D&D 5E Everything We Know About The Ravenloft Book

Here is a list of everything we know so far about the upcoming Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft.

Art by Paul Scott Canavan​

• May 18th, 256 pages
• 30 domains (with 30 villainous darklords)
• Barovia (Strahd), Dementlieu (twisted fairly tales), Lamordia (flesh golem), Falkovnia (zombies), Kalakeri (Indian folklore, dark rainforests), Valachan (hunting PCs for sport), Lamordia (mad science)
• NPCs include Esmerelda de’Avenir, Weathermay-Foxgrove twins, traveling detective Alanik Ray.
• Large section on setting safe boundaries.
• Dark Gifts are character traits with a cost.
• College of Spirits (bard storytellers who manipulate spirits of folklore) and Undead Patron (warlock) subclasses.
• Dhampir, Reborn, and Hexblood lineages.
• Cultural consultants used.
• Fresh take on Vistani.
• 40 pages of monsters. Also nautical monsters in Sea of Sorrows.
• 20 page adventure called The House of Lament - haunted house, spirits, seances.

​

D&D 5E - Full Wraparound Cover Art For Ravenloft

We've seen the cover already, but here's a look at the full wraparound art by Anna Podedworna. https://www.enworld.org/threads/updated-with-cover-the-d-d-book-is-van-richtens-guide-to-ravenloft.678411/ https://www.enworld.org/threads/heres-the-ravenloft-alternate-cover.678414/...

www.enworld.org

D&D 5E - Here's the Ravenloft Alternate Cover!

As usual, there is an alternate hobby-store exclusive cover for the upcoming Ravenloft book. Here's a look at it! And here's the full wraparound art. https://www.enworld.org/threads/updated-with-cover-the-d-d-book-is-van-richtens-guide-to-ravenloft.678411/...

www.enworld.org

D&D 5E - [Updated with cover!] The D&D Book Is.... Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft!

Yesterday's hints that a new D&D book would be announced today have born fruit -- we now have a product description and a title! It's a Ravenloft setting book, with tools and new rules for horror-themed games, and new horror-themed character options. I'll update this post with a product image as...

www.enworld.org

 

[Remathilis]

The Core always felt like a bad idea to me. It shouldn't be that easy to just waltz one from domain to another. Islands adrift in a sea of Mist. Even if you can travel through the Mists... you may just wind up in another domain. The idea that they're separate pockets in the Shadowfell doesn't make much sense, though. The Domains of Dread should be its own region of the Shadowfell (if we must have it there at all), but the Domains themselves shouldn't have a border you can just traipse across.

Part of Ravenloft's schtick is being trapped by the Mists. I don't think that will change even if you can enter and exit the Shadowfell to go between domains.

 

[Bedrockgames]

For example Falkovnia's massive army: "They are recruited through an unusual method; upon conscription into the army, each is forced to drink a foul brew, the recipe for which is known only to Vlad Drakov (it is rumored to contain the gritty powder of a ground-up talisman of ultimate evil and swamp water from the lair of a will o' wisp). The unwilling imbiber must make a successful saving throw vs. spell or be driven mad. This insanity manifests itself as a switch to an evil alignment and an intense pleasure that is gained by witnessing a slow and painful death. The drink also provides a limited magical resistance."

Some thoughts on "the break up of the core"

When the original Ravenloft module was published it was designed to drop into an ongoing campaign. It was, therefore, part of "the real world" of the setting.

However, the second module, The House on Griffin Hill, connected to the first not by geography, but by dream. The suggestion was each time the party slept they would transfer between Mordentshire and Barovia.

This was based on a strong tradition in gothic horror (gothic romance too) of blurring the line between dreams and reality.

When the campaign setting was released it complicated matters. Now it was explicitly not the real world of the campaign setting, PCs where transported from their "real" fantasy world through the mists - a sort of dream within a dream. However, running counter to that was the fixed geography of the core. With real world issues such as international trade, diplomacy, economics and politics entering the setting - not such things as dreams are made of! And, along with economy, the need for people to be able to live productive lives in the world without being ripped to shreds by monsters as soon as they stepped outside their doors.

With the break up of fixed geography in 5e, combined with the placement of Ravenloft in the Shadowfell (reiterated in Tasha's) it makes the setting more dreamlike. Non-static geography - I walk down my childhood street in Liverpool and enter a familiar London pub - is a feature of dreams, as is a constantly changing reality. The peasant we saw eaten yesterday is back at work today. And the soulless folk introduced in CoS start to make sense - they are shadow-people, native to the Shadowfell. This also explains the horror trope of the villagers refusing to accept there is anything unusual going on, despite all evidence to the contrary!

So, this making Ravenloft more dreamlike also makes it more gothic. At the same time as introducing non-gothic horror! But one thing you can do with these individual mini-worlds is drop them into your "real" world campaign setting, losing any dreamlike element, and making the horror entirely real. Which takes us back to the original I6 Ravenloft Module.

Has the top stopped spinning?

The advantage of having a core was it was a good foundation for campaigns. The potential issue if they are all islands of is less freedom of movement. The reason I loved the classic Ravenloft set up was you had a core, which a lot of players seemed to like because they weren't stuck in one domain, and it gave a bit of variety, freedom, etc (thought the lords could always close the borders), but you also had the islands (and later the clusters). To me that was the best of both worlds.

I do hear you on the dreaminess. It is one of the reasons I liked the original core rather than the post grand conjunction one. The old core had more varied domains that weren't all vaguely european (mostly eastern european). After the grand conjunction, the core felt more cohesive, but I saw that as a flaw rather than a strength (I preferred having things like Bluetspur, G'henna and the nightmare lands as part of the core). I will say I liked some of the post grand conjunction changes, but I kind of prefer my core a little disjoined and stitched together.

On the dreaming island front, you do make a good point there. I actually tried to do something like that when I did Strange Tales of Songling (it was inspired by Chinese supernatural accounts, but there was a Ravenloft-like dreamy-floating island thing I tried to incorporate). It worked well for one shots and short series of monster of the week adventures (which is what I was trying to do). But one downside was for less structured campaigns, and longer campaigns, it was harder (so I shifted away from that for those ones). I think there is upsides and downsides here.

For me, and again this is just my opinion, don't expect everyone to share it, that first boxed set really caught lightning in a bottle and the line (particularly the early material) was just great. I think I am not really the target audience for this as I am in my mid-40s (realized I incorrectly said 43 earlier, actually 44). So this is for a younger audience who is more accustomed to 5E and to current fantasy aesthetics. But I thought the Ravenloft line worked well. I had so many campaigns there, and many of the complaints I do see, just were never an issue for me (often the things people don't like were things I liked about it).

 

[overgeeked]

Sure, but Maztica was written by adult, in 1990/1991, not a child in the 1960s, an adult who did an absolute ton of research because the books contain a lot of stuff very specifically derived from both South American/Mesoamerican mythology, and from the history of the European invasion of the area.

There's no way he didn't know that conquistadors were basically extremely bad news. Indeed, there are references to that sort of thing in Maztica, and to casting a faith (I forget which? Torm?) as the Catholic church in a bizarre way, but at the same time, the bulk of the setting glorifies the conquistador-types, and basically as them to as there to help the poor natives.

It's messed-up in the extreme.

EDIT - Also btw exactly how OLD do you think I am? 60? Learned in the 1970s? I was barely born in the 1970s! I learned about the that stuff in 1990-ish, when I was 11/12. Point is though, this was stuff in textbooks for kids. It wasn't risky or novel or shocking. The text books were from earlier in the 1980s (they had them on the Vikings too, I remember that, because it influenced some of the D&D I was running!), with lovely colourful art. It didn't dwell on the conquistadors being horrible monsters, but it did acknowledge it.

So I feel like an adult doing research on the same era, in the same time period, had to know all this and more - but they clearly thought it wasn't important and it was fine to re-write things so invaders were heroic saviours and so on.

It's bizarre though because for all Oriental Adventures' sins, it's much less bad the Maztica, because it takes the approach of "these people are just as good as Westerners, but do things their own way". Had Maztica been written by Zeb Cook as OA was, I strongly suspect the Mazticans would have been a bunch of badasses like the OA crew, and would have been sailing to the Sword Coast etc., not vice-versa, with no need for a conquistador narrative at all (of course it might have ended up getting called "Americas Adventures" and yet focusing solely on Incan myth or something lol).

Well, any honest examination of your typical D&D adventuring party and the surrounding tropes will conclude that the adventurers themselves are power fantasy stand-ins for the conquistadors going out and slaughtering natives for gold and power.

 

[Bedrockgames]

The Core always felt like a bad idea to me. It shouldn't be that easy to just waltz one from domain to another. Islands adrift in a sea of Mist. Even if you can travel through the Mists... you may just wind up in another domain. The idea that they're separate pockets in the Shadowfell doesn't make much sense, though. The Domains of Dread should be its own region of the Shadowfell (if we must have it there at all), but the Domains themselves shouldn't have a border you can just traipse across.

Just one observation: one issue with not having a core, or with having players transport to random domains or domains of the GMs choice, is it is very heavy handed entrapment for players to go through. One trap I think Gms can fall into with ravenloft, is making it torturous for players, rather than intriguing. The core gives players the ability to have some say in where they are going, what they get to explore. It also gives the setting a bit of a spark of life in my opinion. Entrapment is definitely a part of Ravenloft, but I think the setting actually works best when the players buy into that entrapment. This is why I never sprang Ravenloft on players in an existing campaign set elsewhere, I always just said: this campaign is set in Ravenloft, and you are characters drawn from another realm (and we'd hash out what that backstory was). That allowed us to keep them as outsiders, allowed for escape to be a possible campaign goal, but they still had freedom to explore ravenloft and have a sense of some agency (whereas the times I kept them trapped in a domain so the plot would happen, only seemed to be frustrating for them).

 

[Bedrockgames]

Well, any honest examination of your typical D&D adventuring party and the surrounding tropes will conclude that the adventurers themselves are power fantasy stand-ins for the conquistadors going out and slaughtering natives for gold and power.

This seems highly dubious to me. I don't think most people are imagining themselves as conquistadors when they clear a dungeon for example. This seems like a very, very esoteric reading of what is going on in other peoples heads.

 

[Bedrockgames]

To me, that was the tonal shift from "weekend in hell" vs. "Campaign setting". Escaping Ravenloft vs. Making it a better place. Outsiders who are feared vs natives born and raised there. Isolated realms vs connected continent. It never felt like the transition from Escape the Sealed Evil in a Can model to Heroes Fighting the Hopeless War clicked. Which of why breaking up the Core doesn't bother me; it barely worked as a unified landmass and created more problems than it solved.

For what it's worth, my Ravenloft idea prior to this was Darkon set between the Requiem and Azalin's return with no Dark Lord in control and dozens of factions fighting for control, so that might tell you a little on how I viewed Ravenloft.

The way I would run Ravenloft was as a campaign setting but with the players drawn in from elsewhere. But that was the whole premise of the campaign: I didnt' literally pluck their characters from another campaign we were running. This worked to me. There were a lot of TV shows growing up that had that kind of premise so everyone kind of got it (a sort of 'will the adventurer's find a way out next week?').

Obviously people often wanted very different things from the setting. I like the earlier material, and I liked taking that weekend in hell premise, but turning it into a whole campaign. I think the setting got a little less interesting when you made the player characters natives (did that plenty too, especially with later books and it never quite landed the same for me).

I think what worked best though was campaigns where the players were monster hunters of some kind. Those are the adventures and campaigns that shined the most for me.

 

[overgeeked]

This seems highly dubious to me. I don't think most people are imagining themselves as conquistadors when they clear a dungeon for example. This seems like a very, very esoteric reading of what is going on in other peoples heads.

Or a very straightforward surface reading. So a king or queen or lord or duke or mayor hires a bunch of itinerant ruffians to go over there and kill the locals. The ruler wants: 1) all the locals dead; 2) a share of any treasure found; 3) specific items from the locale; 4) possession of the land; 5) a mix of the above; 6) all of the above.

That equally applies to historical conquistadors and a strong majority of D&D modules and actual games.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Any word on Borca? That was always one of my favorites (although admittedly, it's been a long time since I read anything on it -- probably the 3E Ravenloft core book).

 

[Bedrockgames]

Or a very straightforward surface reading. So a king or queen or lord or duke or mayor hires a bunch of itinerant ruffians to go over there and kill the locals. The ruler wants: 1) all the locals dead; 2) a share of any treasure found; 3) specific items from the locale; 4) possession of the land; 5) a mix of the above; 6) all of the above.

That equally applies to historical conquistadors and a strong majority of D&D modules and actual games.

I am really not seeing it. If this is the lens you are using, this is what you are going to see I think. I mean I see the parallel you are drawing, but I don't think any of this is going on in peoples heads when they play adventurers. More likely they are responding to either a desire to find treasure in a dungeon inhabited by monsters, or calls for from locals or local leaders to help eliminate monstrous threats in their area. That notion of adventure goes back well before the conquistadors. There are all kinds of myths and legends exploring that. To me your argument very much is one where again, it is esoteric: someone is engaging in a fun activity (i.e. clearing out a tomb of undead) and you are layering on a critical lens to find the 'hidden meaning' or 'hidden motive; of what they are doing. Frankly it feels like witch finder tactics. Not a real or honest exploration of what is going on.

 

[Remathilis]

Any word on Borca? That was always one of my favorites (although admittedly, it's been a long time since I read anything on it -- probably the 3E Ravenloft core book).

Nothing yet, but to be fair, most of the Domains they've discussed have been ones with major changes. They might be highlighting the "not your father's Ravenloft" stuff right now.