So to give you an idea of how the corn maze one shot went we decided it ended on a pastel chalked freeze frame of the party's werewolf, wearing a fancy Victorian dress, sprinting away on all fours with a magic staff clutched in her teeth while the rest of the party, including a necromancer and a hopping scarecrow, chase her through a corn field.
One concept I'm playing with in the Darkon game I'm running is that reality is a little... squishy in #Ravenloft. So the current plot the players are involved in has the Church of the Overseer (or more accurately their head Derakoth) attempting to manifest their fake God into reality and in the body of Tavelia, the Kargat vampire who enthralled him.
And then later on I'm going to play with the concept when it comes to the Alanik Ray subplot, in particular the fictional-in-universe Adam Worth.
When the players themselves visit the falls I have an idea for an encounter where they run across a "phantom" of Adam Worth reenacting this battle, which at this point is famous across Ravenloft through the books. Except it's not quite Adam Worth and occasionally the fact it was Alcio bleeds through in places.
It's gonna be a bit until the players get to this point but I think it'll make a cool encounter and few things are as epic as a battle on the top of a waterfall.
And the name Adam Worth is itself a reference to real life and the man considered to be the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes' nemesis James Moriarty. So we have layers and layers of fiction and reality at work here.
It also resulted in a significant shift to an upcoming plot where in the original 2e Ravenloft campaign a wealthy rug maker named Stefan Dyreth has staffed his factory entirely with zombies that are actually reanimated children.
I'm keeping the general structure of that plot, except the zombies are all adults. Zombie kids are a step too far for me.
When I worked at Barnes & Noble it was peak Hunger Games ripoff years so we invented a Mad Libs for the genre.
It was something like "In a world where [blank] our protagonist [blank] is a conventionally attractive white girl who is special because [blank] and on her 16th birthday must Choose [blank] while caught in a love triangle between a [blank] suitor and another [blank] suitor."
I bought the first of the #CiaphasCain books on audiobook and as a relative newbie to #Warhammer40k I like that it gives more of a ground level look at the world.
It's also funny to me that chuds in the 40k fandom I have encountered through the genral tabletop community are very "No girls allowed" but the main unit in these books is a mixed gender unit.
My most black-pilled opinion on tech is that The Algorithm is to blame for a lot of the ways our world is actively getting worse, as are the people who created and continue to maintain it.
Since I now consider it within an acceptable time frame to promote it, my holiday #DnD5e adventure!
Fight holiday monsters, adventure through the snowy land of Midwinter, possibly resolve an HR dispute and more in "Someone's Halls Are Getting Decked" now on #DMsGuild!
And, while you're at it, my bard subclass the Mari Lwyd is also on sale. If you have ever wanted to put a horse skull on your head and rap battle your opponents, now is your chance!
My advice to anybody who wants to #DM is just embrace the chaos. Because some of the funniest bits have been the result of me having to come up with something on the spot.
Which is how we ended up with Tim Gunn as a gnome as a shopkeeper NPC, and he has since made several other appearances and ended up with a family connection to another fairly major NPC.
Since I'm almost done with the current D&D campaign I'm DMing I've started preliminary work on the next one which is going to be #Ravenloft Darkon. I'm gonna end up taking bits from different editions rather than sticking with 5e canon.
There is a lot of interesting stuff in previous editions like the whole deal with the Necropolis and "Death" but the idea of Azalin being gone and the domain starting to collapse is very interesting to me so I'm doing the "Why not both?" method.
Looking for a Halloween one shot adventure for your #DnD5e party?
Take a trip to the Shadowfell in Samhain Eve: The Masquerade as guests of Queen Mab and meet a variety of unseelie. But watch out, because something out there plans to crash the party.
I just did the #DM cackle. Inspired by something that happened to me while playing Baldur's Gate 3 I decided that the next time the party fights they're going to do so in a cellar that has a bunch of barrels in it and see if they can figure out that they are full of dwarven liquor. Several of them have fire spells, so it's a test to see if they can figure out they should probably not do that in there unless they wanna get blown up.
I'm also feeling especially evil this week because in the game there's a safe with a DC 30 lock that I spent like 5 minutes trying to crack and it turns out to be empty except for the skeleton of a guy who got locked in there.
My favorite refutation of the "The Egyptians were too good at pyramids, they must have had aliens help" argument is how there are multiple pyramids that straight up fell down and the one where they changed the angle halfway up because they realized it wasn't gonna work (the Bent Pyramid).
It was a process to figure out how to do it right filled with multiple failures. Survivorship bias means that only the ones that were built best are still up.