So I’ve been reading Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft and watching PhDnD’s fantastic YouTube series where he selects one of the ‘Domains of Dread’ from the source books (he also comes up with a couple of his own), explains the basic premise of it, provides a lot of inspirational media to ‘get an imaginative grip on the domain’ (my favorite part) and then sketches out an adventure you can run in that domain. He’s done a couple dozen so far, and I just joined his discord server to see what other domains he will put on his docket.
It is that last thing that has inspired me to try my own hand at building out an adventure for one of the domains myself. I might keep it here, see if I can run it in my own game, perhaps convert it to something I can publish on DM’s Guild, send it in fleshed out in the hopes he can make it into another segment in the series, or who knows? I might try recording my own video with my own take on the process.
I’ll first go over what info the sourcebook gives us about the domain and then dive into what genre of horror I think best suits it, why and how the darklord is being tormented, some bits of media that offer good inspiration, and finally design an adventure for it.
So, the domain I’m trying my hand at first is the domain of Scaena. Here’s the (one paragraph) description of the domain from VRGTR:
Scaena
Darklord: Lemont Sediam Juste
Hallmarks: Reality-manipulating theater
Lemont Sediam Juste fancied himself a serious playwright, and he achieved popular, if not critical, acclaim throughout Dementlieu for his works of grisly horror. But he craved respectability, and with his new play Apparitions, Lemont believed he would find it. The night of the premiere, when the audience signaled their boredom, the playwright was crestfallen. His supporters wanted blood, so he gave them what they craved. By the play’s end, Lemont had joined the play and viscerally murdered every member of the cast while the crowd roared their approval. As the show ended, the playhouse broke from Dementlieu, and Scaena was formed. Comprising a single playhouse, the domain can create any reality Lemont desires upon its stage. The Darklord’s immersive performances are somewhat predictable, though, as they always end in slaughter.
– Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft
One of the things VRGTR provides is a breakdown of the many genres of horror that exist (body horror, cosmic horror, psychological horror, etc.) and lets you know what genre of horror each of the MAIN domains are likely to feature. Since this is not one of the fleshed out ‘main’ domains, we don’t get that, but I think it’s pretty easy to see from their highlight of “reality-manipulating theater” that the best fit for horror genre would be psychological horror. As VRGTR states:
Psychological horror stories create suspense by heightening or calling into question characters’ states of mind, emotions, and perceptions. They often highlight the difference between what characters think and how they behave.
– VRGTR
HOWEVER, this domain is rather unique as the torment the darklord suffers here is not at all that genre, but from a different one entirely! We will be giving the PCs Psychological Horror, but the darklord will be experiencing Gothic Horror. In Gothic Horror:
…[it] is about the terror within, not without. It shatters the illusion of humanity in a poignant way by holding a mirror up to us and saying: look at what we truly are, and look at what we pretend to be. Under that mask of civility, there is depravity. Under that thin veneer of society, there is wickedness. Under all the trappings of sophistication, are we not all predators or prey?
– VRGTR
An advantage of having 2 distinct genres to work with is that, once the players figure out the source of the Psychological Horror they are under, we can switch to leaning on Gothic Horror to keep the horror theme going.
Now, for the inspirational media I can draw from, I started with this line that grabbed me from that description: “the domain can create any reality Lemont desires upon its stage.” Some sources of inspiration to pull from would be The Truman Show, along with the Matrix movies are a good start. Another that comes to mind is the film In the Mouth of Madness, in which a writer gains enough popularity from the public that he can rewrite reality.
But for me, the first thing that sprang to mind was The Twilight Zone: two episodes in particular. One is an episode from when the show was rebooted in the 80’s; a segment of the 15th episode of their first season called “A Matter of Minutes“.
In it, a couple wakes up to the clamor of a crew of faceless blue workers moving their things INTO their house, and all the houses on their street. They don’t see anyone else as they explore their neighborhood and town, only blue work crews everywhere; building structures, arranging a fender bender in the street, adding dirt and leaves to gutters, etc.
They also come across blank white voids where there should be something there. Eventually a ‘foreman’ finds them and explains to them that they have accidentally entered a ‘backstage’ of sorts for time itself. The world is built by this crew of blue workers, minute by minute, ahead of everyone else traveling thru time. The couple SHOULD be with everyone else at the current time but accidentally woke at 11:37am; a couple of hours before it was ready. He explains that the ‘white voids’ they found weren’t mistakes, it was purposefully left unfinished because nobody would be in or see those places during the minute of 11:37am, so there’s no point in completing them.
The foreman tells them that now they’ve seen all of this, they cannot be permitted to go back to the regular flow of time, but they escape and hide until the present catches up to 11:37am, where they rejoin the rest of the world in the ‘present’.
What I like about the story, for this Domain, is the slow realization that the world is a thin facade. Especially discovering the ‘unfinished’ white voids. I imagine a scene in the adventure where our PCs do something unexpected and end up seeing thru the theater facade to see reality behind it. I especially like the faceless blue work crew tirelessly building the facade of continuity in the background. It reminds me of the black-clad stage hands in Kabuki theatre. That’s the uneasiness I would want to create for any players that find themselves in this domain. We’re going to actually work this realization directly into the adventure as a plot point. More on that later.
The other Twilight Zone episode, “It’s a Good Life” which was also part of the Twilight Zone Movie, features a boy with the godlike power to manipulate reality. I want to be very selective in what inspiration I draw from this episode, though, as the central premise of this episode (being at the mercy of a god-child and trying to cater to his whims) isn’t what the domain we are using seems to be about.
In the Twilight Zone episode, the boy manipulating reality is doing so for his own entertainment and doesn’t care at all for what others want. Contrast that with Scaena, where the darklord is a playwright trying desperately to win the approval of his audience despite his own wishes. And this is where we can explore how the darklord of this domain is being tormented by the dark powers.
Unlike the boy in the Twilight Zone episode, he actually wants the approval of others. He doesn’t use the stage to warp reality for his own amusement, but merely a tool to tell a story to his audience. He wants to write more respectable, cerebral works, but his fans are expecting what he’s known for: blood and gore. He wants to grow beyond that, beyond what he now considers dreck. He wants to produce The Sound of Music and the audience wants Fast and Furious 15.
Here I’d like to introduce what I think should be the darklord’s fatal weakness and how, in our adventure, the PCs will have to use to defeat him. I was inspired to think of this Achilies heel for Lemont from an episode of the Superfriends cartoon called “The Rise and Fall of The Superfriends“.
In it Mr. Mxyzptlk, an imp-like creature with reality-warping powers, has captured all the superheroes and is forcing them to act out a screenplay he’s written. As with most occurrences of Mxyzptlk, the only way to stop him is to trick him into saying his own name backwards, causing him to return to his home dimension. In the cartoon episode Superman uses his heat vision to change one of his lines in the script to ‘kltpzyxm’ and tricks him into reading it aloud.
It’s this kind of weakness I want this darklord to have. In the description, Lemont attempts to please the crowd with more and more bloodshed. But the crowning moment of gore that the audience craves, one nothing else could possibly top, would be his own death. Since the description in VRGTR details how Juste joined the cast onstage in order to slaughter them, I imagine the scenario of all the other actors onstage would have prop weapons and armor, and Juste the only one with a real dagger or sword, the mechanics of it should be that only Lemont’s own weapon can hurt him.
But another possibility is the audience being the thing to defeat. It is truly the crowd screaming for gore that Lemont really despises for wanting blood, not the PCs. So another resolution might be instead to sway the audience to appreciate the drama and prose of Juste’s writing. I can see this happening with a series of performance or persuasion checks, once the PCs become aware of the existence of the audience.
So now that we have a finale or two picked out, let’s work backwards and flesh out the other parts of the adventure we want to include. One major story beat I want to have is the reveal that the PCs are not in the real world, but on a stage in the Scaena theater acting out a play written by Lemont. Since this is meant to be psychological horror, it works best as a twist. So neither the PCs nor the players should know.
I envision the PCs are in the heat of battle against some monster, and one of the characters manages to ‘break’ the 4th wall. An accidental (or should I say, unscripted) misstep into a pit trap or off a cliff face that leads to them instead tumbling off the stage into the theater. The illusion is broken, but only for that PC.
They look up to see the rest of the party still on stage, but all of their armor and equipment is fake, their swords wooden props, the spell effects bits of colored ribbons or dry ice waved around by stage hands. The monster they are ‘fighting’ nothing more than plywood and paper mâché with clockwork limbs or strings being worked by a puppeteer from above. Then they look out into the theater to see it is filled with ghouls and werejackels and gnolls cheering on the PCs, or the monster, whichever one is spilling the most blood at that moment.
A couple good sources of inspiration for this are the penultimate episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender called “The Ember Island Players” and “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen“. In the former, one of my favorite episodes in the cartoon series, the whole cast of characters secretly attend a play depicting themselves and their adventures. It has fantastic depictions of period-style theater that works great for a fantasy setting.
The latter has moments in the movie where the titular character sees a play being performed of his own exploits with equally fitting period-style theater effects and props. We jump back and forth from him berating the actors in exaggerated costumes depicting him and his friends to their real-life versions as he tells the audience ‘what really happened’.
I love this idea for the reveal, where those offstage see everyone still onstage to be in exaggerated costumes, theater makeup, and projecting everything they say so they can be heard in the back rows. Meanwhile, those offstage look, behave, and are equipped as they normally are in real life, but the moment they step back onstage, they revert back to their theater costuming and props.
Now we’ll need a setup for all these payoffs we want to see in our adventure. To setup the final boss fight, we’ll need to get them into the theater and onstage (where they enter the onstage ‘reality’ of the domain). Once there, we can have nearly any standard adventure play out – from a simple one-shot to an entire campaign arc – culminating in our envisioned final fight, since they never actually leave the stage. Although we could make this chunk as long as we like, I’d keep it to a one-shot, as we will want to be making perception or intuition checks throughout the time the PCs are onstage to see if they discover the ‘illusion’.
Now some of you might rightly point out that in order to get this pre-scripted ending we’ve written for ourselves, we’d need to railroad our players, and you’d be right! And this is where we get to go real meta by leaning into the fact that the adventurers are stuck on stage acting out a play: Juste HAS A SCRIPT that he is expecting the PCs to follow, and the DM will also have a script that they are anticipating the players will follow. And here’s the brilliant part: the final reveal can only happen when the players have their characters do something unexpected! We work the fact that the players are going to veer off the obvious plot path a bunch, and those moments are when the immersion breaks and the characters see behind the scenes of their reality.
For instance, say we have a plot point where the players are in a village and you know they have two NPCs they need to talk to: the Bartender and the Innkeeper. But, one of the players has their character wander off to see a blacksmith for some reason.
At that moment, when that PC starts off toward the blacksmith, they suddenly discover that they’re walking into a painted background, looking to either side, they see the nearby buildings are merely two-dimensional cutouts with bracing behind them, holding them up.
If they make a series of perception checks afterwards, they notice more and more: that everyone is talking in exaggerated volume or that there seems to be a void taking up a wall or they can hear booing/cheering/heckling coming from somewhere. Eventually, they might see through the entire illusion and see the stage edge, the audience, and Lemont at a desk backstage furiously writing notes in a script.
But if they fail those perception or intuition checks, they turn back around to find the backdrop they walked into is now a ‘real’ street or building again, the mysterious void vanishes, or the sounds of the audience coming from a group of people suddenly appearing (the result of Juste hastily making rewrites to the script to incorporate the PC’s sudden ‘improv’).
So I’d start this adventure with the party discovering promotional posters appearing around town. Posters advertizing the premiere performance of a new play, and it stars the PCs! There are detailed and eerily accurate depictions of them on the posters: I’d lean into details that are far too recent to have been known whenever these posters could’ve been made, like a character wearing a new necklace that they just bought at the market an hour before finding the ads, that sort of thing.
Naturally, they’ll want to investigate this theater production to find out how/why they are involved. I’d have directions on the poster to the Scaena theater – you can make it the location of a theater they already know of, or I like the idea of them having to go thru specific and convoluted positions to reach it (go to the tree in the center of town at noon, walk around it three times, look for the squirrel with a black acorn, follow it thru the mists to the barn, knock three times, etc.)
Once they reach the theater, it should appear empty and abandoned and there should be some sort of obstacle preventing easy entry from the front, but a very obvious path thru a backstage entrance, with signage telling the PCs – by name – that they should enter this way as they are ‘performers’.
The key here is that if the PCs enter thru the front, they will see it is already filled with a crowd ready to see the show; THEIR show. But by entering thru the back, they will make their way onto the stage before having a chance the see the audience in the seats. But as they step onto the stage, the reality Lemont Juste has written for them takes over and the show begins. The PCs are now in Lemont’s reality where they see an empty theater hall and hear the voice of the playwright asking to see them from just offstage.
Here, the playwright heaps praise on them and confesses to making the posters to hopefully catch their attention so he can plead with them to solve a problem for him. At this point, we will run a standard adventure, but we want to make sure we make the theme of this adventure-in-an-adventure heavily based in Gothic Horror.