Project_Lamordia Turns Ravenloft’s Mad Scientist Into a Tech Company
Picture a maze of ruined offices with the mists of Ravenloft pressed up against the windows. The lights still work. Nobody’s answering the front desk.
That’s the setting for Project_Lamordia, which went live on D&D Beyond on October 13. It’s a modern-day, techno-horror take on Lamordia, the Frankenstein-flavored Domain of Dread, and it costs $14.99 on the D&D Beyond marketplace. D&D Beyond describes it as a trilogy of short adventures set on the campus of Mordenheim Kinetics, and the three runs are written for levels 1, 3 and 5: Sanctuary, Deep Freeze and Neural Tuning. Each one comes with a map of the facility, according to ENWorld’s rundown of the release.
The villain is a familiar one in a new job. Viktra Mordenheim, the scientist who rules Lamordia in the older books, is now the founder and director of a private technology company. Her obsession is the same: ending death. The teaser D&D Beyond ran in late September was built as a corporate intake page, with her personnel file marked active and access denied. It’s a smart bit of dressing. The release, as ENWorld reads it, has her offering digital immortality at the cost of your soul. The setting is Gothic Earth, so think badge readers and freezers, not castles and drawbridges.
The part that matters at the table is how you build a character. Crit Hit the Giant, which previewed the project before launch, reports that you can play with just this product and the Player’s Handbook. There’s also a Lamordian Survivor option that skips the usual class, species and background steps and hands you a preset stat block instead. The four starting archetypes are an Evangelist (a Cleric), an Infiltrator (a Rogue), a Mercenary (a Fighter) and a Technician (a Wizard), all at level 1 with room to level up. The same preview calls that mode deadlier than standard play, and says each adventure can be finished without fighting the main antagonist, though you may have to make some morally grey choices to get there. That preview is the author’s read, not a review of the final text, so weigh it that way.
If you’d rather build a character the normal way, there’s a new Reborn species, four backgrounds and four dark-gift feats, along with five monster stat blocks. ENWorld’s summary says the Reborn here is a person whose mind was uploaded into a synthetic body after death, a victim of experimentation, which is a different animal from the stitched-together corpse in Ravenloft: The Horrors Within. The feats are reflavored from that book. Digital extras include Quickplay maps with creature tokens preloaded and fog of war, plus scene prep notes pinned to each map.
Now the caveats. We haven’t run any of it, so we can’t tell you yet whether the survivor stat blocks make for a good night or a short one. It’s also digital only, so a table that doesn’t use D&D Beyond gets less out of it. And $14.99 for three short adventures is fair for what’s listed, but it’s a one-shot-sized purchase for anyone who wanted a full campaign. A table that already owns The Horrors Within will find the Reborn and the feats familiar.
The reason to pay attention is the format. Dungeon masters get a ready-made horror night that doesn’t require the group to roll up characters first, and that’s the part of one-shot horror that usually eats the first hour. If you want the classic gothic version to run next to it, the original Ravenloft: The Horrors Within is still in print. Either way, Mordenheim Kinetics is a good reminder that the scariest monsters usually come with a mission statement.
