Design Journal- One Night Strahd in Mörkbörg (part 2)
I have been re-writing Castle Ravenloft in the world of Mörkbörg, with the intent to run as an extended 1-shot. You can read Part 1 here.
Design principles for this iteration
The Underclock (known as the Ravenclock here. I had a convoluted random encounter table that was too much trouble for it provided for a 1-shot and replaced it with Goblin Punch’s Underclock. I wanted something player facing to help build tension amongst them. I also already owned a physical prop of the Tarrokka Deck from Curse of Strahd to stand in as the physical representation. For the rules, I tied each suit of the deck to one of the four factions with the high deck representing special circumstances (ranging from neutral to mildly helpful). I then hand-picked 20 cards to build the encounter table.
Streamlined bestiary. My first attempt tried to incorporate as many monster statblocks I could find or create; in play, we saw a small percentage of those. For this time around, I cut many of the monsters, and for those that remained, I streamlined the statblock. This allowed me to keep each factions’ monsters to a single A5 page. I would have to use the environment or situation to diversify encounters (and there were still eighteen monsters in the bestiary).
Simplified objectives. Only one thing to do: find a way to get out. This involves a quest for any of the factions and I gave that information away the first time they met each faction. Previous iterations didn’t much guidance to the players, so I wanted them to have a clear solution to their goal within the first 30 minutes of play. Also to mix it up, I threw them into the Dungeons to start (buried alive!) which really only gave them one direction to go, up.
Sandbox Faction play. There are 4 factions with their own agendas who don’t really care about the PCs. They are free to work with or manipulate any of them to suit the characters’ needs. This was a big change from everything in Castle Ravenloft works for Strahd and wants to kill you.
Death is not the end. The biggest change is that instead of rerolling a character after death, you pick up a class from Kill Your Necromancer. You return as a ghoul, then zombie, then skeleton and finally ghost. Reminded me of Jack from American Werewolf in London getting decomposing each time we saw him.
Landmark, Hidden and Secret info style. I have read and adopted this playstyle since the first edition and wanted to wanted to align with my current GM style. Without messing with the page layouts too much I had to compromise and ended up with a combined Hidden and Secret section (italicized), relying on my judgement in-situ to determine what was free and what came with a check.
Telegraph Traps. Similar to the above, I wanted less “gotchas” from the original Castle Ravenloft funhouse and to instead turn those into puzzles with deadly consequences. I had already highlighted traps in my notes with a big red TRAP so all it took was adding a preamble warning from d4 Caltrop’s list of clues and tells for traps.
How it turned out
I’ll start with the bad. The original Castle Ravenloft is just too big to do in a standard session, even with consolidated rooms, a rules light system, and a dedicated time to play. This time around we had the weekend together and I planned for two shorter sessions to give everyone a chance to recharge midway through. They spent a lot of time in the dungeons opening crypts for loot, seemingly unafraid of the Ravenclock counting down for each disturbance. I eventually had to force them to pick one last crypt and then move on (no complaints from the players when they realized the real-life time crunch). Once they got going, they made steady progress but it is just too big. We called it with about ninety minutes of play left.
Ok on to the good.
The combats went well although some of my players still have the D&D mentality of killing as the only solution. Once I said, they no longer pose any threat to you, that generally triggered a shift back to exploration/roleplaying mode but not always. My players just have this bloodlust I guess. One fight in particular with a beguiling vampire/bug thing comes to mind. If the PC rolled under a 10 for an attack then it would hit a nearby ally. They all decided to go into melee range of each other and make as many attacks as possible despite several of them being absolutely dismal at combat. They even discovered that showing her reflection would prevent her from taking an action on her turn, but they did not want to retreat and come up with a clever solution so just kept killing each other. I think we had 3 PC deaths from that fight alone, all from friendly fire, although admittedly, it was absolutely hilarious especially when the PCs came back as undead and then would get taken out again.
The Ravenclock was a success as well. It wasn’t distracting to draw cards during exploration and when we revealed the last card, you could feel the tension as the players tried to figure out what “the beggar” would mean for them. And, as hoped, the threat of increasing the die size for how many cards to discard was scary to the players and much more effective than actually doing it.
Returning as undead was the MVP. I kept it a secret until the first PC death and then revealed the shambling ghoul sneaking up on them was their former colleague! Then I got another round of laughs when that ghoul died and stood back up as a zombie the following turn.
Factions freely giving up information was critical. The players picked up on what they needed to do to escape and started asking questions on how they could do it as both characters and players. They still got factions and quests mixed up but they have always been reluctant to take notes.
Recommendations
Overall, I’m pretty happy with how it ran even if we didn’t finish. At this point, I don’t think I’m going to adjust any of the room descriptions or monsters but I will make some tweaks to the base rules of the game.
I need to fix the crypts. I think without my intervention, they would have spent the session opening crypts. I think I just have to artificially limit it, maybe with shoddy demolition tools that break after d3-1 uses. Alternatively, I could turn this section into a deck builder for the Ravenclock. Each crypt opened nets them some sort of loot but removes easier encounters from the deck permanently (so you also get encounters more often).
One change I may incorporate with Death is Not the End is varying which undead you come back as. I think it would be fun if it were a function of how you died. Dying from a slit throat means you come back as a ghoul but getting flesh, bones and organs crushed by a giant stone means you go straight to ghost.
Long-term plans
If I get to a “final” version of Return to Ravenbörg, I am concerned that my players will eventually start remembering rooms so I would like to eventually incorporate a randomizer function. The Ravenclock deck builder (see above) is a way for the players to influence the session they’re going to play. Another way would be to use the Tarrokka Cards at the beginning to define the history of the Castle and what position the factions are in. That would require a pretty big rewrite to the room descriptions to make them swappable between the various factions, however.
I also would love to release this to the community eventually but I think I have directly lifted too many things from too many sources to release, even for free. Maybe after another playtest or two I’ll look into what it takes to release. If you’re interested in some of the material I used, send me an email at tonightssession@gmail.com and I’ll share where you can find what has inspired me.