Dungeons & Dragons lore!

If I may put on my conspiracy theorist hat on for a second, I suspect it may also be the fact Greyhawk was Gygax's baby and the settings as we know them really came into their own under Lorraine Williams.

Mostly because Lorraine created the massive paperback boom that popularized FR and Dragonlance.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Dec 16th 2023 at 4:56:59 AM

eberron, ravenholf and dark sun feel too gimmick compared to forgottem realms, almost "eberron is D&D but with steampunk" "d&d but gothic horror,etc" this make forgotten realms become the central setting so other can compared and contrast

Dark Sun meanwhile is "D&D in a Fallout or Mad Max setting".

Ravenloft doesnt really have to be it's own setting, though.

You can plop it into a FR campaign with minimal fuss.

That's pretty much how I'd use it. Just have it be a part of Faerun that is tuned a bit too strongly to the Negative Plane, or something.

Except without cool cars and coming across as quite depressing. Honestly, the setting reminds me a lot of The Goddamned in tone and aesthetics.

I think the point of Ravenloft is that it's an insane asylum of evil, but the evil it contains are all from different points of a fantasy timeline, with the "most recent" Dark Lord being from a steampunk/gaslight fantasy world.

You can't have that in the Realms, as the Gods themselves have placed a premium in tech/society not advancing past what would be Late Renaissance for us.

I dislike everything about the Dark Powers and the deeper philosophical point of what Ravenloft became, so I would skip all of it. The original Ravenloft module is a pretty good Gothic Horror adventure, with a vampire as the Big Bad. It's very similar to a tabletop-version of Castlevania, wich is how I would treat it.

I think the least interesting thing about Ravenloft is the original module and utterly despise what Van Ritchen's Guide did it to as a coherent setting in its own right. Then again, I really appreciated what the Kargatane did and they helped me become the writer I am today.

+ Clearly, you must now fight with knives. Roll initiative.

Oh there's common ground. There's elements I hate about the design philosophy. I'd wish they'd get rid of the "Weekend in Hell" part of the universe and just embrace it as a Gothic themed world.

I agree that embracing the Gothic world would be preferable, because that sounds more fun. I feel that the concept of the Dark Powers using the Domains of Dread to make it a private hell for someone who *isn't* the player characters, that makes things needlessly over-complicated.

It went from Gothic Horror to Silent Hill basically.

I don't mind the Dark Lords but its very clear the PCs are not the stars of the game and I hate that game philosophy.

If the PCs are heroes in the Demiplane of Dread, obviously the Dark Lords are their targets.

Making the setting so, "and if you kill Strahd, he's back in 5 weeks" then it's like the PCs are utterly unnecessary.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Dec 18th 2023 at 9:58:35 AM

It's their hell, you're just stuck in it.

It's a setting where the highest-level Good-aligned NPC could only cast level 5 spells, and Paladins had no Immunity to Fear or Diseases. The disadvantage is baked into the setting so that the rare instances of true heroism burn bright in the minds of people.

Also, a bit of irony, Strahd's crypts have a gamut of high-level holy people just waiting to be Resurrected by Zhudun's Dark Gift. Yes.

I think there's also a blinkered view there that 1: The P Cs have to be the center of the story and 2: being the center of the story means defeating the most evil force.

Neither of these are true. There's plenty of stories like this, and plenty of parties who want that, but just as many that don't. The best and coolest stories in Dragonlance (including the recent campaign that might be the best official 5E adventure) don't let the pcs kill Takhisis, or Lord Soth, or Ariakas, or the Blue Lady, or Verminaard or...

What's also baked into the rules is that, if you must have your pcs kill the big bad forever and ever, you can just...do that. They kill Strahd and he never comes back, because its your game and you say so. Other people have killed Strahd before, maybe the pcs even get help from them, but nobody did it like your pcs did it.

I can think of stories perhaps a bit more "heroic" than that, but that would be for me and my table.

And that's just for good players. For evil pcs, well, Barovia is full of carboard cutouts that bleed and scream and has a vampire lord who probably cries over his own murder victims.

They haven't seen real evil yet.

Edited by ArthurEld on Dec 18th 2023 at 10:48:22 AM

x4: Thank you for saying this, I see people praising Ravenloft for being dark and gritty but it's just dark and shitty, and it says that you're a bad person for wanting to play a hero who can fix things, or thinking that the tools you as a player have shouldn't be taken away.

It's actively worse than playing in the Hells, because the hells are literally just 'everything is normal but it's full of fiends' while the domains of dread are 'nothing is real, nothing matters. Go fuck yourself, for ever thinking the gods could have any influence in this tiny demiplane.'

Give me stats for the Dark Powers so a level 20 party can stab and fireball them to death.

It's worse than that. Everything is real, it's just that the Dark Powers ensure nothing can really change unless they allow it. And the gods are real in Ravenloft — the Dark Powers are said gods.

The best a heroic party can do is just survive and help out the regular people stuck in the darklords' realms. All you can really be is a Small Steps Hero.

Edited by M84 on Dec 19th 2023 at 9:58:53 PM

Unless, of course, the Dark Powers get bored of their playthings (and/or out-of-universe IP issues mean that Ravenloft isn't allowed to use a certain Darklord anymore), like what happened with Lord Soth (both applied to him). Then your heroes are actually capable of getting a big, permanent victory.

Edited by TrashJack on Dec 19th 2023 at 9:10:52 AM

I get that these might be different play philosophies, but what's wrong with being a Small Steps Hero?

Nothing wrong with that. It's just the way things are in Ravenloft.

Events like that would fall under the "unless they allow it" bit. In-universe, the Dark Powers wanted a new plaything after getting bored with Soth. Which they got in his replacement Inza.

Edited by M84 on Dec 19th 2023 at 11:42:27 PM

It's fine, but would require explicitly communicating with the players how things are in the setting / campaign. Most D&D games have an implicit expectation of being able to affect big changes even at low levels. "Save the town", "Stop a war" etc, with the memetic "reach level 20 and fight god!" being the simplification. Players expecting they are Van Helsing in a classic Hammer Horror and can kill Dracula for real, only to find out "nope!" is a big gut punch that hits in and out of the table.

Well, yes, but that still means people are brining the wrong genre assumptions to a horror game and them acting like it's the game's problem it's not a straightforwards power fantasy

This. Temper their expectations.

One thing I've learned about running (as a DM) and playing IN the Mists is that, you are NOT top dog. Any kind of victory has to be prefaced with lots of investigation, set-up, and all the dirty tricks you can muster to swing things in your advantage. And even then it might not be enough, and surviving to fight another day is a victory in itself.

Originally the game was a darker and edgier take on regular D&D adventures, except with Gothic Horror tropes instead of fantasy ones. It was pretty straightforward, in that you get to fight a Dracula-expy terrorizing the countryside and try to rescue the girl he's harassing. In most sequels the players had similar goals of fighting villains, except that the villains were based on other stock horror antagonists, like Frankenstein and Mr Hyde. This was a Darker and Edgier take on D&D, but still sounds like it could be a fun way to spend a few hours at a time.

At some point the Dark Powers were introduced as a concept, as an explanation for why the setting is the way it is. Dark and depressing games with plenty of soul-searching instead of action can be interesting, but I think it works better when it concerns the protagonists, to give the players some manner of personal investment. The reason I'm not really interested in what Ravenloft has become over the years, is partly that someone else's repetitive Ironic Hell simply doesn't sound as engaging, but could still be interesting as a concept. But the inability for things to be changed in-universe, unless the vaguely defined background-abominations happen to will it, that unfortunately turns the whole thing into an Eight Deadly Words situation for me.

That's why I'd ignore everything dealing with the Domains of Dread and the Dark Powers, as I'd rather just play a more straightforward Gothic Horror adventure, battling vampires and werewolves, and other assorted monsters.

Edited by Mara999 on Dec 19th 2023 at 7:38:40 PM