Ravenloft Revisited

I've been going through Ravenloft withdrawl recently, since it's been over a year now since I've held a session of it, and while I've tried doing some writing in the past few months, it's become hard for me to stick with it since I have no idea when I'll be able to run whatever scenario I write.
A week or so ago, though, I had an idea for a scenario that I could run the next time I'm visiting in Connecticut, hopefully sometime in the spring. It seemed to stick in my mind pretty rapidly, and I've found myself doing a lot of brainstorming (over 15 pages of notes in MS Word so far)

I think what has gotten me so inspired is that I really enjoyed the big game I had done around Halloween right before the move to Florida in 2010. That scenario was the Village of Fear, and was what I call a group scenario since it was meant to be played by a group of people who would be playing one-shot characters written with that scenario specifically in mind, rather than a small group of players playing established characters in a traditional RPG scenario. The only established character in Village of Fear was my nephew's character of Cameron D'Agostino, since the central theme of the story was Cameron's showdown with a nemesis he had been pursuing for some time. What I like about that style of scenario is that you can tailor the characters to the story while not feeling bad about killing them off since it's just a one-shot game. Basically like a convention scenario, without the time constraints (usually 4 hours or so for one gaming event) and with the benefit of not only knowing your players (and in a convention, you never know what kind of people are going to sign up for a game), but being good friends with all of them. For me I think, that's what made the Village of Fear such a blast to run, and it was probably one of the most satisfying scenarios I've run for Ravenloft.

Since I'm (finally) very close now to wrapping up the story of the 13th Hour, which has been either the central or periphery storyline in all my campaigns for the past decade, one of my goals for this scenario is to bring together all the threads of the entire convoluted 20 years worth of mythology that I've written regarding the 13th Hour prophecy.
Since the haunted clock tower that resides at the center of the 13th Hour mythology lies in the town of Pont-a-Condemne, I decided I would have the scenario set there, and have titled it 13 Nights in Pont-a-Condemne.

Now, with the mention of Pont-a-Condemne, a lot of the readers who have played Warhammer Fantasy with me have an idea in their head of this...

When actually, the Pont-a-Condemne I'm referring to is more like this...

Above is the original map I drew for Pont-a-Condemne to be used as a player handout for a session in my Ravenloft campaign back in 1997. As you can see, rather than bell towers, here we have a clock tower as the central landmark. I created the town back in 1995 for a scenario I had written for a gaming convention. The scenario was called "Screams in the Night" and took place in the town. Fortunately I've managed to save all of my previous scenarios in a big file bin over the years, so I can pull out the stapled together pages printed out from my old Brother word processor over sixteen years ago and quote the initial description I had written, which was as follows:

Though you are still nearly a mile away, you can see that the town is mostly comprised of low, squat buildings. What appears to be a grand old clock tower, strange for such a fairly small town, stands alone in the center of the small buildings huddled around it, like a shepherd watching over a sleeping herd.

Some of the game fluff I've written years ago I look back on now and wince, but that was actually decent imagery.

When the murders begin - and there are always murders in a Ravenloft scenario - I had this to say:

You race down the dark, spiraling streets toward the scream, following the road around and around, like a whirlpool pulling you in towards the madly chiming clock tower at the center, and all the while, you can feel hidden eyes watching you from darkened windows.

Again, not too bad in retrospect.

So where did the bell towers come from? Well I built that massive terrain piece for a Mordheim scenario I did at a convention in 2001 (an event that all of two people showed up for - I'm still sore over that). The whole thing I had designed as a homage to the old NES game, Deadly Towers. When I started working on my Forsaken Vale map-based Warhammer Fantasy campaign in 2009 for Ordo-Ineptus, I knew I wanted to include it on the map, and since I couldn't have Mordheim on the map, I decided to have another ruined city, and reused the name Pont-a-Condemne, since it fit.


So now with the general themes and setting decided upon, it was time to start fleshing out the idea a little more. I wanted to approach some things differently than I did with Village of Fear, so that it will be a completely different experience. In VoF, the player characters were all either residents of the doomed village of Zamspiele, or visitors who either happened to be passing through or were specifically there for some reason. And while most of the characters were trying to get to the bottom of what was going in the village -for example, why did all the cows, deer, chickens, and squirrels in the region suddenly develop the intense taste for human flesh - a few of them were definitely in the 'evil' column.
Also in VoF, all of the player characters knew one another, and with each character sheet there was a sheet of basically what their character knew about each of the other characters, and how they felt towards them. (for example, every other character thought the jailer was a dick. Mikey's portrayal of him did little to change that)
For 13 Nights, I'm planning on using the complete opposite approach. None of the characters will have ever met each other at the start of the game. This has the benefit of being different from last time and also saving me all those hours of writing all those different capsules of each character from every other character's perspective.

Another element in Village of Fear was that even though many of the player characters were adversaries in varying degrees, they were encouraged to work together much of the time, as with a traditional RPG. In 13 Nights, I want to encourage people to do just the opposite and work independently. Usually every other time I've tried this in a big game, it ends up dragging things out, as I have to do stuff with each player individually while everyone else sits around, and like as not, begins to chitchat amongst themselves, taking everyone out of the mood. I think I may actually have devised a method that could actually work by having the whole first half of the game play out as a board game, with the map of Pont-a-Condemne serving as a game board.


I liked the way the poster drawing of the village of Zamspiele had come out, and I think it was a helpful reference for players in the Village of Fear Scenario as they could look and see places they might want to investigate and could put their character model right there on the map. I plan to do the same thing for Pont-a-Condemne, and revise the look a little bit to make it seem more Victorian and less village, yet still not to large of a city. I'm also going to add a couple side streets going straight out from the center of town, so that there is more than one road to get around and you actually have a couple intersections. Since time and clocks are going to be a big theme, I may actually do two streets coming straight out from the center to resemble a clock face.

As the name suggests, 13 Nights will take place over the course thirteen days of game-world time, with the first twelve being played out as turns on a board game, leading up to the final night, which will play out as a single location RPG session. My preliminary idea of how the turns will work is that at the beginning of each turn, or day, players will receive a printout with the word "Day One" at the top (for example) with each of the 24 hours listed down the page. Players then block out their character actions for the day, by listing different locations they want their character to visit. Right now, I'm thinking that each location requires a 4 hour block to visit, and that an hour must be left between locations to account for travel, meals, etc. (to simplify this, I may end up just having time periods that are each 4 hours long, with an hour or two in between. Players must allocate a number of hours to sleep each day, or suffer a penalty to stats and die rolls.

Once all players have planned out their actions for the turn, they turn in the sheets to the GM, and I resolve all of the actions in sequence. Each location will give one of several random cards, which will give a brief summary of what occurs at the location. For anyone who has ever played boardgames like Arkham Horror or Touch of Evil, you'll know what I'm going for here. Many of these 'event cards' will call for some kind of dice roll using one of the character's skills. If they succeed at the roll, they are given another card or piece of paper, which will describe what they have found, learned, etc. Everything will be numbered, so that I can have it organized for easy reference.

So for example, if the Library is visited, the player chooses one of several listed topics to research, then makes a Gather Information roll for their character. If they succeed, they receive a particular document or clue (for example, Document #22)

Some locations will have different events based on the time of day they are visited. I'm right now thinking somewhere around 50+ possible events total, which will require a lot of work and preparation, but I think will pay off, as players will have something in their hands to inspect and think about while all of the other player's actions are being resolved.

Since the characters will all be staying in the same inn, players will still be able to compare notes and talk to one another as much as they like while planning out their actions for the day, representing all of the characters being in the common room of the inn at some point. While all players will have a specific secondary goal which has brought them to town in the first place, and may go against the secondary goals of other characters, the primary goal of getting to the bottom of what is going on will be shared by all characters. What I'm hoping this and the first half board game format does is give players a chance to do things and digest plot-related information at their own pace and while getting to perform actions without having some NPC blather on for 20 minutes. By the time the straight RPG half the scenario begins, players will hopefully have a clear idea of what pieces of the puzzle they want to find, what questions they want to ask NPCs, and what they want their characters to try and accomplish.

This all seems like a massive undertaking -and it is, although amazingly not the most massive undertaking for a scenario that I've done. That honor would have to go to the Laruba Mansion Expedition scenario I did in January of 2007, which I still have a large bin full of terrain, cards, and game notes for. Total materials included three CCG deck holders worth of event/item/and ability cards (kind of how I did with the items in the Shellendrak games I ran), a binder of scenario notes, and the entire 3d floor plan of the house, which was made to interlock together piece by piece so that pieces could be added on as the house was explored. Oh, and this was before I had heard of the Shellendrak Manor downloadable terrain set on Worldworks Games (it may not have been released yet anyway) so everything was done in MS Paint and then printed and glued to foamboard. Yeah that was another time I had moved away from all my gaming buddies and had a lot of time to plan and build rather than play.

In this case, there are no massive terrain requirements or insane modelling projects like the zombie hangman's tree and swarms of villager eating animals in Village of Fear. All the work is going to be going into writing the scenario itself.

So that's where I am right now with it. I'll post more as I come up with more specific ideas on characters and game elements. For those of my Ordo-Ineptus brethren that played Village of Fear, as well as those who were unable to, hopefully this will have piqued your interest.