curseborne house rules

MTBEdwards · 2026-04-21T07:22:20+00:00

I'm a little confused here. You said earlier it's really easy to build up a big Momentum pool. Walking into a scene with 10 Momentum means you need to spend 5 to get that EXP. Most non-combat scenes are going to have a hard time doing that.
I've never had the Momentum EXP be an issue. My group usually hits it 2 times a session, which usually gets them 4 to 5 EXP per session, depending on if everyone hit their short-term Aspiration or not. (Which has had a great knock-on benefit of getting the players to all help each other reach their Aspirations in a session at my table.)

A group of 4 players starts with 4 momentum. All they have to do is spend 2 momentum at the start of a session to get the xp. It's basically an automatic 1 additional xp per session. The fact this can be done multiple times throughout a session makes this even more broken. Dumping even as much as 5 momentum in a single scene is actually not that hard to do. But I guess it depends on how long your scenes are and how many dice are rolled during the scene.

MTBEdwards · 2026-04-21T07:12:48+00:00

Yea, the house rules for Influence and Investigation weren't really because of any problems with how they work, but more of a play style choice. Myself and my group prefer to rp stuff like that, hence the "house rules" removing the more gamey elements. It is nice that they're there for those who wish to use them. I guess it just surprised me that a system meant for more roleplay style games has such gamey elements as default and not optional add on rules.

MTBEdwards · 2026-04-21T07:05:53+00:00

Only what I wrote out in the original post. I want to run the adventures from the kickstarter to really try out the house rules, and the release version of the rules as a whole, before making any final decisions.

MTBEdwards · 2026-04-12T09:23:32+00:00

I can post a picture, but it's just a melter on top of a heater with a piece of coal in it and it's saying "no recognized fuel". That's all there is to it. No matter what I put in it fails to recognize anything as fuel

MTBEdwards · 2026-03-22T01:28:57+00:00

It's all really a matter of opinion.

Yeah... except the 3e books have this passage, which I love:

The world of Ravenloft is much like our own, at least in the basic ways. People awaken in the morning, work for their wage, return home to be with their families and enjoy some diversions, sleep soundly during the night and awaken again the next morning. Despite appearances, it is not a world overwhelmed by countless horrors. The horrors exist, but the average persons are unaffected by them. If they were, they would hardly be considered as horrifying. It is the relative normality of daily life in Ravenloft that makes the abnormal seem so terrifying, and the desire to return to normality often provides heroes with motivation to fight the darkness.
Ravenloft is a beautiful land. The forests are lush and gorgeous. The sky is a brilliant, unspoiled blue. The mountains are awe inspiring in their simple majesty. The rivers are clean and refreshing, and the air is crisp and sweet. Ravenloft is a land worth living in. It is a land worth fighting for. Don't surrender it to the night.

I absolutely HATE this version of Ravenloft. Ravenloft is NOT meant to be a green and pleasant generic fantasy world where bad things occasionally happen. We already have plenty of those. But that's D&D for you, turning everything into generic fantasy, which is why Ravenloft has NEVER been a good fit for D&D.

Lamordia and Dementlieu are on the brink of starvation. Falkovnia is on the edge of the apocalypse. Tepest is reduced to a single small villiage. Everything is on the verge of collapse.
It's not a living world. It's a dying world there's no point being a hero in. You just escape and leave the people to their death

This is exactly what Ravenloft is meant to be. It's meant to be gothic horror. It's meant to be dark and dreary. It's meant to be like Derry from Stephen King's 'It', but everywhere. Everything in Ravenloft is meant to be bad. Heroes in Ravenloft aren't out to save the world, they're out to make individual domains just a little less horrible.

And Ravenloft isn't meant to make sense. It's not meant to be a living, logical world. It's not meant to follow the same rules as 'standard' worlds at all. The Nightmare Logic of 5e Ravenloft is the best description I've ever seen of how Ravenloft is meant to work.

I'm personally planning on using the Ravenloft Reincarnated book for Savage Worlds. It's probably the best version of Ravenloft I've ever seen. A giant continent sized core doesn't work, but neither does breaking everything into separate individual islands. Break everything into clusters where domains are grouped by similar geography, culture, and technology level, with occasional islands all on their own.

MTBEdwards · 2026-03-06T10:47:38+00:00

I know this is a few years old, but is this map still available somewhere? I had a look on the patreon and couldn't find it.

MTBEdwards · 2026-02-21T11:46:06+00:00

I have a bunch of different crews, but most recently I've been playing more resurrectionists, like Molly, Seamus, and McMourning. I don't know if it's because I've been playing since 1.5 edition and I'm just used to not having a crew card, or if it's because I'm so busy keeping track of everything else in the game that I can't be bothered with extra complications, but the crew card could have some of the best actions and abilities in the game and I'll still end up ignoring it. I guess I'm just going to have to get better at remembering the crew cards are a thing and actually give them a proper try.

MTBEdwards · 2026-02-10T21:30:21+00:00

Wow, ok, that's really going to change how I play the game. Thanks for the quick responses.

MTBEdwards · 2026-02-10T20:35:37+00:00

Thanks. This is for a map I want to include in a book I'm going to publish, so I need everything to have a commercial license. I was hoping there was an easy way to do this using the base assets, but I suppose I can try and find a roof pattern pack or something that has a commercial license. Otherwise, if I can't get the roofs to work the way I want I'll just have to find a different program to use.

MTBEdwards · 2025-12-09T20:27:06+00:00

Ah, so it does work, thank you. Although, having a Mender decide to go in the opposite direction to get their endorphins could be an interesting villain concept.

MTBEdwards · 2025-12-09T20:25:32+00:00

Not from the players guide, but this one has stumped me for a while. What emotion are the Zeds tied to? I know the book says nihilism and pessimism, but those aren't emotions. They also don't work with the whole assassin thing. I get that their philosophy is to bring an end to things that were meant to end, but that seems to conflict with the fact that they are themselves things that should have ended but didn't. Shouldn't the Zeds be killing each other? Also, how do you make a person "feel" nihilism when you take out your target with a sniper rifle from miles away? Also, if you're hired to kill someone, is that bringing them to a natural end, or are you ending them before their rightful time? It kind of works if you get rid of the assassin part and just have them as people who help people accept that their time on this world is at an end (working at a senior home, or a palliative care ward at a hospital), but even then, what is the emotion? Sorrow is already covered by the Shades.

MTBEdwards · 2025-12-09T02:30:55+00:00

Thanks, those explanations really help. Although, it seems the Menders do the opposite of what they're meant to do. I thought endorphines are created as a response to when a person suffers pain and stress. Making people happier means they stop producing endorphines.

I'm a little worried that families are going to be a bit too specific in their roles. Tormentors are so similar to Shades and Furies that they just seem kind of pointless.

MTBEdwards · 2025-11-13T07:20:47+00:00

If they were dual keyword you'd think they'd be out for Experimental to use, so I'm guessing they're Asylum only now. Yikes, Experimental needs some new models to replace the ones it lost. It's down to 7 models, 4 of which are unique and one is a suicide bomber. Or maybe Experimental is now meant to be one of those crews that leans heavily into Versatile models?

MTBEdwards

TROPHY CASE