Ravenloft Campaigns: What’s the meta-point?

Ravenloft Campaigns: What’s the meta-point?

I would like to discuss how to run a Ravenloft campaign using 4E rules and cosmology, but before we get to the actual rule proposals I would like to discuss why PCs play in a Ravenloft campaign (rather than Core D&D). What’s the story being told? What’s the basic, universal story to Ravenloft campaigns? We need to answer that before we know what rules we’ll need, and what they’re supposed to achieve.

To allude by example, the basic, universal story of Core D&D is: Explore dungeons, encounter dragons, kill them, take their stuff, achieve Epic Destiny. (That Epic Destiny bit is 4E terminology, but in Classic D&D it was called the Immortals Boxed Set, so clearly the idea has been around for a while). Each story consisted of accruing enough gold, loot and XP until you were sufficiently bad-ass to do something super-cool (bringing your PCs story to a satisfying conclusion). This is the universal story, the Heroic Journey, to pretty much any Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk adventure.

If one were to run a Ravenloft one-shot the point would clearly be “Escape.” The story is “Holy Christ, we’re in Ravenloft! Let’s get the frak out of here!” and then proceed to make that attempt. That’s easy. I want to know what what sort of Heroic Journey begins, occurs and ends within Ravenloft.

Whatever that story is, I think it must engage the core concepts of Ravenloft: The existence of the Darklords, the Mists, and horror and madness. Which Domain(s) and Darklord(s) make cameos in your campaign must not be allowed to be as important, otherwise you’ll never be allowed to leave Barovia (or wherever) without the whole campaign unraveling. It needs to be more basic than that (just like how in Core D&D it doesn’t matter which dungeon your explore or dragon you defeat).

Further, the story must have some form of hope, however slim. The odds of any particular 1st level PC actually making it to 30th level are incredibly slim, but there’s hope. There’s no fundamental rule that it cannot be done. The same must be true for Ravenloft if it’s going to be an enjoyable campaign. So what do Ravenloft PCs hope for? What’s the meta-goal everyone agrees on?

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One caveat before I end this post: I think the 2E Ravenloft CS was really, really neat, but fundamentally did not allow for a story about the PCs. The Darklords were too omnipresent and omnipotent. There was no clear focus on the PCs as the Heroes of the tale being told. Like Dragonlance, it made for a few good novels, but not great adventuring. Further, there wasn’t enough hope; remember how Jandyr Sunstar “beat” the Mists by committing suicide? Yeah …, I think most players are going to need something a little more cheery than that to look forward to. So what I’m really looking for is a core story that can be inspired by the legacy of Ravenloft, not a faithfully perfect recreation.

My attempt to answer the question (please improve on this or just suggest somthing better):


I think what Ravenloft PCs hope for is that they will achieve something great without going mad in the process. The purpose or desire of the Mists is to instill horror, and so people have to find a way of coping. The most common way adopted by most people in Ravenloft is to studiously avoid noticing anything they don’t want to notice, usually by locking the doors at night and simply pretending that people who disappear merely “wandered off” or never were. Adventurers by their nature reject this path and face the horrible things in Ravenloft so that they may achieve greatness, but this course of action necessitates a new coping mechanism for dealing with horror. I don’t know how the rules for this would work, but I suspect there’s an easy method and a hard one, and the easy method is to succumb to madness. Madness protects you from the horror, but also draws the attention and power of the Mists.

Necessary rules support:
1. Achieve "something great". Darklords can be defeated?
2. Rules for accruing and working off Horror. Sanity?
2.a. Conversion of "gibbering madness" into "maniacal madness."

You introduce hope I guess as an open albeit hidden path to "greatness". The more hidden it is the more desperate things are, the less hidden the more hope there is. You need to find the right balance.
The next matter is that you introduced two paths here: one of madness and one of struggle I guess. Should it not be better to treat the madness path as a question mark that lies along in the main path? Do you think it should be more like Star Wars treats the force (dark side and stuff) or how does LotR treats corruption?

I think the core story of Ravenloft depends on which side of the shadowy line your character is going to be played on. Played in a heroic mold, the can best be expressed by looking at the core story of Tolkien's work:

"For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was a light and high beauty forever beyond its reach." - The Two Towers

Played straight, the core story is how people - perhaps with shadowy pasts and shaky holds on their sanity - can nonetheless triumph in the darkness simply by being the smallest of lights but refusing to be extinguished. The idea her is to somehow validate existence in the very face of the worst possible nightmare. I think it would attract players with a flair for drama and who are wanting to up the ante abit from your standard dungeon crawl.

I imagine that you can also play Ravenloft from the vantage point of agents of shadow, in something that for me would be 'Edward Gorey' style. In this case, the core story is probably something like, "Throughly vile protagonists with darkness in their hearts and a tenuous grasp on their sanity find themselves saving the day and all the little in the world that is good, not out of any particularly alturistic motive, but because the soul destroying alien horrors that are the protagonists foils refuse to share the scraps." In this case, the campaign is probably (or hopefully) infused with macabre humor, and would attract players who do alot of method acting and could sustain comic improv. I suppose you could also play it straight, but if you did I think you'd be in serious risk of Darker And Edgier trope abuse.

Irda Ranger said:

If one were to run a Ravenloft one-shot the point would clearly be “Escape.” The story is “Holy Christ, we’re in Ravenloft! Let’s get the frak out of here!” and then proceed to make that attempt. That’s easy. I want to know what what sort of Heroic Journey begins, occurs and ends within Ravenloft.

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Prisons within prisons. You wind up in Ravenloft and give your best to escape. Even if you do, some cosmic Murphy's law, wisk you off to Ravenloft again! Perhaps to a different domain. You need to try to escape again and again. Sometime along the way you realise that you are escaping prisons within a prison and you need to get out of that. Take a look at the ending of THX 1138 for your epic destiny.

Frostmarrow said:

Prisons within prisons. You wind up in Ravenloft and give your best to escape. Even if you do, some cosmic Murphy's law, wisk you off to Ravenloft again! Perhaps to a different domain. You need to try to escape again and again. Sometime along the way you realise that you are escaping prisons within a prison and you need to get out of that. Take a look at the ending of THX 1138 for your epic destiny.

Click to expand...

Of course, the easiest escape here is to quit the game. Players should be seeking adventure, not escaping from it. If each "prison" involved interesting milieus, perhaps... Bu then again, these would be places you can never return to.

Ravenloft is basically the end result of applying Hammer Horror or Victorian-era monster fiction tropes to D&D. Transylvania, in both the real-world and in story world is kind of a marginal place; historically and in fiction, it's always being taken over by somebody. It's where the real Vlad the Impaler and Elizabeth Bathory came from. The realms of Ravenloft have a similar set of qualities. Each new realm is a new set of horror tropes, often from a different era in horror fiction; the BBEG that defines the sub-setting is themselves defined by the tropes they are supposed to evoke.

Thus, Ravenloft is less about a core narrative and more about a core set of setting tropes that are essentially unrelated to narrative.

Thats the main reason why I like 3E Ravenloft best, it is not all about escaping. Its about making a miserable world a little less miserable. Its still a patchwork world with evils hidden, evils not so hidden, and evils right out in the open.

The last campaign I ran was in the 3E version, and I had the intention of running it into the Epic levels, allowing for them to bring an end to the demi plane forever. However they only made it to 12th level before I moved from the East Coast to the West Coast.

The group hunted the various evils, destroying them as thoroughly as they could. Maybe not permanently, but buying the people a period of peace at the very least until the creators of the Demi Plane brought in a replacement Domain Lord, if and when they managed to actually destroy one.

It was also about trying to fight and resist the power of the world. There were players growing monstrous appendages, fighting insanity, etc... all the while striving to destroy more of the evil while they still could. One even succumbed to the evil, becoming a Nosferatu, and trying to destroy the party in turn.

The reasons for playing in a Ravenloft game are similar to the reasons for playing in a long-running Call of Cthulhu campaign. Both, being dark horror games, have a somewhat unfair reputation as only being good for one-shots and cameos. The appeal for long-running stories, however, is that of mortal men and women standing up against impossible odds and doing all they can to beat back the darkness. Sometimes they win, sometimes they lose, but every small victory encourages them to rise up and fight again. With my players in Ravenloft, back when I was running it, I noticed that it wasn't always (or even often) about killing the badguy or destroying the domain; it was about foiling the villain's plans, saving a town from damnation, or protecting one of those rare shards of innocence that still existed despite the darkness.

Ravenloft, more than any other D&D setting, was about fighting the good fight simply because it was the right thing to do. Fortune and fame rarely came into it at all, and often the most you could hope for was to make a difference in the lives of a few people and die a hero's death before you became jaded enough to become the monsters you battled. As such, the setting always appealed more to the heroic roleplayers in my groups. Fortunately, I've had more of those over the years than not, which might be why I'm somewhat hesitant to seek out a new group these days.

Well, the last revision of AD&D 2e Ravenloft (the Domains of Dread hardcover) introduced the idea of PCs as Raveloft natives and the demiplane as something more than the manifestation of evils from other settings. The goal here was not escape but, rather, making your own little corner of the demiplane (even if it was just one small village) a little bit brighter and more bearable by pushing out the darkness.