCs will have some issues. With less healing surges and dailies being used more sparingly you can still have combat, but I'd suggest a disproportionate number of 'hard' encounters and allow the PCs to run for it if they have to. Heck, hard encounters should be the standard with 'way too hard' being in there too, allow them room to run the hell away from those ones :smallwink:

Edit: You don't necessarily need to all out prevent the PCs from having extended rests, just have them be... unrestful, so that the PCs don't recover everything they normally would.