Falkovnia. The land subtlety forgot.
Geography first - Falkovnia is a breadbasket and a big food exporter to all the little coastal domains. The Western half in particular is extremely fertile farmland, as you go east and towards the northern border with Darkon, this shifts into largely untamed forests. In the far eastern side, the land itself starts to crumble into dusty uneliable nothingness as you approach the Shadow Rift. Ecologically, we've back to something a bit more like Darkon, shades of your classic medieval-type fantasy world to go with the medieval society and the extremely medieval attitudes of Drakov. Basilisks, ankhegs, wyverns, manticores, even kobolds are here. Are these the only kobolds in Ravenloft? We even have lost cities and dungeons here - remnants of the place's pre-Ravenloft history, and a deep underground complex where an ancient dwarven kingdom (who are now mummies..) built a prison to stash the monsters they happened on in their tunnelling. This'd almost be a normal place for a D&D game - if it wasn't for the actual people who live here...
The human-built environment is a dump. Frowning square stone brutalist architecture for military buildings, primitive improvised hovels of mud, garbage, wattle-and-daub, and poo for everything and everyone else. Roads - even in the cities - are all corduroy, cut timber stacked upon raw earth in the hope of giving at least some traction when the road gets trodden to mud. I mean, really, a guy like Drakov, who thinks and plans about nothing but war and strategy and logistics all the damn time, has let his only internal lines of communication and transit get and remain in this sort of condition? And if you think the writers are maybe laying the whole 'squalid misery' thing on a bit thick at this point, then baby, you ain't seen nothing yet.
History! We have a page or so describing a history of a glorious kingdom which devolved into a mess of squabbling warlords, iron-fisted tyrants and atrocity, from which Vlad Drakov, originally a mercenary commander, sprang. Even S agrees that most of this is basically irrelevant to modern Ravenloft (other than generating the aforementioned dungeons and lost cities). Drakov's basically ruled Falkovnia for a human lifetime at the point, and the place reflects him every bit as much as Barovia reflects Strahd. In recent history, we have a successful campaign Drakov ran against the wererats within his domain, but it's all downhill for him after that. Multiple invasions of Darkon, all turned back by hordes of undead, even when Azalin was too busy being dead in the wake of the Requiem to manage the defence. Invasions of Lamordia and Dementlieu, turned back by gunpowder arms that Drakob refuses to adopt, and one of Borca, turned back when the entire army made the mistake of being hostile to Borca and then eating the food there. This is obviously Drakov's curse - he wants conquest, but he's doomed to fail every time he tries (especially in circumstances he'd find humiliating - beaten and out-generalled in war by women, wimpy bookish wizards, or weak old men), and it's a spectacularly apt one. Unfortunately, this does have the effect of pulling his teeth a little. In the 'Core as living setting' model of Ravenloft that Arthaus are building, his role is to be the big scary militaristic presence who could at any tie launch an invasion in devastating force - but basically every player is OOC fully aware that if he tries, he'll fail. Somehow. He's a profoundly awful person in every possible way, but he's kind of a figure of fun at the same time. If anyone remembers how Abaddon the Despoiler came across in WH40K lore for such a long time, or the Zhentarim in FR, you get the idea. The perennial loser. Repeated failure just isn't scary. Unless you actually have to go into Falkovnia, Vlad is a bit of a meme. Even S has contempt for the guy. Well, to be fair, S has contempt for most people, but when dealing with the heavy-hitting likes of Strahd, Adam, etc there's at least some wary respect. Not Drakov. It even occurs to me - Drakov is one of the few Darklords who does is not a traditional tragic gothic villain. Strahd was once a brave warrior and hero. Hazlik was persecuted, betrayed, mocked, and his body indelibly marked by people he loved. Adam and Mordenheim have a tragic history, and Mordenheim is a brilliant scientist. Even Azalin is widely supported by his subjects for being a strong ruler in a dangerous place. Tristen apBlanc's past is littered with misunderstandings and might-have beens. Nor Drakov. There's no compelling backstory, no tragic pivotal moment of choice or passion in which he damned himself. He was a murderous jerk who was imprisoned in Ravenloft for being a murderous jerk and continued his career of murder and jerkitude once he got there.
Falkovnian society is basically a conglomeration of all the most awful and depressing bits of every murderously militaristic totalitarian regime ever, so much that it actually gets monotonous. There's plenty of Hitler here (Drakov's title is 'Kingfuhrer' and he's obviously being set up as Ravenloft Hitler as opposed to Stalin Azalin with quasi-British Mordent etc off to one side), a bit of Vlad the Impaler, North Korea, some of the worst medieval/dark age tropes, you name it. Slavery, genocide by work of nonhumans, cholera, gladiatorial combat, conscription, forced labor, draconian oppression and punishments, poverty, starvation while a rich agricultural sector exports food, massed impalings, droit de signeur, extortionate taxation and corruption, heaps of dead babies by the side of the road, everyone getting branded as the ruler's property at birth, roadblocks and 'I vill see your papers, pigdog, schnell, schnell!', a leader who has torturous executions as a scenic backdrop to his mealtimes and whose sexual predilections are described as 'unspeakable'. It just goes on and on. I 100% get that the whole idea of this place is that humans can be the worst monsters etc etc, but ... too much, too unsubtle, too much of Cartoon Bad Guy Kitchen Sink.
What we do have here is another domain that isn't entirely magic-unfriendly, however. There's a state-run Ministry of the Arcane that'll keep tabs on wizards and sorcerers, but frankly that's not much different to what the state does to anyone else. It's going to be hard to justify stuff like spellbooks, bardic instruments, libraries of obscure lore, alchemy or scrollscribing equipment etc in a domain where having two blankets is a luxury to most, however. Clerics of various varieties are tolerated and their healing abilities welcomed, although there's an odd lack of religious conviction or motivation - given how bad things are for basically everyone, wouldn't people look to the afterlife, or the teachings of a god who grants prayers to help them? Even among the resistance movements this seems to be the case. Probably a bit of the darklord-shaping-the-domain thing happening here. Drakov is basically toxic masculinity with legs and spellcasting is weak and girly and not what Real Men do, and as is sometimes the case it seems his attitude bleeds into the populace even when it might not make much outward sense.
Bit of a worldbuilding/editing glitch - Drakov is listed here as refusing to adopt firearms for his forces (again, he sees them as insufficiently manly when compared to melee weapons), but in the previous section we heard about him buying arms from technologically-advanced Lamordia. Surely arms from Lamordia mean firearms? (Unless the tiny population there keeps a swordsmithing industry running especially to sell obsolete weapons they don't use themselves to a nation that is perfectly capable of making them already...)
All Falkovnian-born non-humans are chattel slaves here, canonically bound to military authtority and assigned the worst and most gruelling physical labor until they die, which doesn't make it any easier to run a 'standard' D&D adventuring party here. Human Falkovnians are encouraged to have children with half-elves though, to 'breed out the taint'. Ick.
We then have a bit of a summary of the major cities. There's some effort made here to insert plot-hooks that aren't directly related to Vlad and the military, which is a relief but which can be a bit questionable since it's hard to imagine a model of D&D campaign that would actually ever use these, given the nature of the rest of the place. The military is portrayed as omnipresent and all-intrusive, but then we have all these cosy little mysterious shops, and occult detectives and so on? Doesn't make a lot of sense. Of course, bribery and corruption is also endemic here so maybe all this is operating under the noses of officers who overlook lawbreaking if they get their cut. Some of the plothooks are a bit meh (the vampyre infestation of the upper class of Lekar), some are inevitably tied to Drakov (the real fiendish parentage of his apparent son Vigo), while some are more interesting. I do like the giant winged eel that recently emerged from the gorgeously picturesque alpine lake overlooked by Vlad's impaling-pole-festooned summer palace, the extremely creepy-sounding description of the tunnels of H'rakizuhm that miners sometimes creak into, and the crumbling warehouse in Stangengrad that hides a vast and obscure clockwork mechanism of unknown origin.
Wow, the NPCs here are HIGH level. After Kartakass, where we're assuming that Ravenloft is a low-level setting where a dire boar is a real danger to life and limb, we then get here and see things like the head of the military academy who's a fighter 15/rogue 4/aristocrat 1, or the thieves guild leader in Lekar who's a 16th level rogue but a rank 4 ancient dead (mummy) into the bargain, which is a pretty daunting prospect. And this isn't Vlad or his inner circle. These are people who could, in a white-room scenario, probably crush many Darklords, but here they don't even get a serious write-up. I assume the reasoning is that if you're campaigning in Falkovnia you want the sense of oppression and brutality and the overwhelming power of the blood-soacked military, and for the PCs to be underdogs, hunted and threatened and overpowered at every turn and reliant on wits to survive - but jeez it seems like a blunt instrument.
As far as a setting goes, Falkovnia seems very focused on the Ravenloft-as-living-world model. You COULD run a weekend-in-hell here, but the best way i can think of doing it would be a survival or resistance model. Stay alive for time X, rescue your gnome friend from the prison camp etc. Endure, evade, and survive, rather than overthrow and triumph. It's not like Lamordia or Barovia where there's a single Darklord-centric story that ties the place together. Vlad doesn't have any gothic secrets to uncover, or a dark past to unearth. He is exactly what he appears to be. Sure, you could get a bunch of high-level PCs together and have a big combat-fest where you kick his door down and whack the guy, but that's not exactly Ravenlofty. He's almost deliberately meant to be boringly human in his evil (I can't quite talk about the Banality of Evil here, because he's written as being enthusiastically evil in almost every way imaginable) - a sort of 'humans are the real monsters' trope. But that has the side-effect of making him, well, a bit boring. The horror of Falkovnia isn't about Drakov himself, it's about what regular Falkovnians, army officers, soldiers, slavedrivers, torturers, etc - become in a regime like this.
On a side note, I'd love to see a domain in the new Ravenloft where the Darklord isn't some towering flamboyant exemplar of evil, but an obscure grey little bureacrat, anonymous in the system, who justifies his participation in and contribution to massed industrial-scale atrocity with 'I'm just doing my job'. Surely the Dark Powers are capricious enough to do that?
Anyway, Falkovnia is basically being redrawn from the ground up as the zombie apocalypse domain in 5e, and to be honest, I'm reasonably ok with that. It serves a definite purpose in the Core model of Ravenloft, but if you've decided to get rid of that, it's a bit lost. Drakov is defined by his desire to wage aggressive war and dominate. If he's marooned on an island in the mist, sure he'd find it frustrating and it would actually be a fairly apt curse for him, but he's a bit out of place. The oppressive police state theme for a domain isn't a bad one, but again, if (speculating...) 5e assumes the point of Ravenloft is to face and defeat Darklords, it's questionable. The scary bit about being in a police state is its faceless intrusive ubiquity and your own helplessness, having a standout Darklord and kicking his head in doesn't really fit too well with that.
Random character generator this time gave me druid, which was a tough one. There's no druids discussed here, but on the other hand, they're not actively shunned like Lamordia, so it's not completely implausible. So this is an enslaved half-elf put to work in Falkovnian grain fields and whose druidic talent allowed her to improve productivity enough that the camp head decided to maybe keep her alive a bit longer because it gives him more surplus to sell curruptly on the black market. Alas, i can't do either facial branding or dirty skin/clothing, both of which she would certainly have, in Heroforge. Neither is there a proper option for cropped hair. And yes, given the discussion from the past day or so I'm aware this is the second enslaved female PC I've done. I'm deliberately alternating genders for PCs and that's just the way things have panned out so far. It's the last one, I promise!
That's the end of Gazetteer II, next we move on to Dementlieu.
