Vampires: the blathering

 Inspired by a comment from The Guvnor on The Gaming Tavern, I’ve been thinking about Ravenloft and The Known World aka Mystara. Although this post then rambles off in a totally different direction. Probably too much caffeine.

There are two regions in the known world where Vampires are said to be prevalent - Glantri and Karameikos. 

In both cases, the vampires seem to have been introduced in the Gazetteers. Glantri didn’t seem to have much in the way of a description before then, apart from Castle Amber and the odd mention in other modules.

However, a province ruled by vampires fits as part of the country and indeed you could easily set Curse of Strahd there with only minor tweaking.

Karameikos on the other hand is an odd beast. Vampires fit in quite well with the cod-eastern-european culture. But very few published adventures set in the country have them. There’s everybody’s favourite Goth Hobgoblin*, King Vlack in Nights Dark Terror. There may be actual vampires in other adventures but on the whole Karameikos is a bit of a low-level adventurer place for tangling with Vampires. Lycanthropes, there’s loads of, right from the original description of Threshold. vampires, not so much.

So what’s the point of this blog then? I don’t know. Except… maybe there could be a better Known World!

There are strong thematic links between Glantri and Karameikos… but they are nowhere near each other. So in a better known world they would be much closer. 

Glantri also has similarities to Darokin so that would be nearby. That’s is the Byzantine empire so that could be the other way. Just get rid of all the slavery stuff *shudder*. Ylarum and Ethangar would be beyond that.

Hmmm, so basically, I’ve come up with a plan to just put all these places in medieval Europe. Averoigne could actually be part of the known world** and all the racist bits could be lost in translation.

So anyway, I seem to have started a new series of posts on the theme: things that I like that are actually rubbish.

* go on name another 

** the known world needs more weird horror.