Also curious about your thoughts on the plot armor in the created
Just had more time to think about this. I find the newer stuff is very different (but then I also found the S&S very different and the treatment of Ravenloft in 3E under WOTC quite different too. The 90s Ravenloft was built around some of the core ideas and innovations of the original Ravenloft module and the philosophy is laid out most clearly in the Black Boxed Set and in the Van Richten books (those books really give you a clearer idea of how to run monster hunting campaigns and how to make monsters fresh by leaning more on the customization that Ravenloft allowed: it also baked investigation in by giving many of the monsters weaknesses that could be discovered by learning more about their background or conduction a more thorough intelligence gathering). That said the 90s line is all over the map because different writers, different trends emerging, etc. The big benchmarks for me are Black Box era, Red Box Era and the Domains of Dread Era. Different people prefer different things. Red Box is pretty close to black, but Domains of Dread makes Ravenloft more of a functional setting and less of a weekend in hell place (personally I used to run black box as a regular campaign and liked the dreamy quality of it, but DoD is a solid book and many people are bigger fans of that than black box: black box is bare bones, evocative and good if you like having launching pads to build Ravenloft into a setting of your own; Domains of Dread is a bit more thorough----except on Vistani because the Van Richten guide to Vistani was out at that point
Modules and Supplements I remember really liking (not always because the adventure was great, some just had wonderful material to pull into a campaign):
Darklords
Dark of the Moon
Van Richten's Guide to Werebeasts
Van Richten's Guide to the Lich
Van Richten's Guide to the Created
Feast of Goblyns
Book of Crypts
Ship of Horror (not so much for adventure itself as additional material it contains)
Castles Forlorn
Night of the Walking Dead
in terms of novels, Knight of the Black Rose was always my favorite. I liked some of the others as well like Tapestry of Dark Souls and Heart of Midnight. Some of the novels, like Mordenheim, were interesting but a little odd too
app.box.com
