Monster Party Side Story/Prologue: Come on now, who do you, who do you, who do you, who do you think you are? Ha ha ha bless your soul... You really think you're in control?
It was hard for the man to think clearly. He had no idea who he was or where he was, or even what exactly was wrong with him.
All he could be sure of was that, surely there must be something wrong with his mind at the moment, mustn't there?
It felt like... it felt like there was someone else inside his head!
Words were constantly being shouted and images inserted making hard for him to get his own thoughts in order. He could feel an intense pain in the base of his neck, he tried to raise a hand to the wound but discovered that both of his arms were bound by chains.
"Ah you are avake zis is good!" Announced a clipped voice.
In fact the voice was so "clipped" that it only bothered to pronounce half of the letter "w" rather than the whole thing.
"What is going on?" The man whimpered, just as it was hard to think clearly, it was hard to see much of anything.
Most of what he saw was just the inside of a white mask and only managed to glimpse the world through two small holes for his eyes, leaving his peripheral vision was several hampered.
"Ve are about to enter into ze next phase of your treatment 3d." The voice replied at once.
A dirty blond haired man dressed in a brown cloak wearing a pair of studious spectacles walked in front of "3d", and two ice cold blue eyes gazed down at him.
"That's not my name! My name is..." The man bound to the chair began but was promptly cut off.
"You remember your name? Previously it had always eluded you! Still, I'm afraid zat ve can not make exceptions to ze rules! Being named rather zen numbered is a privilege you have not yet earned." The blue eyed man insisted.
"Being named is a privilege?" 3d repeated, having trouble grasping the concept for some reason, yet it sounded strangely familiar.
"If you have forgotten my own, it is Doctor Wright. So how are ve feeling today 3d?" Doctor Wright inquired politely.
The man bound to the chair shifted his gaze about slowly he was dressed in an incredibly drab gray robe.
"My clothes... what happened to my clothes?" He grumbled angrily.
"I am afraid zat if other patients see people moving about vithout ze same garb zat zey must wear zemselves, zey vould see zem as outsiders. At ze very least zey would be frightened. For some of ze more volatile patients zis fear could translate into an outbreak of physical violence. Zus, ze masks and robes are worn to protect both our patients and visitors.
As for myself, in order for me to be able to treat patients effectively, zey must see me as an authority figure. By making it clear zat I am not constrained be ze same rules zat zey must adhere to, I display my so called superiority to zem. Only vith such a relationship in place can zey accept treatment and begin ze long road to recovery.
You must understand 3d, you vere presenting a most horrific malady of ze mind vhen I first arrived." Doctor Wright rattled off the words in a dry manner suggesting he had said them a great many times times before.
"Insane? I'm not insane..." 3d insisted even as he tried to piece his shattered mind back together.
FOLLOW DOCTORS ORDERS!
It was like stumbling through a dark night only to be near blinded by a brilliant light.
That thought blazed through 3d's mind with a certainty that was unlike anything else he could imagine.
"What... what sort of insanity?" 3d eventually pleaded.
"Vell I am afraid zat ze stress of managing zis asylum got ze better of you. It caused ze onset of vhat I believe vas otherwise a dormant hereditary condition. A most horrific disease known as porphyria." Doctor Wright confided calmly.
"The asylum? That's right, this is my asylum! What do you think you're doing to me you bastard?!" 3d roared in anger.
"Be still." Doctor Wright commanded in a tone neither angry or frightened, simply stern.
FOLLOW DOCTOR'S ORDERS!
3d stopped trying to break his chains... chains that seemed strangely thick even for being used to bind a lunatic.
"Why... why are you doing this? I'm not insane!" He exclaimed in a voice that was somewhere between petulant anger and genuine confusion.
"Porphyria is a most horrific disease, vith most unpleasant symptoms. I am afraid 3d zat ze way zat sunlight aggravated your condition, combined with ze need to ingest blood as part of the treatment lead you to eventually be stricken vith ze delusion zat you vere a vampire! A vampire running an insane asylum! Vhat an absurd notion no?" Doctor Wright chuckled.
A vampire?
More of 3d's memories seemed to come into focus as he thought about that word. He could see the backs of countless necks flashing through his mind, he could see the liquid flowing from open wounds... but it wasn't red, weren't vampires supposed to drink blood, wasn't blood supposed to be red? Before he could go much further though Doctor Wright interrupted his train of thought.
"As ze illness took you, your orderlies vere kind enough to call me to treat you and take over running ze asylum. Now zen, are you afraid of garlic?" The blue eyed man explained.
"Not in the least, love the stuff." 3d answered at once.
"See? Real vampires hate garlic, not just ze spice but because zey can not stand to eat actual food of any kind. You are not a vampire. Say it with me please 3d, 'I am not a vampire...'" Doctor Wright instructed.
FOLLOW DOCTOR'S ORDERS!
"I am not a vampire." 3d mumbled.
"You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane." Doctor Wright confided to him.
"I am not a vampire!" 3d repeated with more conviction.
"Much better. Now, as you can see, it is just about dawn. Zrough use of complicated mixture of magic and a few tinctures I created ve have managed to drive the illness from your body.
I am afraid zat ze damage it has done to your mind vas a bit more extreme. Today as I said, ve vill be taking an important step toward helping you recover. Since you are finally physically vell again, ve are going to expose you to actual sunlight for ze first time in far too long." Doctor Wright informed him.
That explained why 3d seemed to be strapped down to a mostly comfortable (BUT VERY STRONG) chair out in the middle of a courtyard.
"The sun? I'm not afraid of the sun!" 3d insisted.
"Zat is also very promising. Fear of sunlight is a common symptom among zose who believe themselves to be vampires. Much like an attraction to startled women in nightdresses or desire to sleep in a coffin." Doctor Wright reflected.
"My coffin? My coffin!" 3d thundered feeling that he was on the edge of thinking about something very important but his mind was suddenly bombarded with countless images of a life that he'd never lived, a life that he never could have lived unless for some reason he had a respectably sized pair of breasts under his robe.
"Be at peace 3d! Please do not provoke yourself into a relapse by letting your imagination run avay vith you." His doctor pleaded.
FOLLOW DOCTOR'S ORDERS!
"Zis coffin you speak of, it is only an imaginary item, fabricated as part of your delusion of being a vampire. You must trust me 3d, ze have searched zis entire asylum room by room without finding a single trace of such a thing. It exists only in your mind." Doctor Wright insisted.
3d sat still for a moment and watched the rays of the rising sun slowly edge their way closer and closer.
They began to edge up his feet and they brought with them only a pleasant warmth.
"Zere see is zat so bad?" The doctor offered in a pleasant enough tone of voice.
3d was about to reply but it was at that point that it suddenly felt as if his own body was tearing itself apart and the only thing he could do was scream in pain as he began to evaporate.
"Orderly Catwarrior, the patient is refusing to submit to his treatment!" Doctor Wright called out.
XXX XXX XXX
A hazy mist that one might assume as having a vaguely human shape vanished through a small crack in one of the asylum's walls.
A moment later another a small cloud of white mist followed it through the exact same tiny opening.
Inside was a large ornate wooden coffin.
One cloud of mist poured into it, while the other one pooled outside it and took on the form of a woman.
Her hair was midnight black hair except for a streak of solid white running down the middle. Her eyes were ruby red and at the moment she was dressed in a simple white jacket and shirt with black pants, of the items in question cut along masculine lines while a white hat rested atop her head.
She lightly tapped the coffin with one of her white shoes and then nodded to herself when it didn't react in the slightest.
"You know... according Doctor Rudolph van Richten, a vampire's coffin is entirely psychosomatic in nature. We don't actually need them, we just feel most comfortable sleeping in them because the soil of our homeland provides us with a thin tie to our mortal lives." The woman muttered to herself as from the bag she produced a bottle larger than its container.
She bit down on the cork easily winning it free and then spat it out. She began to empty the content of the bottle atop the coffin.
"I'm not sure if I believe him or not, or maybe it just varies from vampire to vampire. I've slept in perfectly normal beds without a problem in the past, have you though? Maybe I'm special because I went from human to vampire with the celerity of blowing out a torch, none of this laying around dead for three days first stuff for me.
"More to the point, most vampires when severally injured or in some sort of mental distress naturally return to their coffins." As the woman spoke she produced another bottle and began to repeat the process.
"I mean... I like my coffin. I've got it made of Falkovnian trees so it's this wonderful black color with black leather and I have my family motto engraved on it in gold thread. It's traditional for vampires to have coffins, and it has to be a coffin though, we're better than the living, that's why you've never heard of a vampire with a cut rate casket have you?" She pointed out as she now began to produce several small sticks from the bag and laid them here and there around the coffin in a seemly random pattern.
"The thing that you need to remember about being a vampire though, is that whatever doesn't kill you will make you stronger, eventually. So in the vein of your 'treatments' don't think of this arson, think of it as an interesting experiment on helping your mind break ties with unnecessary nicknacks." The woman advised as from the bag she now produced a bottle of some thick black substance.
She spread it across the coffin before retrieving a simple block of flint and steel knife from the bag.
"You see, you're never going to properly grow as a vampire until you can bring yourself to unlive without this thing." Were her final words before she struck one against the other.
Sparks flew and landed in the mix of oil and what had once been ordinary sacramental wine but had been distilled into something that was quite possibly extra holy but quite certainly extra flammable.
The coffin burned, and burned, and burned, until there was nothing left of it and its occupants but ash and their dirt it had originally contained.
"Oh dear, even if you do find a way to come back from that I'm afraid it's going to take an even greater trick to resurrect your coffin!" The woman reflected with mock sympathy.
Then she transformed back into mist and flowed out of the room.
On the other side of the gap that she'd filtered through she returned to human form and smiled at a tall silver haired man with a green left eye and an eyepatch slung over his right.
The man was dressed in a black outfit of a vaguely martial nature with a few silvery runes inscribed upon it.
"Well that was sorta fun. A girl doesn't get to drink the kin-nectar of a darklord every day after all. Still, it was almost too easy to make him believe that he was insane..." The woman pouted as if somehow the victory had left her unsatisfied.
"Smash a hole in the wall, we're stealing every ounce of his soil. After that, sweep all the ashes up into a bottle, which we'll then fill to the brim with holy water, put put a stopper in the bottle and then make sure to toss it into the ocean when we leave this island.
If he finds a way to come back from that, well good for him, but something tells me we'll well out of his domain first. Now get to work, I've got to go find the man we were brought here to rescue, hopefully he's still sane enough to recognize the pass phrase." The silver haired man commanded before he turned and walked away.
The black haired woman sighed and started to punch at the wall, her ordinary looking fists leaving noticeable dents in the brickwork with each blow.
XXX XXX XXX
"Metus has claimed Erasmus' body." The silver haired man said softly to a figure dressed in a simple gray robe, his face covered by a white mask which was devoid of features other than eye-holes, a parody of a smile, and the symbols '10a'.
The figure in the robe whimpered and babbled meaningless, mindless sounds that couldn't even be called words.
The silver haired man sighed and shook his head it seemed that this inmate wasn't the one he was looking for either.
"Another failure." He muttered to himself and turned to leave.
"BUT HIS SOUL HAS BEEN SET FREE!" The occupant (say better prisoner) of the asylum suddenly shouted at the top of his lungs.
The silver haired man spun on his heel his own face alight with a wide smile.
He swung the door to the cell open and his black gloved hands easily tore the white mask to shreds revealing the face of a haggard man with blond hair that had been streaked gray with age.
His blue eyes were wide and seemed to constantly shift back and forth in fear.
"Monsters... monsters everywhere. They're all... they're all against me... you're here, you're here to eat me..." The older man babbled.
The silver haired man slowly helped the other to his feet and lead him out of his cell.
"It is not insanity but wisdom to be able to look at a 'man' and see the 'monster' that dwells underneath. Still, you might be surprised at just how many of us actually approve of your work.
Come along please Doctor van Richten, you have some very rich friends in Mordent who are very interested in seeing you once more sound of mind and hale of health. You can trust me to get you back to them, or my name isn't Alexander Diamondclaw."
AN: To start with unless you have a strong stomach I would suggest against googling porphyria (do a yahoo search of it that'll be perfectly fine though (sarcasm)) since the pictures that go along with most descriptions of the disease are not pleasant to look at.
Suffice to say, it is a real life disease and also probably exists in Ravenloft, it has a great many symptoms that are most unpleasant to view or contemplate, though it's more likely to make a group of random peasants who see someone suffering from it think they have found a vampire than its victim itself become deluded into imagining they are a vampire. Still if you're trying to convince an insane vampire that they're still alive, porphyria is probably the best route you can go.
The real name of "3d" is actually Doctor Dominiani /Dacluad Heinfroth, but I guess part of the nature /theme of this story was not using names very much so I decided not to name him in story.
This short story is based on the first of the Bleak House trilogy, and adventure called "Whom Fortune Would Destroy" with the unsaid half of the title being "she first makes mad." as writing by Publilius Syrus in Moral Saying's first century B. C. (at least according to the Ravenloft adventure book in question).
I personally prefer the Greek version of the saying (can't find particular person to attribute it to) "Those the gods would destroy, they first make great." which in my personal opinion is a PERFECT fit for Ravenloft since that the entire point of how the Dark Powers play with their darklords, making them "great" and powerful but denying them what they truly want most.
The adventure is interesting to read (well parts of it are interesting to read parts of it I felt an intense desire to skip over I'll get to that later) but I'm not sure how much fun it would be to actually play out. A lot of it rests on the principle of having the heroes get their back shoved against a bunch of no win situations and then having them be treated in a dehumanizing manner, while they have their minds ripped away from them. If Thoughts of Darkness is comparable to a bad drug trip where all your nightmares come alive and try to murder you, then Whom Fortune Would Destroy is best compared to 1984 or at least the tail end of the book mixed with One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
It's adventures like Whom Fortune Would Destroy which give Ravenloft a reputation not as a land of gothic horror but a land where you better make sure to bring a couple extra character sheets with you because whatever character you start out playing isn't likely to last through the adventure.
It includes a number of delightful ways for the villains to induce various kinds of insanity in the heroes from dissociative identity disorder (or "multiple personality disorder" for those who aren't keeping up with the latest version of the DSM (that's the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of mental disorders") to particular phobias, to believing that you've had certain limbs amputated, to stealing your memories to... yeah you get the idea.
I'm not opposed to the idea of an adventure based around the heroes having less gear/less access to their normal equipment /tricks, you could have an interesting adventure where the characters need to go undercover as prisoner's (either with or without the guards knowing) in some prison either to find out some information another prisoner knows or rescue someone. The problem is that this adventure feels too... too mean to me.
I'll give an example of the level of mean that is present in this adventure as written. Take the prison adventure idea I mentioned above, it offers opportunities for heroes to be heroes, sneaking about gathering information, making deals between various factions of power in the prison, despite the fact that they are in a rough spot they are still masters of their own destiny and are able to rise above the standard riff raff in the prison and accomplish more by working together just like they would normally even if they don't have magical swords and armor/have had their spell components taken away.
Now, imagine that one of the situations in that set up involved the rules for detailing something decidedly unpleasant happening to one of them during a group shower. Good taste keeps me from saying more.
This adventure is THAT mean, except it's on a psychological level rather than physical.
I mean if any of your players have relatives who have suffered from long term debilitating mental illness... well it's likely that one of two things will happen; either they will cry, or they will stoically reach across the table and punch you right in the face.
The other big problem with the adventure is that a great deal of it plays out with the group not able to work together, they may not be put in the same cell (well the book as written say they are but if the villains were smarter they wouldn't put them all in the same cell), each one is going to be mentally tortured in a different way, even leaving aside the sensitive nature of what is going on, it's something between, awkward, unpleasant, and boring to either listen to something happening to someone else that is strictly out of character knowledge or spend a lot of the time listening to nothing because the DM only comes into talk with one person at a time.
I know I praised the Wolf Run situation back in the second Monster Party Book for splitting up the characters/ forcing each one to think on their own for how they would outrun werewolves, so why am I hating on that idea now?
Because the Wolf Run was a one time event to shake the characters up, here though, unless they are astoundingly lucky they are each going to have multiple sessions which are designed to induce various mental illnesses, and while being separated from your fellow players once in an adventure will make you feel frightened and alone, having it happen multiple times in the same adventure just makes you realize how much this is slowing down the game.
Also this adventure awkwardly bumps up against that old saw (or at least what I hope is an old saw) about how it isn't a DM's job to tell a PC how to play their character. Telling someone "okay you failed that will save, so now I want you to act like you've got a pathological fear small spaces for the rest of the adventure" is likely to make players cry fowl and I wouldn't entirely say that they're in the wrong.
Then there's the way it is written. I've seen a lot of stuff in Ravenloft designed to mess with the heroes, there's Thoughts of Darkness as I previously mentioned, this adventure, and then there's something that describes what I feel is the gold standard of how to play with the minds of your characters, The Nightmare Court book.
Why do I like the Nightmare Court approach? Because a lot of what it does gives an appropriate feeling of "less is more" with lots of room to play around with how a character's dreams are altered or messed with, and what sort of affects this can have on the character. Also there's something wonderfully mystical about dreams that can already inspire feeling of helplessness within us even in real life, for except for a few people who are lucid dreamers we are all prisoners of our subconscious minds when we dream, unable to do anything but try to wake up as events unfold which we may not understand and certainly do not control.
Not only that, but at the end of the day the Nightmare Court stuff had an appropriately uplifting system built into it. Every time that the evil villains used their powers against you to explicitly make things worse in your dreams, they were also weakening their hold over you, moving you one step closer to the point where you could actively drive them from your dreams.
Since the entire point of it is to make you repeat more or less the same dream several times in a row, it's possible to "fail forward" where so long as you are putting up a good fight and forcing the villains to expend their powers eventually you can reach a point where after say a month you are well stocked and ready to drive them off, so long as a failure is not fatal it makes you stronger, which is how RPGs are supposed to work in my opinion.
(Because of how much I like this system/its fluff expect to eventually see an 8 chapter Nightmare Court Novella getting posted as part of this 'story' a few bits at a time over the next few months)
In this adventure, the entire thing seems designed to create a downward spiral of inducing as many mental illnesses in the players as possible and each one makes the heroes less likely to escape, the villain gets to have things entirely his own way.
Not to forget that the way that he induces these mental illnesses... its almost disappointingly banal when you get right down to it.
You put someone in a room that is designed to have walls that can slide inward to make it grow smaller and smaller every time they take the measurements, yeah that's how you exacerbate any already existing traces of claustrophobia.
Put someone in a room then fill it with bugs, Insectophobia.
Put someone in a chair and then turn on a spell that causes pain whenever they leave the chair, that's how you instil a sense that doing ANYTHING is always the wrong choice and it's better to just catatonically lay there and do nothing.
It feels like insanity and messing with your characters minds is much better accomplished when done through metaphor and a certain amount of "magical tea party" or at the very least rules which are much different from standard rules, rather than just tossing great big "congratulations you now have a 75% chance of doing nothing each combat round" penalty at players.
Also now that I stop to think about it (a phrase I seem to be using a lot in these notes) I realize that this adventure has way too many "magical I win buttons" for the villain. That's almost not a metaphor, there are magical spells that will put everyone to sleep in some rooms for example, and obviously since the villain and his minions are vampires they are immune to it.
Ravenloft is supposed to be a low magic environment, that's something I try to reflect in my stories it's why Cal uses potions and Devi magical artifacts rather than either of them having any sort of magical powers. The only member of the group who can actually cast spells is Florence... who like any proper druid can be a force of nature unto herself when she cuts loose but due to her temperament it's not something she does very often. So yeah having easily reusable magical spells all over the place... that's just TOO explicitly magical for Ravenloft where magic tends to work through warping people (as in you know giving a werewolf or vampire extensions of the powers they already have like making Jacqueline's ability to cow rats as a wererat into mental influence on all rats within her domain) rather than giving the vampire a building that has a magical sleep aura installed.
To make things worse still, most Ravenloft adventures tend to be written with a certain amount of catharsis in mind at the end. You get attacked by killer puppets, have them take over your bodies while you're trapped as a puppet locked in wooden cages and soundly mocked about it in The Created, but it eventually leads to you getting to lock the head evil puppet inside a theater as its burned to the ground. You get constantly chased/hounded by werewolves throughout Dark of the Moon, but then at the very end you get to chase Gregor, possibly even overcoming his ability to control werewolves so you can use the curse he forced on you against him!
The bad guy, however powerful, however strong, should still suffer a fairly resounding defeat at the end of the adventure, even in Ravenloft.
In this adventure though, at the end the most the heroes can probably hope for is being able to run/sail away from the asylum and the island it is on having rescued Rudolph Van Richten, and hopefully not picked up too many new mental disorders in the process.
That in my opinion is a really shitty pay off for an adventure that puts the heroes through hell in a way that's worse than even the traditional Ravenloft adventure...
Before you say 'well it is a trilogy, you can't kill Darth Vader at the end of A New Hope' you should know that I feel it doesn't apply in this particular case. The villain of this adventure does not show up in either of the other two that make it up. Thus there's no reason why the adventure shouldn't have been written towards making sure he gets his oh so richly deserved comeuppance.
I could have written an entire book around this adventure in theory. It'd start with Alexander explaining to the group the fact that Rudolph Van Richten had supposedly checked himself into a mental asylum of his own free will, but two weeks after doing so was no longer in written contact with those he had been beforehand.
So the Weathermay twins of Mordent were hiring Alexander and the group to go and rescue him since Alexander presents himself as a great fan of the Doctor's work who is willing to accept only a small fortune in payment to risk his life in a situation that has proven too much for even Rudolph Van Richten to deal with.
Then of course Mirri complains, not because she feels upset over all the other vampires Rudolph van Richten has killed, but because she's afraid that he'll try to kill her at some point so naturally she'll need to kill him instead and then they won't get paid.
James meanwhile of course is all too happy to get a chance to finally meet the famous Rudolph Van Richten (either his usual impenetrable sense of optimism or the fact that Van Richten expressly mentions being friends with a werewfox at one point is keeping him from worrying over the fact that Van Richten doesn't have the most positive of opinions of lycanthropes) whose books he's all read.
The group goes there, get shipwrecked, gets 'rescued' by a bunch of cerebral vampires, realize that they're all cerebral vampires (well vampires/undead of some sort) Mirri can hear the fact that they lack a heart beat) so then a great big fight breaks out where Florence basically uses the fact that they're on a wooden ship to her advantage to start "breaking"/"remaking" the ship to stake vampires left right and center. The cerebral vampires get their coffins burnt/smashed destroyed and then their ashes pitched over the side of the ship into the ocean meaning even if they do come back to life they won't last very long.
Then they basically arrive at the asylum ready to kill anything without a heartbeat first and ask questions later so they start tearing the asylum apart one vampire at a time (the fact that vampires dress just like the insane prisoners doesn't help when Mirri's ears can tell one from another at a hundred paces) and eventually work their way up to the Doctor Dominiani who runs the place. The Doctor lacks any truly special combat abilities so eventually they defeat him and then its time to rescue Rudolph and go home.
That or we'll get to see how the famous sleep aura that gets used so liberally in the story isn't going to work on Mirri, or on Florence once she goes into plant mode and since Dominani's entire thing is mind affecting attacks for the most part, which don't work on vampires and won't work on plants... Mirri and Florence alone can go Alexander's Angels on his ass.
I could have done all of that, but I decided not to because this adventure is so dark and mean that I wanted to cut to the end of it.
So I did exactly that and showed only the most importance/important parts.
In particular, the part where the darklord de jour gets exactly what he gets to coming to him.
In this particular case it starts with Mirri managing to drink his blood during a fight between him and the group. Once that's done, the kin-nectar rules are fully in effect, because when a vampire drinks another vampire's blood interesting things start happening.
It creates a mental link between the two vampires, and the one that did the drinking is allowed to give some "reasonable" mental commands to the one who got drunk from. In this case, obviously the command that Mirri is giving is "Follow Doctor's Orders" but at the same time she's also constantly projecting her thoughts/memories into Doctor Dominani's head.
Given that like most darklords he's not in possession of the most sane of minds to start with (in fact being half crazy is his curse isn't it?), it really isn't hard to imagine that Mirri could give him a Kin-Nectar induced case of schizophrenia, since after all, one of the main symptoms of that disease is someone hearing voices or seeing things that aren't really there. So drawn your own conclusions about what it would be like to have someone else projecting their thoughts into your mind, even if they aren't trying to control you, that would still be quite disconcerting and get in the way of you thinking clearly to say the least.
Then, after that, once he's been drunk from and temporarily passed out from blood loss, staked in the heart or otherwise incapacitated, you get Dominiani dressed up in one of his own dehumanizing full body robe and mask outfits, the kind he makes everyone (except himself) in the asylum wear.
Next step you go and do what he does to the patients, refer to him by cell number rather than by name and if he isn't insane by the time his treatment's starts he certainly will be by the end of it!
The "doctor" talking to him in this case is of course Cal, doing his very best (or worst as the case may be) Lamordian Doctor voice.
There is a reason why I hate/don't like to write accents. They're a pain to write, and they don't tend to add anything to the story, just the mental work of needing to decipher what a character is actually saying.
Still, I wanted to drive home the "stereotypical Germanic Interrogator/Doctor voice" in this particular situation so Cal is replacing all "Th"s with "Z"s and "W"s with "V"s (excusing his own name because his vanity prevents him from calling himself "Doctor Vright") because who wouldn't trust/take orders from a man who speaks like that?
Cerebral vampires are actually immune to sunlight, which is why Dominiani doesn't burst into flames when the sun light washes over him. On the other hand, they are still required to spend eight of every twenty four hours in their coffin.
So while the light doesn't kill him, Cal just keeps him trapped and talking until he "runs out the clock" and Doctor Dominiani has no choice but to go back to his coffin. In the adventure as written his coffin should simply be in his room, and actually rather easy to find, but I gave him the benefit of the doubt and instead wrote the story with him having a coffin hidden in the sort of place which only a vampire would be able to get to without knocking a wall down, something all smart vampires with established homes should probably to do.
Needless to say, much like that saying about send a thief to catch a thief, if you want to track a vampire back to its coffin, you send another vampire.
At which point Mirri pulls the necessary materials from Devi's bag of holding which she'd been lent for the mission, and by 'necessary materials' I mean everything short of a bellows to help feed a fire.
So, having covered the coffin with some heavily flammable substances, she lights it on fire.
When a vampire has been reduced to resting in its coffin this typically means that it is all but completely helpless, and that can be a great time to cut off its head, stuff with holy wafers and so on and so forth.
For those interested the "perma kill" procedure for a cerebral vampire involves wrapping them up in a straight jacket before doing any of the above, but how the PCs could possible be expected to know that I have no idea.
So it's reflected in story that even Mirri who is the group's expert on undead doesn't quite know what you would need to do to make sure Dominiani never came back.
On the other hand though, while they're helpless this gives you a chance to destroy /defile (possible "refile" since a vampire's coffin is by default something of an unholy object isn't it?) the coffin because most vampires depend on their coffin to sleep in for survival every bit as much as they do having blood (or cerebral fluid in Doctor Dominiani's case) to drink.
Vampires can sometimes come back to unlife after being burnt to a pile of ashes by having blood poured on them, but you're going to need a "wish" spell (something in my version of Ravenloft you have to be mage roughly on par with Azalin to cast) to bring a vampire's coffin back form being a pile of ashes, and Cerebral vampires are described as needing to sleep in EXACTLY the coffin they were buried in, so without that coffin, as I read the rules they're doomed to "die" again with 24 hours of coming back to life since there is no way they can sleep in that coffin, that coffin doesn't exist anymore.
As for Mirri, she lacks this particular weakness (needing a coffin) in part because she instead has the weakness of not being able to automatically return to a coffin to recuperate if seriously injured, something I mentioned back in the first book's commentary.
Also she is immune to that weakness because it is part of the nature of the curse the dark powers laid on her that I'll go into in another side story (the one which reveals how and why she became a vampire). Suffice to say for now, Mirri is, and always has been a more mobile type of vampire than most, which is reflected in both her strengths and weaknesses.