Erik Amundsen's Blog, page 4
October 7, 2014
Remedial Ravenloft: Kartakas
Before - Like playing Are You a Werewolf with Dutch opera singers.
After - Pretty damned much the same. It's too weird for me to really want to mess with it.
Where it is - A small, landlocked nation in the southwestern Core.
Technical Advancement - A touch behind most of the Core, for reasons that are kind of hard to pinpoint or identify. Roughly equivalent to western Europe in the late 17th - early 18th century CE.
Supernatural Advancement - A class of trained magicians of moderate to high level power. Tutelage in the local magical tradition is widespread and protective hexes are widely available for purchase. Supernaturally invested musical instruments are plentiful.
The Land - Kartakas is largely forest and bog with a number of major rivers flowing through and stimulating trade. The forests are old-growth, dark and deep and similar to those found in neighboring Verbrek. Bogs are more settled than the forests, they sport raised platform houses, suspended villages and locals who traverse the land on stilts. Houses are snug and often sport bright paintjobs or, at least, eye-catching trim. Despite the geographic distance and radically different culture, Kartakan architecture is closest to Lamordian in design. Mountains spring up, seemingly without any sort of warning, in the southwest at the Garancian border.
The People - Kartakans are weird. They're pleasant, good-natured, easygoing - and that's odd enough, but they often seem oblivious, sometimes going about their routines in a near fugue state, singing to themselves. They can also seem flighty and forgetful, especially in the face of awful mishaps or eruptions of horror, a fact that can really put visitors from abroad off. That's not to say Kartakans are constantly in a trance or that they aren't cognizant of the world around them. They just seem to sometimes slip into trances (usually singing to themselves) and come out of it ...bemused. Abstracted, usually for a couple hours. Foreign scholars hypothesize that this is a sort of cultural and linguistic trick the Kartakans use to cope with trauma, which, let's face it, is pretty easy to come by in the Realm. Kartakans tend to have either very fair skin (mostly in the south and east) or very dark skin (usually in the west along the Valachan border), and what with populations of ethnic Valachans, Verbrekuns and Sithicans common in Kartakas, a wide variety of features (sithicans are a near human species which the Kartakans refer to as elves, which makes for a lot of confusion among northern Core nationals who have a very different species of elf. Sithican elves are cross-fertile with humans, and mutual attraction between the two species is not rare). Kartakans speak a local dialect of Rabben and a pitched, sung language that's referred to in non-pitched languages as Shokkal. Kartakans have a local religion that is somewhat ancestral and somewhat animistic.
Wag's Eye View - I. Literally. Can't. Even.
The Boring Stuff - Kartakas is not the place you want to go if you like things making sense. The nation is run by their language, which has law and culture seemingly coded in. The songs get interpreted and propogated by a network of bards, who wield some amount of authority, though they seem to find more authority through force of personality than through understanding of the songs. Aside from that, the song seems to serve as law and leader, and native singers of Shokkal who try to flout the law tend to suffer a great deal of anxiety when they do so. The song seems to account for the common good, and despite the lack of any centralized authority, order is generally maintained people are cared for and public works are completed. Occasionally, one or more of the Bards have to step in in the case of dispute or crisis, but their opinions are usually accepted by all parties. In the cases where one party fails to accept the judgment of the bard, well, they tend to be pretty formidible in either martial or supernal arts (or both) and have the authority to solve problems that way as well. Foremost of the bards for more than a generation has been a man named Harkon Lukas, who apparently knows a few songs that most Kartakans do not.
And their Mothers Walked Toward the Forest (Music Tonight, I Just Want Your Music Tonight) - It's probably not going to surprise anyone, what with the whole culture being frustrating to interpret by outsiders, the history of the Domain's inclusion is utter nonsense. Kartakas might have entered the Realm with or part of Bluetspur or Arak, given their history's obsession of those from the mountains, but neither domain is apparently inhabited or even bordering Kartakas in the present configuration of the Core (domains tend to shift around, geograhpically speaking, the last shuffle occuring when Azalin Rex apparently blew up Ilaluk and most of the central Core). There's also some historical accounts of something called the wolf song being employed on a tryrant at terrible cost (in the present day, Lukas is the only one thought to possess the secret of that song. At least, he has intimated that he may consider using *something* to face the tyrant Malocchio in neighboring Invidia if the young man continues to violate Kartakan territory. Something whose efficacy he doesn't doubt.) There's also some songs about a squirrel spirit or a fox spirit or a squirrel-fox spirit (the squirrel-fox being a small arboreal predator that has superficial resemblance to both animals, is common throughout the southern Core, but is not thought to be native to Kartakas), but those go nowhere useful.
The Darklord Could be... It could be Harkon Lukas. The going conjecture is that Lukas knows the Wolf Song, that he used it on the tyrant in question and that the song is of such a nature that it drew Kartakas into the Realm. This would be a good conjecture if there was any evidence of it, but there is fuck all, outside of Lukas' possible bluff in regards to Malocchio's ambitions and the man's strength of personality and appearance relative to his age. Lukas is, like many Darklords, a lot older than he looks, but then, so are most people with Sithican heritage, and he certainly seems to have the markers of that.
...It could also be the Shokkal language. Pitched language is only documented one other place in the Realm and that is on the island of Liffe in the Nocturnal Sea, and we know that language is related to the powers of the Darklord of that Domain. It certainly seems to have a strong effect on the thought processes of those who learn it (whether or not they are Kartakan), but those effects seem to be lessened outside of the nation. The major strikes against this hypothesis is that the Realm does not normally include Domains for nonhuman entities, and persistent rumors of blue-skinned folk singing a very similar pitched language in Bluetspur and Lahey.
...More specifically, it could be the wolf song itself, possibly embodied by Harkon Lukas as the one man who is thought to know it. If that is the case, the song is a very subtle and light handed darklord indeed, having shown none of its presence outside of the occasional closing of the borders.
There is no Escape from the Slave-Catcher's Song - Kartakas is a popular destination for adventurers, especially those with a musical or magical bent. Tutelage in both is easy to come by and Kartakans are remarkably relaxed in the presence of murder hobos, considering. It's also possible to assimilate into Kartakan society pretty easily, as long as you can carry a tune. Several of the more popular and authoritative bards began their careers as adventurers looking to do respectable work (and there are persistent rumors that Lukas himself used to be a foreign adventurer who went native). Kartakas is also a logical staging ground for forrays into Garancia, Sithicus and Invidia, and while it's got wolves like whoa, it doesn't have wolves like Verbrek, so traveling the countryside (the forest moreso than the bog) is dangerous but not foolhardy.
Closing the Borders - When the borders are closed, an eerie song comes up around the Domain. This song causes severe psychic shock after a short time listening to it, and later physical effects, culminating in the eventual shattering of teeth and bones.
After - Pretty damned much the same. It's too weird for me to really want to mess with it.
Where it is - A small, landlocked nation in the southwestern Core.
Technical Advancement - A touch behind most of the Core, for reasons that are kind of hard to pinpoint or identify. Roughly equivalent to western Europe in the late 17th - early 18th century CE.
Supernatural Advancement - A class of trained magicians of moderate to high level power. Tutelage in the local magical tradition is widespread and protective hexes are widely available for purchase. Supernaturally invested musical instruments are plentiful.
The Land - Kartakas is largely forest and bog with a number of major rivers flowing through and stimulating trade. The forests are old-growth, dark and deep and similar to those found in neighboring Verbrek. Bogs are more settled than the forests, they sport raised platform houses, suspended villages and locals who traverse the land on stilts. Houses are snug and often sport bright paintjobs or, at least, eye-catching trim. Despite the geographic distance and radically different culture, Kartakan architecture is closest to Lamordian in design. Mountains spring up, seemingly without any sort of warning, in the southwest at the Garancian border.
The People - Kartakans are weird. They're pleasant, good-natured, easygoing - and that's odd enough, but they often seem oblivious, sometimes going about their routines in a near fugue state, singing to themselves. They can also seem flighty and forgetful, especially in the face of awful mishaps or eruptions of horror, a fact that can really put visitors from abroad off. That's not to say Kartakans are constantly in a trance or that they aren't cognizant of the world around them. They just seem to sometimes slip into trances (usually singing to themselves) and come out of it ...bemused. Abstracted, usually for a couple hours. Foreign scholars hypothesize that this is a sort of cultural and linguistic trick the Kartakans use to cope with trauma, which, let's face it, is pretty easy to come by in the Realm. Kartakans tend to have either very fair skin (mostly in the south and east) or very dark skin (usually in the west along the Valachan border), and what with populations of ethnic Valachans, Verbrekuns and Sithicans common in Kartakas, a wide variety of features (sithicans are a near human species which the Kartakans refer to as elves, which makes for a lot of confusion among northern Core nationals who have a very different species of elf. Sithican elves are cross-fertile with humans, and mutual attraction between the two species is not rare). Kartakans speak a local dialect of Rabben and a pitched, sung language that's referred to in non-pitched languages as Shokkal. Kartakans have a local religion that is somewhat ancestral and somewhat animistic.
Wag's Eye View - I. Literally. Can't. Even.
The Boring Stuff - Kartakas is not the place you want to go if you like things making sense. The nation is run by their language, which has law and culture seemingly coded in. The songs get interpreted and propogated by a network of bards, who wield some amount of authority, though they seem to find more authority through force of personality than through understanding of the songs. Aside from that, the song seems to serve as law and leader, and native singers of Shokkal who try to flout the law tend to suffer a great deal of anxiety when they do so. The song seems to account for the common good, and despite the lack of any centralized authority, order is generally maintained people are cared for and public works are completed. Occasionally, one or more of the Bards have to step in in the case of dispute or crisis, but their opinions are usually accepted by all parties. In the cases where one party fails to accept the judgment of the bard, well, they tend to be pretty formidible in either martial or supernal arts (or both) and have the authority to solve problems that way as well. Foremost of the bards for more than a generation has been a man named Harkon Lukas, who apparently knows a few songs that most Kartakans do not.
And their Mothers Walked Toward the Forest (Music Tonight, I Just Want Your Music Tonight) - It's probably not going to surprise anyone, what with the whole culture being frustrating to interpret by outsiders, the history of the Domain's inclusion is utter nonsense. Kartakas might have entered the Realm with or part of Bluetspur or Arak, given their history's obsession of those from the mountains, but neither domain is apparently inhabited or even bordering Kartakas in the present configuration of the Core (domains tend to shift around, geograhpically speaking, the last shuffle occuring when Azalin Rex apparently blew up Ilaluk and most of the central Core). There's also some historical accounts of something called the wolf song being employed on a tryrant at terrible cost (in the present day, Lukas is the only one thought to possess the secret of that song. At least, he has intimated that he may consider using *something* to face the tyrant Malocchio in neighboring Invidia if the young man continues to violate Kartakan territory. Something whose efficacy he doesn't doubt.) There's also some songs about a squirrel spirit or a fox spirit or a squirrel-fox spirit (the squirrel-fox being a small arboreal predator that has superficial resemblance to both animals, is common throughout the southern Core, but is not thought to be native to Kartakas), but those go nowhere useful.
The Darklord Could be... It could be Harkon Lukas. The going conjecture is that Lukas knows the Wolf Song, that he used it on the tyrant in question and that the song is of such a nature that it drew Kartakas into the Realm. This would be a good conjecture if there was any evidence of it, but there is fuck all, outside of Lukas' possible bluff in regards to Malocchio's ambitions and the man's strength of personality and appearance relative to his age. Lukas is, like many Darklords, a lot older than he looks, but then, so are most people with Sithican heritage, and he certainly seems to have the markers of that.
...It could also be the Shokkal language. Pitched language is only documented one other place in the Realm and that is on the island of Liffe in the Nocturnal Sea, and we know that language is related to the powers of the Darklord of that Domain. It certainly seems to have a strong effect on the thought processes of those who learn it (whether or not they are Kartakan), but those effects seem to be lessened outside of the nation. The major strikes against this hypothesis is that the Realm does not normally include Domains for nonhuman entities, and persistent rumors of blue-skinned folk singing a very similar pitched language in Bluetspur and Lahey.
...More specifically, it could be the wolf song itself, possibly embodied by Harkon Lukas as the one man who is thought to know it. If that is the case, the song is a very subtle and light handed darklord indeed, having shown none of its presence outside of the occasional closing of the borders.
There is no Escape from the Slave-Catcher's Song - Kartakas is a popular destination for adventurers, especially those with a musical or magical bent. Tutelage in both is easy to come by and Kartakans are remarkably relaxed in the presence of murder hobos, considering. It's also possible to assimilate into Kartakan society pretty easily, as long as you can carry a tune. Several of the more popular and authoritative bards began their careers as adventurers looking to do respectable work (and there are persistent rumors that Lukas himself used to be a foreign adventurer who went native). Kartakas is also a logical staging ground for forrays into Garancia, Sithicus and Invidia, and while it's got wolves like whoa, it doesn't have wolves like Verbrek, so traveling the countryside (the forest moreso than the bog) is dangerous but not foolhardy.
Closing the Borders - When the borders are closed, an eerie song comes up around the Domain. This song causes severe psychic shock after a short time listening to it, and later physical effects, culminating in the eventual shattering of teeth and bones.
Remedial Ravenloft: Garancia
Before - No one expects the Spanish Inquisition to get totally left out of a setting that calls itself Gothic, but there it was, left out. I suspect that it was Satanic Panic hangover and the notion that putting a Domain in that evoked the Spanish Inquisition would upset the Catholics upset at D&D because Spanish Inquisition and the Protestants upset at D&D because Catholics (and yeah, this was the 80s so Protestants who thought Catholics were Mary-worshipping heretics of questionable loyalty to America were still around in numbers, before anti-choice policies brought them all together).
After - The Spanish Inquisition gives not one straggly fuck if you expect it or not, you're still getting a turn in the scavenger's daughter.
Where is it - A nominal kingdom (actual theocracy) located on a peninsula in the southwest corner of the Core.
Technical Advancement - Technology is unevenly spread in Garancia; while the cities and the military enjoy technology close to contemporary to the rest of the Core (equivalent to western Europe, mid 18th Century CE), the countryside gets by on advancements that can range to centuries behind.
Supernatural Advancement - Officially there is none in Garancia. That said, members of the church are often accomplished occultists. The church also enslaves those found with psychic abilities, particularly clairvoyants and telepaths and presses them into service as witch finders. Traffic in any extra-normal ability is a crime in Garancia punishable by death or induction into the witchfinders, depending on the ability. Three guesses who gets off easier.
The Land - Garancia is surrounded by water on three sides, and has three smallish coastal mountain ranges, covered in rainy forest on the ocean side. Inland is a low-lying drier plain, broken up by birch, cork oak and pin forests. Terrain gets slightly hillier in the center. Granacians are packed within or around the ancient castles and fortresses; larger cities often incorporate more than one castle into their land. Cathedrals dominate the cityscapes, and the ones in the larger cities are all larger themselves grander than even the grand cathedrals in Dementlieu and Borca. Garancian architecture is designed to intimidate and no wall over 30 feet tall goes without a suspended cage. Public squares are dominated by instruments of torture, some built into the architecture as a grim decoration, some fully functional and perhaps in use at any given point in the day. Garance has a weird fixation on the gaunt and attenuated human form in their art and architecture as well, and at least two suffering stone figures will be silently entreating you for mercy from any angle you choose to look in the poulous areas. Richard Riddick might have gone a different way.
The People - Garancians expect the inquisition. They expect the hell out of it. The church has gone to great lengths to isolate each individual from community, family and friends, and it's created a strongly reactionary and suspicous culture. Garancia is currently suffering from the same kind of population decline that Falkovnia has been suffering and for similar reasons - people do not trust one another enough to have children together, let alone raise them. The church's practice of widespread oblation motivates parents to keep their children well out of sight, if they cannot have them in secret, and Garancia's cities, in particular appear to be utterly without children. Oblates are raised by the church in similar environments of suspicion, informancy and backstabbing. The army is just as bad. Garancians range from olive to fair skin, though much darker skin tones are common along the border with Valachan, and pointed ears along the borders of Sithicus and Kartakas. Garancians speak Cuervo and follow the Garancian Ezraist church with all their heart and soul in intense, white knuckled devotion because the other option is getting the penitant's pear. Granacian culture has also become deeply, deeply chauvanist in the last generation or two, which many attribute to the Archbishop's own personal misogyny.
Wag's Eye View - Ezra said that life was pain, they decided it wasn't painful enough, and their company is almost as bad as the things their priests dream up to scare them.
The Boring Stuff - Garancia is a monarchy, they even have a king and queen and a royal family, and sometimes the Archbishop even lets the king sign his name on things that the Archbishop had written for him to sign. The country is, in fact, a totalitarian theocracy controlled by the Ezraist Archbishop and his cabinet. Whether it is actually the Archbishop in charge or a member of the cabinet (because it might be the Chief Patriarch of the Inquisition). Almost all social order, maintenance and justice is administered directly by the church. There is a fairly large noble class who handle some of the commerce and, in theory, administer the army, but, in practice, they are almost exclusively employed in turning one another in to the Inquisition to increase personal holdings and discipline in the army has decayed to the point that the church and, really, anyone who feels they need people to fight for them, employ foreign mercenery companies. Recently, a lot of the ones in service to the Church have come from Falkovnia, a development that makes no one nervous. Not at all. Garancia has a great climate for agriculture and rich soil and they export a lot of food, rivaling Falkvonia in their exports (again with Falkovnia... I wonder if there is anything going on there). Garancian-employed merceneries have made some small-scale raids on neighboring Valachan and Kartakas (and probably Sithicus, not that anyone in Sithicus would let any other nations know), but those were just mistakes. Really. We swear. Die, heathens.
It's What You Oughtn't to Do, but You Do Anyway - Garancia's recent history centers on the struggle between the previous queen (sort of a distant cousin to the current king) and the archbishop, which took the form of years of maneuvers and counters as the queen fought a desperate holding action against the Archbishop's growing power and the sickness that had plagued her since childhood and was slowly killing her. I don't expect the fact that the Archbishop won that race and that the queen's execution (public, burning, preceded by the sort of treatment the Inquisition has become famous for) is the frontrunner for events that brought the kingdom to the Mists. In a way, it's almost boring; utterly predictable. Where it gets interesting from our point of view is in figuring out what religion was the archbishop archbishop of?
The current Grancian church is Ezraist, with a scripture that is based on the Borcan church but heavily edited by, we presume the Archbishop himself. In fact, new editions with further changes and refinements of the Ezraist faith in Garancia come out every couple of years, and aren't you expected to know it. Preaching from last year's scriptures will ... well I won't say it will get you burned faster than anything else, becuase the Inqisition likes to take its sweet, sweet time with errant priests, but it will get you burned. The thing is that, any serious scholarship on Ezraism reveals that it's a religion utterly fabricated, in a number of different Domains at different times, it can be utterly ahistorical, or, at least the histories of Domains tend to range between cheerfully ignorant of Ezraism to downright contradictory, claiming an entirely different religion (or differently characterized religion) held sway (though extant holy texts that predate any given Domain's arrival in the Realm are suspicously and conspicuously absent). With Garancia, it's hard to tell, since just about every word written to paper which is not the Archbishop's latest and greatest gets thrown in the fire (often along with the writers), but if Ezraism is, likewise, a post-induction addition to the kingdom, then the Archbishop would have, logically, been cognizant of it, and likely the only religious scholar to have survived with any chance of having remembered. None of the other Domains that birthed a branch of Ezraism are or ever seemed to be particularly religious, and very few if any who were alive at the time of induction survive to this day. Sadly, it seems that the Archbishop hates scholarship slightly less than he hates women, and slightly more than he hates everything else in the world and not in the world, so any insight he might possess into Ezraism and the rise thereof is probably never going to be ours.
The Darklord Could be... Well, the obvious choice the Archbishop Juan-Miguel Celadaron de Constancia. The kingdom, if not the Domain is certainly bent to his warped ego, he has made each and every man, woman and child in Granacia as alienated and suspicious as he is, if not as hateful (and more often than not, as hateful). He's also over a century old, which is kind of telling, especially since he looks to be in his 60s, but then, a lot of his cabinet were well into three digits even before induction; sorcery is pretty common in the higher offices of the church.
Run All Day, Run All Night, Keep Your Dirty Feelings Deep Inside - Garancia doesn't have a lot to offer the adventurer other than a turn on the rack and a toss in the fire, but it has become a popular place for important people to send their enemies. It turns out that keeping an entire country under the level of repression that the Archbishop's ego seems to require is extremely expensive, and so opening up one's torture chambers to those willing to pay a premium to put people there has become a popular revenue generator. And for every market, as the graverobber reminds us, there is an opportunity for adventurers to generate revenue sneaking in and retrieving the people sent in. Preferably before they are broken. If one is too late, there are rumors of a very well-hidden and cagey coven of Hala witches who know how to restore the psyche (to an extent, at least) of someone broken completely by torture.
Closing the Borders - The Archbishop keeps the borders closed as often and as long as he can as a matter of course and has the comparatively small land border locked down under fortifications, but keeping the border shut seems to tire him out, eventually, and it's only then that even those on official business can leave Garancia. When the borders are closed, the smoke and screams from all the people burned to death fills the air, getting thicker as one tries to move into the mountains to Kartakas or Sithicus. The smoke eventually blots out all sight and asphixiates anyone trying to leave. Those who have found protection from the smoke report that, eventually, it's just a curtain of flame, destroying anything it touches.
After - The Spanish Inquisition gives not one straggly fuck if you expect it or not, you're still getting a turn in the scavenger's daughter.
Where is it - A nominal kingdom (actual theocracy) located on a peninsula in the southwest corner of the Core.
Technical Advancement - Technology is unevenly spread in Garancia; while the cities and the military enjoy technology close to contemporary to the rest of the Core (equivalent to western Europe, mid 18th Century CE), the countryside gets by on advancements that can range to centuries behind.
Supernatural Advancement - Officially there is none in Garancia. That said, members of the church are often accomplished occultists. The church also enslaves those found with psychic abilities, particularly clairvoyants and telepaths and presses them into service as witch finders. Traffic in any extra-normal ability is a crime in Garancia punishable by death or induction into the witchfinders, depending on the ability. Three guesses who gets off easier.
The Land - Garancia is surrounded by water on three sides, and has three smallish coastal mountain ranges, covered in rainy forest on the ocean side. Inland is a low-lying drier plain, broken up by birch, cork oak and pin forests. Terrain gets slightly hillier in the center. Granacians are packed within or around the ancient castles and fortresses; larger cities often incorporate more than one castle into their land. Cathedrals dominate the cityscapes, and the ones in the larger cities are all larger themselves grander than even the grand cathedrals in Dementlieu and Borca. Garancian architecture is designed to intimidate and no wall over 30 feet tall goes without a suspended cage. Public squares are dominated by instruments of torture, some built into the architecture as a grim decoration, some fully functional and perhaps in use at any given point in the day. Garance has a weird fixation on the gaunt and attenuated human form in their art and architecture as well, and at least two suffering stone figures will be silently entreating you for mercy from any angle you choose to look in the poulous areas. Richard Riddick might have gone a different way.
The People - Garancians expect the inquisition. They expect the hell out of it. The church has gone to great lengths to isolate each individual from community, family and friends, and it's created a strongly reactionary and suspicous culture. Garancia is currently suffering from the same kind of population decline that Falkovnia has been suffering and for similar reasons - people do not trust one another enough to have children together, let alone raise them. The church's practice of widespread oblation motivates parents to keep their children well out of sight, if they cannot have them in secret, and Garancia's cities, in particular appear to be utterly without children. Oblates are raised by the church in similar environments of suspicion, informancy and backstabbing. The army is just as bad. Garancians range from olive to fair skin, though much darker skin tones are common along the border with Valachan, and pointed ears along the borders of Sithicus and Kartakas. Garancians speak Cuervo and follow the Garancian Ezraist church with all their heart and soul in intense, white knuckled devotion because the other option is getting the penitant's pear. Granacian culture has also become deeply, deeply chauvanist in the last generation or two, which many attribute to the Archbishop's own personal misogyny.
Wag's Eye View - Ezra said that life was pain, they decided it wasn't painful enough, and their company is almost as bad as the things their priests dream up to scare them.
The Boring Stuff - Garancia is a monarchy, they even have a king and queen and a royal family, and sometimes the Archbishop even lets the king sign his name on things that the Archbishop had written for him to sign. The country is, in fact, a totalitarian theocracy controlled by the Ezraist Archbishop and his cabinet. Whether it is actually the Archbishop in charge or a member of the cabinet (because it might be the Chief Patriarch of the Inquisition). Almost all social order, maintenance and justice is administered directly by the church. There is a fairly large noble class who handle some of the commerce and, in theory, administer the army, but, in practice, they are almost exclusively employed in turning one another in to the Inquisition to increase personal holdings and discipline in the army has decayed to the point that the church and, really, anyone who feels they need people to fight for them, employ foreign mercenery companies. Recently, a lot of the ones in service to the Church have come from Falkovnia, a development that makes no one nervous. Not at all. Garancia has a great climate for agriculture and rich soil and they export a lot of food, rivaling Falkvonia in their exports (again with Falkovnia... I wonder if there is anything going on there). Garancian-employed merceneries have made some small-scale raids on neighboring Valachan and Kartakas (and probably Sithicus, not that anyone in Sithicus would let any other nations know), but those were just mistakes. Really. We swear. Die, heathens.
It's What You Oughtn't to Do, but You Do Anyway - Garancia's recent history centers on the struggle between the previous queen (sort of a distant cousin to the current king) and the archbishop, which took the form of years of maneuvers and counters as the queen fought a desperate holding action against the Archbishop's growing power and the sickness that had plagued her since childhood and was slowly killing her. I don't expect the fact that the Archbishop won that race and that the queen's execution (public, burning, preceded by the sort of treatment the Inquisition has become famous for) is the frontrunner for events that brought the kingdom to the Mists. In a way, it's almost boring; utterly predictable. Where it gets interesting from our point of view is in figuring out what religion was the archbishop archbishop of?
The current Grancian church is Ezraist, with a scripture that is based on the Borcan church but heavily edited by, we presume the Archbishop himself. In fact, new editions with further changes and refinements of the Ezraist faith in Garancia come out every couple of years, and aren't you expected to know it. Preaching from last year's scriptures will ... well I won't say it will get you burned faster than anything else, becuase the Inqisition likes to take its sweet, sweet time with errant priests, but it will get you burned. The thing is that, any serious scholarship on Ezraism reveals that it's a religion utterly fabricated, in a number of different Domains at different times, it can be utterly ahistorical, or, at least the histories of Domains tend to range between cheerfully ignorant of Ezraism to downright contradictory, claiming an entirely different religion (or differently characterized religion) held sway (though extant holy texts that predate any given Domain's arrival in the Realm are suspicously and conspicuously absent). With Garancia, it's hard to tell, since just about every word written to paper which is not the Archbishop's latest and greatest gets thrown in the fire (often along with the writers), but if Ezraism is, likewise, a post-induction addition to the kingdom, then the Archbishop would have, logically, been cognizant of it, and likely the only religious scholar to have survived with any chance of having remembered. None of the other Domains that birthed a branch of Ezraism are or ever seemed to be particularly religious, and very few if any who were alive at the time of induction survive to this day. Sadly, it seems that the Archbishop hates scholarship slightly less than he hates women, and slightly more than he hates everything else in the world and not in the world, so any insight he might possess into Ezraism and the rise thereof is probably never going to be ours.
The Darklord Could be... Well, the obvious choice the Archbishop Juan-Miguel Celadaron de Constancia. The kingdom, if not the Domain is certainly bent to his warped ego, he has made each and every man, woman and child in Granacia as alienated and suspicious as he is, if not as hateful (and more often than not, as hateful). He's also over a century old, which is kind of telling, especially since he looks to be in his 60s, but then, a lot of his cabinet were well into three digits even before induction; sorcery is pretty common in the higher offices of the church.
Run All Day, Run All Night, Keep Your Dirty Feelings Deep Inside - Garancia doesn't have a lot to offer the adventurer other than a turn on the rack and a toss in the fire, but it has become a popular place for important people to send their enemies. It turns out that keeping an entire country under the level of repression that the Archbishop's ego seems to require is extremely expensive, and so opening up one's torture chambers to those willing to pay a premium to put people there has become a popular revenue generator. And for every market, as the graverobber reminds us, there is an opportunity for adventurers to generate revenue sneaking in and retrieving the people sent in. Preferably before they are broken. If one is too late, there are rumors of a very well-hidden and cagey coven of Hala witches who know how to restore the psyche (to an extent, at least) of someone broken completely by torture.
Closing the Borders - The Archbishop keeps the borders closed as often and as long as he can as a matter of course and has the comparatively small land border locked down under fortifications, but keeping the border shut seems to tire him out, eventually, and it's only then that even those on official business can leave Garancia. When the borders are closed, the smoke and screams from all the people burned to death fills the air, getting thicker as one tries to move into the mountains to Kartakas or Sithicus. The smoke eventually blots out all sight and asphixiates anyone trying to leave. Those who have found protection from the smoke report that, eventually, it's just a curtain of flame, destroying anything it touches.
October 1, 2014
Remedial Ravenloft: Verbrek
Before - Like playing "Are you a Werewolf" with a bunch of fucking amateurs.
After - Every day is Luprecalia! Every day is also a free screening of Ravenous.
Where it is - One of the city states in the central west coast of the Core with Dementlieu, Richemulot, Borca & Dorvinia and all those places.
Technical Advancement - A hodgepodge, similar to southern Europe in early 16th century CE on it's good days. Most lasting structures were built using 1st century CE technology.
Supernatural Advancement - Most people have access to lower level witchcraft and folk magic. Tutelage is easy to find but limited. Charms (especially ones to protect against wolves and help find your way) are readily available for purchase. Supernatural healing is fairly common.
The Land - Verbrek used to be the center of a major empire in the ancient world, and the city itself still holds a lot of that grandeur, though most of the ancient buildings are long since fallen into ruin, and the modern architecture is ...utilitarian. Rustic, even. The only thing that remains are the walls, which are high and broad and relatively well guarded, which makes some visitors wonder if Verbrekuns share a common culture with Aralaine, though this is more a case of convergent evolution of two cultures with things they want to keep out. The countryside around the city is forest, dark and full of wolves, which you expected, because this is Ravenloft, but when I tell you the forest is dark and full of wolves, I mean that it is making a run at being the darkest and most full of wolves. The major roads into the city are fully covered, raised structures made from timber and stone, and all they manage to do is to kind of restrict the wolves a little in terms of tactical options when trying to eat travelers. Countryside farmsteads, logging camps and quarries are tucked into high palisades, which, likewise, don't do as much to deter the wolves as anyone would like.
The People - Though they exhibit a lot of different skin tones, hair and eye colors, Verbrekuns trace their lineage to a single man, a hero great in strength, stature (and apparently sexual appetites and potency) who led his lovers, wives and children to this city after it had been destroyed and abandoned by the wolves. Verbrekuns share their founder's robust size and build, most are well over 6 feet tall with muscular or stout builds, men and women. This seems to be a dominant trait amongst Verbrekuns, likewise red hair, even on Verbrekuns with darker skin. Their distinct physiques have made foreigners wonder if they are not some other, closely related species than other humans in the Core, but there's very little evidence of that being the case. Modern Verbrekuns do not claim to share much of a cultural heritage with the builders of their city, though they have adopted their stone work. Traders from other places find Verbrekuns direct and expressive; folks from more reserved cultures are often startled by the range of emotion they're willing to openly display. Families yell and cuff each other a lot, as do friends; scuffling is a Verbrekun display of affection, a fact that makes smaller folks from other cultures really nervous. Verbrekuns speak Corvino and Rabben, switching back and forth in a local pidgin a lot of the time. The Borcan church has a little influence here, but most Verbrekuns are unregenrate pagans, either following Hala (the witches are able to operate in the open in Verbrek and have official protection of the government) or their own local Owl and Rooster-themed deities. All of them, Ezraist and Pagan fear the Wolf, which considering the influence his children seem to have on the place, seems pretty reasonable.
Wag's Eye View - Freeze a Verbekkun in a block of ice and you could sell the body in Dementlieu or Lamordia as a specimen of primordial man. Take a live one anywhere, and they will never invite you back.
The Other People - Now's about the best time to talk about the wolves. Wolves in the Realm are not like wolves elsewhere, unless elsewhere is Narnia, and the wolves are Jadis the White Witch's secret police. Wolves in Ravenloft talk, speak their own language and can pick up human languages. They are fully sapient and, on average, as smart as humans; the are also hateful, spiteful, thoroughly wicked, basically Always Chaotic Evil. Their social structure is what we thought natural wolves used to have - a violent top-down hierarchy with a single alpha dominating as many as their strength and organizational abilities allow. Some wolves develop supernatural powers. Some press goblins into serivce, when they can find them, or bully and threaten human agents into acting on their behalf. They can open doors. Some of them can even pick locks. This is not just Verbrekun wolves, this is all wolves in the Core, though the ones in Verbrek are foremost in strength, sapience and wickedness.
Wag's Eye View - Did you hear something?
The Boring Stuff - Verbrek is a medium sized city state governed by a representative body that contains both representatives of the Verbrekun clans and well regarded experts (at current, this is comprised of an overseer of trade, the ranger captain, head of the Halan Circle, an Owl Pirest, a Rooster Priest, a treasurer, historian and an engineer). Appointment to the body is done by the clan or by vote of the body itself, in the case of the experts. Verbrek mostly exports timber and stone, but does a reasonable trade with the local city states. Defense from outside invasion is pretty well handled by ALL THE WOLVES; defense from the wolves is handled by rangers, and becoming a Verbrekun ranger is a great path to either social advancement or the digestive systems of several wolves, depending. When Verbreka was first contacted, they had a technical level around that of western Europe in 9th century CE, but have adopted as much of the more contemporary technology as they're able to obtain.
When the Moon is Round and Full Gonna Teach you Tricks that will Blow your Mongrel Mind - Verbrekun historians are more preservers of history than interpreters, so when you go digging into the history, you get to deal with large, loud and suspicious scholars who might be able to choke-slam you into oblivion and have their own clan's interests higher on their list of priorities than the search for truth. Also, most of the history is oral, which makes cross-referencing a bitch. That said, one thing that tends to come out in most accounts is that things only got as bad as they are fairly recently. A couple of generations ago, the forest grew up overnight and the Wolf blessed his children with words. If this doesn't sound like transition to the realm to you, then you're in the wrong line of work to be reading this.
Anyway, the closest thing that anyone can find to an inciting incident on the human side of things is the discovery of an extensive set of underground ruins that included the former inhabitants' secret wolf cult's temple. It's hard to know if the wolf-cult had anything to do with the Verbrekun's Wolf (different cultures, but local to one another and the city was finally destroyed by an invasion of wolves, according to Verbrekun history), but either some of the original explorers, or other folks drawn after seem to have taken up the practices of the old wolf cult, and even now, they are constant trouble for the clans. Recent investigations revealed the possibility that their members are numerous and well-connected. As for beliefs of the wolf cult, one of the major things is that, since wolves eat humans to gain their powers, turnabout is fair play. Also eating other humans to gain their powers. Whether or not someone gets shape-shifting as a power out of this is hard to say. It's not as though there is conclusive proof that there are such things as lycanthropes, but there's a lot of anecdote. And a lot of missing persons.
The Darklord could be... This is just a guess, but if there is a leader or founder of the wolf cult still alive in Verbrek, I'm guessing that's our man. Or womany. Or shape-shifter. That said, it's also possible that the Dark Powers like the sins of Wolf as much as they do the folly of Humanity, which means that the darklord could be out there in the woods, running and howling and we'd never know it.
Running with the Big Dogs - Verbekuns respect strength and ability and still organize themselves in clans, so adventuring clans have unprecedented opportunities to just fit in to Verbekun society, if they want to go legit. There are a couple adventuring Verbekun clans out there, specializing in witchcraft or the martial arts. That said, there's not a lot of profit to be found in the woods and a whole lot of wolves, so there aren't as many draws in Verbrek as there might be in other places. The government would be awfully grateful if someone wanted to investigate the wolf cult, but some members probably wouldn't be, and maps showing where those subterranean ruins actually were don't seem to exist anymore.
Closing the Borders - The road runs out but the forest does not. Anyone who continues on finds that the forest is pretty well endless and that the dinner bell is ringing for the wolves the whole time.
After - Every day is Luprecalia! Every day is also a free screening of Ravenous.
Where it is - One of the city states in the central west coast of the Core with Dementlieu, Richemulot, Borca & Dorvinia and all those places.
Technical Advancement - A hodgepodge, similar to southern Europe in early 16th century CE on it's good days. Most lasting structures were built using 1st century CE technology.
Supernatural Advancement - Most people have access to lower level witchcraft and folk magic. Tutelage is easy to find but limited. Charms (especially ones to protect against wolves and help find your way) are readily available for purchase. Supernatural healing is fairly common.
The Land - Verbrek used to be the center of a major empire in the ancient world, and the city itself still holds a lot of that grandeur, though most of the ancient buildings are long since fallen into ruin, and the modern architecture is ...utilitarian. Rustic, even. The only thing that remains are the walls, which are high and broad and relatively well guarded, which makes some visitors wonder if Verbrekuns share a common culture with Aralaine, though this is more a case of convergent evolution of two cultures with things they want to keep out. The countryside around the city is forest, dark and full of wolves, which you expected, because this is Ravenloft, but when I tell you the forest is dark and full of wolves, I mean that it is making a run at being the darkest and most full of wolves. The major roads into the city are fully covered, raised structures made from timber and stone, and all they manage to do is to kind of restrict the wolves a little in terms of tactical options when trying to eat travelers. Countryside farmsteads, logging camps and quarries are tucked into high palisades, which, likewise, don't do as much to deter the wolves as anyone would like.
The People - Though they exhibit a lot of different skin tones, hair and eye colors, Verbrekuns trace their lineage to a single man, a hero great in strength, stature (and apparently sexual appetites and potency) who led his lovers, wives and children to this city after it had been destroyed and abandoned by the wolves. Verbrekuns share their founder's robust size and build, most are well over 6 feet tall with muscular or stout builds, men and women. This seems to be a dominant trait amongst Verbrekuns, likewise red hair, even on Verbrekuns with darker skin. Their distinct physiques have made foreigners wonder if they are not some other, closely related species than other humans in the Core, but there's very little evidence of that being the case. Modern Verbrekuns do not claim to share much of a cultural heritage with the builders of their city, though they have adopted their stone work. Traders from other places find Verbrekuns direct and expressive; folks from more reserved cultures are often startled by the range of emotion they're willing to openly display. Families yell and cuff each other a lot, as do friends; scuffling is a Verbrekun display of affection, a fact that makes smaller folks from other cultures really nervous. Verbrekuns speak Corvino and Rabben, switching back and forth in a local pidgin a lot of the time. The Borcan church has a little influence here, but most Verbrekuns are unregenrate pagans, either following Hala (the witches are able to operate in the open in Verbrek and have official protection of the government) or their own local Owl and Rooster-themed deities. All of them, Ezraist and Pagan fear the Wolf, which considering the influence his children seem to have on the place, seems pretty reasonable.
Wag's Eye View - Freeze a Verbekkun in a block of ice and you could sell the body in Dementlieu or Lamordia as a specimen of primordial man. Take a live one anywhere, and they will never invite you back.
The Other People - Now's about the best time to talk about the wolves. Wolves in the Realm are not like wolves elsewhere, unless elsewhere is Narnia, and the wolves are Jadis the White Witch's secret police. Wolves in Ravenloft talk, speak their own language and can pick up human languages. They are fully sapient and, on average, as smart as humans; the are also hateful, spiteful, thoroughly wicked, basically Always Chaotic Evil. Their social structure is what we thought natural wolves used to have - a violent top-down hierarchy with a single alpha dominating as many as their strength and organizational abilities allow. Some wolves develop supernatural powers. Some press goblins into serivce, when they can find them, or bully and threaten human agents into acting on their behalf. They can open doors. Some of them can even pick locks. This is not just Verbrekun wolves, this is all wolves in the Core, though the ones in Verbrek are foremost in strength, sapience and wickedness.
Wag's Eye View - Did you hear something?
The Boring Stuff - Verbrek is a medium sized city state governed by a representative body that contains both representatives of the Verbrekun clans and well regarded experts (at current, this is comprised of an overseer of trade, the ranger captain, head of the Halan Circle, an Owl Pirest, a Rooster Priest, a treasurer, historian and an engineer). Appointment to the body is done by the clan or by vote of the body itself, in the case of the experts. Verbrek mostly exports timber and stone, but does a reasonable trade with the local city states. Defense from outside invasion is pretty well handled by ALL THE WOLVES; defense from the wolves is handled by rangers, and becoming a Verbrekun ranger is a great path to either social advancement or the digestive systems of several wolves, depending. When Verbreka was first contacted, they had a technical level around that of western Europe in 9th century CE, but have adopted as much of the more contemporary technology as they're able to obtain.
When the Moon is Round and Full Gonna Teach you Tricks that will Blow your Mongrel Mind - Verbrekun historians are more preservers of history than interpreters, so when you go digging into the history, you get to deal with large, loud and suspicious scholars who might be able to choke-slam you into oblivion and have their own clan's interests higher on their list of priorities than the search for truth. Also, most of the history is oral, which makes cross-referencing a bitch. That said, one thing that tends to come out in most accounts is that things only got as bad as they are fairly recently. A couple of generations ago, the forest grew up overnight and the Wolf blessed his children with words. If this doesn't sound like transition to the realm to you, then you're in the wrong line of work to be reading this.
Anyway, the closest thing that anyone can find to an inciting incident on the human side of things is the discovery of an extensive set of underground ruins that included the former inhabitants' secret wolf cult's temple. It's hard to know if the wolf-cult had anything to do with the Verbrekun's Wolf (different cultures, but local to one another and the city was finally destroyed by an invasion of wolves, according to Verbrekun history), but either some of the original explorers, or other folks drawn after seem to have taken up the practices of the old wolf cult, and even now, they are constant trouble for the clans. Recent investigations revealed the possibility that their members are numerous and well-connected. As for beliefs of the wolf cult, one of the major things is that, since wolves eat humans to gain their powers, turnabout is fair play. Also eating other humans to gain their powers. Whether or not someone gets shape-shifting as a power out of this is hard to say. It's not as though there is conclusive proof that there are such things as lycanthropes, but there's a lot of anecdote. And a lot of missing persons.
The Darklord could be... This is just a guess, but if there is a leader or founder of the wolf cult still alive in Verbrek, I'm guessing that's our man. Or womany. Or shape-shifter. That said, it's also possible that the Dark Powers like the sins of Wolf as much as they do the folly of Humanity, which means that the darklord could be out there in the woods, running and howling and we'd never know it.
Running with the Big Dogs - Verbekuns respect strength and ability and still organize themselves in clans, so adventuring clans have unprecedented opportunities to just fit in to Verbekun society, if they want to go legit. There are a couple adventuring Verbekun clans out there, specializing in witchcraft or the martial arts. That said, there's not a lot of profit to be found in the woods and a whole lot of wolves, so there aren't as many draws in Verbrek as there might be in other places. The government would be awfully grateful if someone wanted to investigate the wolf cult, but some members probably wouldn't be, and maps showing where those subterranean ruins actually were don't seem to exist anymore.
Closing the Borders - The road runs out but the forest does not. Anyone who continues on finds that the forest is pretty well endless and that the dinner bell is ringing for the wolves the whole time.
September 30, 2014
Remedial Ravenloft: Dementlieu
Before - Throw some French at the wall and see what sticks.
After - A three-way courtly battle between Fantomas, the Phantom and a psychic hellfire club backed by the Deep Ones. That is to say, the French that stuck.
Where is it - A city state on one of the nicer stretches of coastline. Western Core, on the Sea of Sorrows.
Technical Advancement - Analogous to western Europe, mid-late 18th Century CE.
Supernatural Advancement - Supernatural powers are common amongs the upper classes, tutelage and artifacts are available for purchase, some supernatural public works. Powers focus on psychic/mental development and contact with alien entities, mostly ones located in the barrier reefs beyond the bay.
The Land - The city of Dementlieu is grand and old, old and grand, spires, steeples, towers; they say that Dementlieu and Richemulot built their cities as high as one another, just that Dementlieu started at ground level and Richemulot started a lot lower. There's not much of an underground in the city, being very close to the water in both proximity and elevation. Canals are a major method of transportation in the city, and, yes, a visitor from our world would be forgiven if they thought someone mashed Paris and Venice together, with regard only for brooding, picturesque atmosphere. Sometimes the obvious choice is the correct one. The city is in a surprisingly well sheltered and defended harbor, covered by state of the art guns and star-forts, and is the major hub of maritime trade. Ships from all over the Core and the Sea of Sorrows are constantly coming in and out. Countryside is actually really nice, coastline rising pretty quickly into rocky, lightly forested hills. Dementlieu controls a number of barrier islands out in the Sea of Sorrows, many of these are reserved by the Council of Brilliance for official use, and range from manicured manors to creepy, stinking tangles rising from the sea.
The People - Dementlieu is the cultural center of the Core, so when the Dementlieuese say that (and they will), they actually have something there to back it up. Dementlieuese fashion, music, art, education and thought are in high demand just about everywhere they have a little money to spend. Artists and poets and fashionistas all over the Realm learn Corbeau so they can grab some of the glamour. Dementlieu is one of the few places in the Core with a strong (and comparatively affluent) middle class and some... well, we'll give them the credit of having progressive ideas and ideals in government. In practice, there's a huge and impoverished underclass that's just as ground down and kicked around as any vampire-bitten Barovian serf, but there's public education, so of course that's not really the case. Dementlieuese overall are, again, fairly diverse, owing to their status as a maritime hub, but the upper classes lean toward light skin, dark hair and eyes, speak Corbeau and tithe at the Dementlieuse church, though religious conviction is something for the poor. Most Dementlieuese are superstitious about the islands and reefs beyond the bay, and new moons are the nights where everything locks down in the city and surrounding countryside, opposite basically the rest of the Core. Mists tend to freak them out as well, though that's fairly reasonable. Dementlieu gets more frequent and heavy visitations from the Mists than most Domains seem to, and those either bring more active Mistbound predators or encourage local predators to come out and play.
Wag's Eye View - Posh douchebags. Even the desperately poor in Dementlieu manage to be desperately poor posh douchebags, somehow.
The Boring Stuff - Less boring, owing to the viciousness that goes on below the surface. The city-state of Dementlieu is technically a republic run by an elected council called the Council of Brilliance. In theory, election is popular and open and anyone with sufficient votes could win a seat. In practice it's about as open as a totally unsupervised high school club's office elections, and to the extent that it is a popularity contest, it is popular. The names of those up for election are determined in social clubs for the ultra rich that meet behind closed doors and practice dark arts. No shit, actual Dark Fucking Arts, because that's the kind of jaded we're dealing with in Dementlieu. Hellfire clubs used to be common passtimes for the elite, but they have since grown into a sort of shadow establishment to the official government. Each one has a different specialty, as those things go. Weirdly, though, the city has seemed to benefit from both the high level of supernatural power the aristocrats often develop and the canceling effect of multiple alien entities with interests in owning the city outright.
AND I WANT AND I WANT AND I WILL ALWAYS BE HUNGRY - And there's the rub. The secrecy and supposed depravity of the hellfire clubs makes it near impossible to figure out how Dementlieu came to be a Domain or who might be it's Darklord. There's just too much to choose from and most of the choices are well hidden from even the local crusading detective (Alanik Ray, member of an especially long-lived near human species and a righteous pain in the ass of almost everyone, but too useful and canny to just kill off. So Far), making it very difficult to pinpoint who, when and how it happened. We know that Dementlieu was very successful for a very long time, and prosperity led to boredom among the upper classes, which led to interest in developing supernatural powers, a practice which may have actually been forbidden by their religious establishment (the secrecy seems a little extreme given that Ezraism, while ambivalent, does not forbid development of man's natural capacity to contend with the supernatural, and the Dementlieuese church is one of the more liberal branches where that is concerned). This created the culture of the hellfire clubs, and we're pretty sure some posh asshole brought Dementlieu into the Mists to impress his douchey friends. Fucked if we know which douche and when. We're prone to taking it on faith that Dementlieu and Richemulot were born into the Realm at the same time, but Richemulot's history is no help in that matter, either. They might have been the same Domain initially, or conjoined like Borca and Dorvinia. They might have been a buy one get one deal for the Dark Powers (any Dementlieuese hearing that would be quick to call Richemulot the one the Dark Powers got gratis).
The Darklord Could Be... It could be Dominic D'Honaire, current (and long-running) chief executor of the Council of Brilliance. An apparently unassuming man who is, nevertheless frighteningly popular and, if we're being honest, a damned good chief executive as they go. The irony is that he gets to be on this list based on what we do not know about him. His public persona is that of the public servant, unpreposessing and unflappable, cajoling order and progress out of the nest of vipers that is the rest of the council. The fact that he's been doing this with incredible success, considering, for four consecutive five year terms without telekinetically impaling someone on the spire of the Grand Cathedral (it's happened more than once; actually, it was first done by Dominic's father during his term on the Council. Man was a trend setter) is telling. You don't get to survive in the big chair, let alone succeed unless you're the devil. Also, motherfucker hasn't aged. That's a dead giveaway (really, it's not, a half dozen of the other members of the Council are suspiciously well preserved; one might be breaking in a full body transplant courtesy of his contacts in Lamordia).
...It could be the Brain, criminal mastermind, probably a powerful telepath, weaver of memories and perceptions who has been plaguing the Council and everyone else with high profile, occasionally brutal crimes for slightly less time than his proclaimed nemesis D'Honaire has been running the council (the fact that the Brain calls D'Honaire "nemesis" lends creedence to the notion that it's him, I swear). It's Dementlieu and the Brain is still operating, so it's clear he's damned good at keeping his secrets. The only thing we know of the man for certain is the crimes for which he has claimed responsibility.
...It could be the lonely figure that prowls the quayside theater district, disrupting productions, seducing young stars, causing scandal, murder and mayhem and is linked with a rival master criminal, less established than the brain and more theatrical (see what I did there) who goes by "The Phantom." Or the lonely figure that prowls the Grand Cathedral, scaring the be(crystal dragon)jeezus out of novices and acolytes, blending in with the gargoyles and ringing the bells at odd hours. Or the lonely figure sometimes seen swimming in the canals (this is a super bad idea), or out on the wharfs on moonless nights singing weird songs to the sea. Fuck Dementlieu. Seriously. Well, the food is nice.
Land of Opportunity - Seriously, if you cannot find something profitable, shady and violent to do with your time in a city state run by secretive magicians and psychics who have more money than they have venom for one another (and only because they have truly ridiculous wealth), where theatrical master criminals engage in battles of wits with (let's be honset, Alanik), theatrical master detectives, I don't even know what I could do to help you. Just write everything down - your memories of your time in the city might not be accurate, and not just because of the wine.
Closing the Borders - Closed borders just shroud the city state in Mists, and each bank of fog is a Mistway to wherever in the Domain the Darklord wants to see you end up. It's efficient, understated (LIKE D'HONAIRE).
After - A three-way courtly battle between Fantomas, the Phantom and a psychic hellfire club backed by the Deep Ones. That is to say, the French that stuck.
Where is it - A city state on one of the nicer stretches of coastline. Western Core, on the Sea of Sorrows.
Technical Advancement - Analogous to western Europe, mid-late 18th Century CE.
Supernatural Advancement - Supernatural powers are common amongs the upper classes, tutelage and artifacts are available for purchase, some supernatural public works. Powers focus on psychic/mental development and contact with alien entities, mostly ones located in the barrier reefs beyond the bay.
The Land - The city of Dementlieu is grand and old, old and grand, spires, steeples, towers; they say that Dementlieu and Richemulot built their cities as high as one another, just that Dementlieu started at ground level and Richemulot started a lot lower. There's not much of an underground in the city, being very close to the water in both proximity and elevation. Canals are a major method of transportation in the city, and, yes, a visitor from our world would be forgiven if they thought someone mashed Paris and Venice together, with regard only for brooding, picturesque atmosphere. Sometimes the obvious choice is the correct one. The city is in a surprisingly well sheltered and defended harbor, covered by state of the art guns and star-forts, and is the major hub of maritime trade. Ships from all over the Core and the Sea of Sorrows are constantly coming in and out. Countryside is actually really nice, coastline rising pretty quickly into rocky, lightly forested hills. Dementlieu controls a number of barrier islands out in the Sea of Sorrows, many of these are reserved by the Council of Brilliance for official use, and range from manicured manors to creepy, stinking tangles rising from the sea.
The People - Dementlieu is the cultural center of the Core, so when the Dementlieuese say that (and they will), they actually have something there to back it up. Dementlieuese fashion, music, art, education and thought are in high demand just about everywhere they have a little money to spend. Artists and poets and fashionistas all over the Realm learn Corbeau so they can grab some of the glamour. Dementlieu is one of the few places in the Core with a strong (and comparatively affluent) middle class and some... well, we'll give them the credit of having progressive ideas and ideals in government. In practice, there's a huge and impoverished underclass that's just as ground down and kicked around as any vampire-bitten Barovian serf, but there's public education, so of course that's not really the case. Dementlieuese overall are, again, fairly diverse, owing to their status as a maritime hub, but the upper classes lean toward light skin, dark hair and eyes, speak Corbeau and tithe at the Dementlieuse church, though religious conviction is something for the poor. Most Dementlieuese are superstitious about the islands and reefs beyond the bay, and new moons are the nights where everything locks down in the city and surrounding countryside, opposite basically the rest of the Core. Mists tend to freak them out as well, though that's fairly reasonable. Dementlieu gets more frequent and heavy visitations from the Mists than most Domains seem to, and those either bring more active Mistbound predators or encourage local predators to come out and play.
Wag's Eye View - Posh douchebags. Even the desperately poor in Dementlieu manage to be desperately poor posh douchebags, somehow.
The Boring Stuff - Less boring, owing to the viciousness that goes on below the surface. The city-state of Dementlieu is technically a republic run by an elected council called the Council of Brilliance. In theory, election is popular and open and anyone with sufficient votes could win a seat. In practice it's about as open as a totally unsupervised high school club's office elections, and to the extent that it is a popularity contest, it is popular. The names of those up for election are determined in social clubs for the ultra rich that meet behind closed doors and practice dark arts. No shit, actual Dark Fucking Arts, because that's the kind of jaded we're dealing with in Dementlieu. Hellfire clubs used to be common passtimes for the elite, but they have since grown into a sort of shadow establishment to the official government. Each one has a different specialty, as those things go. Weirdly, though, the city has seemed to benefit from both the high level of supernatural power the aristocrats often develop and the canceling effect of multiple alien entities with interests in owning the city outright.
AND I WANT AND I WANT AND I WILL ALWAYS BE HUNGRY - And there's the rub. The secrecy and supposed depravity of the hellfire clubs makes it near impossible to figure out how Dementlieu came to be a Domain or who might be it's Darklord. There's just too much to choose from and most of the choices are well hidden from even the local crusading detective (Alanik Ray, member of an especially long-lived near human species and a righteous pain in the ass of almost everyone, but too useful and canny to just kill off. So Far), making it very difficult to pinpoint who, when and how it happened. We know that Dementlieu was very successful for a very long time, and prosperity led to boredom among the upper classes, which led to interest in developing supernatural powers, a practice which may have actually been forbidden by their religious establishment (the secrecy seems a little extreme given that Ezraism, while ambivalent, does not forbid development of man's natural capacity to contend with the supernatural, and the Dementlieuese church is one of the more liberal branches where that is concerned). This created the culture of the hellfire clubs, and we're pretty sure some posh asshole brought Dementlieu into the Mists to impress his douchey friends. Fucked if we know which douche and when. We're prone to taking it on faith that Dementlieu and Richemulot were born into the Realm at the same time, but Richemulot's history is no help in that matter, either. They might have been the same Domain initially, or conjoined like Borca and Dorvinia. They might have been a buy one get one deal for the Dark Powers (any Dementlieuese hearing that would be quick to call Richemulot the one the Dark Powers got gratis).
The Darklord Could Be... It could be Dominic D'Honaire, current (and long-running) chief executor of the Council of Brilliance. An apparently unassuming man who is, nevertheless frighteningly popular and, if we're being honest, a damned good chief executive as they go. The irony is that he gets to be on this list based on what we do not know about him. His public persona is that of the public servant, unpreposessing and unflappable, cajoling order and progress out of the nest of vipers that is the rest of the council. The fact that he's been doing this with incredible success, considering, for four consecutive five year terms without telekinetically impaling someone on the spire of the Grand Cathedral (it's happened more than once; actually, it was first done by Dominic's father during his term on the Council. Man was a trend setter) is telling. You don't get to survive in the big chair, let alone succeed unless you're the devil. Also, motherfucker hasn't aged. That's a dead giveaway (really, it's not, a half dozen of the other members of the Council are suspiciously well preserved; one might be breaking in a full body transplant courtesy of his contacts in Lamordia).
...It could be the Brain, criminal mastermind, probably a powerful telepath, weaver of memories and perceptions who has been plaguing the Council and everyone else with high profile, occasionally brutal crimes for slightly less time than his proclaimed nemesis D'Honaire has been running the council (the fact that the Brain calls D'Honaire "nemesis" lends creedence to the notion that it's him, I swear). It's Dementlieu and the Brain is still operating, so it's clear he's damned good at keeping his secrets. The only thing we know of the man for certain is the crimes for which he has claimed responsibility.
...It could be the lonely figure that prowls the quayside theater district, disrupting productions, seducing young stars, causing scandal, murder and mayhem and is linked with a rival master criminal, less established than the brain and more theatrical (see what I did there) who goes by "The Phantom." Or the lonely figure that prowls the Grand Cathedral, scaring the be(crystal dragon)jeezus out of novices and acolytes, blending in with the gargoyles and ringing the bells at odd hours. Or the lonely figure sometimes seen swimming in the canals (this is a super bad idea), or out on the wharfs on moonless nights singing weird songs to the sea. Fuck Dementlieu. Seriously. Well, the food is nice.
Land of Opportunity - Seriously, if you cannot find something profitable, shady and violent to do with your time in a city state run by secretive magicians and psychics who have more money than they have venom for one another (and only because they have truly ridiculous wealth), where theatrical master criminals engage in battles of wits with (let's be honset, Alanik), theatrical master detectives, I don't even know what I could do to help you. Just write everything down - your memories of your time in the city might not be accurate, and not just because of the wine.
Closing the Borders - Closed borders just shroud the city state in Mists, and each bank of fog is a Mistway to wherever in the Domain the Darklord wants to see you end up. It's efficient, understated (LIKE D'HONAIRE).
September 29, 2014
Remedial Ravenloft: Richemulot
TL;DR - Do you hear the rodents sing? Singing the song of angry rats!
The Land - The city of Richemulot manages to be both crowded and half-abandoned, bleached looking stone facades for half collapsed buildings, shanties built in the bones of monuments, narrow lanes covered completely in conjoined buildings. Half-finished construction in eerily white local marble from abandoned make-work projects are everywhere, either incorporated into the homes of the poor or left to stand like bones. The countryside is mostly neat and orderly as long as you don't go near the manors of the former landlords, and every inch of the city-state has sewer beneath it, large and sturdy, possibly maintained by those unseen. Beneath the sewers are catacombs, and beneath them, more catacombs. Richemulot is larger on the inside, and dotted with small shrines full of rats and offerings made to them, as well as stone statues of the rodents that seem to simply appear when no one is looking.
The People - Ruchemulese boast some of the best immune systems in the Core. Like the Falkovnians, a lot of people look down on Richemulese as filthy (though they are fastidiously tidy, a trait that seems to be common throughout). This is partially because of the rat houses. It's also partially because the Richemulese recently divested itself of its aristocracy and bourgeoise in the kind of uprising that makes neighbors especially nervous. But the rats don't help, and one of the things that seems an almost universal trait amongst Richemulese is a live-and-let-live attitude toward their local rats. For their part, the rats seem to be much better... behaved? It's not quite the right word, but while the people keep cats and terriers and patrol their parts of the city for rodents, other parts are reserved entirely for the rats and Richemulese will sometimes speak of the beasts as though they were sapient, coequal and comerades. Whether this is a sincere sentiment or Richemulese humor (which has a dark streak and revels in being associated with the lowest and the worst), that depends on the individual. Richemulese come from many places and are fairly diverse in appearance, but almost all of them speak Corbeau and follow Dementlieuese Ezraism (except for the handful that speak Corvino and lean Borcan). There are some rumors of human-sized and humanoid, clothing and tool-employing ratlike aliens that live in the catacombs, separate and distinct from the sapient giant rats also rumored below and separate from the wererats, also rumored below.
The Boring Stuff - Richemulot is a city state that is currently run as a fairly functional anarchist collective. Until fairly recently it was a far more centralized and dictatorial republic following the slightly less recent revolt against the ruling classes. The countryside is overseen by local farming collectives which are largely unchanged from the usual centuries old we-live-in-a-farming-village-and-mind-our-own-shit-thanks-very-much way they were run. The city is a little more complicated, but recently the Reiner family has taken on a lot of the responsibilites of managing things (and commensurate authority) almost solely by the virtue of the fact that there are kind of a lot of them and they're both organized and motivated. Richemulot does reasonable trade, especially with Aralaine, selling a lot of their food, timber and stone to the walled province, and trades through Borca and Dementlieu. Richemulot also has regular trade with certain subterranean Domains, and is the major entrance to the western-Core underworld. Richemulot has a very close relationship with Dementlieu, and despite the large population of exiled Richemulese aristocrats constant calls for it to be otherwise, the relationship is weirdly harmonious.
Try the Gray Stuff - It's Delicious - It's often pretty easy to look at a Domain's history and figure out when it came to the Realm even if you're not to certain about the Darklord. With Richemulot, this isn't the case. The Realm often makes up history and forges historical documents with an insulting lack of rigor, but if 500 years of records in Dementlieu have any basis in fact, Richemulot has never gone more than 25 years without a major, bloody upheval that cuts across all levels of society. Starting with factional wars among the ruling families, consolidations, pogroms, secular revolt, religious revolt, reigns of terror, Richemulot's history may as well be a blood stained rag, because that's all the city's got. Most recently, Richemulot was suffering under that last, under Comrade Dorien, who had risen to a kind of de facto head of the revolutionary council that replaced the landowner and merchant council that had been repressing and exploiting everyone since they took over from the cruel and torture happy archbishop whose predecessor deposed the last mad prince of a doomed house, and you get the idea. Comrade Dorien was eaten alive by rats, and the council imploded. When the dust settled, no one was in charge, but certain things did get managed. Slowly, the city and surrounding countryside is starting to reorganize with the Reiners leading, but how long until they run mad and start killing everyone? The point is that any given day in Richemulot's history had something that would have piqued the Dark Powers' interest, so how does one choose which one brought the city to the Realm?
A possible clue lies in the fact that Richemulot has always been neighbor to Dementlieu. No one who studies the Domain hypothesis thinks that Dementlieu and Richemulot are the same Domain (they have been closed to one another in the past), but if it were possible to find the date and transgression that brought the former Domain into the Realm, it could pinpoint when that Domains poor cousin came along. Posisbly.
The Darklord Could Be... Jacqueline Reiner? It's grasping at straws; people were pretty sure that Comrade Dorien was Darklord when he held sway over the Revolutionary Council and their guillotine, but his death has not caused the usual uphevals that follow the fall of a Darklord (some Domains have appeared to vanish entirely, while others change radically - in the most recent case Gundarak's geography changed, its lands and people appropriated into Barovia and Invidia, and as much as the Barovian Gundarakites clamor for independence, no one considers reunification with the Invidian Gundarakites. Likewise, the Invidian Gundarakites are more interested in staying away from Malocchio and his soldiers than helping their Barovian brothers). His authority was hardly long-lived, and before him, the Richemulese Council of Brilliance (they wanted to be Dementlieuese, but behaved like Dorvinians is the common way of talking about them) had any number of those motherfuckers could have been a Darklord. Anyway, Jacqueline is not the matriarch of her family by any means, still young and unmarried, as far as anyone can tell. She's intense, serious, a little jumpy, but also very smart and persuasive and tends to be the Reiner you're most likely to be talking to. She's clearly got some authority, which is more than anyone else has, but, yeah, it's not much to go on.
The Rat King. Deep below the city, somewhere in a liminal space between the catacombs and the underworld, there's a place full of rats and rat people and wererats and all things rat. They have a king, so the story goes, and it is his likeness that appears in the form of the stone rat statues, holding pitchers (many of which seem to pour forth with endless clean water, because the Rat King is kind, sometimes). The story is that he harbors great resentment towards humanity but also great tenderness, which hardly seems like the whole story, but certainly it's a good start. There's a rumor going around that the Reiners are his human (or possibly wererat) servants and that Jacqueline in particular is a devotee, bride or avatar to his will.
Beyond the Barracades, is there a World you Want to See - Richemulot, right now, is fairly calm, and importantly, it has a lot of access to the more hospitable parts of the Underworld. There's plenty of places in which to claim squatters rights, and if you're willing to do the odd favor for the Reiners, it's a good place to be an Adventurer. Richemulese are pretty easygoing and progressive where origin is concerned, so you could even mingle with... well, the students who mostly lead the collectives are not exactly high society, but it's about as good as someone who traffics in occult forces, violence and theft is going to get. Dispossessed nobles in Dementlieu are frequent clients for adventuring clans, particularly the ones of a more larcenous or assassinish bent. Also, Underworld. We mentioned that.
Closing the Borders - When the borders are closed, barracades of mounded debris swarming with bitey rodents spring up around the edges of the Domain. In the countryside its more a jumble of rat houses, Rat King statues and hedges, but the effect is the same. Those who fight their way to the other side find that it is in one of the rat-owned quarters of the city, regardless of where you started.
The Land - The city of Richemulot manages to be both crowded and half-abandoned, bleached looking stone facades for half collapsed buildings, shanties built in the bones of monuments, narrow lanes covered completely in conjoined buildings. Half-finished construction in eerily white local marble from abandoned make-work projects are everywhere, either incorporated into the homes of the poor or left to stand like bones. The countryside is mostly neat and orderly as long as you don't go near the manors of the former landlords, and every inch of the city-state has sewer beneath it, large and sturdy, possibly maintained by those unseen. Beneath the sewers are catacombs, and beneath them, more catacombs. Richemulot is larger on the inside, and dotted with small shrines full of rats and offerings made to them, as well as stone statues of the rodents that seem to simply appear when no one is looking.
The People - Ruchemulese boast some of the best immune systems in the Core. Like the Falkovnians, a lot of people look down on Richemulese as filthy (though they are fastidiously tidy, a trait that seems to be common throughout). This is partially because of the rat houses. It's also partially because the Richemulese recently divested itself of its aristocracy and bourgeoise in the kind of uprising that makes neighbors especially nervous. But the rats don't help, and one of the things that seems an almost universal trait amongst Richemulese is a live-and-let-live attitude toward their local rats. For their part, the rats seem to be much better... behaved? It's not quite the right word, but while the people keep cats and terriers and patrol their parts of the city for rodents, other parts are reserved entirely for the rats and Richemulese will sometimes speak of the beasts as though they were sapient, coequal and comerades. Whether this is a sincere sentiment or Richemulese humor (which has a dark streak and revels in being associated with the lowest and the worst), that depends on the individual. Richemulese come from many places and are fairly diverse in appearance, but almost all of them speak Corbeau and follow Dementlieuese Ezraism (except for the handful that speak Corvino and lean Borcan). There are some rumors of human-sized and humanoid, clothing and tool-employing ratlike aliens that live in the catacombs, separate and distinct from the sapient giant rats also rumored below and separate from the wererats, also rumored below.
The Boring Stuff - Richemulot is a city state that is currently run as a fairly functional anarchist collective. Until fairly recently it was a far more centralized and dictatorial republic following the slightly less recent revolt against the ruling classes. The countryside is overseen by local farming collectives which are largely unchanged from the usual centuries old we-live-in-a-farming-village-and-mind-our-own-shit-thanks-very-much way they were run. The city is a little more complicated, but recently the Reiner family has taken on a lot of the responsibilites of managing things (and commensurate authority) almost solely by the virtue of the fact that there are kind of a lot of them and they're both organized and motivated. Richemulot does reasonable trade, especially with Aralaine, selling a lot of their food, timber and stone to the walled province, and trades through Borca and Dementlieu. Richemulot also has regular trade with certain subterranean Domains, and is the major entrance to the western-Core underworld. Richemulot has a very close relationship with Dementlieu, and despite the large population of exiled Richemulese aristocrats constant calls for it to be otherwise, the relationship is weirdly harmonious.
Try the Gray Stuff - It's Delicious - It's often pretty easy to look at a Domain's history and figure out when it came to the Realm even if you're not to certain about the Darklord. With Richemulot, this isn't the case. The Realm often makes up history and forges historical documents with an insulting lack of rigor, but if 500 years of records in Dementlieu have any basis in fact, Richemulot has never gone more than 25 years without a major, bloody upheval that cuts across all levels of society. Starting with factional wars among the ruling families, consolidations, pogroms, secular revolt, religious revolt, reigns of terror, Richemulot's history may as well be a blood stained rag, because that's all the city's got. Most recently, Richemulot was suffering under that last, under Comrade Dorien, who had risen to a kind of de facto head of the revolutionary council that replaced the landowner and merchant council that had been repressing and exploiting everyone since they took over from the cruel and torture happy archbishop whose predecessor deposed the last mad prince of a doomed house, and you get the idea. Comrade Dorien was eaten alive by rats, and the council imploded. When the dust settled, no one was in charge, but certain things did get managed. Slowly, the city and surrounding countryside is starting to reorganize with the Reiners leading, but how long until they run mad and start killing everyone? The point is that any given day in Richemulot's history had something that would have piqued the Dark Powers' interest, so how does one choose which one brought the city to the Realm?
A possible clue lies in the fact that Richemulot has always been neighbor to Dementlieu. No one who studies the Domain hypothesis thinks that Dementlieu and Richemulot are the same Domain (they have been closed to one another in the past), but if it were possible to find the date and transgression that brought the former Domain into the Realm, it could pinpoint when that Domains poor cousin came along. Posisbly.
The Darklord Could Be... Jacqueline Reiner? It's grasping at straws; people were pretty sure that Comrade Dorien was Darklord when he held sway over the Revolutionary Council and their guillotine, but his death has not caused the usual uphevals that follow the fall of a Darklord (some Domains have appeared to vanish entirely, while others change radically - in the most recent case Gundarak's geography changed, its lands and people appropriated into Barovia and Invidia, and as much as the Barovian Gundarakites clamor for independence, no one considers reunification with the Invidian Gundarakites. Likewise, the Invidian Gundarakites are more interested in staying away from Malocchio and his soldiers than helping their Barovian brothers). His authority was hardly long-lived, and before him, the Richemulese Council of Brilliance (they wanted to be Dementlieuese, but behaved like Dorvinians is the common way of talking about them) had any number of those motherfuckers could have been a Darklord. Anyway, Jacqueline is not the matriarch of her family by any means, still young and unmarried, as far as anyone can tell. She's intense, serious, a little jumpy, but also very smart and persuasive and tends to be the Reiner you're most likely to be talking to. She's clearly got some authority, which is more than anyone else has, but, yeah, it's not much to go on.
The Rat King. Deep below the city, somewhere in a liminal space between the catacombs and the underworld, there's a place full of rats and rat people and wererats and all things rat. They have a king, so the story goes, and it is his likeness that appears in the form of the stone rat statues, holding pitchers (many of which seem to pour forth with endless clean water, because the Rat King is kind, sometimes). The story is that he harbors great resentment towards humanity but also great tenderness, which hardly seems like the whole story, but certainly it's a good start. There's a rumor going around that the Reiners are his human (or possibly wererat) servants and that Jacqueline in particular is a devotee, bride or avatar to his will.
Beyond the Barracades, is there a World you Want to See - Richemulot, right now, is fairly calm, and importantly, it has a lot of access to the more hospitable parts of the Underworld. There's plenty of places in which to claim squatters rights, and if you're willing to do the odd favor for the Reiners, it's a good place to be an Adventurer. Richemulese are pretty easygoing and progressive where origin is concerned, so you could even mingle with... well, the students who mostly lead the collectives are not exactly high society, but it's about as good as someone who traffics in occult forces, violence and theft is going to get. Dispossessed nobles in Dementlieu are frequent clients for adventuring clans, particularly the ones of a more larcenous or assassinish bent. Also, Underworld. We mentioned that.
Closing the Borders - When the borders are closed, barracades of mounded debris swarming with bitey rodents spring up around the edges of the Domain. In the countryside its more a jumble of rat houses, Rat King statues and hedges, but the effect is the same. Those who fight their way to the other side find that it is in one of the rat-owned quarters of the city, regardless of where you started.
September 25, 2014
Remedial Ravenloft: Lamordia
TL;DR Version - If you're blue and you don't know / Where to go to, why don't you go / Where fashion sits?
The Land - A cold and rocky coastline, lots of reaches, cliffs, black stone beaches, islands and hidden coves; no part of Lamordia is far from the sea, and the barony includes an archipelago of subarctic condtions. Storms are frequent, winters are cold as hell, forests are thick and deep and pine and full of wolves, but this is Ravenloft, so dark and deep as they are, they aren't that remarkable in comparison to other forests. Cities are snug and well constructed and neatly arranged; rural communities look a lot like the cities, only smaller.
The People - Lamordians society aspires to rationality and reason, which is commendable in a reasonable world, but given that this is, as established, fucking Ravenloft, rationality requires some serious blinders. Reserve and industry in people are less remarkable than dark and full of wolves are in forests (and tortured grammar in my writing), but in this case, Lamordians are pretty remarkable. Physical contact and displays of emotion are rare bordering on scandalous in public, chaste marriages are quite common (also "chaste" same-sex marriages, uncharacteristically accepted in an otherwise deeply conservative culture). There is only one respect (aside from the one already mentioned) in which the Lamordians diverge from total hidebound conservatism, and that is in a kind of fashion of ideas. Concepts and hypotheses sweep through the Lamordians like colors and fabrics sweep through Dementlieu (and are just as embarrassing when a season out of date). These ideas tend to range from fantastically wrongheaded because they would apply to a reasonable world and Ravenloft is not a reasonable world, to fantastically wrongheaded because they are fantastically wrongheaded. Lamordians seem to be of an ethnic group with Falkovnians, only well fed and bathed; light skin, hair and eyes, spare and rangy builds. Lamordians speak Rabben and their education system mandates they learn at least one other language; Corbie, Korpsvart and Corbeau are the most common. The Vaus Ezraists maintain very well constructed, snug and utterly empty churches; most Lamordians are rock ribbed atheists and many refuse to believe in the supernatural at all, characterizing it as trickery, hoax and occasionally something not fully tested by science. Lamordian sailors (of which there are many) are well known for efficiency and good order, but better known for being unsuperstitious.
The Boring Stuff - Lamordia was a barony in a constitutional monarchy; in the absence of the national government it's run by an elected congress with Baron Aurbucker as its chief executive. Lamordia is a martime, trading country with a strong economy and a tradition of scientific advancement that outstrips that of almost every known Domain and nation in the Core. Conversely, they have almost no attainment in the supernatural arts, and are culturally motivated to shun those courses of study and those who pursue them (occasional scientists who try to ascertain rational, physical principles behind magical phenomena make up the bulk of Lamordia's distressingly populous lunatic fringe). Lamordia is especially advanced in terms of public health and civil engineering (though the former suffered a dangerous setback a generation ago when anti-vaccination became a trend). Lamordia has a small but well equipped and highly trained army, merchant navy and merchant marines, owing to the danger of Garlish pirates and Falkovnian invasions (the latter usually coinciding with disastrous storms and terrible stirrings from the Vausland forests which forestall the invasions before they begin - sometimes both at the same time, naming the Gefrorenensoldatenwald* on Lamordias Vausland border).
He'll Have a HUGE Schwantztucker - Sing along if you know this song. There was a brilliant young man, a scientist, whose obsession with mapping and understanding the processes of life led him right to the dangliest thread still sort of attached to abovementioned Lamordian lunatic fringe. And out there on the dangliest thread, there's that whole reanimation of dead tissue into actual life. In most other worlds that poured their most tragic sinners into Ravenloft, there's necromancy, which is hardly worthy, in a lot of said places for Dark Attention, but bringing back a corpse to the walks-around club with science? Apparently, that's something else (it's not clear whether magic was a thing in Lamordia's world; their willful blindness to its existence suggests it was not).
So we have Victor Mordenheim, a thunderstorm and a pile of stitched together corpse parts with the brain of a recently hanged murderer. Lucky for us Frankenstein is in the public domain, eh? Go read it. I'll wait. Birth of Science Fiction, kids.
Okay, so here's where things get different; the resulting monster and his creator both survive their apparently final confrontation; neither having learned anything from the experience, ultimately; for though he returned chastened, Mordenheim has slowly and hesitantly, like a homicidal psychopath, relapsed, making new (though shorter lived and never sapient) reanimated monsters and doing his best to hide the evidence. He won't stop. He can't. He doesn't understand enough yet.
And then there is the monster, living alone in the wilds of the largest island in the icy northern archipelago, still slipping back onto the mainland (or Mordenheim's private island) every summer when the thunderstorms get bad.
The Darklord Could Be... It could be Mordenheim. Like most of the sinners that the Realm makes into Darklords, he cannot get clear of his sin. He can't learn any more than he knew when the Mists rose. He keeps returning, from every different angle, to revivifying the dead, causing tragedies and covering up the fallout. His fortunes are ever on the wane, but never fully depleted. He's also managed to hit upon a secret to longevity shared by other otherwise human Darklords, nearly 80 but still in his aparent 50s.
...It could be his monster, driven by impulses, tormented by alienation, and never quite able to feel remorse for the things he does, however he pursues philosophy and religion to gain humanity. His search for humanity is just as fantastically wrongheaded as his creator's search for immortality, and it takes just as many innocent lives.
...but it's probably the center of gravity between man and monster. They orbit one another like binary stars in a system of hubris, alienation and violence. Neither can manage to undo the other, and so they keep committing the same actions, again and again on others. It's pretty certain that Mordenheim would view all of this as superstitious hokum; the monster? Who knows.
Only in it for the Science - As conservative as Lamordia is, they have a lot of technological and societal advantages that are of great interest to progressives in other Domains and nations. Likewise, Lamordia runs a lot of trade between Garland and the mainland, as well as the other islands in the Sea of Sorrows; if you're coming to Lamordia, it's probably on fairly legitimate business. There aren't many (or any, really) ruins of note, very few scary things in the forests or on the islands, and anything that is scary or spooky is probably roundly ignored by its pool of victims. A lot of people who shipwreck in the Sea of Sorrows end up washing ashore in Lamordia. A fair number of people who shipwreck in a Nocturnal Sea, do as well, though it's on the far side of the continent. Lamordians tend to credit that to phlogiston. For reasons.
Closing the Borders - Whoever closes the borders, on the rare occasion they do, drops a snowstorm on the barony, and anyone they really don't want leaving, those folks tend to wander, lost, until they find themselves on the island claimed by Mordenheim's first and foremost monster.
*Frozen Soldier Forest. Not a popular tourist destination. Especially not for Falkovnians. Some of them are still standing.
The Land - A cold and rocky coastline, lots of reaches, cliffs, black stone beaches, islands and hidden coves; no part of Lamordia is far from the sea, and the barony includes an archipelago of subarctic condtions. Storms are frequent, winters are cold as hell, forests are thick and deep and pine and full of wolves, but this is Ravenloft, so dark and deep as they are, they aren't that remarkable in comparison to other forests. Cities are snug and well constructed and neatly arranged; rural communities look a lot like the cities, only smaller.
The People - Lamordians society aspires to rationality and reason, which is commendable in a reasonable world, but given that this is, as established, fucking Ravenloft, rationality requires some serious blinders. Reserve and industry in people are less remarkable than dark and full of wolves are in forests (and tortured grammar in my writing), but in this case, Lamordians are pretty remarkable. Physical contact and displays of emotion are rare bordering on scandalous in public, chaste marriages are quite common (also "chaste" same-sex marriages, uncharacteristically accepted in an otherwise deeply conservative culture). There is only one respect (aside from the one already mentioned) in which the Lamordians diverge from total hidebound conservatism, and that is in a kind of fashion of ideas. Concepts and hypotheses sweep through the Lamordians like colors and fabrics sweep through Dementlieu (and are just as embarrassing when a season out of date). These ideas tend to range from fantastically wrongheaded because they would apply to a reasonable world and Ravenloft is not a reasonable world, to fantastically wrongheaded because they are fantastically wrongheaded. Lamordians seem to be of an ethnic group with Falkovnians, only well fed and bathed; light skin, hair and eyes, spare and rangy builds. Lamordians speak Rabben and their education system mandates they learn at least one other language; Corbie, Korpsvart and Corbeau are the most common. The Vaus Ezraists maintain very well constructed, snug and utterly empty churches; most Lamordians are rock ribbed atheists and many refuse to believe in the supernatural at all, characterizing it as trickery, hoax and occasionally something not fully tested by science. Lamordian sailors (of which there are many) are well known for efficiency and good order, but better known for being unsuperstitious.
The Boring Stuff - Lamordia was a barony in a constitutional monarchy; in the absence of the national government it's run by an elected congress with Baron Aurbucker as its chief executive. Lamordia is a martime, trading country with a strong economy and a tradition of scientific advancement that outstrips that of almost every known Domain and nation in the Core. Conversely, they have almost no attainment in the supernatural arts, and are culturally motivated to shun those courses of study and those who pursue them (occasional scientists who try to ascertain rational, physical principles behind magical phenomena make up the bulk of Lamordia's distressingly populous lunatic fringe). Lamordia is especially advanced in terms of public health and civil engineering (though the former suffered a dangerous setback a generation ago when anti-vaccination became a trend). Lamordia has a small but well equipped and highly trained army, merchant navy and merchant marines, owing to the danger of Garlish pirates and Falkovnian invasions (the latter usually coinciding with disastrous storms and terrible stirrings from the Vausland forests which forestall the invasions before they begin - sometimes both at the same time, naming the Gefrorenensoldatenwald* on Lamordias Vausland border).
He'll Have a HUGE Schwantztucker - Sing along if you know this song. There was a brilliant young man, a scientist, whose obsession with mapping and understanding the processes of life led him right to the dangliest thread still sort of attached to abovementioned Lamordian lunatic fringe. And out there on the dangliest thread, there's that whole reanimation of dead tissue into actual life. In most other worlds that poured their most tragic sinners into Ravenloft, there's necromancy, which is hardly worthy, in a lot of said places for Dark Attention, but bringing back a corpse to the walks-around club with science? Apparently, that's something else (it's not clear whether magic was a thing in Lamordia's world; their willful blindness to its existence suggests it was not).
So we have Victor Mordenheim, a thunderstorm and a pile of stitched together corpse parts with the brain of a recently hanged murderer. Lucky for us Frankenstein is in the public domain, eh? Go read it. I'll wait. Birth of Science Fiction, kids.
Okay, so here's where things get different; the resulting monster and his creator both survive their apparently final confrontation; neither having learned anything from the experience, ultimately; for though he returned chastened, Mordenheim has slowly and hesitantly, like a homicidal psychopath, relapsed, making new (though shorter lived and never sapient) reanimated monsters and doing his best to hide the evidence. He won't stop. He can't. He doesn't understand enough yet.
And then there is the monster, living alone in the wilds of the largest island in the icy northern archipelago, still slipping back onto the mainland (or Mordenheim's private island) every summer when the thunderstorms get bad.
The Darklord Could Be... It could be Mordenheim. Like most of the sinners that the Realm makes into Darklords, he cannot get clear of his sin. He can't learn any more than he knew when the Mists rose. He keeps returning, from every different angle, to revivifying the dead, causing tragedies and covering up the fallout. His fortunes are ever on the wane, but never fully depleted. He's also managed to hit upon a secret to longevity shared by other otherwise human Darklords, nearly 80 but still in his aparent 50s.
...It could be his monster, driven by impulses, tormented by alienation, and never quite able to feel remorse for the things he does, however he pursues philosophy and religion to gain humanity. His search for humanity is just as fantastically wrongheaded as his creator's search for immortality, and it takes just as many innocent lives.
...but it's probably the center of gravity between man and monster. They orbit one another like binary stars in a system of hubris, alienation and violence. Neither can manage to undo the other, and so they keep committing the same actions, again and again on others. It's pretty certain that Mordenheim would view all of this as superstitious hokum; the monster? Who knows.
Only in it for the Science - As conservative as Lamordia is, they have a lot of technological and societal advantages that are of great interest to progressives in other Domains and nations. Likewise, Lamordia runs a lot of trade between Garland and the mainland, as well as the other islands in the Sea of Sorrows; if you're coming to Lamordia, it's probably on fairly legitimate business. There aren't many (or any, really) ruins of note, very few scary things in the forests or on the islands, and anything that is scary or spooky is probably roundly ignored by its pool of victims. A lot of people who shipwreck in the Sea of Sorrows end up washing ashore in Lamordia. A fair number of people who shipwreck in a Nocturnal Sea, do as well, though it's on the far side of the continent. Lamordians tend to credit that to phlogiston. For reasons.
Closing the Borders - Whoever closes the borders, on the rare occasion they do, drops a snowstorm on the barony, and anyone they really don't want leaving, those folks tend to wander, lost, until they find themselves on the island claimed by Mordenheim's first and foremost monster.
*Frozen Soldier Forest. Not a popular tourist destination. Especially not for Falkovnians. Some of them are still standing.
September 24, 2014
Remedial Ravenloft: Darkon
TL;DR Version - What happens when an undead Etruscan sorcerer conquers Russia?
The Land - Darkon is easily the largest nation in the Core and the largest continuous domain, and it sports a wide diversity of terrain and climate. Central and western plains, northern and southern forests, mountains in the far north and southeast. The most distinct settings in Darkon, however are manmade. Darkon is unique among nations in that it retained the ancient formula for concrete and still employs it, widely, creating massive, small windowed slab buildings totally devoid of charm. A sort of early modern take on Soviet Brutalism. The other distinctive feature of Darkon is the scattering of ruins throughout the nation, some revealed by sinkholes and miles wide, ancient, extensive mines and underground highways as well as more modest temples that reflect the spiritual practices of the king's original home, which was far distant from the original Darkon he ruled.
The People - Darkon is the most diverse nation in the Core, boasting all skin, hair and eye colors, all features and in any combination. Despite difference in appearance, Darkonese share a fairly strong sense of national character and are often weirdly ignorant of their own ethnic descent (as well as visibly uncomfortable speaking on the subject). Darkon also boasts high populations of human-resembling, alien species, particularly a species of semi-subterranean, stout bodied craftsmen and miners and a very closely related human species that is proportioned to about half the standard size. Smaller populations of more distinct species live in Darkon as well, a handful of them quite alien in appearance or outlook. Members of these species likewise share their human neighbors' sense of national unity and discomfort over their own origins. Another trait Darkonese all seem to attempt to cultivate is a sense of reserve and equanimity in the face of life's events. Foreigners complain that Darkonese are very hard to know, almost unfeeling, unless the feeling is a vague suspicion and unease, but it seems a fairly well adapted behavior for living in a kingdom ruled for centuries by an immortal and paranoid sorcerer with a love of secret police.
Darkonese speak Voron, though some in the west speak Rabben or Korpsvart. A variant of Corvus gets used for state functions, so most Darkonese have at least some command of the language. Despite the extensive use of Corvus, Ezraism has almost no influence in Darkon (some small Vausland and Borcan congregations do exist, poorly maintained and attended). Darkonese tend to follow an elaborate system of signs and divinations to determine the actions and attitudes of their ancestors, and the great among the dead (Aita and Orcus, Mania and Mantus, Vanth, Leinth, Turms and all the rest - even the most devout haruspex will be quick to tell you they aren't gods, the only God is Death, blah blah blah, "Not today," sing along if you've heard the song). Azalin did attempt to codify these practices into a religion called the Eternal Order, but he and the Darkonese abandoned that project around the time he accidentally blew up himself along with the former capital. Most Darkonese lack much in the way of religious conviction.
The Boring Stuff - Darkon is a kingdom that, in its modern form, has only ever had one king, the immortal Azalin Rex. Azalin is a distant sort of ruler, intervening once a generation or so to induct members into his secret police and clear deadwood out of the senate. The Senate oversees most of the actual running of the country, with large landowning families taking care of their own parcels at the local level. There is a large and well equipped secret police, the Kargat, which mostly intervenes on Azalin's personal behalf. Most of its members are powerful supernatural beings in their own right, and you're probably doing the right thing if you're terrified of them. Darkon has both rich natural resources and strong manufacturing so it is an economic powerhouse, and possesses the only military in the Core capable of going toe-to-toe with Falkovnia or Nova Sarcosa (both of those nations discovered that attacking Darkon only swells the ranks of their military with risen corpses). Darkon has, however, shown little interest in intervening in the political affairs of the Core and some of their trade in the west has been complicated by the fact that many of those routes used to go through Ilaluk, which now glows with a toxic gray light and crawls with the animated corpese of its former residents.
Don't Talk of Worlds that Never Were. In the End, that's All that's Ever True - Azalin was a haruspex of the ancient world, the kind who made enough enemies in the afterworld that there was never any doubt that he was going to have to give Death a very large payment of "Not Todays," if he wanted to accomplish anything but suffering beyond his allotment. His search for solutions hit a serious snag near the end of his living days as he began to get forgetful, confused; suffering from precipitous cognitive decline, Azalin grew desperate and hit on an imperfect solution to his plight, which was lichdom. This kept him on our side of That Old River, but it also made him unfit for polite company. So he bided his time, looking for better forms of immortality he might reach from his apparent dead end (*cough*). His culture fell, supplanted by another. That one fell, and Azalin began to wander. Somehow he got up north into a large nation.
Azalin was looking for ruins and secrets, but he found that his reasearch required a lot of resources, so he conquered the country and set himself up as king with enough bureaucracy to minimize the necessities of actual rule and enough secret police to keep the bureaucracy from forcing him to kill them all. Once ensconced, he went back to his work. It was during one of these experiments that the sorcerer found himself wandering into Barovia, then a solitary island in the Mists. Azalin had a brief alliance with the Count, but both now believe the other profitted from that alliance at the one's expense and personally despise one another. Azalin walked into the Mists, hoping to find his way back to his kingdom, but instead found his way into a cunning but obvious fake, which, as it happens was just waiting for its king eternal. Azalin has been looking for a way out of the Realm ever since.
The Darklord Could be... It could be Azalin Rex. In his attempts to learn the nature and means of escape from his prison, Azalin has become responsible for most of the information that scholars possess on the nature of the Realm (It's worht noting that most scholars aren't even aware of things like Domains, Darklords or Dark Powers, and those who are consider it Azalin's pet hypothesis, and will believe it or not as their own experiments and observations seem to concur or refute. We know he's dead [*cough*] on, but this is not common or authoritative knowledge within the setting). Azalin has discovered that he is once again suffering from the cognitive degeneration that plagued him at the end of his living years. Worse, this sort of decline is much more profound than what will torment and kill a living person, this kind of decline is the end of lichdom, which eventually leads to total spiritual dissolution. As such, and even with centuries left, Azalin is starting to panic. Actually, panic set in around the time he started the experiment that destroyed his capital, his body, at least two other Domains, and caused earthquakes across the Core (his body and one of the two Domains has since recovered, the Domain relocated into the Mists somewhere, so there's a possibility that the other one might still reside elsewhere). Azalin has only recently reformed his physical body and returned to his throne, so no one is sure what changes the experience might have caused in him.
Azalin believes himself to be the Darklord of the Domain of Darkon, though he and anyone else who's made a study of his hypothesis will note that he was not taken directly from his world with his Domain as many Darklords are. He wandered in by accident and found no means of egress. The possibility that he might not have been chosen by the Realm or its masters (Azalin had a long and accomplished career as a monster before coming to the Realm, and the act that precipitated his arrival was a fairly standard penetration into the invisible world, which is not, in itself, that evil an act), but is stuck here anyway, apparently really galls him.
Police Yourself (Police Me!) - Darkon is unique among Domains in that, given the blase that the Darkonese try to cultivate and the diversity of the population, an adventurer could become a citizen, hell, even a legitimate landowner or senator before Azalin noticed they were there and recruited them to the Kargat. Azalin shares his former ally's relative esteem for powerful murderous hobos but is not as permissive as the Count. Adventurers can easily find work as junior Kargat agents or independent contractors. Azalin needs both hard-to-obtain resources and any and all information, and will pay well to get his bony hands on it. He's also kind of easy to annoy and kills things that annoy him as a matter of course, so do be polite and honest or do be very elsewhere. Darkon shows evidence of massive and extensive subterranean construction similar to that of its modern resident aliens, and those people are quite interested in exploring those ruins. They are also more than willing to hire specialists to aid in their expeditions. Finally, there is the remains of Ilaluk, and things within that, thus far, the living cannot access due to the the toxic light, and the dead cannot access because of an authority within that supplants their will. If a person could figure out how to penetrate the city safely, Azalin would be very interested.
Closing the Borders - As far as we know, Azalin never has. If he want's you, he'll send Kargat to fetch you, and you will be fetched.
The Land - Darkon is easily the largest nation in the Core and the largest continuous domain, and it sports a wide diversity of terrain and climate. Central and western plains, northern and southern forests, mountains in the far north and southeast. The most distinct settings in Darkon, however are manmade. Darkon is unique among nations in that it retained the ancient formula for concrete and still employs it, widely, creating massive, small windowed slab buildings totally devoid of charm. A sort of early modern take on Soviet Brutalism. The other distinctive feature of Darkon is the scattering of ruins throughout the nation, some revealed by sinkholes and miles wide, ancient, extensive mines and underground highways as well as more modest temples that reflect the spiritual practices of the king's original home, which was far distant from the original Darkon he ruled.
The People - Darkon is the most diverse nation in the Core, boasting all skin, hair and eye colors, all features and in any combination. Despite difference in appearance, Darkonese share a fairly strong sense of national character and are often weirdly ignorant of their own ethnic descent (as well as visibly uncomfortable speaking on the subject). Darkon also boasts high populations of human-resembling, alien species, particularly a species of semi-subterranean, stout bodied craftsmen and miners and a very closely related human species that is proportioned to about half the standard size. Smaller populations of more distinct species live in Darkon as well, a handful of them quite alien in appearance or outlook. Members of these species likewise share their human neighbors' sense of national unity and discomfort over their own origins. Another trait Darkonese all seem to attempt to cultivate is a sense of reserve and equanimity in the face of life's events. Foreigners complain that Darkonese are very hard to know, almost unfeeling, unless the feeling is a vague suspicion and unease, but it seems a fairly well adapted behavior for living in a kingdom ruled for centuries by an immortal and paranoid sorcerer with a love of secret police.
Darkonese speak Voron, though some in the west speak Rabben or Korpsvart. A variant of Corvus gets used for state functions, so most Darkonese have at least some command of the language. Despite the extensive use of Corvus, Ezraism has almost no influence in Darkon (some small Vausland and Borcan congregations do exist, poorly maintained and attended). Darkonese tend to follow an elaborate system of signs and divinations to determine the actions and attitudes of their ancestors, and the great among the dead (Aita and Orcus, Mania and Mantus, Vanth, Leinth, Turms and all the rest - even the most devout haruspex will be quick to tell you they aren't gods, the only God is Death, blah blah blah, "Not today," sing along if you've heard the song). Azalin did attempt to codify these practices into a religion called the Eternal Order, but he and the Darkonese abandoned that project around the time he accidentally blew up himself along with the former capital. Most Darkonese lack much in the way of religious conviction.
The Boring Stuff - Darkon is a kingdom that, in its modern form, has only ever had one king, the immortal Azalin Rex. Azalin is a distant sort of ruler, intervening once a generation or so to induct members into his secret police and clear deadwood out of the senate. The Senate oversees most of the actual running of the country, with large landowning families taking care of their own parcels at the local level. There is a large and well equipped secret police, the Kargat, which mostly intervenes on Azalin's personal behalf. Most of its members are powerful supernatural beings in their own right, and you're probably doing the right thing if you're terrified of them. Darkon has both rich natural resources and strong manufacturing so it is an economic powerhouse, and possesses the only military in the Core capable of going toe-to-toe with Falkovnia or Nova Sarcosa (both of those nations discovered that attacking Darkon only swells the ranks of their military with risen corpses). Darkon has, however, shown little interest in intervening in the political affairs of the Core and some of their trade in the west has been complicated by the fact that many of those routes used to go through Ilaluk, which now glows with a toxic gray light and crawls with the animated corpese of its former residents.
Don't Talk of Worlds that Never Were. In the End, that's All that's Ever True - Azalin was a haruspex of the ancient world, the kind who made enough enemies in the afterworld that there was never any doubt that he was going to have to give Death a very large payment of "Not Todays," if he wanted to accomplish anything but suffering beyond his allotment. His search for solutions hit a serious snag near the end of his living days as he began to get forgetful, confused; suffering from precipitous cognitive decline, Azalin grew desperate and hit on an imperfect solution to his plight, which was lichdom. This kept him on our side of That Old River, but it also made him unfit for polite company. So he bided his time, looking for better forms of immortality he might reach from his apparent dead end (*cough*). His culture fell, supplanted by another. That one fell, and Azalin began to wander. Somehow he got up north into a large nation.
Azalin was looking for ruins and secrets, but he found that his reasearch required a lot of resources, so he conquered the country and set himself up as king with enough bureaucracy to minimize the necessities of actual rule and enough secret police to keep the bureaucracy from forcing him to kill them all. Once ensconced, he went back to his work. It was during one of these experiments that the sorcerer found himself wandering into Barovia, then a solitary island in the Mists. Azalin had a brief alliance with the Count, but both now believe the other profitted from that alliance at the one's expense and personally despise one another. Azalin walked into the Mists, hoping to find his way back to his kingdom, but instead found his way into a cunning but obvious fake, which, as it happens was just waiting for its king eternal. Azalin has been looking for a way out of the Realm ever since.
The Darklord Could be... It could be Azalin Rex. In his attempts to learn the nature and means of escape from his prison, Azalin has become responsible for most of the information that scholars possess on the nature of the Realm (It's worht noting that most scholars aren't even aware of things like Domains, Darklords or Dark Powers, and those who are consider it Azalin's pet hypothesis, and will believe it or not as their own experiments and observations seem to concur or refute. We know he's dead [*cough*] on, but this is not common or authoritative knowledge within the setting). Azalin has discovered that he is once again suffering from the cognitive degeneration that plagued him at the end of his living years. Worse, this sort of decline is much more profound than what will torment and kill a living person, this kind of decline is the end of lichdom, which eventually leads to total spiritual dissolution. As such, and even with centuries left, Azalin is starting to panic. Actually, panic set in around the time he started the experiment that destroyed his capital, his body, at least two other Domains, and caused earthquakes across the Core (his body and one of the two Domains has since recovered, the Domain relocated into the Mists somewhere, so there's a possibility that the other one might still reside elsewhere). Azalin has only recently reformed his physical body and returned to his throne, so no one is sure what changes the experience might have caused in him.
Azalin believes himself to be the Darklord of the Domain of Darkon, though he and anyone else who's made a study of his hypothesis will note that he was not taken directly from his world with his Domain as many Darklords are. He wandered in by accident and found no means of egress. The possibility that he might not have been chosen by the Realm or its masters (Azalin had a long and accomplished career as a monster before coming to the Realm, and the act that precipitated his arrival was a fairly standard penetration into the invisible world, which is not, in itself, that evil an act), but is stuck here anyway, apparently really galls him.
Police Yourself (Police Me!) - Darkon is unique among Domains in that, given the blase that the Darkonese try to cultivate and the diversity of the population, an adventurer could become a citizen, hell, even a legitimate landowner or senator before Azalin noticed they were there and recruited them to the Kargat. Azalin shares his former ally's relative esteem for powerful murderous hobos but is not as permissive as the Count. Adventurers can easily find work as junior Kargat agents or independent contractors. Azalin needs both hard-to-obtain resources and any and all information, and will pay well to get his bony hands on it. He's also kind of easy to annoy and kills things that annoy him as a matter of course, so do be polite and honest or do be very elsewhere. Darkon shows evidence of massive and extensive subterranean construction similar to that of its modern resident aliens, and those people are quite interested in exploring those ruins. They are also more than willing to hire specialists to aid in their expeditions. Finally, there is the remains of Ilaluk, and things within that, thus far, the living cannot access due to the the toxic light, and the dead cannot access because of an authority within that supplants their will. If a person could figure out how to penetrate the city safely, Azalin would be very interested.
Closing the Borders - As far as we know, Azalin never has. If he want's you, he'll send Kargat to fetch you, and you will be fetched.
September 19, 2014
Remedial Ravenloft: Falkovnia
TL;DR Version - Like a Werner Von Herzog film set in the middle ages blew up all over the place. With a German version of Lu Bu in charge. I've changed this one a lot.
The Land - Falkovnia sits smack in the middle of the central Core plain; the western areas are extensively farmed, making this country the breadbasket of the Core. The eastern areas are dense oak and pine forests, the extreme eastern edge suffering a mysterious blight that strips individual trees of their bark and leaves, bleaching the interior wood stark white in a very short time. Eastern foresters claim this happens to a single tree each day around sunset - it bursts into screaming white flame for a few minutes, then the flame dies, leaving the trunk and branches like bleached bone. Some folks claim that this phenomenon coincides with when the Kaiser takes his evening meal (these folks are either refugees from Falkvonia or foreigners, and most importantly, not in the country when they talk shit about the Kaiser). Cities are densely packed and filthy. Everything, in fact, is filthy - travelers report that keeping their bodies and gear clean in Falkovnia is a near full-time occupation, and Falkovnian refugees suffer a lot from other nations' characterizations of them as being eternally filty. Flocks of red eyed pigeons dominate the skies, sometimes thick enough to bring momentary night to an area as they take wing. There are extensive roadways and fortifications, the former being very well maintained, the latter looking ancient and ready to crumble. Falkovnia's architecture seems centuries behind that of her neighbors.
The People - Probably all you need to know about Falkvonians is that they have their foreheads branded with the hawk's head of the Faulk family at birth and their hair is routinely cropped brutally short, men and women. They are rangy, rawboned people, light skin, half starved, horsefly welts, dark circles and downcast eyes. About two thirds of them will die from exhaustion, which is to say that they will drop in the fields and be beaten to death by soldiers. They speak Rabben, and when permitted, follow the Vausland branch of Ezraism, though faith isn't a common trait among Falkovnians. They do their utmost to conceal any traits, lest they stand out and catch someone's attention. About a third of the population of the country is in the military; soldiers are comparatively well fed, dressed and equipped with modern clothing and gear in contrast to the positively medieval kit civilians get and utterly desensitized to everything due to their training, the warrior fraternities and cults that add further tests and trials to their experience and the knowlege that a single failure, however minor, can send them to the farms. The armies of the nations that Falkvonia likes to invade (which is everyone they can reach via a border or Mistway) don't attempt to keep captured Falkovnian soldiers anymore, they are too poorly socialized, and their nation considers them dead, anyway. Men and women in the Falkovnian civilian class tend not to aspire to join the military, and the military is slowly becoming a separate ethnic group from the peasants. It's worth noting that both groups are suffering alarming population dips as suicide, starvation, military misadventure and low birth rates are taking their toll.
The Boring Stuff - Falkvonia was a collection of five principaities conquered by a single mercenery army, who had been left to garrison one of same and took it over in the absence of the Prince. It is now a military totalitarian state ruled by the leader of the mercenery company, him having taken the title of Kaiser. Government is done entirely by the military, overseen by a corps of secret police, handpicked by the Kaiser for loyalty and ruthlesness. Falkovnia was initially pretty far behind its neighbors both in technological and supernal development, but its abundant cereal crops have financed a series of rapid modernizations. The country is still largely behind its neighbors, but its military has rapidly gained technical and strategic parity with the admittedly small militias that its neighbors are able to field. The Kaiser intends to conquer the whole of the Core and has already launched several disastrous military campaigns that have met with not just defeat, but, in some cases, annihiliation. So far, only Darkon has launched military reprisals into Falkovnian territory (and that was just sending all of the Kaiser's soldiers home as walking dead). Almost every other nation has gone to war with Falkovnia and yet still buys their wheat and rye. War is war, but everyone's got to eat, I guess.
Fighting so Grim so True so Real - Klaus von Faulk was unkillable. No one could ever match his strength on the battlefield. No one could ever outsmart him with assassins and poison. He gathered up a band likewise blessed with brute strength and low cunning and set out to conquer his divided land, to show them all what true strength could accomplish. What Faulk never did and probably never will understand is that true strength really can't accomplish much. He grew in fame and infamy, grew wealthy, grew frustrated. Murdered client after client when they failed to show the ambition to propel him higher. He began, in his boredom and frustration and sense of the futility of his own strength, to get off on watching people suffer. And then not get off on it, but require it. Contracts dried up. He spent time as a bandit. Then a serious threat came to the principalities, and someone turned up desperate enough to hire him and his band. Faulk had lost numbers by then, and was only able to field a force almost fit to garison a city, which is what he was left to do. Frustration gnawed at him, so he took the city over with his little force, and repelled the Prince who had once controlled it. Emboldened, he appointed himself Prince and set off conquering his neighbors. At first, he was extremely successful, and quickly managed to bring five weakened principalities under his banner. And then things went wrong as he went after number six.
There isn't a good historical record of what happened or why, only that Prince Klaus returned home in defeat and disgrace, his army routed, his hold on the other principalities in serious jeopardy, and when he got back to his capital, he and what was left of his original band killed everyone there. Impaled each and every person inside the city on wooden stakes. Apparently, he can no longer digest properly if his meal is not accompanied by someone dying in this very manner where he can observe while he eats. For over a week, he waited, under a dense fog, for his enemies to arrive and take all he'd managed to gain. They never did, and when the mist cleared, his other principalities were still under his control, preserved for him by a power much greater than his strength. And don't you think he doesn't fucking know it.
The Dark Lord Could Be... Oh, it's the fucking Kaiser. Klaus von Faulk's now in his 90s, but looks half his age, a rangy, sinewy silver fox with long hair, long mustache, dressed in black, looking every inch the lead singer of the devil's favorite black metal band. Falkovnia shows the clear stamp of his ego down to the darkening clouds of pigeons for his falcons to catch and catch and catch and never dent the nubers or even have to try their wings or senses on a challenge. The land intervenes to maintain all that he was able to gain, and the other lands work in concert to make certain he never gains any more than that, however many lives he spends. He may not be as tied up in the metaphysics of his prison as many other Darklords, but Falkovnia is clearly a prison built just for him.
Q: What's the Best Way to See Falkovnia? A: In your Rearvier Mirror. - If you are in Falkovnia, you should be trying to get our of Falkvonia. Lucky for you, it's not as hard in the same way as getting out of most other Domains tends to be. The Kaiser doesn't either doesn't have the aptitude or doesn't have the desire to use the powers and authorities most Darklords exercise over their prisons, and there's good eveidence that he doesn't really understand the situation he's in, regardless. That said, you'll be dodging soldiers the whole way out. Most of the time you deal with Falkovnia, it will be in the form of an incursion or invasion. These end disasterously for Falkovnia, sure, but the end disastrously for a lot of other people, too, and one could lead you to a bad end if you are not careful.
Closing the Borders - The Kaiser rarely closes the borders of Falkovnia. He would rather send soldiers and secret police to retrieve or murder you if you escape. But when he does, the pigeons come down in huge clouds, far as the eye can see, swirling around, blocking sight and suddenly you are somewhere much deeper in the kingdom than before.
The Land - Falkovnia sits smack in the middle of the central Core plain; the western areas are extensively farmed, making this country the breadbasket of the Core. The eastern areas are dense oak and pine forests, the extreme eastern edge suffering a mysterious blight that strips individual trees of their bark and leaves, bleaching the interior wood stark white in a very short time. Eastern foresters claim this happens to a single tree each day around sunset - it bursts into screaming white flame for a few minutes, then the flame dies, leaving the trunk and branches like bleached bone. Some folks claim that this phenomenon coincides with when the Kaiser takes his evening meal (these folks are either refugees from Falkvonia or foreigners, and most importantly, not in the country when they talk shit about the Kaiser). Cities are densely packed and filthy. Everything, in fact, is filthy - travelers report that keeping their bodies and gear clean in Falkovnia is a near full-time occupation, and Falkovnian refugees suffer a lot from other nations' characterizations of them as being eternally filty. Flocks of red eyed pigeons dominate the skies, sometimes thick enough to bring momentary night to an area as they take wing. There are extensive roadways and fortifications, the former being very well maintained, the latter looking ancient and ready to crumble. Falkovnia's architecture seems centuries behind that of her neighbors.
The People - Probably all you need to know about Falkvonians is that they have their foreheads branded with the hawk's head of the Faulk family at birth and their hair is routinely cropped brutally short, men and women. They are rangy, rawboned people, light skin, half starved, horsefly welts, dark circles and downcast eyes. About two thirds of them will die from exhaustion, which is to say that they will drop in the fields and be beaten to death by soldiers. They speak Rabben, and when permitted, follow the Vausland branch of Ezraism, though faith isn't a common trait among Falkovnians. They do their utmost to conceal any traits, lest they stand out and catch someone's attention. About a third of the population of the country is in the military; soldiers are comparatively well fed, dressed and equipped with modern clothing and gear in contrast to the positively medieval kit civilians get and utterly desensitized to everything due to their training, the warrior fraternities and cults that add further tests and trials to their experience and the knowlege that a single failure, however minor, can send them to the farms. The armies of the nations that Falkvonia likes to invade (which is everyone they can reach via a border or Mistway) don't attempt to keep captured Falkovnian soldiers anymore, they are too poorly socialized, and their nation considers them dead, anyway. Men and women in the Falkovnian civilian class tend not to aspire to join the military, and the military is slowly becoming a separate ethnic group from the peasants. It's worth noting that both groups are suffering alarming population dips as suicide, starvation, military misadventure and low birth rates are taking their toll.
The Boring Stuff - Falkvonia was a collection of five principaities conquered by a single mercenery army, who had been left to garrison one of same and took it over in the absence of the Prince. It is now a military totalitarian state ruled by the leader of the mercenery company, him having taken the title of Kaiser. Government is done entirely by the military, overseen by a corps of secret police, handpicked by the Kaiser for loyalty and ruthlesness. Falkovnia was initially pretty far behind its neighbors both in technological and supernal development, but its abundant cereal crops have financed a series of rapid modernizations. The country is still largely behind its neighbors, but its military has rapidly gained technical and strategic parity with the admittedly small militias that its neighbors are able to field. The Kaiser intends to conquer the whole of the Core and has already launched several disastrous military campaigns that have met with not just defeat, but, in some cases, annihiliation. So far, only Darkon has launched military reprisals into Falkovnian territory (and that was just sending all of the Kaiser's soldiers home as walking dead). Almost every other nation has gone to war with Falkovnia and yet still buys their wheat and rye. War is war, but everyone's got to eat, I guess.
Fighting so Grim so True so Real - Klaus von Faulk was unkillable. No one could ever match his strength on the battlefield. No one could ever outsmart him with assassins and poison. He gathered up a band likewise blessed with brute strength and low cunning and set out to conquer his divided land, to show them all what true strength could accomplish. What Faulk never did and probably never will understand is that true strength really can't accomplish much. He grew in fame and infamy, grew wealthy, grew frustrated. Murdered client after client when they failed to show the ambition to propel him higher. He began, in his boredom and frustration and sense of the futility of his own strength, to get off on watching people suffer. And then not get off on it, but require it. Contracts dried up. He spent time as a bandit. Then a serious threat came to the principalities, and someone turned up desperate enough to hire him and his band. Faulk had lost numbers by then, and was only able to field a force almost fit to garison a city, which is what he was left to do. Frustration gnawed at him, so he took the city over with his little force, and repelled the Prince who had once controlled it. Emboldened, he appointed himself Prince and set off conquering his neighbors. At first, he was extremely successful, and quickly managed to bring five weakened principalities under his banner. And then things went wrong as he went after number six.
There isn't a good historical record of what happened or why, only that Prince Klaus returned home in defeat and disgrace, his army routed, his hold on the other principalities in serious jeopardy, and when he got back to his capital, he and what was left of his original band killed everyone there. Impaled each and every person inside the city on wooden stakes. Apparently, he can no longer digest properly if his meal is not accompanied by someone dying in this very manner where he can observe while he eats. For over a week, he waited, under a dense fog, for his enemies to arrive and take all he'd managed to gain. They never did, and when the mist cleared, his other principalities were still under his control, preserved for him by a power much greater than his strength. And don't you think he doesn't fucking know it.
The Dark Lord Could Be... Oh, it's the fucking Kaiser. Klaus von Faulk's now in his 90s, but looks half his age, a rangy, sinewy silver fox with long hair, long mustache, dressed in black, looking every inch the lead singer of the devil's favorite black metal band. Falkovnia shows the clear stamp of his ego down to the darkening clouds of pigeons for his falcons to catch and catch and catch and never dent the nubers or even have to try their wings or senses on a challenge. The land intervenes to maintain all that he was able to gain, and the other lands work in concert to make certain he never gains any more than that, however many lives he spends. He may not be as tied up in the metaphysics of his prison as many other Darklords, but Falkovnia is clearly a prison built just for him.
Q: What's the Best Way to See Falkovnia? A: In your Rearvier Mirror. - If you are in Falkovnia, you should be trying to get our of Falkvonia. Lucky for you, it's not as hard in the same way as getting out of most other Domains tends to be. The Kaiser doesn't either doesn't have the aptitude or doesn't have the desire to use the powers and authorities most Darklords exercise over their prisons, and there's good eveidence that he doesn't really understand the situation he's in, regardless. That said, you'll be dodging soldiers the whole way out. Most of the time you deal with Falkovnia, it will be in the form of an incursion or invasion. These end disasterously for Falkovnia, sure, but the end disastrously for a lot of other people, too, and one could lead you to a bad end if you are not careful.
Closing the Borders - The Kaiser rarely closes the borders of Falkovnia. He would rather send soldiers and secret police to retrieve or murder you if you escape. But when he does, the pigeons come down in huge clouds, far as the eye can see, swirling around, blocking sight and suddenly you are somewhere much deeper in the kingdom than before.
September 18, 2014
Remedial Ravenloft: Borca (and Dorvinia)
TL;DR Version - Rappucini's daughter. Also, Rappucini's dramaturge nephew. A little of the Borgias. Because Borgias.
The Land - Borca is hills and scrub forest with swampy, geothermically active low-lying areas that have an awful lot of little geysers and sink holes. Dorvinia is primarily swampy low-lying areas which are slightly less geothermically active. Both city states have decent farmland but have serious problems with invasives, particularly poisonous and uritic invasives. In fact, if you are a fan of climbing nightshade, poison ivy, poison oak, poison sumac, giant hogweed, stinging trees and the like, this is the place for you. Borca's also famous for its rhododendron forests. Nightshade-relative vegetables and fruits grow very well here, but every once in a while, they take on the toxic nature of their more murderous relatives. Ratatouille is a popular dish here, but it goes by a name that translates to "brave man's meal." Also in residence, a cornucopia of poisonous and venomous animals, ranging from the sort of prosaic to things like cockatrices.
The People - Borca and Drovinia were moderately prosperous pawns of larger empires and more powerful local city states for most of their history and their people have developed a certain blend of friendliness, suspicion, long memory and easygoing tolerance to exploitation that marks the sort of places that armies like to trample through but aren't currently doing so. Add an abundance of different sorts of poisons, a strong magical tradition and very lax and corrupt law enforcement, and you get a place that values politeness as survival skill. Other Domains feud, some others feud l more, but no one feuds in the quiet, cerebral way that Borcans and Dorvinians feud. People don't usually end their lives naturally around the city states, and what's more, they usually aren't murdered by anyone with a personal grudge against them. On behalf of someone with a personal grudge, maybe. Usually just to make a point to someone their murderer has a personal grudge against. Borcans range from fair to olive skin, dark hair and eyes; Dorvinians tend to be fairer and have lighter eyes and hair (and the occasional redhead). Both city states speak mostly Corvino (and a little Cuervo in Borca) and follow the Borcan branch of Ezraism.
The Boring Stuff - Borca and Dorvinia were independent city states that were kind of part of the empire that included Barovia, but old maps place them far to the west and a little south of Barovia, where now they are directly bordering the county. Each city state is ruled by a Prince, in this case cousins Ivana Boritsia and Ivan Dilisnia for Borca and Dorvinia, respectively. Though ruled is probably the wrong term. Boritsia and Dilisnia are more the top of a pyramid of distributed protection rackets, and really any services or public good is provided mostly at the individual level, when it is provided at all, or by the Church, which, in the city states is also a protection racket that operates independently of the venomous twins. More prosperous families do, at least, try to maintain the roads, as trade is about the only thing keeping Borca and Dorvinia from sinking into total anarchy. Both cousins do sort of operate... well, they do operate large gangs of leg-breakers who have the clout to draft citizens into public service, or, at least, collect bribes, but the fact that either city operates at all, at this point is largely unaccountable. Truly so - observant folks have noted that there are times when roads and buildings seem to maintain themselves, even in the face of total neglect or active misuse. Some folks credit this work to Ezra, though most have taken to calling whatever agency makes things not fall completely apart the Invisible Hand.
The Grabbing Hands Grab all they Can - You remember the unnamed asshole in the story of Barovia? Yeah, that was a guy named Ivan Boritsi. He'd been appointed a governorship of Borca and Dorvinia in the early days of the war, and, by all accounts started the way that the two city states meant to go on. Boritsi's superiors weren't terribly happy with the incredible, paralytic graft and corruption he'd instituted, so they sent him back home. To Barovia. To help with the war effort and oversee the local Count's progress and make sure he was supplied. That would be our man Strahd. This turned out to be a nightmare for Boritsi, since Zarovich was very shrewd, meticulous, and a bit of a control freak. He sniffed out Boritsi's attempts to graft onto the war budget and decided to have a chat with Boritsi, with the latter man hanging by his ankles off the battlements of Castle Ravenloft. Boritsi quickly realized that he needed to straighten up and fly right or he'd be flying into the Musarde river from a very high place. So, he plotted to kill the count. First he did this by leaving altered and adulterated copies of his grimoires for Strahd to find. Boritsi was not a very good necromancer, but he knew enough to adulterate the formulae enough that a scholarly and curious man like the count would likely get himself into real trouble. But then some asshole (the count) figured out not only how to fix the problems with the formulae, but use the imperfections to improve them. Boritsi decided to abandon being clever and arranged dozens of further assassination attempts over the years, culminating in hiring the crossbow section for the wedding band for Sergei and Tatyana's wedding.
We all know how well that worked. Boritsi and some of his family did escape from Barovia and ran into the mists ringing the county. When those mists cleared, they found themselve back in the lands of their patriarchs former posting, or, at least, a sly reproduction of same. Boritsi himself never truly believed that the cities were real, and then he disappeared, leaving behind an old, blood-stained napkin from the count's brother's wedding table. His daughters rose to prominence in Borca, but then had a falling out, Camilla sending Lucrezia off to Dorvinia with a poison in her system that would activate if she ever encountered Camilla again. Camilla became head of the family (she married a man briefly and then poisoned him), Lucrezia married some moneyed fop but took his name after she poisoned him. They each had a child within a month of one another. Since then, it's been poison and family values that would make Carrie White's mom a little uneasy. They worked out about as well, actually, since both children turned around and murdered their mothers. Both worked together to get to the tops of their respective branches of the family and their city states, but last anyone heard, they hate one another now.
The Darklord Could be... Ivana Boritsia; to quote Messrs. Bell, Biv and Duveau, that girl is poison. Literally. Her blood is poisonous, as is, one would assume, all her bodily fluids. She's a murderer and a criminal and literally the worst lover ever, since her attentions invaribaly kill her paramours. She's also a brilliant chemist.
...Ivan Dilisnia, her cousin, younger by a month; a vain, strutting peacock, fop and brute who prefers the visceral bashing of peoples' skulls (he's not very strong and he gets tired fast, so leaves the finishing of the job to his lieutenants more often than not) to the comparative subtlety of poison, though he's just fine with poison, too. Ivan's a little bit mad, and he thinks he is a genius playwright and actor. He's not, but you'd better clap anyway, or he'll kill you.
...probably, it's both of them. Even when Borca is closed, you can get to Dorvinia, and to other Domains from Dorvinia, unless it is also closed. Likewise, for Dorvina, you can get to Borca and escape, possibly. That said, most of the time, when one border closes, the other one also closes pretty shortly thereafter.
You're Gonna Need and Ocean of Calamine Lotion - Both Borca and Dorvinia are relatively major trade hubs, and do export a reasonable amount of both finished goods and raw materials. If you want anything from the southern regions of the Core, you're probably going through the city-states, but for Ezra's sake, why? Nothing in the southern Core is worth having and the bribes alone are more than you're bound to gain. Still, some do. Borca is a decent base of operation for several adventuring clans, precisely because it is anarchy, and it is located a lot closer to profitable lands that have laws and don't care for adventurers much. Its also got a lot of ruins, particularly of some pre-Ezraite culture and proto Ezraite churches, and since the religion has some very spotty history, it's of real interest to religious scholars. Ivan Dilisnia has been hiring adventurers and condotiere to raid Invidian territory run by Mallochio, partially in support of the little tyrant's mother and partially because of the raids Mallochio has been financing into the city-states. Also, it bears mentioning that neither cousin's position is that strong. Right now, they are in charge because they managed to poison all the other contenders, but that's hardly divine right or madate of the people. Just saying.
Closing the Borders - Have you ever seen a hedgerow of giant hogweed, each plant 20 feet tall and covered in wasp and hornet nests? You will. Bring antihistmine. Oh, wait, they don't have that in Ravenloft. Good luck. Whatever route you choose, it is also bound to collapse into boiling water, since you chose to cross on a sinkhole. It's pretty much inevitable.
The Land - Borca is hills and scrub forest with swampy, geothermically active low-lying areas that have an awful lot of little geysers and sink holes. Dorvinia is primarily swampy low-lying areas which are slightly less geothermically active. Both city states have decent farmland but have serious problems with invasives, particularly poisonous and uritic invasives. In fact, if you are a fan of climbing nightshade, poison ivy, poison oak, poison sumac, giant hogweed, stinging trees and the like, this is the place for you. Borca's also famous for its rhododendron forests. Nightshade-relative vegetables and fruits grow very well here, but every once in a while, they take on the toxic nature of their more murderous relatives. Ratatouille is a popular dish here, but it goes by a name that translates to "brave man's meal." Also in residence, a cornucopia of poisonous and venomous animals, ranging from the sort of prosaic to things like cockatrices.
The People - Borca and Drovinia were moderately prosperous pawns of larger empires and more powerful local city states for most of their history and their people have developed a certain blend of friendliness, suspicion, long memory and easygoing tolerance to exploitation that marks the sort of places that armies like to trample through but aren't currently doing so. Add an abundance of different sorts of poisons, a strong magical tradition and very lax and corrupt law enforcement, and you get a place that values politeness as survival skill. Other Domains feud, some others feud l more, but no one feuds in the quiet, cerebral way that Borcans and Dorvinians feud. People don't usually end their lives naturally around the city states, and what's more, they usually aren't murdered by anyone with a personal grudge against them. On behalf of someone with a personal grudge, maybe. Usually just to make a point to someone their murderer has a personal grudge against. Borcans range from fair to olive skin, dark hair and eyes; Dorvinians tend to be fairer and have lighter eyes and hair (and the occasional redhead). Both city states speak mostly Corvino (and a little Cuervo in Borca) and follow the Borcan branch of Ezraism.
The Boring Stuff - Borca and Dorvinia were independent city states that were kind of part of the empire that included Barovia, but old maps place them far to the west and a little south of Barovia, where now they are directly bordering the county. Each city state is ruled by a Prince, in this case cousins Ivana Boritsia and Ivan Dilisnia for Borca and Dorvinia, respectively. Though ruled is probably the wrong term. Boritsia and Dilisnia are more the top of a pyramid of distributed protection rackets, and really any services or public good is provided mostly at the individual level, when it is provided at all, or by the Church, which, in the city states is also a protection racket that operates independently of the venomous twins. More prosperous families do, at least, try to maintain the roads, as trade is about the only thing keeping Borca and Dorvinia from sinking into total anarchy. Both cousins do sort of operate... well, they do operate large gangs of leg-breakers who have the clout to draft citizens into public service, or, at least, collect bribes, but the fact that either city operates at all, at this point is largely unaccountable. Truly so - observant folks have noted that there are times when roads and buildings seem to maintain themselves, even in the face of total neglect or active misuse. Some folks credit this work to Ezra, though most have taken to calling whatever agency makes things not fall completely apart the Invisible Hand.
The Grabbing Hands Grab all they Can - You remember the unnamed asshole in the story of Barovia? Yeah, that was a guy named Ivan Boritsi. He'd been appointed a governorship of Borca and Dorvinia in the early days of the war, and, by all accounts started the way that the two city states meant to go on. Boritsi's superiors weren't terribly happy with the incredible, paralytic graft and corruption he'd instituted, so they sent him back home. To Barovia. To help with the war effort and oversee the local Count's progress and make sure he was supplied. That would be our man Strahd. This turned out to be a nightmare for Boritsi, since Zarovich was very shrewd, meticulous, and a bit of a control freak. He sniffed out Boritsi's attempts to graft onto the war budget and decided to have a chat with Boritsi, with the latter man hanging by his ankles off the battlements of Castle Ravenloft. Boritsi quickly realized that he needed to straighten up and fly right or he'd be flying into the Musarde river from a very high place. So, he plotted to kill the count. First he did this by leaving altered and adulterated copies of his grimoires for Strahd to find. Boritsi was not a very good necromancer, but he knew enough to adulterate the formulae enough that a scholarly and curious man like the count would likely get himself into real trouble. But then some asshole (the count) figured out not only how to fix the problems with the formulae, but use the imperfections to improve them. Boritsi decided to abandon being clever and arranged dozens of further assassination attempts over the years, culminating in hiring the crossbow section for the wedding band for Sergei and Tatyana's wedding.
We all know how well that worked. Boritsi and some of his family did escape from Barovia and ran into the mists ringing the county. When those mists cleared, they found themselve back in the lands of their patriarchs former posting, or, at least, a sly reproduction of same. Boritsi himself never truly believed that the cities were real, and then he disappeared, leaving behind an old, blood-stained napkin from the count's brother's wedding table. His daughters rose to prominence in Borca, but then had a falling out, Camilla sending Lucrezia off to Dorvinia with a poison in her system that would activate if she ever encountered Camilla again. Camilla became head of the family (she married a man briefly and then poisoned him), Lucrezia married some moneyed fop but took his name after she poisoned him. They each had a child within a month of one another. Since then, it's been poison and family values that would make Carrie White's mom a little uneasy. They worked out about as well, actually, since both children turned around and murdered their mothers. Both worked together to get to the tops of their respective branches of the family and their city states, but last anyone heard, they hate one another now.
The Darklord Could be... Ivana Boritsia; to quote Messrs. Bell, Biv and Duveau, that girl is poison. Literally. Her blood is poisonous, as is, one would assume, all her bodily fluids. She's a murderer and a criminal and literally the worst lover ever, since her attentions invaribaly kill her paramours. She's also a brilliant chemist.
...Ivan Dilisnia, her cousin, younger by a month; a vain, strutting peacock, fop and brute who prefers the visceral bashing of peoples' skulls (he's not very strong and he gets tired fast, so leaves the finishing of the job to his lieutenants more often than not) to the comparative subtlety of poison, though he's just fine with poison, too. Ivan's a little bit mad, and he thinks he is a genius playwright and actor. He's not, but you'd better clap anyway, or he'll kill you.
...probably, it's both of them. Even when Borca is closed, you can get to Dorvinia, and to other Domains from Dorvinia, unless it is also closed. Likewise, for Dorvina, you can get to Borca and escape, possibly. That said, most of the time, when one border closes, the other one also closes pretty shortly thereafter.
You're Gonna Need and Ocean of Calamine Lotion - Both Borca and Dorvinia are relatively major trade hubs, and do export a reasonable amount of both finished goods and raw materials. If you want anything from the southern regions of the Core, you're probably going through the city-states, but for Ezra's sake, why? Nothing in the southern Core is worth having and the bribes alone are more than you're bound to gain. Still, some do. Borca is a decent base of operation for several adventuring clans, precisely because it is anarchy, and it is located a lot closer to profitable lands that have laws and don't care for adventurers much. Its also got a lot of ruins, particularly of some pre-Ezraite culture and proto Ezraite churches, and since the religion has some very spotty history, it's of real interest to religious scholars. Ivan Dilisnia has been hiring adventurers and condotiere to raid Invidian territory run by Mallochio, partially in support of the little tyrant's mother and partially because of the raids Mallochio has been financing into the city-states. Also, it bears mentioning that neither cousin's position is that strong. Right now, they are in charge because they managed to poison all the other contenders, but that's hardly divine right or madate of the people. Just saying.
Closing the Borders - Have you ever seen a hedgerow of giant hogweed, each plant 20 feet tall and covered in wasp and hornet nests? You will. Bring antihistmine. Oh, wait, they don't have that in Ravenloft. Good luck. Whatever route you choose, it is also bound to collapse into boiling water, since you chose to cross on a sinkhole. It's pretty much inevitable.
September 17, 2014
Remedial Ravenloft: Aralaine
This one is one of mine, rather than one of the existing published ones. When I make a new Domain, I'll mark it as such up here. When I significantly change a published Domain, I'll write what I changed.
TL;DR Version - Attack on Titan... Loft.
The Land - Aralaine is defined by three concentric walls. The outer one contains meticulously managed and groomed but depleting and fatigued farmland managed by small and badly run-down farming communes. The second wall contains the sprawling, overcrowded, crime-riddled provincial (and now national) capital of Montefils. The third contains the eerily silent, vast palace, patrolled by green robed monks and very few others. Those approaching from outside of Aralaine aren't likely to encounter the outer wall at all, passing through the borders of the neighboring lands into the worn farmland. Turning back will reveal the outer wall and the trackless redwood forest outside that teems with mindless ravening giants. The exits from Aralaine are through the gates out of Montefils, different gates at different times connect to mistways that lead to various bordering Domains. These exits are quite well known and documented, but aren't common knowledge. The walls themselves have vast, labyrinthine understories, tunnels and catacombs beneath them that seem just as endless, and only slightly less dangerous than the forest.
The People - Aralaine, especially Montefils, used to be a trading hub that eventually became the largest refugee camp in the Core region, and consequently, is very diverse. Most people speak Corbeau and follow the green-robed-monk-endorsed Dementlieuese branch of Ezraism, but fact is, they only thing that anyone seems to have in common is not enough food or privacy. Population density in Montefils is ridiculous, food is pretty scarce, but violence, crime and diseas are really not scarce. This tends to drive up recruitment for both the military and the green-robed sect, the former occaisionally getting sent out to try to take territory in the forest. This works out terribly, unless you're one of the cynics who believes that the purpose of the military is to ease population pressure by feeding half a generation's worth of young people to the giants. And you should be one of them, assuming you like being right.
The Boring Stuff - Aralaine used to be a somewhat remote agrarian province in a larger kingdom. Since the walls went up, it transitioned to manufacturing and trade. Aralaine still manages brisk trade with her neighbors, despite the fact that trade relies entirely on Mistways. Montefils has taken on manufacturing with some success, having enjoyed a slightly higher level of technology than her neighbors. Aralaine is a monarchy, having become the seat of the king of their former nation just before the Mist and the forest swallowed the rest up, and is ruled, in theory, by the king, still. In actuality, the king remains in meditation at all times and the green-robed monks of the Gunsen Hommeroi handle the actual administration of government. Aralaine maintains a large military as well, though it is more geared toward fighting the giants than other nations. That said, they do hire out, especially to other nations threatened by Falkovnia (their major trading partner for grain and everyone's biggest military threat, thus bringing the concept of "frenemy" to Ravenloft).
We Build the Wall to Keep us Free - Jean-Pierre III grew up terrified of his father, Sebastien, the great reformer and midnight stalker of the palace, dagger in hand, murderer of anyone who crossed his path. I suppose Jean-Pierre had really good reasons. The man used to hold his son up by the ankles, shouting that he was going to devour the boy, which he tried to do on two occasions. So when the king died, and his 16 year old son, nine fingers and bite scars all over his body, took the throne, the boy did so as a nervous wreck. This wouldn't have been that bad for the kingdom, except for the fact that the previous king had done a lot worse to his civil service, and there was very little in the way of living bureacracy to keep things moving. A great opportunity for hucksters. Unfortunately, Jean-Pierre got great hucksters.
The monks got their in with the court by offering treatment for Jean-Pierre's host of maladies (stemming from brutal insomnia, nightmares and later delusions of ravening, sometimes skinless giants everywhere, seeking to devour him), and from there expanded their influence over the king, the court and the nation, taking over a lot of government offices that were vacated by Sebastien's midnight murder sprees. They set up a meditation chamber for the king and taught him some techniques that seemed to help, but at the same time, they fed his delusions - the giants he saw were real, chewing their way into the world from beyond, and soon to bust in. In order to save his people, they said, the king was going to have to make new walls to keep them out. Walls around the province of Aralaine, it's capital and the new palace you're building up there, sire, to keep you safe, right? Also around the whole nation, but they ran out of money a long, long time before that happened. In fact, it's kind of a miracle they got the whole province encricled before they bankrupted the nation. When the outermost wall was complete, the king evacuated everyone he could into Montefils, invited as many dignitaries and foreign representatives as he could find to visit, and presided over the dedication of the walled province.
Then the monks tried something. We're not sure what. Most of the monks, when you torture them to find out what (and some people have, and by some people I mean Azalin Rex, who has a deep and abiding interest in these things. Also torture.) don't have any clue, but it probably didn't work. Unless the Gunsen Hommeroi wanted to kill a third of the population, send the province to Ravenloft and make the king's delusion real and hungry giants. If that was the case, then cheers. Mission accomplished. Since that night, Aralaine has buried all the dead, tried to make the best of their situation and suffered two breaches of the outer wall and incursions by the giants. The king has retired to his meditation chambers full time (his spirit keeps the giants at bay), and the monks have set about running things in his name, possibly preparing to try again whatever it is they failed to do before.
The Darklord Could Be... King Jean-Pierre III, poor nervous, delusional, sleepless wreck he is. The Gunsen Hommeroi says he sees all that happens in his reduced and impoverished kingdom from his green-draped meditation chambers. They could be telling the truth. The Domain seems to take the shape of his delusions.
...The Abbot of the Gunsen Hommeroi, since they're the ones who say these things about the king. They might be in a better position to know than seems apparent. Fact is, no one remembers hearing the young king say much about giants before the monks arrived.
...Sebastien IV, who might have returned, deep in the forest, as a great giant, taller even than the wall, who howls and gibbers and gets ever closer as his hunger slowly grows.
What You're Doing Here - Despite the poverty and desperation of most of the people in Montefils, Aralaine is still a good place for trade and manufactured goods. It's also a gathering place for refugees from everywhere - they kind of arrive in Montefls, wherever they left and wherever they were going. It's one of the liklier places for people from other lands and places to show up. Aralaine also has some of the best mapped mistways in the Core, which makes the place of more than passing interest to scholars and adventurers. Adventuring clans are kind of rare here, and none of them have shown much interest in what is beyond the wall (spoiler alert - it's bitey death). That said, there is some interest in what is within and below the walls, becuase the monks had a lot of subterranean structures in the plans and the order is much reduced in numbers who remember what and where and why those structures exist. Aralaine boasts a lot of Gygaxian dungeon, if one is into that kind of thing.
Closing you in - The Mistways just stop working. Want to leave, you can go over the outer wall into the forest and bitey death.
TL;DR Version - Attack on Titan... Loft.
The Land - Aralaine is defined by three concentric walls. The outer one contains meticulously managed and groomed but depleting and fatigued farmland managed by small and badly run-down farming communes. The second wall contains the sprawling, overcrowded, crime-riddled provincial (and now national) capital of Montefils. The third contains the eerily silent, vast palace, patrolled by green robed monks and very few others. Those approaching from outside of Aralaine aren't likely to encounter the outer wall at all, passing through the borders of the neighboring lands into the worn farmland. Turning back will reveal the outer wall and the trackless redwood forest outside that teems with mindless ravening giants. The exits from Aralaine are through the gates out of Montefils, different gates at different times connect to mistways that lead to various bordering Domains. These exits are quite well known and documented, but aren't common knowledge. The walls themselves have vast, labyrinthine understories, tunnels and catacombs beneath them that seem just as endless, and only slightly less dangerous than the forest.
The People - Aralaine, especially Montefils, used to be a trading hub that eventually became the largest refugee camp in the Core region, and consequently, is very diverse. Most people speak Corbeau and follow the green-robed-monk-endorsed Dementlieuese branch of Ezraism, but fact is, they only thing that anyone seems to have in common is not enough food or privacy. Population density in Montefils is ridiculous, food is pretty scarce, but violence, crime and diseas are really not scarce. This tends to drive up recruitment for both the military and the green-robed sect, the former occaisionally getting sent out to try to take territory in the forest. This works out terribly, unless you're one of the cynics who believes that the purpose of the military is to ease population pressure by feeding half a generation's worth of young people to the giants. And you should be one of them, assuming you like being right.
The Boring Stuff - Aralaine used to be a somewhat remote agrarian province in a larger kingdom. Since the walls went up, it transitioned to manufacturing and trade. Aralaine still manages brisk trade with her neighbors, despite the fact that trade relies entirely on Mistways. Montefils has taken on manufacturing with some success, having enjoyed a slightly higher level of technology than her neighbors. Aralaine is a monarchy, having become the seat of the king of their former nation just before the Mist and the forest swallowed the rest up, and is ruled, in theory, by the king, still. In actuality, the king remains in meditation at all times and the green-robed monks of the Gunsen Hommeroi handle the actual administration of government. Aralaine maintains a large military as well, though it is more geared toward fighting the giants than other nations. That said, they do hire out, especially to other nations threatened by Falkovnia (their major trading partner for grain and everyone's biggest military threat, thus bringing the concept of "frenemy" to Ravenloft).
We Build the Wall to Keep us Free - Jean-Pierre III grew up terrified of his father, Sebastien, the great reformer and midnight stalker of the palace, dagger in hand, murderer of anyone who crossed his path. I suppose Jean-Pierre had really good reasons. The man used to hold his son up by the ankles, shouting that he was going to devour the boy, which he tried to do on two occasions. So when the king died, and his 16 year old son, nine fingers and bite scars all over his body, took the throne, the boy did so as a nervous wreck. This wouldn't have been that bad for the kingdom, except for the fact that the previous king had done a lot worse to his civil service, and there was very little in the way of living bureacracy to keep things moving. A great opportunity for hucksters. Unfortunately, Jean-Pierre got great hucksters.
The monks got their in with the court by offering treatment for Jean-Pierre's host of maladies (stemming from brutal insomnia, nightmares and later delusions of ravening, sometimes skinless giants everywhere, seeking to devour him), and from there expanded their influence over the king, the court and the nation, taking over a lot of government offices that were vacated by Sebastien's midnight murder sprees. They set up a meditation chamber for the king and taught him some techniques that seemed to help, but at the same time, they fed his delusions - the giants he saw were real, chewing their way into the world from beyond, and soon to bust in. In order to save his people, they said, the king was going to have to make new walls to keep them out. Walls around the province of Aralaine, it's capital and the new palace you're building up there, sire, to keep you safe, right? Also around the whole nation, but they ran out of money a long, long time before that happened. In fact, it's kind of a miracle they got the whole province encricled before they bankrupted the nation. When the outermost wall was complete, the king evacuated everyone he could into Montefils, invited as many dignitaries and foreign representatives as he could find to visit, and presided over the dedication of the walled province.
Then the monks tried something. We're not sure what. Most of the monks, when you torture them to find out what (and some people have, and by some people I mean Azalin Rex, who has a deep and abiding interest in these things. Also torture.) don't have any clue, but it probably didn't work. Unless the Gunsen Hommeroi wanted to kill a third of the population, send the province to Ravenloft and make the king's delusion real and hungry giants. If that was the case, then cheers. Mission accomplished. Since that night, Aralaine has buried all the dead, tried to make the best of their situation and suffered two breaches of the outer wall and incursions by the giants. The king has retired to his meditation chambers full time (his spirit keeps the giants at bay), and the monks have set about running things in his name, possibly preparing to try again whatever it is they failed to do before.
The Darklord Could Be... King Jean-Pierre III, poor nervous, delusional, sleepless wreck he is. The Gunsen Hommeroi says he sees all that happens in his reduced and impoverished kingdom from his green-draped meditation chambers. They could be telling the truth. The Domain seems to take the shape of his delusions.
...The Abbot of the Gunsen Hommeroi, since they're the ones who say these things about the king. They might be in a better position to know than seems apparent. Fact is, no one remembers hearing the young king say much about giants before the monks arrived.
...Sebastien IV, who might have returned, deep in the forest, as a great giant, taller even than the wall, who howls and gibbers and gets ever closer as his hunger slowly grows.
What You're Doing Here - Despite the poverty and desperation of most of the people in Montefils, Aralaine is still a good place for trade and manufactured goods. It's also a gathering place for refugees from everywhere - they kind of arrive in Montefls, wherever they left and wherever they were going. It's one of the liklier places for people from other lands and places to show up. Aralaine also has some of the best mapped mistways in the Core, which makes the place of more than passing interest to scholars and adventurers. Adventuring clans are kind of rare here, and none of them have shown much interest in what is beyond the wall (spoiler alert - it's bitey death). That said, there is some interest in what is within and below the walls, becuase the monks had a lot of subterranean structures in the plans and the order is much reduced in numbers who remember what and where and why those structures exist. Aralaine boasts a lot of Gygaxian dungeon, if one is into that kind of thing.
Closing you in - The Mistways just stop working. Want to leave, you can go over the outer wall into the forest and bitey death.
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