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BRP Ravenloft


Chaot

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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.

Ravenloft Character Guide sample.jpg

Ravenloft Generation pamphlet sample.jpg

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22 hours ago, HorusArisen said:

Looks good, why the 4d6 roll rule though?

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.

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Wow, nice editing and layout. Great to see this ported over to BRP

Great work mate 

Edited by Mankcam
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" Sure it's fun, but it is also well known that a D20 roll and an AC is no match against a hefty swing of a D100% and a D20 Hit Location Table!"

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Very nice work Chaot. And why would anyone use D&D for Ravenloft when you can use a far more appropriate system like BRP. D&D is great for dungeon delve games, but for gritty story driven games like Ravenloft BRP makes more sense. 

I hope to see more of your work on this project, I love this kind of stuff. My favorite threads to follow are the ones about how people are adapting the rules to fit their campaign ideas.

Miles

 

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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.

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Totally agree that Ravenloft is such a cool setting, but the gothic fantasy genre was always mismatched to D&D's high fantasy flavour (D&D should of just kept with Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms IMO). Portraying Ravenloft with a BRP system like BGB or MW just makes so much more sense.

Really looking forward to the finished product!

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" Sure it's fun, but it is also well known that a D20 roll and an AC is no match against a hefty swing of a D100% and a D20 Hit Location Table!"

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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.

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I think keeping the setting weird, mysterious, and forboding is the way to go. Anything that assists this vision is the trick, so yeah I would portray the demi-humans as bizarre and keep them mainly as NPCs in order to maintain this presence. I do this with the Aldryami and Mostali in Glorantha, and I find it works so much better, otherwise players will tend to portray the Elder Races as too human. Likewise in Ravenloft the Demi-humans need to be otherworldly in order to keep that gothic flavour, so keeping things human-centric probably will work best as a rule of thumb.

Edited by Mankcam

" Sure it's fun, but it is also well known that a D20 roll and an AC is no match against a hefty swing of a D100% and a D20 Hit Location Table!"

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14 hours ago, Chaot said:

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.

You might even want to make things more "normal" the further away from a site inhabited by a ghost, monster,etc. One thing I've found with horror adventures is that familiarity breeds contempt. If the players know they are playing a horror game, then they are forewarned and kinda toughen up and take everything in Strahd, er stride. But if they expect things to be "normal" (normal being somewhat subjective) then a supernatural horror was a much greater impact.

It's why the best horror games I've ran were in non-horror RPGs. 

 

Edited by Atgxtg
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23 minutes ago, Atgxtg said:

You might even want to make things more "normal" the further away from a site inhabited by a ghost, monster,etc. One thing I've found with horror adventures is that familiarity breeds contempt. If the players know they are playing a horror game, then they are forewarned and kinda toughen up and take everything in Strahd, er stride. But if they expect things to be "normal" (normal being somewhat subjective) then a supernatural horror was a much greater impact.

 

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.

Edited by Chaot

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On 6/18/2017 at 5:58 AM, Chaot said:

.... Any genre I touch turns into pulpy mystery though. I'm a bit of a one trick pony.

I am envisioning (with some amusement) some interesting base genre's for you to pulpily mystify ... :D

 

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5 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

I'm envisioning a denouement where the detective has a crypt full on monsters and then names the murderer to be "the chap with the fangs". :P

Or perhaps the second solution:  all the monsters in the crypt had a bite of the victim...

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

For characteristics generation: "Roll 4d6 and drop the lowest until you roll 16 or above".

Wouldn't it be quicker to do something like "roll 15+1d3" or "roll 2d3 and keep the lowest, add 15" ?

Rolling 4d6 and keep 3 only has 13% chance to generate a value of 16 or more.

Edited by Mugen
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On 7/1/2017 at 5:11 PM, Mugen said:

For characteristics generation: "Roll 4d6 and drop the lowest until you roll 16 or above".

Wouldn't it be quicker to do something like "roll 15+1d3" or "roll 2d3 and keep the lowest, add 15" ?

Rolling 4d6 and keep 3 only has 13% chance to generate a value of 16 or more.

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. 

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12 minutes ago, Chaot said:

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.

Uh, why? You could simply state that after the stats are rolled normally, the player has the option to replace one stat with a 16, or 1d3+15. 

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