Anyway, just thought I'd say that......
So, more on topic. Who here has made their own domains up? I'd like to know what other people might have thought of, I like hearing of new domains.
I love Ravenloft! Who here has made their own domains up? I'd like to know what other people might have thought of, I like hearing of new domains.
Hello & welcome Marv,
Have you seen all the free downloadable Netbooks at Kargatane.com and in the Library at Fraternityofshadows.com?
Who here has made their own domains up? I'd like to know what other people might have thought of, I like hearing of new domains.
Welcome, Marv! Yeah, as with Lost Heretic, I've had too much fun tinkering with the already established domains.
Dementlieu and Har'Akir are two of my favorites.With so many domains that need fixing up, I don't bother making my own. What's the point when 90% of the domains are so empty that you can do whatever you want with them!
Quite true.
Have you seen all the free downloadable Netbooks at Kargatane.com and in the Library at Fraternityofshadows.com?
No, but I know about them now......man, I never realized there was so much Ravenloft fan stuff....
Welcome, Marv! Yeah, as with Lost Heretic, I've had too much fun tinkering with the already established domains. Dementlieu and Har'Akir are two of my favorites.
Yeah, I like to make up stuff for existing domains too, but I don't like to go too far with them.
I'm currently (trying to) makeing one that'll be under the shadowborn cluster, although I'm new to RL and have none of the books so everything spooky-ish is homebrew.
I have a bunch of the books, but none of them say much about that cluster, so I guess making something up is the way to go.
The fungus is comprised of hard tubules, and harbors various highly dangerous symbiotic life forms in it that defend it. Humans are locked in a perpetual battle against the fungus, clearing it away with fire and tools, so that they can clear and build their tiny outposts. The fungus also has psionic properties, seemingly driving people insane with their psychic attacks.
The fungus also grows if left untended, and unexpected fungal blooms can choke and asphyxiate human settlements overnight, leaving nothing but corpses with their brains full of psychic worms and other such horrors.
The secret behind the fungus is that it is mildly sentient, although it appears to be dumb because the vast majority of humans cannot use psionics to communicate with it. It exists as a semiconscious mass that reacts to pain and danger, and it partially directs the vectors of its own growth.
The fungus has a tragic cycle that has endured for several million years. It grows more intelligent as its own mass increases and its processing power increases. However, in order to attain true sentience and to escape from its dreaming state, the fungus must grow exponentially in mass. This has occurred several times in the past, leading to overexploitation of the biomass and ground nutrients, and causing the fungus to die off precipitately. This tragic cycle of growth and death and regrowth means the fungus reaches its maximum sentience and enjoys a brief period of what it recognizes as "intelligence", before dying off and retreating to a tiny core, waiting for the outer layers to rot and refertilize the ground once more. The fungus has never truly "died", but it has just enough sentience to know it once knew a shadow of true intellect. It spends most of its time in a half-dreaming state, unable to react in any way except in instinctive reflex against intruders.
I altered this slightly to fit my own campaign, but I doubt anybody else could use it the way I did because it's a little too specific. But I used the Nintendo child's game of Super Mario Bros. and changed that so it became fairly dark and mature. The mushroom-men, cute retainers of the Mushroom kingdom, were reworked into psychic projections masking the fungus' true monstrous nature. The humans also were not the only sentient animals trying to exploit the fungus - a separate evolutionary tree has brought forth a vast reptilian race that is susceptible to plentiful genetic mutations, and these mutate so quickly between generations that the fungus has never managed to quite wipe them out.
These reptilians take the place of the Koopa turtles in the Mario storyline, giving rise to the winged fireproof, giant, and other variants of turtles you see in the videogame.
In one campaign arc, the humans teamed up with the fungus and finally managed to drive off the reptilians for good, scoring a decisive victory against their leader and trapping him underground in the fungal mass forever. The ending, far from triumphal, was bittersweet.
The fungus acknowledged the help of the humans, and showed its gratitude by producing various crops and fruits that they could use to survive. Nevertheless, the campaign ended on the note that the fungus was expanding furiously into the space vacated by the reptilians, thus hastening the critical mass and the resultant massive global die-off that much faster...