Sunday, December 4, 2011

What the Dark Country is Like

I know that I've spent a large amount of this blog trying to express the feeling of the Dark Country, but I was inspired by Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque to put it into a more concise form.



The Dark Country
Precis: A wet and mountainous haunt of pagans, vampires, and satanists.  Hammer Horror meets The Baltic Crusades with a dash of Diablo I for taste.

Conspectus: undead Templars; The White Lady and her bestial servitors;  pagan rebel groups and secret societies; satanists masquerading as clerics;  horrible nature "deities" that demand sacrifice;  bickering city states and bishoprics;  wild eyed mercenaries who believe they kill for God; werewolf villages hidden the woods; fogbound forests; ruins tainted by foul sacrifices; haunted battlefields; Frogling caravans with perversely magical wares; secretive necromancers probing the nature of humanity;  human sacrifice; villages besieged by unseen forces; the Great Swamp; cyclopean ruins older than humankind; the Mountain King and the last kingdom of the dwarfs; Black masses; the Devil; mindless vampires; glowing horrors created by a magician's mad experiments; fearful peasants; lots of frogs; the haunted and endless ruins of Nightwick Abbey

Taste, Sound, Image: A mouthful of mud, Pagan Altar Volume 1, Roger Corman's Masque of the Red Death



Does that sound about right to everyone else?

9 comments:

  1. Sounds pretty cool really. And a nice way to set it out.

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  2. I like this. I have given some thoughts to using the "system" for describing the Lands Beyond the Drowning Woods. Nice to see you using it too.

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  3. I have to admit that when I first read of "the Dark Country" I envisioned it lying 'between forests'.

    captcha = brann. O.O

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  4. Thinking of maybe setting my next game in The Dark Country, or someplace very similar.

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  5. Thanks all.

    I have to admit that when I first read of "the Dark Country" I envisioned it lying 'between forests'.

    It's more of Hammer's interpretation of Transylvania than the actual Transylvania. As such it has a lot of forests and fog machines.

    Thinking of maybe setting my next game in The Dark Country, or someplace very similar.

    If you do decide to use the Dark Country, I'd definitely like to hear about it. It would be fascinating to see what another DM did with a setting I made.

    I'm going to be too busy with other projects for the next few weeks, but after about Christmas I plan on revisiting the dark country and making all new monsters, tables, and other nonsense for use with LotFP.

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  6. 1. It indeed sounds like a perfect description of the Dark Country from what I've read over time here and from my limited experience in-game.

    2. You really need to write this up and publish a setting book, Evan. Seriously.

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  7. Yes, please give us a setting book. I'm dying to get something I can actually use out of the box, maybe with some hexmaps and all. I'm hoping knightly intrigue will be included...

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