#Kali the Dragonborn

[heylittleriotact]

It's Snippet Sunday Wednesday (because time is arbitrary soup and making your own rules is fun!)

I have been snippet-ed-ed by the ever wonderful, ever charming, ever hilarious @thefallenangelsgang and hiatus doesn't mean No Writing At All Ever. No. NOBODY PUTS BABY IN THE CORNER.

Anyway, this is a portion from a WIP document that's lovingly titled "UNUSED" and it's taken on a life of its own and I'll probably finish it and post it as a oneshot at some point.

It's part of a story about the one time back in their adventuring days when Senna decided that the best way to help their cleric friend was to drug her into unconsciousness at the dinner table.

Enjoy!

(Also, forever thanks to @allofthebarks for the absolute joy that is Nayeli <3)

The next evening, Senna sat at a table in a secret demiplane with Kali, Ennic, Nayeli, and her father, Malek: the hulking Efreeti they had freed from the dreadful prison in the fire plane where he had languished for the entirety of his daughter’s life until very recently. 

Upon his return to the inn the night before, Senna had spoken with Ennic and Kali while Nayeli was doing her evening prayers and the three had hatched a plan: bring Nayeli to her father’s safehouse and somehow talk her into staying with him while they ventured to the hells to deal with the matter of her contract… do everything they could to hang the fact that she had a lifetime full of memories to make with her absent father over her head and hope that it was enough to guilt her into sitting this one out. 

It was a terrible idea, and arguably opened her to knowingly breaching the contract if she agreed to it - which she wouldn’t, judging by what Senna knew of the stubborn cleric by now - but no one else needed to know that. 

All that mattered was that they were here, around this table, sharing a sumptuous feast from Malek’s magical pantry as father and daughter continued to acquaint themselves amongst cheerful company. Wine was poured, truths were told, jokes were made and memories too. 

Timeless as this plane was, hours flew by in effortless enjoyment. It was hard to come by guiltless laughter and frivolity for the four thrown-together adventurers these days. Senna found himself enjoying the novelty of well-wasted time with others… a feeling he hadn’t felt deserving of in centuries. 

But there was still work to be done. 

He flipped his silken golden hair over his shoulder with one hand and reached over the table, making to nudge Ennic’s scaled hand away from the plate of massive olives - one of the many delectable treats on the table. “S’cuse me, your lordship.” A jesting mockery of the white dragonborn’s proud noble heritage. 

“Hey now!” Ennic chided, the air around his nostrils clouding as he huffed with indignance. 

Senna popped an olive in his mouth, meeting his scaled companion’s glacial eyes purposefully as he slid the fruit over his tongue and delicately gnawed at the soft flesh, stripping it away from the pit with his molars. 

Kali was pouring herself another glass of wine. Nayeli was speaking loudly to her father, her hands flashing through the air as she regaled him with some tale. Malek stared at her, attention rapt - taking in every word, every motion, every breath of his daughter as if she might vanish into dust any moment.

“You seem… tense,” Senna said, lifting his hand up to draw the naked pit from his mouth, watching the dragonborn’s eyes follow the path of his fingers all the way from his lips to the bowl where the other pits were piled up. His left hand popped the cork from the vial he had procured the night before and as he dropped the pit in his right hand, his left extended over the table in a precise, fluid movement. It passed over Nayeli’s cup of wine - one, two - then back to him, his fingers snagging another olive, the half empty vial secreted in his palm. “Want to talk about it?” He flashed Ennic a devastatingly coy smile. 

Ennic squinted then rolled his eyes, picking up his cup of passionfruit juice and swirling it with dignity. “Ha-ha. Mister I-Hate-Rich-People-And-Look-Good-Doing-It-Because-I’m-A-Pretty-Elf trying to bully me around because of my upbringing. Soooo predictable!” He took a sip and pursed his lips defiantly at Senna. 

Senna arched a brow and chuckled. “I only wanted an olive. You’re the one that made it personal.” He made a point of drawing his lower lip through his teeth, earning a faint rush of pink that sashayed across Ennic’s snout. Next to the dragonborn, he marked the movement of Nayeli taking a big drink of her wine - she was well in her cups and well past the polite sipping she’d been doing earlier. She slammed it back on the table, spilling a few drops before launching back into her story. 

“Look, I don’t know you three the way you know each other, but sometimes I get the sense that you’re not telling me everything.” 

Senna smiled drolly around the second olive, eyes lidded as he stretched his bare arms up over his head luxuriously. “How does one put a definition to something as inescapably broad as ‘everything’ though?” He worked the meat from the olive once more and maneuvered the pit with his tongue to the front of his mouth where he gripped it very, very gently with his incisors. 

Ennic’s rose-pink blush deepened, and his eyes darted away. “Stop that.” 

The pit fell into Senna’s waiting palm and he chucked it effortlessly into the bowl. “Stop what? I’m only eating olives. I didn’t realize that was a crime in this demiplane.”

Ennic’s neck frills flared, quivering slightly and throwing off flecks of frost as his claws dug into the table and he leaned over the banquet to Senna. He opened his mouth to retort at the exact same time Nayeli very loudly declared, “There were orgies in Sune’s temple, but not as many as you would think!” She shot to her feet, downing another mouthful of wine and pointing at nothing somewhere over Malek’s shoulder. “The lookie-loo tourists were verrrrrry disappointed… buncha perverts…” She frowned, swayed on her feet… looked at Senna. The frown became a glare. “You dare–” 

And then she collapsed back down to the bench and folded face first onto the table. Her goblet rolled from her hand onto the table, its contents staining the weathered wood. 

The room turned crimson, then white. Steam billowed off of Ennic as the windowless sanctuary they occupied became unbearably hot in an instant.

“WHAT?!” Malek was on his feet, fists the size of swans slamming onto the table. “MURDERERS!” He roared, white flame blazing from his eyes and curling up his brow.

Huge. He was huge. His arms were as wide around as Senna and he towered over his daughter’s so-called friends, sparks spilling from his mouth as he looked to each of them as if deciding who to roast first.

At the sudden sound of Nayeli hitting the table, Kali had sprung away from the bench, pressing her back to the wall and holding her daggers before her defensively, lip curled in a fanged snarl as her pointed tail cut through the air around her. 

Ennic was staring with an awestruck expression at Malek, and Senna clambered over the table to stand between the enraged Efreeti and the dragonborn, hands held high.

“No! No murder. She’s fine - just sleeping. I swear.” 

This. This was why Ennic and Kali couldn’t know of his plan: better he be subjected to a molten ass-kicking at the hands of an extremely pissed off Efreeti than all of them. 

He ducked under the fiery fist that was barreling towards his face and nudged a pile of rolls off of a silver platter, kicking it up into his hand as he straightened. “She’s fine, see?” He knelt on the table and with deliberately exaggerated tenderness turned Nayeli’s head so she was no longer facedown on the table. He held the platter in front of her mouth and angled it so Malek could see her breath fog the polished surface. 

This appeared to at least somewhat quell Malek’s rage as he appeared to be gripping the edge of the table in a concerted effort to restrain himself from throwing another punch at Senna. The wood under his fingers sizzled and blackened. 

“You had better have a very good explanation as to why you think you can come into my home and poison my daughter in front of me and leave this place alive.” Sparks flew from his mouth with each word. “Explain.” He demanded in a tone that promised painful death should the explanation not satisfy. 

No pressure tags if you feel like it or if you have anything cooking: @allofthebarks, @inkymoonbunny, @roguishcat

[omgkalyppso]

Hello. (◡‿◡)ﾉ✿

You can call me Fate, Kal, Kaly, or Kalyppso.

I generally tag series for my own peace of mind, and characters upon request for people's blacklists. Sometimes I tag characters for comfort reasons.

You are always welcome to ask me to tag characters, concepts and things for your comfort.

I also make things. I have a general #i made this tag, and otherwise use the very common #my art and #my writing tags.

Here's my a/o3. If there's an E rated fic you're interested in reading but you're sex repulsed or w/e, I often have an "ace-friendly" version available upon request; some are just Here.

Some of my oc's which are currently occupying my brain include:

Baldur's Gate 3:

• Étoile (they/he) is my nonbinary high elf Paladin of Auril. Starts as Neutral Good Oath of Devotion Paladin and ends the bg3 adventure as a Neutral Evil Oathbreaker. #oc tag: étoile

• Borgakh (she/her) is a queer half-orc Hunter Ranger who has been an oc for (holy shit) something like nineteen years. She's seen a few different settings, and is often Lawful Good. #borgakh

• Meabh (they/she) is my nonbinary dark urge half-wood elf Assassin Rogue. They're new here. Chaotic Evil. #oc tag: meabh

Fire Emblem:

• Faedolyn (they/them) is my nonbinary fe3h My Unit / Byleth oc, occasionally explored as a student in the Golden Deer House. #faedolyn

• Zoran, sometimes Zora, (he/she) is Faedolyn's genderfluid brother, a student of the Ashen Wolves House. #oc tag: zora(n)

• Avery (he/they) is my nonbinary few3h My Unit / Shez oc. Pulled into Faedolyn's polyamorous relationships. #oc tag: avery

• Almanzor (he/him) is a cousin to Dimitri from fe3h, one of the Blaiddyd Bastards that friends and I concocted as children to Rufus Cassius Blaiddyd before the introduction of Rufus Thierry Blaiddyd. #oc tag: almanzor

• Eugénie (she/her) is my wife to Rodrigue, mother at least to Glenn and sometimes also Felix depending on the au. #oc tag: eugénie

Skyrim:

• Meldiara (she/her) is my Chaotic Neutral dunmer Rogue / Thief type Dragonborn. #oc tag: meldiara

My OC Masterlist

(ง •̀‿•́)ง Thank you for reading!

[feykrorovaan]

Dragonborn running up to the Throat of the world to see papa Paarthurnax:

LDB:"Daddy?"

Paarthurnax, a literal ancient dragon:"Do I look..."

Based on this:

[sephiratales]

Odahviing headcanon

HC that Odahviing is a total dragon bro towards my Dragonborn Kali. Once she defeated Alduin, seeing her freezing on the Throat of the World, he brings her back near Whiterun.

[autumnalmoth]

conceptual face design for a dragonborn-tiefling character im running in a campaign soon :3c

(the horn patterns are carvings and the white marks are cosmetics; the rest of their skin patterns are their natural colours)

[secretagentdragon]

pride pics for my two active dnd chars, Pax Royale (bi, she/her), and Kalis Anzaeshan (agender bi ace, they/them)!

[ultraviolentdraws]

Massive doodle dump. Apparently all I draw now are DND characters, so here ya go. Enjoy.

[solaris-starr]

Pages for Kali’s journal~ This time of her family: her dad and his adventuring party who raised her and her adopted siblings. I love these guys. Theres her dad, Rubun, who’s a fighter, Dragar the dragonborn rogue, Venna the elven ranger with her hawk Fae, Sane the halfling cleric of Bahamut, and Robis the tiefling wizard. 

[gilmores-glorious-blog]

something that no one asked for and no one will understand: those “what your favorite ship says about you” memes but it’s my dnd party/various npcs

brief character descriptions for context under the cut!

rasha: my character, vampire bard, bisexual and very horny for all the npcs, in a slowburn enemies to lovers romance with taer after having bit him, bes is their dead lover

taer: amnesiac half-elf, he/she icon, very sweet to rasha but is also scared of her still from being bit

scamp: my brother’s character, traumatized kobold, is a scaly

junebug: goblin, mom friend, artificer, has a dead husband

rune: we actually retconned her for now but it’s fine,, angsty drow paladin who’s probably gay

alastair: middle-aged monster hunter tiefling, lost his gay lover but we don’t know how

astara: evil succubus, working with the also evil goddess karaza

lyrth: edgy drow, has the same tragic backstory as scamp, hates astara but has fucked her

meran: hot werewolf dude, friends with alastair, got charmed by astara and was sleeping with her for a while

silas: mysterious guy who we befriended but who’s currently betrayed us, had to have an awkward sex talk with junebug when she believed that he and lyrth were fucking

lil’ slippery: this fucking bitch we just met, pretty boy blond elf who’s very dramatic and won’t tell us anything useful, probably fucked kali

kali: rasha’s sister, part of a vampire hunting organization

thamios and celenwe: gimli and legolas but it’s a less problematic relationship

kylar: some random dragonborn we met

[washipink]

Hey, y'all! I drew my oc, Kaly again. Check her out.

[mourningmoth]

hi my name is narkhet-kali sarpa and i have long green tendrils along my scaly back with big black horns with carvings and solid black eyes like the abyss and a lot of people tell me i look like durnehviir (AN: if u dont know who he is get da hell out of here!). im not related to alduin but i wish i was because he's a major fucking hottie. im a tiefling but also a dragonborn. i have mossy green skin and black stripes. im also a necromancer, and i go to a lich school in the bog where im alone and eating roadkill (my bloodline is cursed). im a goth (in case you couldnt tell) and i wear mostly rags. i love hot topic and dumpster dive all my clothes from there. for example today i was wearing a soggy tattered robe with matching algae around it and a necklace of my favourite animal bones and mummified legs. i was wearing white eyeliner. i was walking outside my hollow tree stump. it was foggy and raining so there was no sun, which i was very happy about. a lot of townspeople stared at me. i made my skeletal minion put up its middle finger at them.

[simul16]

Somebody's Guide to Whatever This Place Is

Back in September of 2020, on the final day of the D&D Celebration online event, Ray Winninger, the then-newly-installed Executive Producer of D&D announced that three new campaign settings would be introduced into Fifth Edition D&D in 2021. Speculation over which 'classic' settings would be chosen was rampant, and nearly every old setting had folks who were willing to either predict that setting or at least express a desire for that setting to be one of the settings updated for 2021. (The article linked above suggested that Dark Sun, Spelljammer, and Greyhawk would be good choices, but again, this was more 'these are the settings I'd like to see' then 'these are the settings that are most likely to occur'.)

In the six months that have passed since then, we've gotten confirmation on two of those three settings. The first is Dragonlance, in the aftermath of the lawsuit brought by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman related to a new Dragonlance trilogy that was, in theory, going to be pocket veto-ed by WotC, but is now back on schedule to be published later this year.

The second was revealed in a recent product announcement: in May of 2021, a new setting book, Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, will be released. Few predicted Ravenloft would be one of the two settings Winninger referred to, as WotC had already released Curse of Strahd, a hard-cover re-imagining of the classic I6 Ravenloft module from AD&D days updated for Fifth Edition, and had at the same time allowed folks to update other parts of the Ravenloft setting to Fifth Edition via the DMs Guild. Now that the announcement is official, I'm filled with trepidation as to what WotC is going to do with the full campaign setting.

There are a number of things WotC could do with the setting that would make me at least appreciate if not love the new version of the setting, but I'm not holding out a great deal of hope that these things will actually happen. Nevertheless, I thought I'd note some of those things here as a preliminary 'wish list' of things that would make me happy about the re-imagined 5E Ravenloft, and more importantly, why.

Break up 'the Core' into Islands of Terror

Curiously, this is something we already know will actually happen in the 5E Ravenloft setting, thanks to information included as part of the announcement. Nevertheless, it's a change that has a number of more traditional Ravenloft fans upset.

"The Core" is a group of domains physically connected into a single giant land mass which can be navigated as any other continent on a campaign world might be, either via road, river, or what-have-you. Those who argue that the Core should remain do so under the presumption that, if you plan to use Ravenloft as a campaign setting, you need a way to migrate from one domain to another. There are some domains that aren't part of the Core, either in 'clusters' (smaller groups of related domains 'clustered' together into geographic units like the Amber Wastes or the Verdurous Lands, or as isolated 'islands of terror'. Since these other domains are separated from the Core by the Mists, they are at least in theory harder to get to; there are a few 'Mistways' which can be used to travel from one domain to a cluster or island or vice versa, but those Mistways are by their nature unreliable, resulting in anything from a small to an almost certain chance of not actually ending up where you intend to go. Meanwhile, simply marching down the Old Svalich Road from Barovia will ultimately and unerringly get you to the next domain along the road, unless Strahd chooses to close the borders of his domain, preventing your escape.

So why am I in favor of this change? Because it makes sense given the existing campaign canon. The last books to be published that actually defined and/or expanded the Ravenloft setting were published under license by Swords and Sorcery Studios back during Third Edition, specifically a series of Gazetteers with the conceit that they were written by a mysterious chronicler called 'S' at the behest of the lord of Darkon, Azalin Rex. Included in that chronicle was evidence that the lord of Falkovnia, one Vlad Drakov, had tired of being continually defeated in his attempts to conquer his domain neighbors (this is, in fact, part of Drakov's punishment as a darklord, that his military, supreme within his own domain, is powerless to project his authority outside it) and allied himself with the new Dukkar and de facto ruler of Invidia, Malocchio Aderre, to invade their mutual neighbor Borca. Whether this is simply accidental genius on Drakov's part, or whether he had puzzled out some aspect of his punishment and decided that an alliance with a power that wasn't subject to his personal curse might serve as a way around that curse wasn't made clear, but the underlying assumption was that given the relative military power of the domains in question, unless Borca's allies in the 'Treaty of Four Towers' came to its defense, Borca would not be able to survive the combined forces of both Falkovnia and Invidia and would fall. More to the point, nothing would prevent Malocchio, who is not a darklord, from entering Borca and removing that domain's darklord (or more accurately, twin darklords). The simplest way for the Dark Powers to enforce Drakov's curse and ensure that his mutual invasion with the Dukkar doesn't succeed, or at least results in such a huge cost that the victory likely won't be worth the price, is for the Dark Powers to close the borders around both Falkovnia and Borca; doing so would turn every passage from Falkovnia or Invidia into Borca into a Mistway, and even such a Mistway with 'excellent reliability' would cause the invading forces to be decimated -- 10% of all the creatures passing through the Misty Border would be re-directed to other locations and would thus be extremely unlikely to be able to contribute to the war effort. For an adventuring party, this is irritating, but for an army, where each different member of a unit is part of a larger structure, randomly removing 1 in 10 members of that army results in organizational chaos and disaster. Add in that communications between the army in Borca and its headquarters in Falkovnia also are now subject to the potential for Mist-led misdirection, and that Drakov, as a darklord himself, is unable to pass over the Misty Border at all, and Drakov's curse seems fairly easily enforced as a result.

But if the Dark Powers are going to isolate Falkovnia and Invidia, why not take the obvious next step and simply isolate every domain in the Core from every other domain? It only makes sense.

There is another reason why such a change makes sense, but it's more properly discussed as part of a larger idea:

Tie the changes to the Time of Unparalleled Darkness

Changes in D&D editions have often resulted in changes to D&D's associated campaign settings. The best example of this is actually the Forgotten Realms. When D&D moved from 1st to 2nd edition, the changes in the rules necessitated by this change were propagated to the Realms as part of a Realms-wide event, known as the Time of Troubles (or the Avatar Crisis), where the deities of the Realms were kicked out of their divine realms by the Overgod Ao and forced to dwell on Faerun in mortal forms. Some deities survived, while others didn't, which helped explain the changes in the world resulting from the changes in the D&D rules (the removal of assassins as a class option was justified by the death of the god of assassins during this time, for example). Similarly, when Third Edition was replaced by Fourth Edition D&D, the Realms was subjected to the Sundering, a worldwide disaster that unravelled the Weave, significantly modified the world's geography, and even posited a land swap between Toril and its twin sister world Abeir to explain the sudden appearance of dragonborn, which went from being an optional splatbook race in Third Edition to a core racial option in Fourth. (Nearly all of these changes were undone as part of the move from Fourth Edition to Fifth, but the Sundering still canonically happened in the Realms, continuing to support the changes in the setting that still needed to be justified by rules changes).

A similar thing occurred in Ravenloft, referred to alternately as the Grand Conjunction or the Great Upheaval (and referred to in even different ways in specific domains, such as in Sri Rajj, where it is called the "Rebirth of Kali"), and resulted in a reshuffling of the Core's domains, with some Islands of Terror becoming parts of the Core (Dominia), some parts of the Core becoming Islands of Terror (Bluetspur, G'Henna), some parts of the core being relocated (such as Markovia moving from a landlocked Core domain to an island in the Nocturnal Sea), and some domains being absorbed into other domains (Arak being absorbed into Darkon, Arkandale being absorbed into Verbrek, Dorvinia being merged into Borca, and Gundarak being split between Invidia and Barovia). PCs had the opportunity to participate in the lead-up to this event through a series of six adventures that represented the six parts of Hyskosa's Hexad, a prophecy from a past Dukkar that presaged massive change and destruction in Ravenloft. So in a sense, simply turning all of the Core's domains into Islands of Terror wouldn't necessarily be the most drastic change that's ever been made to the campaign's setting, but the past changes were at least tied to an in-game event that is both known and is significant to the domain's residents.

The Time of Unparalleled Darkness, another prophecy, though this one not from a Vistani seer but from a priest of the goddess of the Mists, already exists in Ravenloft as a future peril (at least it was in the future as of the current date of the setting while it was in the hands of Swords & Sorcery Studios); tying the 5E campaign changes to the Time of Unparalleled Darkness, and simultaneously advancing the campaign timeline past 775 BC (Barovian Calendar), the predicted year of the Time of Unparalleled Darkness, would further cement the event as part of existing Ravenloft lore, rather than making the changes seem arbitrary. This isn't to say that part 1 above (the breakup of the Core into Islands of Terror) has to be contemporaneous with the Time of Unparalleled Darkness -- in fact, a pretty good series of adventures, not unlike the Hyskosa's Hexad adventures, could likely be written as a prelude to the Time of Unparalleled Darkness, with the rising of the Mists occurring in an early adventure as part of the PCs' investigation into the joint Falkovnian/Invidian invasion of Borca and culminating in the event that results in more signficant changes to the domain.

De-emphasize the role of darklords in the setting

In reading about other folks' opinions on the upcoming Ravenloft book, it's a bit surprising to me how many of them are convinced that the 'point' of Ravenloft as a setting is to throw your PCs against the machinations and the will of the setting's various darklords, and I'll admit that Curse of Strahd, looked at simplistically, doesn't seem to go against this premise. Though much of what the PCs do in Curse of Strahd is only peripherally related to Strahd himself, the PCs can't actually leave Barovia without venturing into Castle Ravenloft and 'defeating' Strahd, which opens the way for them to escape. Because of this, a lot of folks who seem to be opposed to the idea of breaking up the Core seem to be basing their opposition on the idea that it would thus be harder for PCs to 'piss off' a darklord and then escape into a neighboring domain, where that darklord holds no sway. (This seems to ignore that most darklords of the Core have the power to close the borders of their domains, thus forcing irritating PCs to 'stay put' and receive their punishment for defying the darklord's wishes, but whatever.)

I happen to think that this is a fundamental misrepresentation of the role of the darklords in the Ravenloft setting, akin to someone believing that a Call of Cthulhu adventure isn't complete until and unless the characters have come face-to-face with one of the Great Old Ones, from which the adventure takes its flavor and inspiration.

To continue the comparison with Call of Cthulhu, the main conceit of that game is that the Great Old Ones are above humanity; so far so that not only can humanity not deal with the very existence of the Great Old Ones (any human who directly encounters one has their sanity shattered as a result), but that humanity is but a tiny speck against the long-term plans and goals of the Great Old Ones. The Great Old Ones don't hunt down and destroy those who defy them; at best, a Great Old One might wave away such irritations as we would wave at a gnat, but the real 'hunting', if it occurs at all, occurs by the cult (or cults) devoted to the Great Old One who take umbrage at their own part of the grand design being thwarted (even though, again, from the perspective of the Great Old One, it doesn't matter which of their irrelevant minions brings about their will, because they know their designs will ultimately come to fruition regardless). The role of PCs in Call of Cthulhu is not to destroy or even defeat a Great Old One, but to defeat a plan set in motion by the more mundane servants of a Great Old One, thus pushing doomsday off for another time, and for a later group of investigators to discover and (hopefully) thwart again.

This isn't to say that Ravenloft has to become the same game as Call of Cthulhu; most of the darklords in pre-5e Ravenloft were once mortal, so their motivations are not nearly as odd and inscrutable as the alien thought processes of the entities in the worlds of HP Lovecraft: the evils in a Gothic horror story are much more understandable and comprehensible than the evils of a cosmic horror story. I'd even argue that the classics of Gothic horror, on which a number of Ravenloft domains are based, are more akin to classical tragedies -- for example, the hubris of Victor Frankenstein in striving to create life causes him to build a monster and almost create a race of such monsters, and it costs him his own family. Victor Mordenheim's hubris is similar, and creates a similar, though slightly different tragedy. In this sense, one could create a Ravenloft domain based on the story of Oedipus and it would fit right in with the other tragic darklords of the setting. This kind of tragedy has a very different feel than the cosmic horror of Call of Cthulhu, and should feel different, though neither strictly fits within the existing structure of how stories are told in D&D.

The other thing that de-emphasizing darklords allows is for the focus of adventures to be put back onto those who fight the monsters rather than the monsters themselves. It's not coincidental or a surprise that the height of the setting's popularity was coupled with the most popular and well-known character unique to the setting (rather than either of the D&D adventures that preceded it): Dr. Rudolph Van Richten. Van Richten is rightly known for being a monster-hunter, yet never once does Van Richten defeat or even directly oppose a darklord; the only two times Van Richten (in pre-5e material) interacts with a darklord are once very early in his career, when the lich-king Azalin Rex helps Van Richten take his revenge on the Radanovich clan of Vistani for kidnapping his son Erasmus, who is turned into a vampire by Baron Metis, and later when Van Richten's stealthy intrusion into Castle Ravenloft while Strahd "sleeps" serves as the framing device for the self-serving version of Strahd's history related in "I, Strahd" to leak out into the Realms of Dread. Van Richten doesn't even defeat every enemy he comes across: for example, the fiend Drigor, whose serial possession of the Mandrigore family is responsible for the series of books known as The Mandrigorian, notably destroys all of Van Richten's adventuring companions, but leaves the Great Doctor himself alive to pass along the tale (as well as live with the error -- assuming that Drigor, the author of a centuries-long series of texts related to fiends and their relationship with the Lands of Mists, was lawful rather than chaotic -- that directly led to their deaths). Gothic heroes, after all, are frequently just as tragic if not more so than the villains they do battle with, and if they fail, as they sometimes do in such stories, it's that tragic flaw that is frequently the cause of their failure.

And as long as we're discussing Van Richten's tragic flaw...

Bring the setting's treatment of the Vistani more closely in line with their portrayal in Van Richten's Guide to the Vistani

When Chris Perkins set down to write his 'blood-soaked love letter to the Hickmans' that was Curse of Strahd, he largely left the Vistani as depicted by Tracy Hickman in that classic D&D module. This, understandably, was not considered a good move, as Hickman didn't even refer to the Vistani as the Vistani in that classic module -- they were 'gypsies' and served Strahd in an odd and inimical way which left them as representing many long-time stereotypes and prejudices of the actual Romani people. The reaction against that portrayal was one of a number of factors leading to last year's WotC announcement on Diversity and Dungeons & Dragons, and that WotC would be "working with a Romani consultant" to refocus their depiction of the Vistani to avoid these harmful and stereotypical assumptions. While the mention of the Romani consultant certainly helps them make their case that they are taking this task seriously when it comes to the Vistani, WotC already owns a much more nuanced view of the Vistani, if only they choose to make use of it.

To go back a moment to our previous item, Van Richten's tragic flaw is his sense of the rightness of his own actions, a tragic flaw that nevertheless doesn't expose itself until very late in the Great Doctor's career, when he finally comes to understand that his very first act as a monster-hunter, destroying the Radanoviches who were involved in kidnapping his son, caused him to be the target of a deadly Vistani curse. The twist is that the curse is not deadly to Van Richten himself, but to those who stand with him and whom he comes to care about, and it contributes to their destruction while leaving Van Richten himself alive to continue to spread woe just as he also brings hope. (See above for the tale of Van Richten versus Drigor both for another example of Van Richten's flaw as well as the operation of the curse.)

The story of how Van Richten comes to realize he is laboring under a Vistani curse, how he unwittingly cast a curse upon the Radanoviches as well, and how he and a Vistani whom he comes to know and befriend work to overcome their mutual curses forms the framing device for "Van Richten's Guide to the Vistani", written by David Wise, published by TSR in 1995, and inherited by WotC when they purchased TSR in 1998. Van Richten's Guide to the Vistani is one of my favorite game supplements of all time, for any game, and deserves to be remembered as more than just the supplement that provided rules to allow players to make full Vistani characters. The main reason why this supplement works so well (at least for me) is that the supplement humanizes the Vistani by having Van Richten travel with his new Vistani friend and living with different groups of Vistani, learning about them and the strange and wonderful (and terrible) things they can do.

No one doubts that there can be evil Vistani, just as there can be evil orcs, drow, and humans. The issue that some inelegantly fear will happen, though, is that rather than being portrayed as a complex culture of different views and perspectives, the Vistani will be 'Tolkienized' in much the same way as elves were within AD&D, made into a race that is strictly better than human in nearly every way. I don't believe that this is what is going to happen to the Vistani, however; if only because the old-school 'elves are awesome' perspective has already been unwound by the current design team in many ways (for example, by removing the racial-specific requirement to be a bladesinger). My concern is that the Vistani will become just another 'hat' that a PC can put on to look different than the default without actually having to be different from the default.

My biggest piece of evidence in favor of this approach is not the removal of culturally-specific items from each D&D 'race' (like bladesingers, which traditionally were elves, now coming from any race), but an argument made by a former administrator in the D&D Adventurer's League during the season in which Curse of Strahd was the feature hardcover, and in which all the associated AL adventures took place in the domain of Barovia. The first adventure in the series took place in the Forgotten Realms (the default setting for AL at the time), and described a family of wanderers from Barovia who physically resembled Faerun's version of a Romani-type culture: the Gur. It would make sense that typical residents of the Realms, unfamiliar with Ravenloft and their Vistani, would refer to this family as a curious tribe of Gur, since that's the thing they know. But this admin took the comparison a very large step farther, positing that every Romani-like or Traveler-like culture in any D&D campaign world was actually that world's version of the Vistani; in effect, positing the Vistani as a planar culture that simply goes by different names on different worlds. While this might be an interesting idea to posit with a new race of beings in D&D, my problem with this theory is that the Vistani are so closely tied to Ravenloft and iconic to that setting, that simply declaring that the Gur are 'Faerun's Vistani' is just as reductive and stereotypical as saying that the Gur are 'Faerun's Romani'. You're not solving the problem of problematic representation by claiming that every iteration of a real-world culture in fantasy is actually a copy-paste of a single view of that culture; if anything you're reinforcing the idea that any negative view of that culture in any setting is justified in all settings, simply due to the equating of that culture in one D&D world with the same culture on any other D&D world.

So the Vistani should remain unique to Ravenloft, in my view, and while a Romani consultant can certainly help with tweaking the portrayal of Vistani characters and the Vistani culture to be less overtly problematic, I don't see how it helps the Vistani retain their unique character that has helped them become such a well-known part of the Ravenloft campaign setting. More than just about every other work in D&D history, "Van Richten's Guide to the Vistani" actually does this, presenting the Vistani as a unique culture with its own drives, values, and heroes, while showing that the Vistani culture does not always agree with the 'default' cultures presented in other parts of the setting.

Perhaps I'll be pleasantly surprised on this topic, and the same designers who ultimately figured out that the alignment rules as presented in the Fifth Edition Players Handbook suggested that sexism was bad, but racism was surprisingly OK and decided to do something about it will take a similarly nuanced approach toward the Vistani in their new Ravenloft setting book. Unfortunately, I think a much more likely approach will be to do exactly what that AL admin thought was such a great idea; since they'll have gone to all the trouble to finally make 'good gypsies' for Ravenloft, they'll save themselves a lot of potential work by simply declaring that every Vistani-like culture in any other D&D setting is just the Vistani by another name, thus making every Romani-like or Traveler-like culture in D&D into the 'good gypsies' by default, erasing any question of cultural complexity or questionable flavor in the hope of being more palatable to a mainstream audience that wants to believe that their new Vistani character is just as good as the default, but doesn't want to be bothered to learn why.

[yourplayersaidwhat]

Bad Dog

Context: The party have been tracking down the big bad, the leader of a criminal organisation known as The Crimson Vipers. They recently started their first ‘dungeon’ and have taken a beating from a bunch of thugs who were waiting for them. The Dwarven Ranger (Hazine) is unconscious, the Tiefling Warlock (Akmentai) is annoyed that people are stealing her kills, the Dragonborn Barbarian ('Chills’) is stealing said kills (and has a broken foot), the Elven Cleric (Kelinor) is trying (and failing) to look intimidating, the Elven Druid (Kali) is watching her new Giant Python crush a thug to death, and the Human Fighter (Yukimura) is riddled with crossbow bolts and just hit 0 HP.

DM (Me): As the mace slams into your chest you feel the air knocked out of you as blackness takes over your vision. I need you to make a Constitution Save.

Yukimura: *Rolls, knowing what’s going on.* 14?

DM: As Yukimura hits the ground, you all feel a sudden draw to look at him. As you watch, his face seems to change shape elongating into a snout, his fingers lengthen and grow claws, and thick fur sprouts all over his body. He stands again, no longer the Yukimura you all know as the wolf lets out a howl. Kelinor, what do you do?

Kelinor: Is he friendly?

DM: You have no idea.

Kelinor: I’ll just watch and wait then.

DM: Kali?

Kali: My snake crushes the guy and I do nothing.

DM: Noted.

Hazine: *Is stable. Does nothing*

DM: Chills?

Chills: I roar at it!

DM: Roll intimidation

Chills: *Rolls* 6?

DM: Okay. Akmentai?

Akmentai: I’m just watching.

DM: Okay then. Yukimura’s turn. As you let out your roar Chills, the wolf turns its head, snarls, runs at you and attacks!

Chills: Damn it!

[pixiedurango]

PEOPLE, SHOW ME YOUR DRAGONBORNS 

I know I’m late to the party (well actually its my third playthrough but the first two had been before my tumblr)  and I have no idea who of my followers and mutuals is also still into the game, but I’ll give it a try.

tumblr, meet Urzun’Ghal Khasandar

Orcish Dhovakiin, Stormcloak, Nightingale and Leader of the Rifton Thieves Guild, Alphawolf of the Whiterun Companions but currently being a Vampire to get shit done and running Volkihar Castle. Head of the Dark Brother(Sister-)hood and Arch Mage of the College of Winterhold. Mother of two adopted badass little girls who rather play with Daedric daggers than with dolls. Master Merchant of Skyrim who’s known to make her housecarls her shop attendants 24/7 selling all the worthless crap she brings from her travels. Owner of several estates and thane-ships across the country and just recently builder of houses in the wild. Best friend with Serana the snarky Vampire and Mjoll the Lioness from Rifton who are her favorite companions and best friends. 

Super sneaky archer and wielder of two deadly daggers or one overpowered sword. Occasionally fire and ice mage.  Notorious for getting her horses been slain in no time and being the worst at pickpocketing but the best at lockpicking. Shit at Alchemy, can barely cook, too which in her eyes is like... the same fucking thing. Will stop sneaking through a draugr filled dungeon just to mine some iron and let her team mate do the fighting while going around looting the shit out of every corpse, urn and chest. Just likes... the shinies™.One of her ancestors might have been a goblin. Or a dragon, HAHA!!!!! Always on the verge of carrying too much around for this reason. @sephiratales (maybe this is of any interest to you and maybe you want to ad your own Dragonborn Kali with a few words and pics and then tag some people to do the same)

[sephiratales]

Still working on Kali and Vilkas’ story. I can’t explain exactly why but they are my fav relationship to write. I mean, of course I love the other relationship I’ve created/written, but these two are the death of me. Even if I write the fic, I’m still melting when I read them.

They are too cute together.

[keithissmellierthanvoltron]

More art of my boy, Amvyll, this time getting cozy with the girl he’s crushing on. In-game he’s only gotten as far as going out drinking with her and telling her she’s pretty, but there’s nothing saying he can’t dream of more. Her name is Kali Atke, and she’s a Tiefling Circle of Dreams Druid. The little Dragonborn girl is Kildara Toriv and she’s Amvyll’s best friend.