New Domain Lord of Ravenloft

Yes! I have finally done it! I have usurped control of the Gardens from the Baron. And now to put my evil plans into motion! Mwhahahaha!

Actually, don't believe a word of it. The Baron has been kind enough to let one of his lowly henchmen take over moderation of the Gardens in his absence and I was fortunate to be the one chosen for this honor. So, I will do my best to maintain the high standards that the Baron brought to this group when he first formed it and continue on with his work.
Now, as my good friend Tamerath has recently stated we intend to try and keep the ball rolling as far as the online Ravenloft game idea is concerned. While Tamerath is busy exploring the real-time game possibilities, something that I hope to help him with and be a part of (of which I will say more in his thread on the online game) I am still interested in doing a play by post. I believe both forms have merits of their own and I don't want to give up on the play by post idea before ever really giving it a chance. With that in mind I will be exploring what I can and can't do over the next couple of weeks. But as Tamerath has also stated, it may take a while as time is not in over abundance with me as well. So anybody who is interested, please bear with me and keep and eye out for further updates on this thread concerning the play by post.

Well, as you can see I've figured out how to post a map here. This is one I drew several years ago. It wasn't at all difficult and it's better than I could have hoped for actually because by placing your cursor over the map you can enlarge it to look at details. This will work great for what I have in mind.

Alright, I have worked out a lot of the details and have come to some decisions on how I want to try and run the play by post. For the most part, everything that the Baron set down in his PBP rules holds true with me but with a few exceptions (See the thread: "Vaults of Silence: A Ravenloft PBP").

1) I will have to run it in 3.5 or 2e. I'm thinking 3.5 will be most likely as it seems that most interested parties will be more familiar with it. However, if enough people would prefer 2e (which I am most familiar with) then we will go with that instead.

2) One of the biggest rules that the Baron emphasized in his list of rules is that no PCs will be allowed to attack other PCs. Normally, I might agree with this. But in this case I do not. The reason for this is that I don't want any players thinking that they have nothing to fear from certain other characters. The fear of not knowing who you can and cannot trust is a big part of Ravenloft and there may be times, for example, when, unknown to you, your buddy has been turned into a vampire, and you won't find out until he attacks you. Part of Gothic horror, after all, is a sense of paranoia and a fear of the unknown which means that characters (and players) should not be absolutely sure of anything.

3) Keeping the above rule in mind, I do however highly advise players to run good characters for two reasons: One - to keep unnecessary backstabbing out of the game; and Two - more importantly, to give the player the best chance possible to continue playing his/her character. What does this mean? For those who may be unfamiliar with certain rules of Ravenloft, every time a character does anything that might be considered evil or anything related to necromancy a Powers Check is made. A Powers Check is a percentile dice roll to see if the evil Powers that rule over Ravenloft take note of that character's action. If the Powers do take note they might reward that character with some kind of power or ability while at the same time slowly begin to transform the character into a monster. If a character fails enough Powers Checks it becomes a monster, which means it also irrevocably becomes an NPC run by the DM. So the less good a character is, the more likely it is to eventually turn into a monster. For evil characters (run correctly) it is only a matter of time. For neutral characters, it will take longer, but they might also eventually become monsters as well.

Now, despite the fact that I advise all players to run good characters, I'm not entirely opposed to let one or two players slip in with neutral or even evil characters, provided that they realize it might be a real short run for that character. Chances are, the other good characters will get wise to any evil character in their midst long before it gets turned into a monster and will either be forced out of the group or killed.

4) Because of this, and for other reasons, I do not want any of the players to reveal any information about their characters whatsoever (most especially alignment) that isn't obvious by that character's appearance (except to me of course). In other words, when we start up the play by post, each player will introduce their character by giving a description of the character's physical appearance and nothing more - not even the character's name. Everything else will be revealed through role playing. Now, in the interest of trying to develop a balanced party, the players will be allowed to state to each other that they are running one of the following:

Warrior (if running a fighter, paladin, ranger, monk or barbarian)
Divine Spellcaster (if running a cleric or druid)
Arcane Spellcaster (if running a bard, sorcerer or wizard)
Rogue (if running a rogue, gypsy <the class> or thief)

All other info will be revealed to the DM only via PM or through e-mail. Once we have figured out who will be playing and they have figured out who will be playing which of the above four kinds of characters the players will then fill out a character sheet at home and then e-mail a copy of it to me. Then every time a character moves up in level, and the player has made all the appropriate adjustments to his/her character sheet, then that player will again e-mail me the updated version so that we can both have accurate copies of the character sheets.

5) I am also thinking that I will start up a social group specifically for the play by post so that I can be sure I can always moderate it. But also so that I can set certain parameters for the group. For instance, I would like to make the threads available for those outside the group to see what is going on so they will hopefully become interested in joining in, but at the same make it so that only members of the group can post there, making sure there is no outside interference. Another reason for creating a play by post group is to possibly take advantage of the dice roll generator there. Now, initially I intend to do the dice rolling as we had agreed on previously, where the DM takes care of all dice rolling. But at some point in the future we might also experiment with the roll generator.

Later on I will create a post giving an example of how I hope and expect the format of the posts to look, for both players and DM. I would like everyone to follow this example in order to avoid any confusion but also to avoid using game terms or other OOC questions or comments in the main text of the posts, which should read something like a Gothic horror novel written by numerous authors.

Nice job,Continue.........