Chaot

Set them up for high fantasy. Give them equipment and abilities. Make sure they have some very high skills (100%+, they should be dicing for criticals). Set you average NPCs at about 30% for their combat skill. Go wild! Remind the player that combat isn't always the best option and that death waits around every corner.

Finished up a character creation sheet too!

Fantastic! Tell her to take a look at this thread. https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?463484-necro-BRP-Ravenloft. It has a bunch of ideas on how to stat up the Domain Lords. I should really go through that and make them pretty pdfs. I've basically run two Ravenloft games so far, so there are many out there with more experience in the Dread Realms than me. Often I feel like my game is some unholy mixture of Captain Kronos Vampire Hunter and the Fearless Vampire Killers. I'm not a Ravenloft purist. A trap, I think, in the published material is that so much of it outlines the NPC background in great detail, explaining why they are so doomed and dreadful and stuff. It kind of puts them on a pedestal. In my opinion, they are there to be interacted with and defeated by the PCs. Your wife might want to be ruthless in letting them die. Be ruthless with the published material too. Change anything you want in the setting. In my game Avonleigh and Nidala were located where the Shadow Rift is now for game reasons. I think my next game is going to be set in Paridon, but I think I'm going to relocate it to existing in Mordent for game reasons. I'm also thinking about stealing heavily from The Walking Dead and adapting it to an event in Paridon. Last bit of advice I would give. When you read the Ravenloft adventures, they do a terrible job when it comes to player agency. Replacing them with dopplegangers, turning them into monsters, all sorts of things. Don't do this. Open up the option of letting player characters being corrupted though and let the player run with it. Discuss things OOC, in private if story telling needs be, and make sure you're not ruining the players time by messing with their character. As I was writing that, a new idea occurred to me. I think I'll add a small section on the character sheet that says "Why are you doomed?" I'm just interested in seeing what the players would write. Speaking of character sheets. I have a few floating around. I want to finish a few domains and I'll post my most recent character sheet. If your wife decides that she wants to run a game. Anyway, Enjoy!

Professions are done and I'm officially back in New York. Now it's down to finishing domains and working out scheduling. Hopefully I'll have a game running soon. Bonus material will be how I work Sorcery, Wizardry and the other powers. Not replicating spells because they are basically out of the book. House rules added in the document are the Brawn/Finesse Damage Bonus, Holding and Rushing Actions and dropping Weapon Hit Points/Breakage. Not present in these documents but evident in the character sheet, I will be grouping weapons into Combat Styles a la RQ6. I'm dropping the combat advantages from that though and limiting a Style to including one to two weapons. I'm reworking shields as well so that they augment the characters Armor roll instead of being their own separate thing. I've used all of these before and they fall into my category of "The less thinking I have to do during a game, the better."

Next up are character professions. They are almost done. Some are old favorites and some are new that I cobbled together. After that will be short bits explaining the very basics of use Sorcery and Wizardry. Spells and stuff are relegated to the rules books so if you're playing along at home you'll want to get Magic World and Advanced Sorcery for Sorcery and Classic Fantasy for Wizardry.

Ok, I've had some scheduling issues and did some unexpected traveling. However I now have some fun stuff for you to look at. Feedback and questions are always appreciated. The purpose of the following documents is to make character creation as simple as possible.

Horror is a relative term. I've described my game as pulp mystery. I've had two players describe it as soap opera. I have a sneaking suspicion that I'm trying to run Hellboy and really running Dark Shadows.

That's a cool idea. I'm honestly not too worried about randomization though. I think an simple distribution of points is best for me. I find that in game decisions make much more of an impact on characters than stats. The closer I can get to the bruiser, the face, the acrobat, the intellectual and the mystic, the better. Get that part over and move on to the game.

It doesn't make sense to me right now, but it made a lot of sense to me in the early 80s. You had to make sure you were wearing parachute pants too when you rolled. Otherwise it didn't count.

Quicker, yes. The concept is an old hold over from D&D in which you want to make sure that you have at least one really good stat. Sportsmanship demanded that they all be rolled the same way, we just changed the point at which we started counting them. For the final document I'm just going to give them an array of points that they can drop in. Then they can redistribute a few as they see fit. I've don it that way before and it goes fairly quickly. I'll be updating this thread soon. Couple set backs but the game got pushed back too due to circumstances outside of my control. So, I have a little time. Planning on finishing up some domains and reviewing and posting the character generation document.

*elbows Atgxtg out of the way* Not only would I love to see them, I'd love to pick your brain in how they shook out during play!

Ouch. Now that's a pun worthy of a horror check! I agree. I cringe a little when I read something that's all sturm and drang. Any genre I touch turns into pulpy mystery though. I'm a bit of a one trick pony. Edit: Oops, just saw a bit formatting error. I forgot to bold parts of the sheets. Also made small changes in Flakovnia and Hazlan.

Totally agree. I may or may not be alone in this but I think Ravenloft should be humanocentric and demi-humans should be ditched. They just feel out of place. If you put something like a fantasy dwarf or an elf into the game, they should be twisted and unnatural, just like all the other monsters running around. Another peeve of mine is the weekend in hell stuff. I prefer the domains to be a bit mysterious but also largely self contained. Not that I totally mind outsiders finding the domains but I prefer the PCs to be characters who originate within the domains. Having said that, I so want to run Curse of Strahd using characters who have been torn from our world.

Thanks guys. I hope to have all of the Domains that PCs can be from by the end of next weekend. I should also have nailed down the various magic systems by then too. I want to have a clear character generation handout ready for session zero. One thing I'd love to have done but don't think I will have time to write up is a list of rumors for each domain to use as story seeds and to get the player's imaginations going. Another thing I'd like to have put together but don't think I'll have time is a short dossier of organizations the PCs might be from, ranging from The Karat to The Circle. Once it's all done I'll put it in the downloads section as a pdf. So please, if you have feedback, see something you question or don't see something you feel should be included feel free to post and say so.

No big reason. I was running some Rules Cyclopedia D&D when I first wrote this up and that's how I have people roll up characters. It will probably change to a simple 'distribute x amount of points between your stats' before this is over.

You totally win the MVP award Atgxtg! You didn't have to buy the game to tell me the mechanics. Still I'm glad you did, it looks interesting enough that I'm going ot go ahead and pick it up too. (Would have responded yesterday but I was a sick dog.)

In the next week I'm polishing up some Ravenloft material I have been sitting on and I need someplace to put it. I haven't been active on message boards at all recently. I have a thread that I was using over at RPGNet but it has been pretty dormant for a while now. Additionally, the occasional recommendations that I just run it using D&D were a little annoying. So here's a preview. I hope to nail everything down by the end of next week. I'd like to have everything ready for players soon. I'll probably continue to tweak things far into the future. Any comments or advice is welcome. Enjoy.

Not really, I know the name. The internet tells me its dice mechanic is similar to Unknown Armies. How does the Trauma system work? I don't see anything that really describes it.