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

 

[Minigiant]

This only makes sense if they created the domain knowing that in time a second dark lord would be born there. Which... almost works? Like if I squint and tilt my head, but that gets into them grabbing people before they are born and determining their guilt before they are born, which seems unlike usual DnD settings.

Well if you are in the business of creating horrible misery prisons, there is a chance you will create enough of them that one of your horrible misery prisons births a person who deserves their own.. And you have all the resets to judge them as evil in their own right

It's just probability at that point.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Nothing about that warlord from Falkovia seemed to indicate him as being sympathetic in anyway. And you kept insisting that he was inspired by Vlad and Hitler. That raises problems, and I think that was the only point being made.

I don't keep insisting he is inspired by Hitler, that is another poster (I do think that comparison is there, but he is also easily compared to Stalin and similar figures). For me, him being based on historical monsters is perfectly in keeping in with a horror game though (perhaps for you it isn't, or it is a bridge too far, and that is fine). But I already expressed my reasons for why I thought that was compelling, why it didn't personally bother me. You can read that post, if you still think it is a problem, then that is fine. We can have different opinions.

In terms of sympathetic, I think the lords vary, in terms of how that is handled, and Drakov is hitting a particular note, so he isn't sympathetic in the same style as Strahd. wWhose pining for his youth and the lost love who represents that youth is something people can relate to and sympathize with: even if the remainder of his actions: killing his brother, driving her to suicide, still make him a monster. This combined with his charm, his musical and arcane talents, give us something to admire. It creates that combo of being compelling and being repugnant.

In Drakov's case, as I recall (and I am going by memory here) he is a military conquerer trapped in a place where he can never really conquer anymore. As for Drakov, here is the section from the book that I think makes him a bit relatable:

Here is the part of his background that I think places him pretty firmly into horror (note this is his entry, not the domain's, and this is just part of his entry):

Obviously few can sympathize with his horrendous actions, but I can totally sympathize with being looked down upon and that fueling some kind of deep resentment. I think that is a near universal experience.

With Ravenloft it varied for sure, but it was a pretty firm guideline that these villains were meant to be tragic and sympathetic. There is camp too, and fun. Ivan Dilisnya is an example of that. But they all tend to have some basic human need or desire thwarted that you can at least understand. Again, they are compelling but also repugnant

 

[Bedrockgames]

But here is the problem, I'm just smashing into. You said "Darklord of Dementlieu, Dominic d'Honaire, was born in Mordent."

I don't need to know the whole history of this guy, but let me run through the issue. Mordent was created to punish some other darklord. This Dominic guy starts doing evil things, then an entirely new place called Dementlieu springs up around him? It starts to feel like prisons are spinning off prisons. Especially since, the domain's reset. The Jackalwere sees his home destroyed, then it resets and happens all over again. The Egyptian guy sees his home destroyed, then it resets and happens all over again.Strahd tries to get his love, she dies, then it resets all over again. So... why have spin off dark lords? Why didn't this guy reset?

Sure, the Dark Powers are mysterious, but that seems odd to pull in people and entire places from across the multiverse, but to also just create new places when people in the places that already exist get too evil.

A couple of things here, the domains don't reset like a video game or anything like that (unless you have a land with a groundhog day premise or something). With Strahd Tatyana is reborn like every generation or so (can't recall the precise timing).

With domains, they are like real places. So once the land forms, whether it is drawn from another place, a copy of another place, or created whole cloth by the dark powers (and this as others have pointed out is a bit inconsistent and isn't always clear how it is handled: which I think is fine because I prefer to lean into one explanation as I need when I am making my own domains, rather than have a concrete way it needs be done), it is inhabited by people who are real, and that domain goes on to exist like a real place within Ravenloft (and this is one reason why I think having the core works). Mordent is formed in like 579, the calendar in the black box I think had present day as 735 (could be wrong on that). Dementlieu was formed in 707. So there is ample time for someone to be born within Ravenloft and to go on to do evil and have a new domain form around them.

On the prison thing. Ravenloft's best theory is that it is a prison for its dark lords. But the dark powers are deliberately left mysterious, it isn't really known why they are doing what they are doing. For all we know it is an evil terrarium and the eventual production of guys like Dominic d'Honaire is actually the final purpose of Ravenloft. It is left vague so it can be left to the imagination and so different GMs can lean into different explanations.

 

[Faolyn]

This is an odd take, especially with how many times people have said "Strahd doesn't care about you."

Maybe this is something fans who are more familiar with the setting understand, but this seems to just add a kink where none existed in the weave of the setting.

How so?

Each Darklord is different. Strahd doesn't care about most things. He basically has three rules: don't enter his castle, don't steal from the state, and don't hurt the Vistani. If you don't violate those rules, he doesn't care.

OK, take a typical D&D adventure. There's a monster that's eating the villagers; can the PCs stop it? In, say, the Realms, it might just a monster that's eating people. Or it might have been hired or let loose by the real villains. Or maybe it was the magical byproduct of an experimenting wizard.

In Ravenloft, the monster might have been created by a villager. Maybe Bob the villager killed his gluttonous neighbor in a rage, and now his neighbor has risen from the grave and is eating everyone, leaving Bob for last. Maybe Bob was kind to the new woman in town, not realizing she's a monster of some sort, and she repays his kindness by killing everyone who was mean to Bob. Maybe Bob was such an abusive husband and father that the Dark Powers turned him into a werebeast, and he's only just starting to realize that he's eating the other villagers. Maybe Bob's cows were killed by a pack of vicious wolves and, in a desperate, insane attempt to save his farm and livelihood, he took the least mutilated cows, sewed on new limbs to replace the ones that had been torn off, and now he has some confused and hungry golem-cows wandering around.

That's what I mean by personal. In Ravenloft, the plot is there specifically because of people's actions, and are designed to reward or punish those people. No matter what, Bob the villager is going to get what's due to him, but it's just as likely to be by his own creation as it is by the point of an adventurer's sword.

 

[Faolyn]

For example, a group of adventurers attempt to leave Lamordia to get to Mordent. They reach the border of Lamordia, which is open because Adam is having a good day. To get to Mordent, they have two options.
1.) Enter the veil of Mists and arrive in the Shadowfell, which appears as a gloomy road along an even gloomier forest. They travel this road, which is bereft of other travelers, watch out for undead and shadowy monsters that prowl the roads. After X amount of time (days, weeks, hours?) they make it to another wall of Mist and enter Mordent. Of course, this is assuming the information they were given was accurate and the Dark Powers willing...

Exactly. Elsewhere in this thread (or the other one regarding this book) I used the phrase Oasis of Horror. I meant it kind of as a one-off remark at the time, but it really would be the case in Ravenloft where each domain was all alone in the dark.

When I was a kid and would spend summers with my Dad, we'd sometimes end up driving very late at night. Because he lived in SoCal and didn't mind driving very long distances, there would be long stretches of often unlit highway surrounded by these empty desert stretches. Just tufts of scrub brush and dark hills in the distance, sometimes completely blotted out by the shadows of highway signs.

That's kind of what I'm picturing when I say roads. Only in this case, it would be the dark desolation of the Shadowfell.

(In reality, it was probably a lot more built up and brightly lit, but hey, that was 25-30 years ago; I'm lucky I remember anything from then.)

 

[SkidAce]

...Maybe Bob's cows were killed by a pack of vicious wolves and, in a desperate, insane attempt to save his farm and livelihood, he took the least mutilated cows, sewed on new limbs to replace the ones that had been torn off, and now he has some confused and hungry golem-cows wandering around...

Thank you, Yoink!

 

[Faolyn]

Thank you, Yoink!

Now I just need to figure out what golem-cow milk products would do to a person who consumed it...

 

[tetrasodium]

Living in ravenloft isn't going to be all that bad for most of the common folk when compared to the common folk inareas with people in a lot of d&d worlds living in ravenloft isn't all that bad. Sure you might have to worry about vampires werewolves or whatever at times, but those are a thing in every world & really not that bad when you consider that a village(r) may have been plucked from the path of an army of orc/gnoll/cannibal halfling/daelkyr reavers that would have slaughtered everyone. The Dark Powers are a lot ore subtle than FR/GH gods & fiends that go around getting in bar brawls over cities & such too. The move might be a little jarring & confusing but by & large most of the village(r)s aren't worth notice by the powers that be.

Not only that, now they have the common sense to say "oh my god, how incredible this is to mostly only have one kind of monster to worry about so we can plan for the full moon or whatever." Sure "Bob's neighbors" are screwed as @Faolyn mentioned, but serial killer "he was so normal" and "now that we really look back he was always a little off" can apply to most of the ones that are actual people.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

My contention is Ravenloft as a setting was a masterpiece as presented. That doesn't mean it was perfect. It doesn't mean I thought every single domain was as good as the best one. But overall, I found most of the entries in the black box to be good, and to eventually yield a lot of good horror even if I didn't click with them at first (and often not clicking simply had to do with the domain's flavor not being inspired by stuff that I was as interested in). I would put it this way: to me, it is the best horror setting regardless of system. As a horror fan it satisfied me for the kind of horror I liked more than any other game or setting.

In terms of the updates, I am not enthused by what I am hearing. That is just preference. I also wasn't terribly into the material in CoS. Again preference. I think I just prefer to tone and style of classic Ravenloft to the stuff coming out now. I also do want something more like what was presented in the black box, but again, that is preference.

Not sure which one of your many quotes of the same material I'm supposed to respond to here, but ok... I guess? Certainly you've presented no case beyond "Well I liked it!" for why we should agree with this. I mean, that's fine... you don't have to do that... but it's unconvincing. Your statements remain contradictory.

I'm kind of intrigued by what the "kind of horror" you like is, and what films/books/TV are "horror" to you. To me it seems like it might be something that most people wouldn't call "horror" at all, merely "dark fantasy", stuff focused entirely on atmosphere rather than actual horror. Which can be cool but can also get pretty funny-by-accident - c.f. Ligotti.

Anyway, none of this has any bearing on what's coming in the new Ravenloft. I have little doubt it'll work better for most people than a mere refresh of the 2E take would have, but I'm excited to hear more about it, particularly any brand-new domains.

@tetrasodium That's true it being far less dangerous in Black Box-era Ravenloft than many D&D settings, but that was yet another problem with the setting, and why I described it early as that Forgotten Realms with the lights dimmed 15%. Most Ravenloft domains were full of these supposedly "fearful villagers" who are described in these ridiculous terms and always supposed to be "afraid of strangers" (why? rarely explained in any way that makes sense) and looking over their shoulders (again, why?) and so on, but the reality of the situation was that they were safer than most D&D villages, and certainly as safe as someone of the safer areas of the Forgotten Realms. It's almost like they're cos-playing or LARPing at being frightened villagers.

It was much better in the domains where there actually was a reason to be scared, and to act like that - then it made sense - ones with highly active and vindictive lords and roving packs of actually-dangerous-to-villlagers monsters and so on. But in a lot of places it felt like the villagers were basically theme-park staff there to "create atmosphere" for the PCs, not people who actually lived there.

EDIT - I kind of wonder if the "only 10% of villagers have souls" (which I expect the Ravenloft book to retcon, or make specific to Barovia, btw) was inspired by the bizarre and hard-to-understand behaviour prescribed for a lot of the locals.

 

[JEB]

I can't see Hazlin (both because a red wizard isn't scary and there are some real homophobic undertones in his origin) coming either.

Someone upthread said they heard Hazlan was actually going to be in there; perhaps, like with certain other domains, they see an opportunity to correct old mistakes.

You can have xenophobia without it drifting into racism. Just treat all outsiders as unwelcome without calling out their racial heritage (or worse, try to measure it like Outcast rating did) and allow some native other races into the larger or more urban domains. No reason why an elf can't live in Mordent or dwarves live in Nova Vaasa.

This is plausible for the human-looking races, but doesn't work so well for tieflings (which literally look like fiends) or dragonborn, or any number of other non-core races. But I also recognize that there are marketing reasons for Wizards to decide that superstitious villagers aren't going to attack tiefling PCs on sight. We'll see, though.

Dominic's highly condensed backstory is, even at a very young age, he was a quintessential Whispers Bard with maxed-out Charisma who manipulated everyone for the heck of it, and people felt sorry for him because he was a cute wittle kid who's mom died in childbirth. So even if they realized how manipulative he was, they allowed it. One day, his actions ended up drawing too much attention and so to avoid it he convinced his family to move away. And thus, the Dark Powers created Dementlieu.

Another weird trick of the Dark Powers that they can create false histories and false memories, so even if Dementlieu never existed before that point, everyone now believed it always had.

So at this point, the Dark Powers started grooming Dominic for evil by rewarding him until his manipulative powers became fully supernatural in nature. As an adult, he became one of the advisors to the Governor of Dementlieu and the country's Darklord. Maybe he was the Darklord the second he entered Dementlieu that but didn't realize it until he reached adulthood. I dunno; there aren't any canonical child Darklords that I can think of.

So that's how a person from one domain can become a Darklord of another.

Reading this makes me kind of sad they've removed d'Honaire as a darklord. I guess they have their reasons, though.