1
Feb

Obsidian Portal Campaign of the Month February 2023: The Domain of Dread Council Meeting.

It may have been some time since you have heard the name “Ravenloft”, but in this DREADFULLY exciting campaign, you will hear it again. GameMaster ElMuggs has concocted a scenario where some of D&D’s BADDEST ever BADDIES have got together to remind people the true meaning of FEAR once again, in The Domain of Dread Council Meeting.


First off, feel free to tell us about the person behind the GM screen. Where are you from? What brought you into the world of TTRPGS? Where can we interact with you on the internet?

Well I grew up in rural Australia and was introduced to Dungeons and Dragons when my stepmother caught me playing Castle Adventure on my Dad’s computer and asked ‘Are you playing Dungeons and Dragons? You know some people played that on acid and KILLED someone?”

Being a seven year old girl this very much left a impression on me as obviously Dungeons and Dragons had to be the coolest, most extreme game EVER! But being that there was nobody to play with I had to rely on the videogames until in 2017 I stumbled upon three people sitting at the back of the room at the game store that had opened up in my home town.

They were the Redbook Roleplayers and did a total OMG You’re Playing Dungeons and Dragons can I play tooo OMG !

Yeah I’m that cool. I don’t use much social media but you can find me on the Obsidan Discord or Twitter (while it lasts!) as @ElMuggs

You have described “The Domains of Dread Council Meeting” as “a comedic misadventure through the mists of Ravenloft”. In a “nutshell” please explain to the Obsidian Portal Community what your campaign is all about.

Well that’s basically it, but to see why this campaign is a bit different let me ask the characters what they think it’s about?

Strahd (Vampire Ruler of Barovia): It is my duty as the first and greatest Dread Lord to show these lesser nursery rhymes villain what it means to be terror incarnate! Honestly these modern day dark lords, they can barely manage to lure backpackers into the woods, or leave a blood soaked message on the wall! Back in my day you had to do better than a jump scare or two! Here now Vecna, let me tell you how we used to do it in the old country! I’d climb into a coffin and lie in wait for hours on end, even weeks, just waiting for the right time to jump out and go BLEAGH!!!!

Daniel (Unkillable Tiefling): I don’t know? The Awesomeness of Awesome? I’ve been though the dark and the light and the light and the dark and it’s all the same. Apart from my Super-Awesome Domain but theres nobody in it, just me and the Hamstercows – but that was the Mistake. Maybe Llamacows? Then I found the perfect people to bring along but SOMEBODY ended them. Terrible Train accident! I’m all shiny though – got a shiny butt!… Problem with Tieflings though is that they can’t wear hats.. uh.. What was I talking about?

Vecna (OG Litch and God of Secrets): It’s my unjust punishment for getting involved with the other Lords of Dread.

Tasha (Witch and Best selling Author): Pft, always so dramatic! In truth Poor Vecna hasn’t had much to do for years, and Strahd.. well he’s so just so PRIMITIVE. He really needs to move with the times as the scary vampire in his castle pining over a poor women he’s obsessed with is just so cliche!

So then I thought why not invite one of these new Dreadlords to our secret little Council? The invisible one had the wonderful idea to ride out and spread some fear. But then Daniel showed up, Strahd got us lost and things have been going downhill ever since!

You seem to have started out the campaign with players taking on the main PC’s at HIGH LEVELS. Did this present any issues in building up the characters of the players?

The Campaign started by accident after a bit of silly in-character conversation between our ForeverDM talking about his love of Curse of Strahd. Soon he was roleplaying Strahd talking about how he was the greatest big bad in DND and it was hillarious. I immediatly wondered how Vecna would react to this? It didn’t take much to convince the others to jump in with their own characters.. and session 0 quickly ended up with the characters riding out on their first adventure.

The big challenge was getting a grip on the lore as playing with Strahd, Tasha and Vecna required doing a deep dive into the history going all the way back to 2nd Edition. Vecna had been a Dreadlord back in 2nd edition but escaped and outside of Critical Roll he hadn’t really been seen in 5th edition. Likewise Tasha also had a lot of gaps in her history as Wild Beyond the Witchlight hadn’t been released yet.

Then there’s Daniel who was a PC from our first campaign together. While we loved him there was the small problem that he died and being brought back to life via Wish had left him immune to the Dead condition! If that’s not wild enough for you there’s also the Invisible Person. Their unique power is that they are so invisible not even I know where they are at all times. This is because the player works, and so doesn’t make it to many games, so when they arrive I ask them where their character was and we fill in the gaps from there.

All of this works because I tend to avoid worrying about balance and CR ratings and instead look for what makes the most interesting challenge for the players? A lot of the game is about leaning into the personality of the characters.

What version of Dungeons and Dragons have you used for the campaign and what inspired this decision?

Our group has always used 5th edition+ UA Playtest material and a good chunk of Homebrew. In terms of story it takes place sometime after the events of Wild Beyond the Witchlight.

I like 5th edition because it gives you plenty of space to shape the rules around the story you want to tell. While DND is simpler then 3.5 etc. it’s also really flexible both for players and DMs. As a new DM the biggest issue I find is that if there’s a ‘Rules as Written’ sometimes you can end up feeling trapped because it doesn’t make sense for the situation or story you’re trying to tell.

The other reason is that it’s very easy to slip in rules from other games and editions. One of the Domains turned the characters into teenagers and had they stayed there I was planning to bring in some of the rules from Tales from the Loop to go with the 80s suburbia vibes.

Likewise the ‘Levelling for Dreadlords’ rules call back to 2nd edition as my first experiances playing Baldur’s Gate II. In earlier editions Vampires where much scarier as they could drain your XP and suddenly you’d lose all those levels you’d worked hard to gain! There’s also some older edition spells that were missing in 5th edition that also make a comeback in this campaign.

You obviously have a great love of the Ravensloft campaign. How long ago did you first play in or GM that campaign, and are any of your current players returning from that time? Have there been any issues in updating the concepts to suit your current campaign?

So first up I need to give props to James Haeck’s Strahd Must Die Tonight – in Space! https://www.dndbeyond.com/posts/895-strahd-must-die-in-space which inspired the idea of bringing in new genre’s to provide a new take on old DND adventures. Having now had to deal with Ravenloft Castle I have a lot of respect for Will who DMed this for us as a Halloween One Shot back in 2020.
It was the first time most of us had played in Ravenloft and set up the events that lead to Castle Ravenloft no longer being part of Barovia.

One reason I’m excited about people learning about this campaign is that the Setting Information is what I like to call the “Ravenloft Remix” as I really wanted to set up each Domain to really feel different from one another. So it was a chance to really bring in things that my players wouldn’t expect and each domain has it’s own little world. Because it’s the players that provide the comedy there’s really nothing to stop someone else using the material as part of a more ‘straightforward’ adventure.

Our group has a long history of working from older editions. The actual world that this campaign fits into is a big Planescape adventure that’s been run by multiple people over probably 10 years or more? We’ve done all sorts of crazy things from Tomb of Horrors to escape Dark Sun and Spelljammer (before it was 5e).

To date the biggest challenge for me as DM has been going back to Ravenloft Castle. I wanted to make sure I was keeping it in line with what the players knew and remembered of the campaign while avoiding any major spoilers for Curse of Strahd. I decided to use the map from the original 2nd edition adventure and age-up the Castle so that just enough things had changed while Strahd was away that even he didn’t know what to expect.

The timing was also perfect to bring back two of the heroes of the original adventure! Poor Strahd came home to find that his Castle now belonged to a young, handsome elven vampire who looked like he’d just stepped out of an Anne Rice Novel. Meanwhile the top half of the Castle is a fallen Solar who’s hell-bent on ensuring the Castle is destroyed!

There are some very innovative design modifications in your campaign, including a custom built navigation board. Who is responsible for your overall campaign design? Can you share any useful “design tips” with other OP members?

That would be me! At high school I wanted to be a web designer so I learned a lot of HTML and CSS. The nav bar is a recent addition and at some point I’ll probably find myself getting curious about what kind of Javascript functions are possible.. but not today!

Looking at past COTM was really inspiring early on to see what was actually possible but the hardest bit was deciding what to do. Odd as it sounds I wanted to try and replicate the feel of a mouldy old book the players might stumble across in Strahd’s attic. So a lot of work went into using code to capture that sense that it should smell of old books.

In terms of tips, One thing I learned studying CSS and web design is to be careful with images. You need them big enough to not be blurry, but too large and the file size will cause your site to become unusable. This site uses a lot of repeating elements because once you load an image it’s usually cache’d so you can use it over-and over again without any problems.

The other big trick is the Google Web Fonts – I have a love/hate relationship with them as when they work they’re amazing, but they can also be a pain because you often need to adjust the text size to make them readable. The Adventure Log uses a lot of them – but the actual posts just use a normal font. This is because it’s not easy to read a full page of text in script, so most of the time it’s usually just used for headers and special effects.

Finally learning to find your way around the Inspect Elements tools can make it a lot eaiser as you can test things without actually changing the site itself. There’s also nothing to stop you making up your own tags like this:

Lets me mimic those ‘comment’ boxes from Tasha’s Cauldon of Everything:

How important are the Adventure Logs to your campaign? Who creates them? How involved are your players in the process?

The adventure log is intentionally subjective, sometimes they might include the direct notes from a campaign but more often than not they’re pieced together from memory and whatever notes survived the session. Often I will forget small details, names or ‘what happened in what order’ but my players are always great at reminding me.

It’s very important to me as a DM as a way to keep track between sessions as sometimes months may pass between games. So it’s been great now that I have it and can start working on the Adventure Log the day after the game while it’s all fresh in my head. This way I can get everything updated, provide the players an update on Inspiration, and get ahead on any changes and planning for the next session.

It’s also has an in-game use as spells like Legend Lore exist so Characters could actually read the Adventure Log if they wanted to. This is because it’s canon in our games that there is a Library that records everything that ever happens – and one of the players is DMing a campaign set in it!

I’m still working on getting my players to use the Portal as it’s still very new – but I love the way they can post their own ‘thoughts’ on events and have the ability to add to it over time.

Your campaign seems to have been running from around the end of 2020 up to the present day. Have there been any modifications you have had to make to the way you play in relation to the worldwide pandemic?

We’ve been playing online via Roll20 since I joined the group in 2017. Playing virtual was really what made it possible to have weekly games because Australia is a really big place! Most of us also have crazy scheduals of work, study and other commitments so each week means looking for a notification to say there’s a game on.

I honestly prefer DMing online because you are not constrained by what you can hide behind the DM screen or fit on the table. So I found it really freeing in that if the characters want to do something crazy I can hide my face, take a breath and quickly look up whatever is needed to keep the game going. It’s created a game where I’m just as excited as my players to know what will happen next, as my version of prep focuses more on the first five minutes at most, then seeing what the players will bring to the table.

By far the hardest thing about running the campaign is that being a backup game that I run when there’s not enough players for the main campaign or the DM needs a break there’s often big gaps between games. Often I don’t know I’m DMing until the night and rarely do I know what will happen next.

This means needing to keep a lot of secrets from players to avoid spoilers for Domains and characters they might come across in future – or return to one day.

How long have you been using Obsidian Portal? What brought you to the site and what keeps bringing you back?

A few months? I found the site when I realised it was going to be impossible to run Ravenloft Castle without a proper system for keeping track of the 88 map markers. When I looked at others they where really locked-in on what kind of ‘style’ of campaign you could run – while they might look more ‘fancy’ I really just wanted something I could use while DMing to quickly get things at a moment’s notice.

I love how the Wiki section is really free to being used to store whatever campaign information you want, rather than being forced to use a format set for a particular game system or campaign style. I like how Items and Characters both have their own ‘section’ as these are things are repeatedly pop up in games, and it’s handy to be able to build up a database that you can quickly go back to when you forget a name or thing that you mentioned in an earlier session.

The GM section and Secrets are very important for my campaign and it’s great that my players can be given their own version of events. Plus, as a visual person, I love that I can share the artwork that inspired parts of the adventure, and give a lot more personality to the world.

If you had to pick just one thing, what would you say Obsidian Portal helps you with the most?

It really makes it a whole lot easier to run games. Normally finding a specific NPC, picture or location would take combing through folders full of images and random documents on my computer or the internet. These days I keep the Obsidian Portal open behind the Roll20 screen and I can quickly run a search to find what I need.

What would you say is the biggest highlight of your game so far?

So what’s been really fun DMing all of this has been how it really pushes you to ask the big questions like: ‘Would an angry Ultraloth consent to being Polymorphed into a T-Rex?’ “How many hit points does a black hole have?” Or the big one – ‘What happens if a Dreadlord dies outside of their domain?

So I thought I might share the story of how one of these questions lead to a series of events leading to what I like to call ‘Blobfish Strahd’.

This started with a classic question: What happens if a vampire is diseased by an Aboleth to only be able to breath underwater?

By RAW the answer is nothing – because apparently there’s one line in the 5e Monster Manual that says vampires don’t need to breath. But this is Ravenloft a land of poetic justice! Unlucky for Strahd I didn’t have the Monster Manual, I was using the 2nd edition Domains of Dread where there was no such comment. Nor did it make sense that a Aboleth would have a disease that didn’t work on certain types of creatures. So I ruled that was true, he didn’t need to breath BEFORE he was diseased by the Aboleth.

I wouldn’t have done this but being a high level party it shouldn’t have been too hard for them to find a way to cure the disease right? It was then that we learned that this party of Dreadlords had no clerics, no paladins and the only healing spell anyone knew was Wish!

So sadly for Strahd they missed out on curing the disease and the party was forced to seek help. However the player ended up deciding NOT to cure Strahd and instead stay in mist form. So, on entering Vecna’s domain I was given another big question:What happens to a vampire in mist form when subjected to the intense gravity of a nearby black hole? Turns out that under intense pressure a gas doesn’t become a solid – instead it turns into a SuperCritical Fluid forming Plasma!

So over time Strahd’s gaseous form grew smaller and smaller until he became a Plasmoid that could best be described as ‘Blobfish Strahd’. Which the player LOVED so much they set their Discord picture to this little guy:

Okay, as a last question, we always ask for the GM’s “pearls of wisdom”. What GM insights can you offer the community this month?

If I have one bit of advice for ForeverDMs it’s that if you want to play, challenge your players to try DMing for a night! This is how I made the jump from player to DM. Our ForeverDM was feeling burnt out after taking us all the way from Level 1 to 17 over a course of 3 years!

So, For New Years 2020 we were given a ‘challenge’ for three of us to run a game. My first game was supposed to be one-shot and had a proper map, detailed NPCs, Monsters traps etc. All the players had to do was escape. I had some ideas of HOW they could do this but apart from the setup the players where free to ‘solve’ the problem however they wanted.
This is how it started:

This is what it looked like by the end:

For this campaign, I got rid of the map and swapped to Theatre of the Mind so that there was really no limits to what could happen. This also had the perk of being able to give the players more power.This happens in a few ways over my campaign. The most obvious is when Dreadlords are in their own Domains they can use Inspiration to shape the Domain to their will. But a more subtle trick is that when dealing with crowds or where there’s a lot of decisions to be made on the fly, I’ll ask the players to help me out. This way if there’s a party split or whatnot you don’t have a character stuck waiting around with nothing to do.

Instead, I give them a job! One Player might be asked to describe the NPC’s appearance, while another might decide what the room looks like, and another gives them a name. Other times I will offer them a NPC’s during a party split or if they arrive without a character.

The first time I tried this was when a friend popped into the game to say Hi. We were in combat so I gave them a NPC Guard who was in the unlucky situation of facing down Strahd, Vecna and a room full of Strahd’s minions at the end of Man vs Machine > https://thedomainofdreadcouncilmeeting.obsidianportal.com/adventure-log/cyrelons.

While in my hands he was just another Guard for the party to kill, making him a Guest NPC changed everything! This guard managed to stab Vecna and hold them off for two full rounds – everyone was excited to see how long he’d last. We learned this nameless guard had taken the shift to avoid being at home with his wife and nine children. He died a hero – turning what might otherwise have been a forgettable encounter into this epic last-stand.

That’s all for this month folks! Don’t forget to head on over the the OP forums to nominate your favorite campaigns for our next Campaign of the Month!

Award Winning!

Gold ENnie for Best Website 09'-11'


Silver ENnie for Best Website, Best Podcast 2012-2013
Petrified Articles
Categories
© Copyright 2010-2024 Words In The Dark. All rights reserved. Created by Dream-Theme — premium wordpress themes. Proudly powered by WordPress.