Lamordia
The Land: Lamordia is a coastal domain in the northwestern section of the Core. A relentless, cold wind usually blows out of the northwest, lashing Lamordia with its fury. In winter, ice floes clog the harbors, and great frozen slabs rear up on the rocky shore. It is not uncommon for Lamordia to be consumed by a blizzard while Necropolis suffers only a drizzle and Dementlieu's skies are clear. In late spring, Lamordia's roads become rivers of deep, clinging mud. In the short, warm summers, clouds of mosquitoes drift across the domain, plaguing the deer and elk. A forested ridge called the "Sleeping Beast" stretches along the eastern border of this domain, sheltering Falkovnia from most of Lamordia's storms.
Lamordia reaches far into the Sea of Sorrows, and several islands off the northern tip of the domain are included in the lands controlled by Adam, the darklord. The Isle of Agony, the largest of these islands, is his usual hideout.
During low tide in summer, a muddy causeway links the islands to the mainland. At that time, it is possible to walk the causeway, but progress is slow, and the mud can swallow a full-grown man to his waist or deeper if he is not careful. Seabirds add to a hiker's worries by diving, harassing, and occasionally even attacking. When the tide is high, water covers the causeway, but in winter, jutting slabs of ice link the isles to the mainland. Still, to cross the ice safely, travelers need ropes and ice picks.
Lamordia has two major settlements: Ludendorf and Neufurchtenburg, each housing fewer than one thousand people. As in other domains, travelers will encounter isolated huts in the wilderness, but the region's harsh conditions attract very few immigrants.
Lamordians are extremely fearful of the Isle of Agony. Some claim it is home to a man-eating sea monster. Others call it "the devil's domicile". No one, not even adventurous young boys, will explore the island willingly.
Cultural Level: Renaissance.
The Folk: Lamordians are tall and fair skinned, with eyes of blue or green and hair ranging from light blond to dark brown. They favor dark, woolen clothing. These independent, hardy folk have learned to withstand the winters in good spirits. Blizzards may keep them indoors, but snow itself is no hindrance. They travel on skis, sleighs, and snowshoes.
The language of Lamordia is different than any other spoken in the Core. The Lamordian spoken language is similar enough to that of Dementlieu that it is easily learned, but it is virtually impossible for a born and bred Lamordian to speak Balok, the language of Barovia, without a heavy accent.
Several trappers live in isolated areas of the domain, as do a few miners, and some shepherds winter their animals on the leeward side of the Sleeping Beast. However, most Lamordians are craftsmen. They spend the winter months carving furniture and building musical instruments. As soon as the snow melts and the roads are passable, their work is exported to other lands. The goods bring an excellent price, a third of which goes to Baron von Aubrecker.
The Lamordian diet is rich in protein and fat. A special pudding thickened with sheep's blood is a local favorite, and goat cheese is a dietary staple.
Native Player Characters: Lamordia has no native priest characters. Most Lamordians hold one of two viewpoints:
Either the gods created life and then withdrew from the world, or gods are the manifestations of superstitious, hopeful minds looking toward an external source for release from their troubles. Lamordians always look for the down-to-earth explanation. While the domain has churches and a small clergy, none of these priests receive spells. Even they assume that the gods have no care for the mundane existence of humanity. Instead, they see their duty as preparing the spirits of their parishioners for the afterlife.
All other classes allowed in the RAVENLOFT setting are found here. Lamordian natives receive a free, crafts-oriented nonweapon proficiency from the General list, and warrior and rogue characters may devote weapon proficiency slots to firearms.
Personalities of Note: The tragic Dr. Victor Mordenheim toils endlessly in his castle, his family estate falling into disrepair around him. Those who have managed to get close to the doctor know that his wife was horribly mangled many years ago when one of his experiments went awry. He seeks tirelessly to cure her.
Baron von Aubrecker and the natives of Lamordia believe the history of their land reaches back to the beginnings of time, but until Dr. Mordenheim and his creation Adam became part of the land, Lamordia did not exist in the Demiplane.
Schloss Mordenheim, the estate of Victor Mordenheim, is north of Ludendorf, on the coast. The estate stands on a cliff, which is dotted with small caves. In spring and summer, the waves crash against the rocks below. Locals avoid this place both because the manor has a reputation for being haunted and because the doctor has a reputation for conducting strange experiments and accidentally allowing deformed beasts to escape from his laboratory. Nearby residents tolerate the doctor, but they do not really like him.
The Law: Baron von Aubrecker, an aristocrat whose family has ruled Lamordia for as long as anyone can remember, maintains his seat of power in a castle perched on the Sleeping Beast, several miles south of Ludendorf. He rules with a light touch, collecting taxes through the mayors of Ludendorf and Neufurchtenburg, while otherwise allowing them to rule the towns as they think best.
Von Aubrecker maintains a token army of 1st-level mounted fighters, equipped with muskets and broadswords, near the Falkovnian border. Monsters are few in Lamordia, and folk are peaceful and law abiding, so Ludendorf and Neufurchtenburg need only maintain small police forces. Whenever some particularly violent or heinous crime is perpetrated, the people often take justice into their own hands.
Encounters: Few monsters roam about in Lamordia. The most common predators are wolves and bears, but they keep to the heights of the Sleeping Beast. The most dangerous encounters will be with flesh golems - escaped subjects of Dr. Mordenheim's experiments. Character have a 25% chance for an encounter once each day and once each night.
Further Reading: Dr. Mordenheim appears in the adventure anthology Book of Crypts, and heroes can square off against the doctor's most successful experiment and the monstrous lord of Lamordia in the adventure module Adam's Wrath. The tale of Mordenheim himself is revealed in the novel Mordenheim.
The darklord of Lamordia is Dr. Mordenheim's most successful experiment in creating life thus far. The monster, named Adam, shares his land and curse with Dr. Mordenheim, although Adam is actually the domain's lord.
Adam
Flesh Golem, Chaotic Evil
| Armor Class | 10 | Str | 20 | ||||
| Movement | 15 | Dex | 17 | ||||
| Level/Hit Dice | 12 | Con | 20 | ||||
| Hit Points | 55 | Int | 16 | ||||
| THAC0 | 9 | Wis | 12 | ||||
| No. of Attacks | 2 | Cha | 2 | ||||
| Damage/Attack | 2d8 | ||||||
| Special Attacks | Nil | ||||||
| Special Defences | Need +1 or better weapon to hit |
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| Magic Resistance | 25% | ||||||
The monster Adam is a patchwork of body parts from different human corpses - each part perfect, the whole grotesque. Large, raised scars crisscross his body and face. This enormous, tremendously powerful man stands more than seven feet tall.
Adam's pale, gray skin is too thin to conceal the play of muscles and arteries underneath. His raven black hair flows long and wild, and at the edge of his eyes and mouth, the skin is bluish and shrivelled. Thin, straight, black lips frame his perfect, pearly white teeth. His small, watery, blue eyes seem loosely anchored in their sockets, barely covered by his eyelids.
Background: Dr. Victor Mordenheim created Adam from the parts of many dead men and gave him life. At first, the creature acted childlike, but Mordenheim had unknowingly infused it with an evil spirit. As Adam grew older, he became increasingly cruel. Finally, the dark powers drew Lamordia into the Demiplane of Dread when Adam murdered the doctor's wife Elise, kidnapped their adopted daughter Eva, and fled into the Mists. That night, he became the true lord of Lamordia, and the land welcomed him.
Current Sketch: As the most powerful being in his domain, Adam has complete control of its borders. He is not Lamordia's political leader and is even considered to be nothing more than a tale told to frighten naughty children. Adam lives as a recluse, usually dwelling in a cave on the Isle of Agony. He is immune to cold and needs little food or water to sustain him. Hence, he can live as wildly and freely as an animal. However, he does not want to be a beast; he wants to be human. He is bitter and frustrated, and sometimes his pent up emotions give way to violence and evil.
Adam despises Dr. Mordenheim but cannot bring himself to harm his creator. The land has bound them together in both body and spirit. The monster feels the doctor's physical pain, and the doctor, in turn, shares the monster's eternal anguish.
Closing the Borders: When Adam wishes to seal his domain, a driving blizzard hurls back any who attempt to leave. These frigid storms have been known to rage even at the height of Lamordia's short summer.
Combat: As the true lord of Lamordia, Adam has been granted many powers by the land. He is immune to natural cold and electricity, but suffers half damage from magical attacks of this type. Other damaging spells harm him normally. He absorbs spells that do not cause immediate damage, using their energy to regenerate hit points (1 point for each level of the spell). Adam is also immune to normal weapons and physical attacks. Only magical weapons can harm him.
The monster resembles neither a common flesh golem nor a lumbering dolt with neck bolts. He is extremely nimble, swift, and clever, using the terrain to superb advantage. He is also willing to retreat if danger is present, allowing the land and its shadows to conceal him. Time is meaningless to Adam, and he can always return another day.
The monster prefers guerilla tactics over full frontal assaults. Like a thief, he can hide in shadows and move silently with an 80% chance of success. He can also detect noise and climb walls with the same odds. While moving silently, his movement rate is halved. If his magic resistance blocks an opponent's spell, he may pretend that the spell has worked, using the falsehood to position himself for an escape or surprise attack. However, he has only a 50% chance of knowing which spell has been cast upon him.
Adam is tightly linked to his creator, Dr. Mordenheim. He can feel any pain inflicted on the doctor, though it does not affect his ability to fight or move.
Victor Mordenheim
0-Level Human, Lawful Evil
| Armor Class | 10 | Str | 10 | ||||
| Movement | 12 | Dex | 17 | ||||
| Level/Hit Dice | 0 | Con | 9 | ||||
| Hit Points | 55 | Int | 18 | ||||
| THAC0 | 20 | Wis | 7 | ||||
| No. of Attacks | 1 | Cha | 12 | ||||
| Damage/Attack | By weapon | ||||||
| Special Attacks | Nil | ||||||
| Special Defences | See below | ||||||
| Magic Resistance | Nil | ||||||
Mordenheim, a scientist and surgeon, appears to be thirty-four years of age. He is six feet tall and has a wiry, if not athletic, stature. His sharp, pronounced features belie an aristocratic background. Though his face is still relatively young, an intense obsession with his work has grayed his hair, so only a few streaks of the original brown remain. A meager diet and reclusive lifestyle have left his skin pale. His blue eyes are tired and muddied, rarely blinking, and he has a constant preoccupied look about him.
Tension plagues Dr. Mordenheim. His tight facial muscles sometimes twitch, and his lips never relax in a smile. The tendons on the back of his hands are taut and raised, and the thin dry skin covering his knuckles is as white as the bones below. He is a man on the edge, but even when extremely agitated, he never loses his temper.
Mordenheim has a distinguishing scar and two small deformities. A fall from a tree at age five left a scar on his forehead that is still faintly visible today. Also, his left earlobe is missing due to another childhood mishap. At the age of ten, he was attempting to perform simple exploratory surgery on his father's favorite hound. The dog, not fully drugged by the bowl of wine that young Victor provided, retaliated the moment its skin was cut. Victor's father refused to have the boy's dangling earlobe reattached. Instead, he instructed the family doctor to remove the lobe completely as a lesson to the little surgeon. At the age of twenty-three, Mordenheim accidentally severed the tip of his own left ring finger when using a surgical saw - a mishap for which he chides himself to this day.
Dr. Mordenheim wears only simple, practical brown woolen suits, never any of the frills or embellishments others of his social status might acquire. In his lab, he dons a surgical gown to protect his garments from blood and other fluids. He wears no jewelry other than a ring with his family crest and a gold watch that was given to him by his wife.
Background: Mordenheim is a gifted scientist and surgeon who became obsessed with the pursuit of knowledge at an early age. While other boys played make-believe, Victor studied the sciences, both modern and arcane. He disdained magic, however, deeming it "a diversion from Truth".
At age twenty-one, Mordenheim married Elise von Brandthofen, much to the surprise of his family and his handful of friends. Were it not for Elise's own persistence, he would never even have met, much less married, her. She was an unusual and intelligent young woman who shared his interest (though not his passion) for chemistry. Unfortunately, she was barren and could not give him children.
Only a few months after marrying Elise, Victor began his research into the resurrection - or more appropriately, the creation - of human life. Thirteen years later, he accomplished his goal and created a monster. Still, although Mordenheim discovered virtually every piece of the puzzle he pursued, the actual spark, the true wonder, was not of his own accomplishment. He was dabbling in the work of gods, and the gods, in turn, dabbled in his.
Mordenheim neither worshiped nor believed in any power higher than man. He was a learned atheist who accepted only that which could be proven. If he revered anything, it was knowledge. At other times, the gods might have tolerated such blasphemy, but Mordenheim had become a festering sore to their sensibilities. So fierce became his desire to create life, so strong his denial of their existence, that the gods decided to grant his wish. They imbued his foul corpse with a twisted, troubled soul, rife with evil intent.
On the night the monster first drew breath, Ravenloft's misty fingers began to tingle with anticipation. In the months that followed, they settled into the soil about Mordenheim's castle, until at last they rose from the earth and surrounded it in a kind of deathwatch. When all hope of Mordenheim's redemption was past, the Mists withdrew from that primal realm, taking with them the castle and all the players in Mordenheim's deadly plot.
Victor delighted in his creation, regarding "Adam" as the child he and his barren wife could never have, but Adam showed an unnatural affection for Elise that terrified and repulsed her. Even when, two years after Adam's creation, Victor introduced a playmate to his creation (a seven-year-old, half-starved orphan whom he had found in an alley near Ludendorf's docks), the situation did not improve. Adam seemed jealous of the attention young Eva (as Mordenheim had named her) received. Such was his antagonism toward the girl that Elise threatened to leave her husband and take Eva away if his attempts to encourage Adam's "social adjustment", using Eva as an experimental tool, were not stopped.
An ordinary man might have heeded the pleas of his wife, but Victor was drunk with the power of his newfound knowledge. His attempts to socialize and educate Adam continued.
One night, Victor's world came crashing down upon him. Awakened by screams, he rushed to Eva's bedroom, only to find the girl missing and his wife in a crumpled heap beside the bed. Looming over her was the monstrous Adam, holding a bloody scrap of Eva's nightgown. Then, with a furious roar, Adam disappeared into the misty night.
Elise was still alive - but just barely. It was clear she would die within the hour unless drastic measures were taken. Now Dr. Mordenheim faced a new challenge: maintaining the spark of life in the woman he loved.
Victor worked feverishly, trying to restore Elise to health. Despite all his efforts, he was barely able to keep her alive. She remained little more than a ragged corpse, in need of ever more complicated machinery to sustain her.
Current Sketch: To the local inhabitants, Dr. Mordenheim is a fiendish madman who conducts unholy experiments in a castle by the sea. They fear him and credit him with powers he does not actually possess. They also credit him with crimes he does not commit. It is true, however, that he robs the graveyards and haunts the hospices in search of newly-dead, feminine bodies. He has, perhaps, even arranged a gentle death or two, using poisons that cause no pain and leave nary a trace. Still, he does not kidnap specimens that are yet warm. That, unknown to most of the populace and even Mordenheim himself, is the work of his brainchild, the monster he named Adam.
Mordenheim's days (and many of his nights) are still devoted to his science, but he no longer seeks to revive the dead. He seeks to restore the living. Elise - or what is left of her - still breathes in his laboratory. Compelled by remorse, and what must truly be madness, he intends to provide her with a new body that all but surpasses perfection. She has regained consciousness only twice since her fateful encounter with Adam. In those brief, moments she cried out for her adopted daughter Eva (whom the monster kidnapped after he attacked Elise) and begged Victor to release her from torment. Her heart continues to beat, but not of its own accord. She lives solely through the intervention of Mordenheim's contraptions. Thanks to the dark powers, he has been striving to revive Elise for centuries now, something which the Lamordians seem strangely unaware of. It is as though they don't notice that Mordenheim remains in his thirties while generations come and go.
Since his creation of Adam, Victor has never again truly revived the lifeless or completely reconstructed the hopelessly maimed. While he has been able to construct several lesser beings - twisted and stupid flesh golems - he has not been able to match the success he had with Adam, nor has he been able to create the vision of loveliness he wants to build for Elise. Without the intervention of the gods that spurn him, he never will. Perhaps some part of him knows this, but in his endless quest for perfect parts and his eternal wait for the perfect moment, he is able to deny the truth: His work is a failure, Elise is gone from him forever, and he is as much her murderer as the wretch who struck her down.
Combat: Dr. Mordenheim is not likely to start a fight. He is a surgeon and has no weapon skills. However, his link to the monster has given him a strange defensive ability. He cannot die unless the monster dies. In fact, he has the hit points of the monster, and his body will similarly regenerate from the slightest piece of flesh. Meanwhile, the pain from his wounds is simultaneously felt by the monster. If Mordenheim's body disintegrates completely, his spirit will seek out the fresh corpse of another human male. Within a week, the new body will change to look just like Dr. Mordenheim.
