Richemulot, AKA 'the domain whose name I always always always spell wrong'
A domain with an actual population! 45000 people here, closer to 50000 if you count the wererats (although Mordent gets double the page count for a tenth of the population). And there's a (relatively) large demihuman population too. Well, 'marginally biologically viable for the halflings at least' is closer to the truth than 'large' given we're AGAIN over 90% human, but it's more diverse than the last few domains, so we'll take what we can get in that department...
(And really, Richemulot is painted in here very much as the melting pot domain, with immigrants coming from everywhere to fill its empty cities. Would it have killed them to have a few demihumans live here?)
Geography - Richemulot is a fairly big place, and for a heavily urban-themed domain and darklord, there's a lot of rural areas here. Amost all the detail of these seems to have been created from whole cloth for this book, I can't find references anywhere else for a lot of the locales listed here. We have rich farmland, ancient forests, sun-drenched vineyards and lakes, and a rocky upland region of superstitious repute that's covered in ancient ruins of towers and chapels. There's a lot to do here for a PC group, but it has absolute zip to do with the darklord or the wererats that the domain was originally themed around.
Once we get to town, everything changes. We have massive cities with impressive architecture, broad thoroughfares and masterful masonry. And, of course, expansive and brilliantly engineered sewerage systems, though unbelievably foul and fithy cos this is a rat-centric domain after all. However, nobody knows who built or engineered these cities, and a large portion of them is empty, boarded up and abandoned with moss and weeds creeping up the marble and sprouting through the cobbles as only rats and pigeons disturb the silence.
The usual evasive history stuff, except even more blatant than usual. DMs are actually encouraged to have feral rat swarms erupt from nowhere to disturb any attempts to discover the deep history of the place through divination magic. In more recent history, it raise more questions than it answers. We have a family of wererats hailing from the original world that spanwed Mordent (which we also know nothing about, as Mordent has also no meaninful history pre-Mists) ending up in Falkovnia, then making the place too hot for them, getting stomped by Vlad's people, then fleeing into the mists where the family head Claude became the Darklord (apparently just because he was a bad guy in general, not through any particular Rubicon-crosssing sin like we see in most Darklords). And after a few decades, his granddaughter Jacqueline murdered him and took over the domain lordship (whether she knew entirely what she was metaphysically doing here, or whether she was just after temporal power and the darklordship came along unasked-for is not clear). I suppose it's just another example of them wacky capricious ol' Dark Powers having funsies, but it's not really clear why the Reniers earned their domain. There's no single seismic monstrous act that condemns them like Strahd's murder of Sergei. Hell, Claude and Jacqueline fled as hunted refugees from the decidedly unpleasant attentions of Vlad Drakov, and then found themselves in a domain that was an ideal safe haven for them and which has given them considerable luxury and power (and remember, Richemulot is a place that was spawned whole from the Mists for the purposes of being the Renier domain, it isn't like Barovia or Forlorn which were transported bodily from their original worlds). If the goal of the Dark Powers was to torment their prisoners, they could have done a much better job, I'm just saying.
Culturally, it's a bit of a mixed bag that doesn't map easily to any real-world culture that I'm aware of, though the names and laguage remain resolutely 'High Mordentish', ie, French. There's a lot of Provence in the countryside, shades of Catharism in the mountains with their strange Ezraite sects, but the city is perhaps more reminiscent of booming early America, bustling, commercial, and approximately meritocratic with a tidal wave of immigrants flooding in to seek opportunity, and finding that it CAN exist here but life's not quite as easy as advertised (though having said that, when the alternative is frothing psychopaths like Vlad Drakov or Malocchio, one would certainly consider it as a pretty reasonable exchange if the worst you had to deal with was some exploitative work practises and having to padlock the toilet seat down overnight so the wererats don't get in). There's even a slightly Arthurian touch in places, ancient castles where maidens lie in enchanted slumber, swords made of sacred steel that curse their wielder should they ever shed innocent blood.
This immigrant boom is something that's first mentioned in this book as far as I know, and I'm a bit ambivalent about it. Depends what you want, I think. If you're seeing the Core as a living world, then it makes perfect sense. Life isn't actually too bad in Richemulot, there's plenty of work, and solidly-built housing that you can literally just walk into at no cost, and it's just awful in a lot the neighbouring domains. Renier seems fairly sane and is a very competent administrator and leader despite being a disgusting rat-monster and having a set of policies that basically run the domain on graft and corruption. In-world, the immigrant influx and the subsequent population and economic boom are entirely credible and understandable, and they also give the western Core that high-population domain that houses all the workshops etc that actually manufacture all the firearms and similar clever gadgets that people in tiny Lamordia hamlets invent.
On the other hand, thematically I'm dubious. The horror aspect of Richemulot has always been twofold. First is the obvious 'eek, the ruling family is wererats!' jumpscare reveal. Secondly though, has been the more existential horror of this mighty marble city lying near-empty and abandoned to rot by its makers, while the rule of the wererats and the everpresent sussurant hiss and scritching of the vermin hordes in the sewers underground remind the dwindling population that the time of humanity's pre-eminence is past, and that the age of the rat has come. A bit of Ozymandias, or Planet of the Apes. This whole undertone is, of course, plenty compromised if the place is undergoing an economic boom, attracting people from all around to its thriving opportunities, and developing a flourishing cafe culture. But on the other hand, the almost bucolic south-of-France vibe of the rural regions messes with the theme just as much, and that's been around since at least Domains of Dread. So yeah, some clarity on what sort of story the domain is trying to tell would be welcome.
We get quite a lot on wererat culture here, which is useful for a campaign centred on them, if not particularly revolutionary or ground-breaking. There's a few ratish plot hooks, I kinda like the one where the non-wererat male Reniers, sick of being used a breeding stock and then getting eaten, have raised Jacqueline's father as a quite respectably powerful mummy and are using him to murder prominent wererats as the start of a power play. There also one where Jacqueline is trying to breed a strain of normal rat that can transmit lycanthropy by bite, and then basically wereratting the whole city in a day. Which seems a bit more Dr Evil than I'd expect from her, she's normally portrayed as the ruthless intriguer rather than the take-over-the-world type. And why would she eliminate her own preferred food source?
This is another domain where there's a vague ruling nobility or aristocracy in charge without anything resembling a monarchy. This really seems to be a Ravenloft specialty, we had the same in Lamordia, Mordent, Dementlieu - hell, even Strahd is nominally a count rather than a king. Renier is specifically stated to keep the leadership through sheer ruthless cunning, blackmail and violence, and a stoking a degree of populist jingoism amoung the common people, but theoretically someone could usurp her power. It's still a bit weird though - historically the aristocracy has been associated with monarchy almost everywhere, but in the Core is just seems like the default form of government and monachies are like hen's teeth. It'd love to know the in-world history and reasoning that led to this state of affairs, but this is Ravenloft and trusting its history is like building a house out of jelly. We do have the same sort of high-social-mobility aristocracy that we did in Dementlieu, though instead of being based on what's fashionable, here it's based on secrets and what you know. If you want an intriguey domain that's NOT dominated by a couple of psychic control freaks, this might be for you.
Refreshingly, this is not a magic- or arcane-unfriendly place. People are wary of magic sure, but they'd likely be equally wary of anyone heavily armed with musketry or swords - like these, magic is power. There's a degree of understanding almost, many Richemuloise are here to better themselves, and leveraging one's advantages and skills in that pursuit, even if those skills are magic-related, is a familiar concept. So this is another domain your wizard PC can call home, at least.
To close the borders, Jacqueline summons a ludicrously titanic horde of rats that literally encircle the entire domain and eat anyone who tries to pass (their bites penetrated damage resistance etc equivalent to a +6 sword, and flight magic fails for anyone who tries to fly over them). Ok, firstly, does this mean you could escape with an Antilife Shell? Secondly - does this happen often, and what the hell do people say it does? I mean, in Mordent or Dementlieu when the borders are closed people can write it of as getting lost or confused, and in Darkon everyone knows that this is the sort of magic that Azalin uses. But here? Surely a mindblowing rat plague like this that
encircled the entire country would stick in one's memory and cause a little comment in a gossip-obsessed society?
Random class generator gave me a monk. I decided that monks were un-Richemulot-y (the 'Richemulotese hero' sidebar in the book agreed with me) and tried again. Got monk again. Reloaded the page and tried again. Monk. Restarted the browser. and tried again. You guessed it, monk. Okay, fine, if that's the way you're going to be, monk it is then. I thought about doing a kensai from one of the weird heretical Ezra cults that spawn up the mountains, a sort of ecstatic dervish devoted to Ezra's favoured longsword. But I wanted to do something urban for an urban domain, so this guy was a successful prizefighter for years before spending a night in the sewers on a bet and falling into the bottle to forget what he saw there. Now sleeps in gutters and is widely despised. Drunken master, with the emphasis on Drunken.
Next, on to Gazetteer IV and Borca.
